I was a senior trader. Now I’m a programmer. Here’s why
- Thread starter trader99
- Start date
I get that. I was just asking, "which were you"?
Can't imagine many ETers think of "trading" as merely executing the orders from customers. No stress nor profit potential in that.
I didn't write the article. Why are you asking me? I'm just posting industry news.
Earlier in my career, I started out in quant research at an investment management firm. There were also "traders" at these large mutual funds/investment management companies. All they really did was executed orders that the portfolio managers(PMs) and analysts decided on. Their pay was lower than PMs since they didn't really call the shots. Their performances were based on getting large order fills at good prices. There are standard metrics to measure that.
Anyhow, I sometimes wonder if those guys are still around given the prevalence of algorithmic trading that will break large orders from big fund managers with little market impact.
Then later on I was briefly at a small hf as a short-term trader. After that, I was in tech industry until now.
In between, I did prop day trading back in the days when you had to put nothing down and use 100% company funds and got paid a small "salary". With what I know now about TA and intraday trading, I would have made a killing. Oh well. NO risk. The cut back then was 50%-75%. When you are just learning daytrading for the first time around, the results were pretty erratic.
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Sorry, I didn't catch the link. Thought you were talking about yourself. My fault.
Could do it now, you know, "with what you know about TA".
If you can earn 2 points/day on 20-lots in the ES... that's $500k/year. Scale up from there.
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Haha. Yes, that's what I trying to do now in between my biz/job/family duties. Back then, I was a free man. Younger with little obligations.
Also back then I had access to large capital from the firm risk-free. You could buy as many shares as your manager let you. There were guys throwing basket orders of 20-40 stocks at a time. Doing a quick math of # of shares * share prices * 20-40 stocks and you realized there was a lot of capital at play. At least for daytraders.
I had even more capital when I was trading at the small hf. I-banks were coming to us and saying they were willing to give us as much leverage as we wanted. Back in the days prior to regulations. I sucked back then. Oh well.
I'm no longer in the industry.
Don't give up. It's there to be taken.
You don't have to "get it right away and go big".
Start small and learn. Scale up as your success and confidence grows. Your objective should be to "get it" someday. Sooner would be better, of course, but not a requirement. Confidence in trading is HUGE! Genuine confidence comes only from "understanding".
Lemme tell you....when it's your money and you want to "go big", you'd better be damend sure that your play "has a high probability of being right and/or the potential reward makes it worth taking the risk", and to understand why. (Still gotta trade with a stop, however.... the market is often tricky and sucks even smart people into the wrong play.)
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You should never underestimate the ability of people to spend their entire paycheck, no matter how large.
If you read the article carefully he never says he was a senior trader. That's just in the headline, written by someone at efinancialnews trying to generate clicks (and it worked!). As you say I doubt very much he was a "senior trader" (whatever that means). I was working as a bank trader just over 12 years ago and AFAIK only one of the guys I was working with is still in the industry.
GAT
Better still...
"Americans can be counted upon to spend everything they make plus their credit capacity" -- Bernard Baruch