As with most industries, it depends. But junior people typically make in the 200-500K range. Then as you gain experience, develop your own ideas/strategies and are able to manage risk appropriately, the sky is the limit. The closer you are to managing money that's being invested the more you make. If you can run a 1.5 - 2 Sharpe strategy and never dip below a ~5% drawdown, i.e. probably have substantial positive skew in returns, you can make in the millions or tens of millions at the right fund. Note that as the OP correctly alluded to, this is much more difficult to do live than in a backtest.
Is 200-500k still true? It used to be, but I think it has decreased significantly over the last decade. I'd say most junior people in this field are making about the same or less than software engineers these days.
But like you said, the range here is incredibly wide and largely depends on how well your strategies do and if you have your own desk/fund.
I don’t think it is. I worked for one of the major HFTs and new graduates earned far less than that. In addition the churn rate was high - I’d say most new graduate hires didn’t last more than 2 years and what you learned in those 2 years was often not much use in terms of experience useful for other career paths.
Bonus distribution was reverse exponential. Like traditional consultancy partnerships, a small few of the old hands made serious money but those at the “bottom” made ok money but after a few years their FAANG based contemporaries were doing better. Advancing up the ranks was not guaranteed even if you survived the frequent blood lettings.
I wonder if this isn't the cause of lack of progress in science. - Why create wealth for all when you can acquire currency for yourself by managing other people's money?
It seems to me like those tragic stories of genuises who died young. What could have been if their ideas had reached the world? But instead of dying the geniuses got sequestered into finance and secrecy, volunteering to make no mark at all on the world of their passing.
