I am currently working at Rates Product Control, and am thinking of moving into business side - trading / quant / risk management type role. I have a CFA charter already, thinking of taking FRM this May, and probably a CQF from June onwards. Probably an MFE would’ve been a sure way to the goal, but want to avoid the investment of 1 year and $80-100k for the degree… So am thinking if CQF (the famous Paul Wilmott is main faculty person) could provide a good alternative. http://www.cqf.com/home For any of you who might be familiar: * How good is CQF as a course? * How good is CQF as a medium to move to business side - trading / quant / risk management type role? Thanks
If you’re in the NYC area, it looks like they have a presentation on the 20th.
Keys?
I heard it’s a good program, the best for a non-university program in quantitative finance. Just be aware that what you get for your money is a certificate from the school which is called 7 City. Not very glamorous name, indeed.
Looks interesting. Probably not worth $18,000 to most people though.
I doubt that the CQF is going to help you jump from product control to quant or trading. If I was in this situation, I would consider doing an MFE.
ohai Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I doubt that the CQF is going to help you jump > from product control to quant or trading. If I was > in this situation, I would consider doing an MFE. Agreed. Spending 1 year and $45,000 to get a MFE from Cornell, Berkeley, NYU etc would be a FAR better investment than spending 6 months and $18,000 to get a CQF from 7city.
To play Devil’s Advocate, you would be spending 45,000 plus your opportunity cost of missing work for a year.
If you just want to learn the material, it’s a good program, I think and a decent value. If you need prestige along with the letters, go with a university MFE program.
The CQF is not anti-prestigious; it does seem to be pretty rigorous and Paul Wilmott is well respected, particularly in the risk community. Those who know about it seem to respect it, but it’s just not that well known (yet).
jmh530 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > To play Devil’s Advocate, you would be spending > 45,000 plus your opportunity cost of missing work > for a year. Valid point; the brochure says the CQF is just six months of part-time study. On the other hand, I bet there’s way more opportunities to play beer pong during an MFE.
Thanks guys, your input is invaluable!
They have a list of books used in the curriculum - could be worthwhile to browse/read those first then decide on whether you’d like to pay for the cost of the course. http://www.cqf.com/content/course-materials
I think we need to be aware that there is a difference between a) something that is good for knowledge, and b) something that is good for recruitment.
Wendy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Spending 1 year and $45,000 to get a MFE from > Cornell, Berkeley, NYU etc would be a FAR better > investment than spending 6 months and $18,000 to > get a CQF from 7city. What if you were really spending $145,000 or more, taking into account opportunity cost of lost wages? Edit: just noticed this was already brought up.
LPoulin133 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > They have a list of books used in the curriculum - > could be worthwhile to browse/read those first > then decide on whether you’d like to pay for the > cost of the course. > > http://www.cqf.com/content/course-materials Agree with this. I bought Wilmott’s book for the same reason. I decided, it’s better to just read the books because I only wanted it for educational purposes.
I totally gravedug this thread to see if knowledge of/prominence of the CQF program has improved much since this was originally posted?
Most of my experience with the CQF consists of CQF people asking me if I know where any jobs are. The knowledge part of the program sounds good, and cheaper than an MFE.
One poster here (Keys) did the CQF and was very up on it. I know him in real life, although from his posts he sounded a bit like that guy who was a cool friend when you were younger who went off and joined a cult and you don’t know what to make of him now. The cult-like bit is the part where he would say (approximately) “Everything I do is better because I do it with math,” “this is the only way to the future,” and the implication that “if you don’t have as much math(s) as I have, there’s no real reason to take anything you say seriously.” Ironically, this often is paired with insufficient analysis of whether you have designed your equations more for their fit with reality or more for their ability to be solved (numerically or analytically).
Maybe he’ll sound differently over a beer, but that’s how he sounded on this topic.
Thanks bchad. That’s pretty much what I figured – but the program looks so good on paper. I would never get an online degree, but somehow the CQF has (in theory) some street cred because of one Paul Wilmott and, if I’m being honest, if it wasn’t him at the helm, I probably would write off the program entirely.
I think the material covered is probably pretty valuable if you are mathematically talented and want a structured presentation on how mathematics is used in finance, particularly for things like derivatives pricing. I probably should have taken it early in my finance career because it would have filled some knowledge holes at a relatively inexpensive price. I say relatively, because it isn’t exactly cheap, which is the main reason I didn’t do it.
Wilmott himself has this slightly arrogant way about how Maths is the key to the universe and anything that is said mathematically is automatically better, and his students tend to adopt that attitude, which I think is distasteful but seems to be de rigeur for quantheads. Personally, I thing of mathematics more as a tool towards an end and I feel that the more complex the mathematics gets the more likely you are to be depending on implicit assumptions that you’ve forgotten about and which you’ll only remember when you write a “Dear Investors” letter explaining how you could have disconsidered an outcome that seems patently obvious to them, and explain that “No one could have foreseen that [night follows day, or something like that], and so our models didn’t consider that possibility” when the real answer is “If our models had considered that possibility, it wouldn’t have had that great back testing performance that got you to stop indexing and give us your money.”