PM at a hedge fund, with a focus on quant credit investing. I have free time these days b/c I quit training the juniors and filled out my staff. PMs spend the bulk of their time talking with the people whose money I manage; when things are good, my phone is quiet and when things get 'turbulent', my phone rings off the hook. Markets are pretty stable since late 2016, so I'm actually a little bit bored, but that's nice compared to the sheer fucking terror I have experienced in the past. In general the HF world is a TON of brief periods of intense action followed by weeks of sitting and waiting as your ideas play out.
The notion of the rapid-fire hedge fund trader (like Jim Cramer) went out of style over 15 years ago. Trading is much slower these days. You have the high frequency guys trading like 60% to 70% of the equity volumes, but that's just bots fighting against bots for a few fractions of a penny. Ironically, HFT forces everyone else to slow down and lengthen their horizons.
But I don't do equities; I do 'credit' which you all would call debt and/or structured products. Structured products are the insane 'financialized' packages of mortgages, commercial loans, asset backed securities, derivatives, etc that caused the 2008 crash. Nowadays, you develop a theoretical mathematical model (heavy applied statistics, with a huge focus on conditionality), hire programmers in the Philippines/India to write the code (always in small chunks so nobody knows what they are doing), test the model/code, implement/run the code and see if it works in a 'dry' environment (eg with fake cash or a tiny amount of real cash); ironically running code in a dry environment is called 'soaking the code' for some reason. If it works you 'go live' with a small amount of money then scale it over months to a year as you monitor it closely. Eventually you develop a small degree of trust in the results it spits out, but there are always humans watching closely.
Its a really clinical and boring process; however, given all the volatility in the markets over the 2005-2015 period, and the fact that quants with shitty models directly contributed to the 2008 crash, investors demand 'clinical and boring'. "Asshole who sits at a Bloomberg terminal and screams at his traders" cant get a job anymore.
How'd I get here? I've had an extremely non-traditional route: grew up really poor. Straight As in high school b/c that was the only way out; full ride to college; full ride to law school. Corporate law (generalist) for a few years, with a ton of pro bono criminal defense work. Switched firms and went into securities law. Hated that. Jumped over to investment banking for a few years and then got two grad degrees in applied math at night. Joined the structured finance desk in 2005....right before the big crash. Stayed in banking for a few years and then went to a hedge fund and worked my way up. I'm at a point where I need to either start my own firm, or do something else. Honestly, I'm tired of wall street and I'm probably going to do something else.