Originally posted by Speculator1929
Congratulations Don. These posts are better than all the advertising you could do independently. Atlanta gave a clear and succinct description of your training. Atlanta, I am assuming you are in the Bright Atlanta office? I heard from a buddy who left that office last year that it was dead and the Office Manager was "worthless". Has that changed? I am reconsidring moving to Atlanta from Chicago and would like to know. Also, Don is Earl V. the same Earl who was a stock clerk on the CBOE in the 80's and early 90's? I clerked on the CBOE one summer (1989) while in college. I am excited about your training and your rates. My firm in Chicago is slowly dying.
Speculator, I am in the Atlanta office. This is my second week here, so I am still learning the ropes a bit. My last trading platform was gr8trade and before that cybertrader which I knew inside and out. Redi plus is similar, but being a slave to habit, I spent much of the first week tweaking it so that the hotkeys and layout were as close to my old layout as possible.
As far as the office goes, I'll break it down for ya. The location could not be better. for most. I have a commute from hell right now but It's right in midtown where everything is. So when you get off work, if you leave at 4:00-4:30 you can beat traffic or if you stay late your within 5 minutes of many a watering hole and plenty of southern beauties where you can wait out the god awful atlanta traffic if you choose, ;-)
The office is only about 1/3 full, most of the traders here trade momentum from what I have seen. (I am going to mix that with some pairs trading , and ofcourse the open only's which are discussed on another thread here). This office has some good tape readers, when guys call out things, its more of the ...."look at the bid on Lehman, or did you just see that print on THC", etc....vs. the last place I traded where I did the majority of the talking and it was more of news orientated or correlation type trading. Where I would see news on say, NOK, and yell out...."watch rfmd and cnxt on that NOK news, they make most of those RF chips, and watch those OEM's too they could drop, etc.).
Here they trade anything that is moving but still weigh heavily toward the NYSE stocks.
The setups are pretty standard....everytrader has 4 monitors as a kind of default, if you want/need more, they don't seem to mind. Most traders here have their own first alert as well. My setup is a redi on one monitor, and FA running on the other three.
We have the spoos pit pipped over the telephone all day after the pal talk (whatever they call it. ;-) in the morning.
As far as the branch manager goes, I like him. He is young and good at multitasking 2-3 things at once. His office is right off the floor and his door never closes. He trades most of the day as I believe all Bright managers do. I have had managers in the past that do not trade, and I am in the camp that prefers that they do. Also, I don't have any numbers to back it up, but when I was out in Las Vegas they seemed to indicate that most office managers are former traders, many of which did well enought that they eventually opened their own offices.
Besides commission rates, that was the largest factor that contributed in me coming here. (the fact that if you do well and want to move to somewhere they don't have an office, then go open one.
The only thing I really miss from my old office is having internet access at my workstation. Here you have to go to another computer. I miss using the lunch time lull to read over briefing, realmoney, check email, etc. I think if we add a few more traders we might get sometype of wireless thing so traders can have that. If not, I will figure out something on my own. I belive the rational right now is that all of our bandwidth is allocated to redi (orderflow)....and that net access might slow things down but I'm not positive on that one.
Obviously, the main draw here if your experienced and not already with Bright are the fees. As I posted initially, my commissions here work out to more than 100K a year less vs. the old place where I had a base rate less than a penny per share but still had to pay the related fees. Those fees for the ecns, soes, etc, are already factored into the pricing here. (those fees at my last place paid for the free lunches, bloomberg machine, parking pass, flat pannel monitors, pool table, christmas parties,etc. from the last place). At this point (I'm 28 now...I think I'd rather just keep more of my money.)
Better get back to programing this first alert.....
Cheers.
