In the US, the brightest are said to join AI firms. In Britain, they sign up to be quantitative analysts. The Financial Times reports that the City is becoming one of the world’s leading “quant” centres. An Oxford don in charge of mathematical finance told its reporters that almost all his students ended up working at quant trading firms, on salaries from £250,000 to £800,000. “If you get offered a salary less than £250K, you’re kind of the sad guy,” he said, adding that “nobody I know interviews for JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs … not once do I hear anybody entertain any of these traditional investment banking jobs.”
The lure is obvious: 45-year-old billionaire trader Alex Gerko earned £682m from his City quant firm XTX Markets last year. Harder to grasp is that modest salaries in once respectable professions now function to deter people from the very graduate careers they once defined. On the FT’s front page, employers warned that graduate entrants to City bluechips earn a median yearly salary of £33,000, not much more than the minimum wage, expected to be £26,400 next year. Executives cautioned that university debt no longer yields a wage premium. To preserve profits, firms said they would look to using more AI or offshore roles.
