Quantitative finance is a funny field. To work in it for an employer, one has to be somewhat smart. If however one were actually smart, one wouldn't need to do quantitative finance for someone else, only for oneself, and directly reap the benefits of one's work in the markets.
the employer raises the capital, so that you invest the someone else’s money.
This has 2 main advantages:
1. You have limited downside. if you lose all the investor’s money, you don’t lose any of your own money - and contractually you still get paud the management fee.
2. It’s way more lucrative to get a very tiny part of the returns on a 1bn investment, than to get all the returns on a 100k investment…
