Any Engineers in Equity Research?

Water Cooler Careers
#1

All,

Asking for a friend, what skills are most useful for an Engineer in EQR/AM?

What skills should one highlight the most to employers? I don’t think generic math/quantitative skills are really a differentiator and focus should be on specialty knowledge of the industry? Any advice?

#2

Any engineer should have quantitative skills far more advanced than what ER requires. I’d say there are two major differentiating factors for making this transition. The first is knowledge of business strategy, corporate finance, and what makes companies profitable. The second is excellent communication skills. ER is 70% writing and promoting your ideas; if you talk like a news anchor, you will go far.

#3

I know 2 former programmers currently in sell side covering software sectors although they are not too fond of their switch now.

#4

^ Can you ask them why? Is the job not challenging enough?

#5

Those guys probably thought their old jobs sucked too. Otherwise, they would not have changed industry. Maybe they are just pessimists.

#6

I guess he enjoys coding more than looking at 10k statements. He does alright for himself though so whatever lol. He told me this, people who are programmers for tech firms or engineers for defense firms, E/P firms etc etc successfully make the career switch to equity research. Very few but they do make the switch…BUT they never go back to their old jobs because nobody at Lockheed or MSFT wants a person who knows little bit - but not to the level of auditors - about accounting and know little bit about valuation (which can be taught in 2 weeks max) and know little bit about excel and powerpoint…Hence he believes automation will soon hit the ground in equity research segment…To correct him, I told him that automation has already hit the research space according to annual DB hedge fund survey, surveys by SumZero, Bloomberg, etc…Trading will be first to go among FO finance jobs.

In summary he feels he should have stayed in tech as a coder because coding/AI/automation is the future. He was in the Windows team at MSFT…lmao…Everyone uses Windows at his current workplace but nobody cares about equity reports at MSFT. Just jam it into Vanguard SP500…