Quantitative analysis · Researcher

You spend an internship at Squarepoint Capital researching trading ideas in data and coding them into the firm's automated trading system.

A quant researcher looks for patterns in market data that predict where prices will go, then writes code so the firm's systems can trade on them without a person placing each order. As an intern you do the same work at a smaller scale. You take a trading idea, test it against large sets of historical data using statistical methods, and if it holds up you implement it inside the firm's automated trading framework. Along the way you learn how different exchanges and asset classes work, meaning the rules and mechanics of each market and of each kind of thing that is traded. The seat can sit in London, Paris, New York, Singapore or Hong Kong.