How to admit you're in finance without admitting you're in finance?

> How to admit you're in finance without admitting you're in finance?

Tell me you have no clue about quant finance without telling me you have no clue about quant finance.

You probably think it’s abstract topology and Ito calculus, when in reality it’s linear regression and PCA. If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll see a sigmoid function.

If someone in finance is using LLMs, it’s for marketing purposes (recruiting talent, or impressing investors). Jane Street/DE Shaw are notorious for this.

Or Cryptanalysis.

" The National Security Agency is the largest employer of mathematicians in the U.S. "

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mathematicians-an...

99.99% of finance is freshman level math if at that. Then 99.99% of the remaining 0.01% is somewhat more complicated but still not frontier level.

There are very-very few cases where you need truly advanced math in finance. The problems that need solving are generally vastly more pedestrian.

You need to deal with terrible data quality, terrible formats, noise in every aspect of your work, disruptions, lack of standards, inability to generate new data (and repeat experiments), conflicting and often opaque incentives, technical problems ranging from shitty APIs to having to squeeze nanoseconds out of your network stack, etc.

These are all difficult problems, but they are crucially not frontier math problems (by and large).

Or signals intelligence.