Quote from EvOTrAdEr:
Listen, I have 2 good friends who interned at t3 and know a few traders there. They basically sell the intern the dream and have them to very tough work like video editing and writing articles, etc.
They work very hard on marketing. Profitable traders can be found at other firms. Some tend to be a bit modest, but t3 is all about marketing hype. when it comes down to it, you are paying a lot extra for something that will not help you make more money.
If you visit any prop in NYC, you will find traders making big payouts and traders blowing out of their account in 3 days. Visit multiple firms and talk to the traders, you're likely to find a better deal.
I Used to trade with them and everything you said is true. I was paying $12 R/T x 1000 with no special routes or dark pool access. Their tech team wasn't very helpfull. They tried to sell all kind of stuff to us ( even their own biography books, events tickets etc) the laverage was 10x1 and they don't pass the ecn rebates to their traders. I even had to pay for their virtual chat!!. But the most anoying thing was the extreme level of arrogance shown by their owners, especially that guy Evan Lazarous.
I felt Robbed by their "training" They Charge me 3k for 2 days trading and they gave me a freaking book full of charts pictures and Evan Lazarous was trying to explain what those charts means.. For 25 bucks you can find that info in amazon. I thought that their training program was about 2 o 3 three month of continuos education, but that wasn't the case, its just a 2 day full of nothing. I even had to wait 1 week to get help from the tech department to set up lightspeed with the hotkey.
I have to said that Marc Sperling is a class act trader but he don't offer mentorship or training. In fact, he have like 4 Clerks trading around him at the office. True, you can see his position on the virtual floor, but only few traders in the office knew what he was really doing. From my personal experience, I think he do a lot of pairs trading stuff with monster volume. True, he makes millions, but out of 350 traders only him and another 2 guy makes real good money. The other 4 big traders in there were making 25k in a day and losing 45k the next day.
My friend and I tried to find a mentor at the floor, but they never show willingness to help us. I fact, they don't care about their clients, they just want the money to fund the big traders account and to squeez some commision on the process.
The turnover in that company is amazing, but they have a superb marketing team. Scott is a superb human being, but he never was at the office. But the others partners are very arrogants, especially that guy Evan and the other guy Shan. Both were big time losers (they close down the P&L board on their virtual trading floor) And that guy Evan was the "guru"! haha.
The funny thing is that they used to treaten everybody with being fired if we left the door open or stuff like that, how can they fired us when we were clients, not employee?. Btw, They share their floor with SMB trading, even a worse company.
PD: I went to the Lightspeed trading floor and I found out that they have more succesfull traders at their floor than any other place I went. I even met with 2 guys way bigger than Sperling and both were very helpfull for us. I remember one guy there (I think his name was ronin) who made like 60k in just one trade on AGQ in just 20 minutes. And another trader was up like 300k on 2 millions share that day, and both were trading they'r own money. But you need some Real cash to trade at that floor if you want good laverage and commision structure.