Why my knowledge is useless

One of my goals is to become an expert of the quantitative finance methods to understand Greater Chinese securities. At this point this is a useless skill, and I came away with a much better understanding of why this knowledge is useless.....

1) Hedge funds find this useless because they cannot trade PRC securities due to capital controls. It is vaguely possible that a macro hedge fund would find my knowledge on the PRC economy generally useful, but again they run into capital controls. Quantitative arbtritage would also find the methodology useful but they still can't make money because of capital controls. Also, getting QFII status is a pain which most smaller hedge funds don't want to go into.

One of my questions going in was how hedge funds handle PRC capital controls.... Answer they don't. Their China plays are through the Hong Kong market.

2) Private equity firms (both US and China firms) find my knowledge useless because venture capitial is fundamentally a qualitative social relation process. One thing that I did come away with is the sense that private equity would be a viable career path for me, but I just like coding partial differential equations more than shaking hands.

3) Real estate firms (both US and China firms) find my knowledge useless because quantitative methods aren't that commonly used in real estate. (They probably should be, but that's another rant).

4) Western banks (both investment and commercial) find my knowledge useless because most of their work in China involves mergers and accquisitions, IPO's, private equity and these involve qualitative methods not quantitative. What quantitative methods exist involve things like risk management and these seem to not involve heavy-duty quanting. Then there are capital controls.

5) Chinese commercial banks are interested in risk management which is highly qualitative and doesn't involve crunching a lot of PDE's.

6) Chinese securities companies can't do a lot of the things (like short selling and option writing) which are needed for quanting to be useful.

7) Chinese asset funds don't find this useful because they do mainly fundamental analysis.

8) Academics aren't interested because for the most part, the quantitative analysis needed for PRC companies isn't mathematically innovative.

Which leaves no one but me who finds this useful. This is actually a good thing for me, since someone else would be doing it if there were currently money in it. The real question is when will people find this useful and more importantly who will find it useful first.

The timeframe for this to become useful is probably not when capital controls get lifted because that is a really long way off (five to ten years). The people who are most likely to be interested are people who do domestic trading within the PRC, once the stock market gets cleaned up and rules for derivatives are liberalized. This would include the Western banks and Chinese securities companies.