what are your professions beside being a trader?
- Thread starter vincentnyc
- Start date
This is an awesome story. Who will play you in the movie?
Congrats on the great run and the book!
Either Miley Cyrus or Oprah Winfrey will play me in the movie. -- or maybe Nicholas Cage.
Nicholas Cage in the movie National Treasure is basically like a trader's journey for the Holy Grail.
Or like Kyle MacLachlan in Showgirls...Vegas and the girls are the crazy, weird Market...and his business is trying to stay alive and grow within it.
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You do not have to manage other people's money to make a living from the market. If your personal funds are large enough but don't have to be anywhere near $5million, a comfortable living should be no problem. Suppose you have $2m. 5% of $2m is 100k. That should be sufficient to support a family of modest living. Actually, I think $1m is also quite enough but more on the risky side. I am assuming you are not living in expensive cities like New York or Silicon Valley.
One advantage about having a job is the respectability it holds compared to a full-time trader. Try telling someone you are a full-time trader. You get funny looks. They will be wondering "Why can't this guy find a proper job? Loser!"
Robert Morse
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Maybe I was not clear. I was an member of the NYSE-AMEX and a broker dealer. I was trading with a BD the SEC only requires capital of $25,000 to operate. You create your BD with the SEC, join a self regulatory organization (SRO), and must then find a clearing broker to be your guarantor. Mine was SLK, then GSEC. At the time, the required $250,000 to offer clearing services and sign up as your guarantor. I was told by the three clearing brokers that did that business, at at some point in the near future, I would need $5mm or more to do that business and have them as my guarantor.
I was not managing others money. I was running my own trading business as a MM. What I was doing can't be replicated off floor as a customer. I would have to trade a different strategy off floor as customer that would require more risk and more capital to make the same living. It was time to move on.
licensed drug dealer
This is a good question! Gives all of us a sense of our backgrounds prior to trading. I was an Electrical Engineer and Engineering Sales Executive at a Fortune 1000 tech company (they just got listed in the SPX last year). Prior to that I had a small software startup that was purchased by the said Fortune1000 company. After 10 years of service, they fired my ass (or contract was up, depending on your perspective). Since then I've become a full-time investor and have never looked back. Today, I have a voracious appetite to invest in different asset classes; stocks/options, commercial real estate, heavy equipment leasing, mortgage notes, p2p loans, franchises etc.
I'm a student of Warren Buffet's rules of investing by not spending on anything unless you generate revenue. I have designed my lifestyle to try and live far below my means. One of my businesses (real estate rentals) pays for all of my personal expenses.
Electrical engineer, computer programmer, pilot, and CEO. Trading 49 years. Profitable every year since 1984.
Ha! LONG time since I heard THOSE names! (Amiga 500 and commodore 64)...God, I'm getting old
