Associate – Applied Mathematician, Electronic Trading and Quantitative Finance
A research role in a small team that builds algorithms for trading stocks, bonds and derivatives, using stochastic control, statistics and numerical methods. It suits a mathematically strong PhD who wants market problems with real depth.
What you’d work on
Our reading of the posting: what a new hire in this role would most likely spend their first months on.
- Develop hedging strategies for large transactions using derivatives
- Model bond inventory optimisation under risk, liquidity and capital limits
- Build pricing models that work from sparse, noisy market data
- Write simulations and turn the findings into trading policies and risk tools
What they ask for
Required
- PhD in applied maths, statistics, operations research or theoretical physics
- Probability, statistics and stochastic calculus
- Optimisation or stochastic control
- Advanced data analysis
- Enough programming to prototype models
- Independent working style
Preferred
- Option pricing and credit default swap maths
- Noisy data and sparse estimation
- Dimensionality reduction
- Numerical optimisation
- Education
- PhD in applied mathematics, statistics, operations research or theoretical physics.
- Experience
- No specific years stated
- Markets
- fixed-income, equities, options
How to prepare
- Read the cited papers on high-frequency covariance estimation and dealer market making and reproduce a simple result
- Solve a small stochastic control problem such as optimal inventory quoting numerically
- Practise estimating covariance matrices from noisy asynchronous data
- Write a simulation that tests a hedging policy under transaction costs
What to study
- Probability, Statistics and Financial Data
- Linear Algebra, Optimisation and Numerical Methods
- Market Microstructure and Execution
- Econometrics and Financial Time Series
The Quantitative Researcher roadmap sets out the stages for this kind of role, with free resources for each.
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Read the full posting on Morgan Stanley’s site before applying: requirements, location and pay can change after we check them.
View the posting on Morgan Stanley’s site ↗
SelfMadeQuant wrote this summary from the employer’s public posting, last checked 6 November 2026. SelfMadeQuant isn’t affiliated with Morgan Stanley and doesn’t handle applications.