Quote from roberk:
Bachillier,
could you give more details. 5 years full-time- you must have some advice and stories to tell..
sure. i have been living a pretty lazy life, many many vacations. in fact i just returned from a month in buenos aires.
i think controlling your risk is most important and trading works best when you have some easy edge, like rebates, millenium or arbitrage or specialist reading. i see all these new kids coming in thinking they are gonna be the new soros, when the only thing they will need to learn is to focus on these things. to overcome these easy edges and go to the next level, requires an extra-extraordinary human being imo, or just immediately start at a hedgefund or bulge bracket firm.
i enjoy this story as well, i wrote it down some time ago: "Some time ago there was a computer which would "switch on" for a short time, once or twice a day. This made our boys a lot of easy money.
What's funny about it, our guys would watch videos or play games all day until the computer would switch on and then they would do their thang (everything quited down in concentrated demeanor) and end up thousands plus in their acccounts after some minutes. One of the guys consistently would play the song "P.I.M.P." very loud and we would start hanging again waiting for the next turn hilarious.. also because one of the guys who didn't like making money on a computer trick was particularly annoyed everytime they played the p.i.m.p song

" (
http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=712778#post712778)
what i am really grateful for is that having this experience as prop trader showed me life can different from going through the ordinary 9-5 threadmill. but maybe i wasn't prepared to do that anyway who knows. and also you can't learn more about yourself than through holding major positions in stressful situations
there probably are some more stories i can't think of right now