5 "Don'ts" Heads of Quant Teams Should Remember


Quant finance projects are usually complex and quants are racers at the critical path. In the worst case they need to make deadlines others have already delayed. Hard work.


We work for quant teams of our clients and I dare to name 5 pitfalls that their heads should avoid. They are quite the same pitfalls we, at UnRisk, try to avoid when running our business.
  1. Don't hide your purpose  - IMO, it should go for all heads: purpose. purpose. purpose! If your clients don't recognize what you do, you will have difficulty to succeed with your projects and to attract talents to building your teams.
  2. Don't grow for the sake of growth - it sounds so simple: don't focus on becoming bigger, but better. But smaller organizations tend to grow faster instead of maintaining a reasonable staff size. 
  3. Don't forget to market and treat yourself as a client - Market your abilities and invest in yourself and your tools. Yes, we are biased on this point, but we think a sound foundation of know how packages and technologies are like a trampoline enabling you to deliver high quality solutions quicker. To be successful atop things others have provided strengthens your position.
  4. Don't stop networking  - we tend to spend most of or time working, but not enough time making connections with our clients. Be a corporate partner, build connections and remember that success happens outside of your comfort zone.
  5. Don't suppress your gut feeling - trust yourself, because you are most probably right. This is where our own experiences are clear: we have supported a client and our instinct told us that may become more of a headache, but we gave it a try. We learned that we should have listened to our gut. Our response to this: no, UnRisk is not for "You".
 We have learned many lessons that have guided us t where we are now. Packaging the experience into 5 "Don'ts" was inspired by this article, FastCompany. I tried to transform them into the world of quant work. 

Picture from sehfelder