I have to respectfully disagree with you there. Once you start in IB or in wealth management,you’re stuck there. Trading has other career paths, namely risk, portfolio management and structuring — but the survival rate for traders is quite low — so for me that’s the most flexible area. But, if you (in the royal sense) do decide to go into trading, your math and stats abilities need to be rock solid. Fundamental analysis is the past; Citadel, Renaissance, Two Sigma, AQR and, really, the buy-side leaders nowadays are driven primarily by quantitative methodologies. It seems people have finally realized that there is no “skill” in picking stocks (their returns are modeled as random processes for a reason) — only in managing exposures and designing structures.
Edit: the most valuable courses you can take, if you’re interested in the quantitative route, are in computer science, optimization (especially linear and integer programming), probability (especially stochastic processes and simulation), econometrics and statistics, though I suspect there are now machine learning courses offered — in which case I would recommend ones that cover artificial neural networks, random forests and regression models (especially XGB). Operations research is the only discipline that covers all of the above — and is why I chose to major in it. Some schools offer financial engineering programs, which are the best choice for a career in finance, but you need to be absolutely sure that you want to go into finance — you’re giving up some skills in favor of specialized knowledge. That may work against you if you’re decide to ditch finance down the road.
