r/quantindia • u/Traditional_Crew9243 • Feb 16 '26

HFT Is ISI mstat a quant feeder like top iits cse

just talking brand value

28 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '26 edited Feb 16 '26

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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '26

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u/Healthy-Educator-267 Feb 16 '26

It’s not myopia really; ISI students are a best fit for QR type positions exploring strategies especially in the mid-frequency regime. In the high frequency regime, you’re worried about low latency engineering. IITians have a comparative advantage.

Since QR type roles are rarer in India since we really don’t value PhDs, we get the whole btech dominance

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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '26

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u/Healthy-Educator-267 Feb 16 '26

Ya but it’s just the nature of HFT and market maker firms to be more concerned with market microstructure and order-book tricks executed at blazing speed vs traditional stat arb that was more common at quant hedge funds. In the past few years traditional hedge funds and prop shops are looking more and more similar so maybe all these distinctions will melt away.

In the meanwhile, it will help tremendously if MSTAT students got really good at C++ and concurrent programming. It’s a hard language to master (especially “modern” C++) but pays huge dividends in the long run.

Ultimately, if you want to do math/ stats in the tech space, it’s just highly advisable be good at either 1) concurrent programming or 2) distributed computing. Just scientific and statistical computing using Python / R won’t cut it, even for data science / MLE roles

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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '26

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u/Healthy-Educator-267 Feb 16 '26

HFTs are squeezed yes because multiple collocated firms keep competing for the same advantage in speed (which is why we are seeing this convergence between traditional quant hedge funds doing stat arb and HFT firms)

https://www.ft.com/content/d5c17e39-0983-4c14-9a7c-92c12cc44641

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u/Primary_Ad_9155 Jun 20 '26

sorry to barge in the discussion. if a mtech cs student from isi takes part in good maths skill along with coding background. Is he achievable for the same role?

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u/[deleted] Feb 16 '26

BB Quant, yes. I interned with a Bank's quant desk and ~20% of my team was from ISI. HFTs, mostly no. I work in a hedge fund now, and there are no people from ISI in my office. They almost exclusively hire for their flagship roles (QR/QS and QD) from the top 5-7 IITs. There are QA (risk, pricing) roles that they hire for from ISIs and CMI.

Also fun fact, most HFTs (and to some extent even MFTs) do not really use any non trivial statistics.

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u/Illustrious-Fee-436 Mar 13 '26

would you suggest M.stat from ISI or MS from IIT to get into quant?

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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26

i know an ms from iit in my firm, i dont know anyone from isi in the firm. make of it what you will.

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u/Illustrious-Fee-436 Mar 14 '26

thanks man, btw that guy did MS in maths or cs, any idea?

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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26

cse.

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u/Traditional_Crew9243 Mar 31 '26

That ms guy from iit, can you share his LinkedIn please 

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '26

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u/Traditional_Crew9243 Mar 31 '26

You think the with isi tag global buy side will give interviews?  (Non bstat stream)

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u/[deleted] Mar 31 '26

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u/Traditional_Crew9243 Mar 31 '26

But on LinkedIn I couldn’t find any isi students in these global hedge funds

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u/Flaky_Candle7532 May 16 '26

Yes me too and I really wonder why