HACKER Q&A
📣 hahnchen

How to Get into Quant?


Any book or blog recommendations?

It doesn’t seem very trivial and I think that people who are really good at it would rather make money than share their experiences.

Nowadays, we even have crypto and derivatives on that crypto.


  👤 _benj Accepted Answer ✓
I once looked into this and it seems like the programming component of it is fairly simple, i.e. and event loop that receives price changes from the market and decided to either buy/sell/hold.

Those can be learned with not too much difficulty on a platform like https://www.quantconnect.com/

But the secret “sauce”, or alpha that allows whatever quant strategy to be profitable is kept very secret, not just because people would rather make money than share but because if the strategy becomes well known, or just known enough that other people start using it it loses all its value.

There’s a book called “Quantitative Trading: How to Build Your Own Algorithmic Trading Business” which I found kind of interesting in giving a good basics about the language, tools and methodologies used by quants, specifically individuals instead of institutional, like how to come up with ideas and how to evaluate them and avoid common mistakes.

Also there’s the Elite Trader forum section on algo trading as well as the algo trading subreddit, but it’s up to you to filter what’s useful from those.

I have a friend who does day trading for a living and has his own profitable strategy and been working with him to see if it could be “quantified” and made into an algorithm and honestly is a fascinating field.

Good luck on your research!


👤 psychstudio
A good yt channel to get some insight into systematic trading is "better systems trader". Also, look back through the archives of "chat with traders" yt channel. More experience on those two channels than you can absorb.

👤 akg_67

👤 t_mann