This series is for non-tech people who want to get a job in today’s financial market. My primary target audience is for a MBA, economists or even accountants who want to take on a high finance role.
First I want to list all the important technologies used in today’s market. From all the places I worked before, and from all job postings, the following computer skills are what banks and funds are looking for:
Excel: Excel to financial professionals is like chopstick to Asian; you simply cannot claim your ethnicity without knowing it inside out. Among the “tricks”, you need to at least know the followings: Sort/Filter, Pivot table, Formula, Charts, Macros and VBA.
VBA. Thanks to the full Microsoft support. VBA can be run on all the MS Office products (Excel, Outlook, Word, etc) and has become the choice of trading desk support and any front-end development, as it allows you to “program” your desktop applications to become your proprietary trading system.
Perl. This high level scripting language is widely used in the overnight batch to process flat (csv) files, and to kick off 3rd party software. It is a de facto back-end language of the bank. On UNIX/Linux, people also use shell scripts.
Java/C++. For a more quantitative role, an OO (Object-oriented) language is essential, as it allows you to effectively develop a model or production grade system.
Numerical Analysis Software: Matlab, Mathematica, Mathcad they allow you to quickly turn models into code.
SQL Database: Learn to use SQL to design table and learn the ER diagram. Learn the interface from all the above languages (Perl, Java, VBA) and learn to normalize your table design.
Data Format: Use XML for a more structure dataset, CSV for super easy and fast data processing. This and database connectivity is very important. After all, data is what IT (information technology) is about.
Communication: Web Service, TCP/IP Socket. Other than APIs and file hand-shaking, these are ways to talk to 3rd party systems.
Industry Specific APIs : Bloomberg to retrieve market rates, pricing, indicatives, etc… ; Intex to access structured finance waterfall model. Adco(Andrew Davidson) & AFT(Espiel) for prepay and loss model; Tradeweb, Polypaths, etc…
Financial Protocols : FIX. This allows your system to talk to another system, to query, to make an offer, to place a trade, to settle, and to consolidate.
For Math, you need to know the following:
Statistics. The backbone of modern-day finance. Learn as much as you could.
Stochastic Calculus/ Monte Carlo Simulation. It simulate the moves of stocks, community, and interest rates.
Optimization : Curve fitting, Calibration, etc…
Linear Algebra / Numeric Analysis : Study of algorithms that use numerical approximation to turn continuous mathematics into code
In my second post, I will go over some basic programming language concepts.
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