Das Sarma didn’t return requests for comment via email and LinkedIn.
The race to acquire such talent is heating up. Recruiter Options Group reports that interviews for credit quant positions are up by a quarter from a year ago.
Man Numeric’s Robert Lam, who leads the firm’s quantitative credit group alongside co-head Paul Kamenski, says the pool of candidates is vanishingly small.
“Building a solid team is a very difficult task,” said Kamenski. Most candidates are skilled in either systematic strategies or credit markets -- but rarely both. “It takes a lot of hard work to get the expertise on the systematic strategies side, as well as be an expert in credit markets.”
Members of Kamenski’s team are trained in disciplines like machine learning, engineering, computer science, and econometrics, or using programming and statistics to inform trading.
Day in the Life
Within the glass-walled offices housing Robeco’s Rotterdam headquarters, PhD graduates from the nearby Erasmus University practically have the run of the place. They’re “able to take empirical data, program a backtest and analyze the results and make sense of them,” says portfolio manager Patrick Houweling.
A day in the life of a credit quant is considerably different from a traditional bond manager, who might spend their days on the phone and wading through dictionary-sized offering documents.
At Robeco the firm’s fundamental traders gathered around TV sets earlier this year to catch one of Mario Draghi’s final ECB press conferences. But the quants were conspicuous by their absence.
“There’s no Draghi on TV screens where the quant researchers sit,” said Houweling, author of a pioneering 2014 paper on credit-factor investing.