1. http://finmath.uchicago.edu/new/msfm/prospective/plan_readin...
( i graduated last month from this pgm. if you have 50K$ and 9 months to spare, its not such a bad idea to apply. i believe 50% of graduating class found a quant job with max paycheck 165K & 20-100% sign-on bonus ( hope this isn't classified info :) If you are smart, just read Hull cover to cover and solve all the problems. I'm not so smart :( )
steven leduc primers ( cliff notes linear algebra, GRE subject math ) - quick brushup before interviews
6. personal suggestion - take 6 months to figure out if this is right for you. open a 5k brokerage account. don't buy any stocks, but grow that 5k by pure derivative play ( butterflies, condors, ratio spreads ) in simple equities. that math is invaluable and not so hard. plus, the programming is not too hard either - just simple 2D graphics, a few threads & number crunching will spit out payoff diagrams you can understand.
The "you must start here" is nothing but a popularity list. It does not really speak to the quality of the titles. Can you recomend anything specific from the list to start with?
Check out QuantNet (http://www.quantnet.com), Wilmott (as SkyMarshal linked below) and Nuclear Phynance (http://www.nuclearphynance.com/). AFAIK, they're the most active forums for quants and usually don't mind answering questions for beginners/students.
If you're looking for an overarching guide to the finance industry - The Complete Guide to Capital Markets for Quantitative Professionals By Kuznetsov is a good book to start. This book explains the major financial markets, players and products, and what a technical/quantitative person could do there.
Quants in banks are generally not working high-frequency trading which this website seems to focus on, and which generally requires very limited modelling. Therefore HFT is often the province of IT teams, though quants may have some input. The role of quants tends to involve hedging, calibrating models, and sensitivities -- http://www.risk.net/type/technical-paper
As a rule of thumb: it is quanty iff the word convex is employed. Interestingly, this can be abused by the uninitiated -- "Have you considered the convexity of the underlying?" etc. -- to pretend to a deeper, quantier knowledge than that possessed.
Depending on the asset class there are more specific books but "Options, Futures, and Other Derivatives" by Hull is a good starting point.
This is from March 2011, from their last(?) newsletter:
Who Reads Quantly?
Based on our web server logs, here are the top firms accessing Quantly over the past six weeks. The firms are listed in order, most traffic first. I've highlighted some of the more hardcore quant outfits.
Credit Suisse Group,
Bank of America,
Deutsche Bank,
Toronto Dominion Bank,
Citadel Investment Group,
Cooperfund,
JPMorgan Chase,
Susquehanna Ireland Ltd,
Barclays Capital,
Cerebellum Capital,
QCAP Management,
Putnam Investments,
Quantmetrics Ltd,
Tradeworx,
DRW Trading,
Goldman Sachs Group,
UBS,
Timber Hill LLC,
SAC Capital Advisors,
GETCO, LLC,
Light Box Capital,
Morgan Stanley Group,
WH Trading,
Crabel Capital Management,
Top universities accessing the site:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Virginia Polytechnic Institute,
Columbia University,
Claremont University Consortium,
University of California, Los Angeles,
Stanford University,
University of Hawaii,
Imperial College London,
University of California at Berkeley,
New York University,
Santa Clara University,
Carnegie Mellon University,
Quantly is woefully inactive: http://quant.ly/newest says the latest 3 posts (not counting the 3 that were posted after the HN post) were 1, 7, 18 days ago respectively.
