If your son or daughter is attending or about to be attending college, perhaps they may want to consider this message coming out of Wall Street.  Firms are desperately seeking high-tech trading talent to run the new high-speed computerized trading desks that are wiping out thousands of more traditional jobs.

 

Annual salaries for the black-box quantitative developers, for example, start at over $1 million, while high-frequency, algorithmic trader,s and other pros can pull down a base of $200,000 — along with breathtaking bonuses of as much as 100% (or more) of base, one top headhunter revealed to The Post.

 

The problem, according to headhunters who are scouring Ivy League campuses: Not enough top-shelf trading candidates.  "I have a big whiteboard in my office right now with the top nine trading positions: One spot is paying a million dollars, one is paying $400,000, another is paying $200,000, and it goes on.  These are all $200,000-plus paying jobs," Kyle Ramkissoon, a top head headhunter and principal at IJC Partners in New York, told The Post.  "My challenge is that we have a shortage of qualified candidates."

 

"Back in the early 2000s, the joke used to be that Wall Street trading departments are soon going to be hiring rocket scientists — and now they are," said Jim Toes, chief executive officer and president of the Security Traders Association. Toes, a former high-ranking Merrill Lynch trader, said banks are shaking up departments — for example, replacing three-person teams in the equity and options markets with one high-tech pro.

 

That’s not much comfort to the old guard.  Michael Caputo, 50, last year closed his trading operations on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The new regulations and trading networks had hammered his business.  At the peak, this popular 20-year NYSE vet employed 12 trading personnel. Caputo himself was making as much as $1 million in a good year. When the business started to crumble, his lifestyle went with it.

 

Meanwhile, it’s a wonderful world for many Ivy League nerds.  Ramkissoon said in his 16 years as a headhunter he’s seen nothing like the number of qualified candidates snubbing his job entreaties.  "Yesterday I reached out to 69 senior quant analysts,” he said, describing pros who develop trading-related strategies. "Only 14 have gotten back to me. They are content where they are working at now."