Out of all the financial industries, I would describe the hedge industry as the most secretive and bold one. Essentially, we are at the buy side, and with a pool of investors money, employ various trading strategies in various markets to earn a profit. It is believed that hedge funds are the least regulated implying the least limitations in what you can trade and how.

The interface between us and the financial institutes comes in execution of trades. For example, the banks handle all the complications in acquiring what we want to buy. We want to go long on GOOG so we call up Goldman and ask them to get a certain amount of GOOG. Now this is a highly simplication of what's going on. There's the aspect of multiple banks, the issue of pricing what assets, the option of trading on the exchange, the packaging of certain assets whose value is derived from another (derivatives), etc.

My advise to the TS is that hedge funds require people with specialized skills and as a result, it probably should be one of the later career choices you make. Unlike investment banking, IPO, M&A, or Private Wealth Management, you don't get to see the broad picture of finance when working in hedge funds.

Now, I'm being careful here. When I say broad, I mean how the different players in the whole finance universe interact with each other. Sure, as a trader, you need to know market interactions that are inferred by financial news. However, you specialize in looking at the news which are connected to pricing a certain asset, like equities or currencies. Any other information, which may be relevant to finance but not relevant to your asset, can be ignored.

As for the math, again it varies. Since I'm a huge math fan, I can expound on it further. The level of math used in hedge funds can be intermediate (George Soros) or widely advance (Renaissance Tech). Not to say that those who use an intermediate level of math imply that they weaker performers. No, because they employ more fundamental analysis.

For those hedge funds using technical indicators, you need to know nothing further than standard deviation, means, maximum, minimum, minimax and maximins. For those filled with Stanford and MIT math students, and these are the hedge funds that rule Wall Street, you need things like statistical inference, martignal concepts, partial differential equations, and stochastic calculus.

And I'm not just word dropping here. There are tons of academic literature out there that suggests trading strategies. All of them starts out with sigma algebras and probability measures. I've read almost a dozen of those. The value of math students going into hedge funds is to create a path from the literature to a fully functional trading system that trades on the abstract theory found in those papers. Have tens of thousands of data points holding prices of assets scattered along the path makes it much more difficult to navigate.

Cheers,
Donny