How Master’s Students Can Break Into Quant Trading

01 How to Secure an Interview

The quantitative finance industry is more competitive than most others. Top-tier firms have higher educational requirements. For instance, a Master’s from a 985 university might easily lead to roles at tech giants like ByteDance, Alibaba, or Tencent, but entering top quant firms often requires a PhD from Tsinghua, Peking University, or a QS Top 50 institution.

If you hold a PhD from Tsinghua, Peking University, or a QS Top 50 program, congratulations: you are eligible to apply to nearly all quant firms in China and will almost certainly receive interview invitations.

If you don’t have that pedigree, you can benchmark yourself against the following tiers:

• QS Top 50 PhDs: Target top-tier firms with ~$50B+ AUM (e.g., High-Flyer, Yanfu, Jiukun).
• 985 Master’s/PhDs: Target mid-tier firms with ~$20B+ AUM (e.g., Kuande, Blackwing, Century Frontier).
• 985 Master’s: Target mid-to-lower-tier firms with ~$5B+ AUM (e.g., Mengxi, Qianxiang, Evolution).
• Below $5B AUM: These are smaller firms. While numerous, they often have lower educational barriers and may not strictly filter by degree.

If your only asset is your degree, you can use a "Tian Ji horse racing" strategy to secure interviews by targeting lower-tier firms.

To aim for a higher tier, you need to add value beyond your degree. Consider participating in competitions like Citadel’s Datathon, Two Sigma & Kaggle Data Science Competitions, Optiver’s Trading Algorithm Challenge, or QuantConnect’s Alpha Five. Domestic firms like High-Flyer and Jiukun also host their own competitions.

For lower-tier firms, practical ability matters more than credentials. The boss may personally review resumes, ignoring strict educational filters. But what can you put on your resume besides degrees and competition results?

Here are two tips.

1. Include concrete quantitative project experiences and optimize keyword matching.

Job descriptions are created by business units. Resume pre-screening is usually handled by HR or intern HR staff who may not deeply understand the technical or business nuances (unlike senior recruiters). To help HR screen accurately, they often request specific keywords from business units.

Therefore, how do you write detailed and realistic projects? You must embed keywords from the Job Description (JD) into your project descriptions. The more detailed your problem-solving steps, statistical methods, and tech stack, and the higher the keyword overlap with the JD, the better. Lower-tier firms care most about whether you can handle daily tasks immediately without extensive training.

This provides HR with screening anchors. When they see these skills integrated into projects, they perceive you as having genuine experience rather than "inflated" skills.

However, some students argue: "I have no internship experience, so I can’t write projects."

This is a misconception. You don’t need to have worked at a major firm to list projects.

Any independent research or practice you’ve done can be listed. With a little effort, you can name your practice exercises professionally to make them look like formal projects. This isn’t deception.

Why not? Would a profit-driven company prefer hiring untrained novices?

2. Include training from Quantide’s "Quant 24 Lessons" and "Factor Mining & Machine Learning Strategies."

There are two reasons for this: First, the curriculum is comprehensive, deep, and equips you to handle daily tasks for roles requiring up to three years of experience. Second, your interviewer might be a course alumnus who will appreciate fellow graduates!

Many of our students have significantly improved their resume pass rates using these two techniques.

02 How to Pass the Interview

Based on our observations, interviews now include traditional written tests and interviews, as well as more open-ended project-based assessments.

For traditional written tests and interviews, you must practice LeetCode problems, review standard interview guides (often referred to as "Green" and "Red" books), and prepare thoroughly for projects mentioned in your resume.

The other type is open-ended project assessments. You will be provided with data, documentation, and APIs, requiring you to complete a strategy backtest within a set timeframe (e.g., one week) and submit a report. This typically involves data acquisition, cleaning, backtesting, calculating strategy evaluation metrics, and report writing. Report writing often requires strong data visualization skills.

Higher-tier firms focus more on algorithms and new technologies, while lower-tier firms emphasize practical execution. Keep this distinction in mind.

03 How to Pass the Probation Period

During probation, you may be required to complete a task within a specified time, such as replicating a research report or an arXiv paper. Some firms require you to mine new factors.

The key lies in whether you received sufficient training and practical experience before entering the industry. If you have already replicated dozens of research reports across different types before joining, adding one more is trivial.

Some firms require you to submit a certain number of valid factors per month. This may seem difficult, given that everyone knows making money isn’t easy.

In reality, it’s not that hard. The principle is that you must understand a wide range of factors, their construction methods, periodic attributes, and signal sensitivity thresholds before joining.

There aren’t many alpha factors that span decades. If there were, they would have already been discovered. Therefore, when a company asks you to submit factors monthly, it essentially asks you to find factors that are currently effective.

This transforms the task from invention/discovery to search and testing. If you understand enough factors before joining, know where to find them, and how to integrate them into your projects, this task won’t be difficult.

04 Conclusion

Before entering the industry, your only task is to undergo high-quality, extensive training, and then list that training on your resume to convince interviewers that you can deliver results immediately, rather than requiring a year of paid training.

So, the answer isn’t on Zhihu. Find good training, start writing your resume immediately. As you learn each concept, ask yourself: Will this appear in a JD? Can I write it on my resume?

Good luck!