Hi From NJ

[IlliniProgrammer]

Hi everyone!

I'm currently a finance grad student at one of the local colleges in NJ. Before that, I was working at a major investment bank as a Strategist in Equity Options trading. That basically meant that I was a programmer who sat on the desk and helped the traders understand what was going on with the market. Our traders did a lot of business with mutual funds and hedge funds, selling them call options to help them protect their investments. Before my job as an options strategist, I worked in quant analytics on Credit Default Swaps and Corporate Bonds at Lehman Brothers. Before that, I studied CS at UIUC.

I've already lined up a job at a hedge fund doing similar work after graduation, but now I'm looking to figure out how to do a better job of saving for retirement (Before grad school I was rich and on track- not quite so sure anymore.) I'm also here because I really enjoy personal finance- I really think it's the most intellectually challenging part of finance- and I enjoy helping folks figure out how to manage risk in their portfolios.

So I'm here to get advice and to also help answer questions if you have any.

Thanks!

-IlliniProgrammer

 

[Gumby]

Welcome aboard.

 

[retire2020]

Hi from another member from NJ. Welcome aboard. R u in IT or finance? I spent 15 yrs in IT on wall street at diff firms

 

[IlliniProgrammer]

Hi from another member from NJ. Welcome aboard. R u in IT or finance? I spent 15 yrs in IT on wall street at diff firms

Well, I started off in quant analytics at Lehman- my undergrad was CS, my work at Lehman and the successor firm after that (I don't want to be too public about my identity online) was mostly in Java, but it started to move more and more towards trade strategy.

Now I work mostly in R rather than Java, with Finance and Econometrics PhDs rather than developers. I now talk more about t-statistics than I do TIBCO or threading. I guess you can still call it coding, but there's a huge finance and stats component to it.