I'm a little rusty on linear algebra. I'd be grateful if somebody who wasn't could check this answer.

@Kodiologist: Yeap, you are good. MATLAB example: rng(123); svd(repmat(randn(100,1),1,4).*repmat(1:4,100,1)) returns a single non-zero eigenvalue.

@usεr11852 Thanks!

We have some threads that have lot of views but very few upvotes, and often either no, poor, or good but only very brief answers. I guess this means that most of the views are "external", coming from people who cannot vote, i.e. most likely from google searches. Sometimes I am wondering if we should try to curate such threads more attentively, for the benefit of the humanity.

Here is an example that is on the front page now: stats.stackexchange.com/questions/78324 - 9k views, but only 2 upvotes. Gung's answer is good, but short, and only has 1 upvote. Thousands of people are arriving from google to read this thread, but "internally" for us this is clearly an obscure thread. I am sure I've seen similar questions with many thousands of views, 1-2 upvotes and no helpful answers at all.

@Silverfish: Have you considered some professional degrees with significant mathematical content like the CQF? I think I have seen some degrees on Operational Research and Risk Management too. Granted such degrees do entail at least 20-30% regulatory material which maybe is irrelevant for your field. Also given you look towards online education I don't think you need to constraint yourself to UK, for example Penn State

has an Applied Statistics that might a good fit for you. I think I have seen that the University of Illinois had a similar programme.

Both university are rather reputable so maybe that is an option you could also consider.

@amoeba Great point. I think that's worth raising in Meta. I actually noticed this issue before (but can't remember which thread - not that one) and thought it might be worth discussing but I got busy and forgot about it.

@usεr11852 Thanks. That's very helpful. I am sure there is a rather wider range of Masters degrees available if one includes overseas than stick to the UK. Due to somewhat precarious health/pre-existing chronic condition I've generally discounted the US option but that's possibly because I'm coming from a position of ignorance.

(As somebody who is very dependent on the NHS, I have no idea how people get by without it - yet clearly folk do. Much more so than if I'd lived in most other countries, I have almost no practical understanding of the way health insurance schemes and the like work. They are, particularly in their US variant, pretty scary to a typical Brit - they are rather demonised over here!)

Based on what I've heard from people I know in the financial engineering/quant kind of roles, it seems to be very programming-intensive (I view coding as a tool, and sometimes as a chore, but there are certainly people who get rather ... excited ... by it, in a way that I can't, so I'd be happier to leave the field clear for them) and the problems fairly abstract in a way I'd expect to find less interesting.

Of course, it's a wider field than the circle of people I know, so I may be overgeneralising from a small sample. But I did get similar impressions from Quant.SE. I'm more curious about dealing with a range of concrete rather than abstract problems, and a world in which people don't get terribly excited about implementing an algorithm in a way that knocks 5% off the time.

So something like the OR or applied statistics sounds rather more in the correct direction for me.

I don't know much at all about time series (CV has been very educational) but can imagine there being interesting roles in forecasting, for instance.

I haven't noticed this so much in the UK, but abroad in particular there do seem to be a few universities with specialist econometrics or at least time-series-heavy masters that sound like a particularly good platform for forecasting work. But other CVers would know more than me.

@Silverfish: It really depends on your particular health plan, state, etc. During my time in US, I was under of the UC Healthcare System and pretty much everything we automatically sorted even as a foreign national. I fully appreciate your point about healthcare though and that's why I mentioned online programmes. I was under the impression you could attend short periods of times abroad, my bad.

The three (N=3 LOL) bank quants I know came from the same academic research background; SDEs/Stochastics. Again that is my small sample. As mentioned check some of the online programs. Some of them have extremely low-attendance requirements (effectively being like OU). I am just curious though as to what you would like to do with this certificate? Is it just to get a foot through the door in the analytics business?

@usεr11852 Not your bad at all - the attendance requirements are actually very interesting/useful.

Probably a view to industry rather than academia.

@Silverfish: "forecasting" is a big field. In the UK, the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting does good work mainly in supply chain forecasting (I'm affiliated), and there are quite a few other supply chain forecasters scattered around - I know some in Cardiff, Bath etc. I think the LSE is a good place to start looking if you are more interested in the econometric side of things.

And yes, I do believe that there are indeed "interesting roles in forecasting" ;-) - one of those roles has been putting food on my family's table for ten years now. Supply chain, though, supermarkets and stuff - not very sexy, but useful.

When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I try to ensure that things like this don't happen:

Better Living Through Statistics! Yay!

@StephanKolassa: Nice touch!