Quote from NYC212:
I currently trade at a prop desk but I have a second job in a banking call center (big downgrade from my prior employement) but the hours are weekends and after the market so I can do both full time (I am one run down SOB red eyes all day long) but it helps pay the bills and I racked up some debt from a failed business idea I am still paying off, until I am doing well as a trader I really cannot leave
I am actually at work as I type
those who have second jobs what do you do?
Your question is near and dear to my life experience, so I'm going to try and give you a sincere response as to how it all worked out for me and all the idiotic things I did to keep learning to trade. My honest and sincere recommendation to you is to save money to live for one year and just go all-out, full-time. You can see why, from my story:
This whole "wanting to trade" thing started when I had a job working at a dating service. The job paid like $80,000 a year and I met a lot of girls through my job. There was this guy at the place who was paid to do nothing (family connections) who gambled all day long trading penny stocks. He invited me over for weed and women, but I wanted to look at his PnL. He was a terrible trader, but he got me thinking about how to make money. So I worked out a deal with my boss to try tinkering with trading systems on company time. I guess my boss had some faith in me, so he gave me $25,000 as the base capital over which I put another $5000 to trade. I traded and learned about ECNs, etc. Well, about a month later, executive management was running around with layoff threats and my boss got canned. When he got canned, I lost my cover and had to find another job (and return the 25k + interest.)
I ended up finding a job writing internet gambling software. I worked and I tried to trade while on the job again, but got derailed and started gambling. I made a good bit of change, started to learn about expected value, etc. I ended up leaving because there was a crazy guy at the job who I feared was going to bring a gun to work and kill us all.
I got yet another job. Tried to work during the day, tried to sneak in trading strategy development. Eventually, I couldn't balance the act, work was a failure. I was gaining weight, doctor tried to put me on drugs (which I never took.) I tried to claim I had some serious sleep disorders to get medical disability to get an unpaid leave to test my trading system. Company gave me $10,000 and said get lost and made me sign a paper promising not to sue them.
I took that $10,000, did not get a job, and I went straight to a west coast prop shop. $5000 went into the trading account, $5000 went to cover my mortgage payments for 3 months. It was at that prop shop where I learned the lingo and all the things I needed to talk correctly for job interviews. I lost about $2500 "learning"; overall, I learned a LOT. This is where ideas started to come together.
I started interviewing at hedge funds instead of technical shops. No luck. Had to stick to some BS job to support the trading habit. So I got another job and traded during the day (from West LA), drove at night to a second job to Burbank (every day) where I wrote software for 5 hours. It was the most exhausting experience and I was a complete failure at my contract job. I lost a few girlfriends along the way, hit depression, and gained weight from not having time to exercise.
Tried many times to get a contract job, most people just did not want to hire a part-timer for any reasonable amount of money. I had a mortgage at the time. I couldn't foot the mortgage so I sold my condo at the very peak of the SoCal housing bubble. I made around $50,000 off the real estate trade. (Incidentally, I had a sub-prime mortgage from WaMu. Subprime because I was an idiot with no credit record.)
Didn't have a job for a while, ended up slumming around in a cheap-rent situation with some gay dude actor-wannabe in Hollywood. Paid $700/month to live in the living room. Tried to trade again, but did not have a real edge.
I spent several nights at Commerce Casino playing poker to make income, trying to see if I could at least cover rent to buy time learning to trade. This bought me a few months, but I noticed my cash flow was still negative.
I left the prop shop, found a remote trading gig. I failed again. By this time, I knew enough about the markets that I could BS my way into trading-related programming jobs.
The first job interview post prop shop was an options MM in NYC forecasting volatility. It was a shitty startup, my base salary was $92,000, and I couldn't trade at all. They had a secret "quant" C++ library that the market-data/infrastructure guys couldn't look at. I reverse engineered it every night.
The fund collapsed and I ended up working for some government funded academic project. I got a degree while working for the government. I did absolutely nothing at this job, tried to trade, but then they caught on to what I was doing so I resigned. At this point, my resume was in total shambles so I made up a bunch of stuff and started interviewing again.
I finally landed a job at a major investment bank. Now, I'm what they call a quantitative programmer, where I write trading strategies for other people. So I see how they work, and then I get paid if they work well or better than expected. Getting this job required an engineering degree at a top 5 school and an Ivy League graduate degree. Prior to having these credentials -and- experience at Fortune 500 companies, no one took me seriously at all and treated me like absolute garbage. Didn't help that I went from a slim young man to a wild-haired overweight crank over the last few years. I was finally making over $100,000 -- built on a pack of lies, but I knew what I was doing and had a ridiculous amount of technical skill by this point.
Last year (2008), I really got ripped off after I saved the traders millions implementing a new piece of software, and my cut was a shitty $26,000 [after taxes]. I demanded a raise, they didn't budge, and I just felt like I couldn't do business with people who didn't see value. So I left, and now I'm being pimped by a new place. The new place is nice in the sense that I'm not really bound by idiotic rules about what I can and cannot trade.
So after about 4 years of BS in New York, this is where I am at the moment. I have this feeling I am extremely close to really making it big, because I've started to develop automated strategies that really work and for which I state I have a legitimate edge. I'm slowly but surely getting the experience I need, trade management, etc.
I don't know how else to put it, but I started tinkering with this stuff in 2003. Now it's almost 6 years and I "see the light" so to speak, where I can read between the lines of people who write on ET and I can tell who knows what they are talking about. I also know what a real edge is, and I got to work on real strategies that did make money.
Please, don't kill yourself like I did trying to balance two things. You cheat yourself in the end, either through health, or relationships, or whatever. There's a right way to do it and a wrong way, and my advice is this:
1) Cut your living expenses down as far as possible. Live in a trailer if you can.
2) Have 40k stashed up
3) Use 5k at a prop shop just to get the experience before you bust
4) Make a connection with a decent sub-LLC prop shop before you give it your all.
5) Assume it will take 2 years minimum to see the light. You are probably smart, but there's lots of smart people out there and it still takes them 6 months+.
Forget the second job BS. You'll just kill yourself. Take it from the ugliest man on ET. I'm the worst of all the day trader stereotypes rolled up into one.
