What degree/master/phd would be the best for a trader?

2rosy said:
look on www.iasg.com there are funds (ctas) that slowly lose and still have investors. also you might be friends with a fund of funds and they invest in you. or if your program falls below its high watermark you can create a new program, suggest investors shift assets into it, and start collecting PnL % again.

due diligence ... thats funny :p
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I have came to understand that it is good that there are swindlers out there who manage to divert investors into losing their money :
we need as many bad traders as possible, and to keep these people into the market we need people willing to lose a fortune.
 
jack hershey said:
I had one job from graduation until 5 years out. I worked for IBM.

I began and have continued as an amateur since 1957. by 1959 my comissions were > my salary at IBM. I always put 50% of salary into account.

Many organizations have offered me jobs. As my knowldegeand skills became known I worked to solve problems. In the US, everyone is affected by my solutions to three problems every day via my controbutions at EOP. Strategically speaking, I have made other kinds of contributions.

Since MAT became formal and informally before that I have maintained an amateur status by regulatory US standards. By 1966 I had a commercial account at UBS in Zurich.

What you typed above is your mythical version you got from someone who is also missinformed.

when I lived in Grennwich before moving to switzerland, I did work for NY Securities, INC on a portal to portal fee plus expenses with respect to "white papers" QA. There I was offered a partnership (I declined). The offer was a consequence of my social connections (See NYSR) and real estate (See Beekman Fund) in the NY metropolitan area .

In Science and Mathematics, SA is done as Problem Solving. This is foreign to ET. For many years I posted flow sheets of the logic for processing market dta. It fell on deaf ears except for alert types of thinkers. and some creeps here tried to steeel it and market it through fidelity. fidelity has no rational platform that is logic oriented. so nothing came of it except it was ranked at top of fidelity stuff for several years.

I know when I post that almost no one can deal with my input to them. So it goes.
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OK, any good books/articles that you would recommend to read for coming up a good strategy? Or you suggest any kind of good way? I can do programming and create trading program but my math/stats knowledge is nothing special so I don't come up with any outstanding strategy.
 
GloriaBrown said:
OK, any good books/articles that you would recommend to read for coming up a good strategy? Or you suggest any kind of good way? I can do programming and create trading program but my math/stats knowledge is nothing special so I don't come up with any outstanding strategy.
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You are asking for three sets of books.

Group A deals with information

Group B deals with how your mind works.

Group C deals with the programming.

Since I am writing books on this I will post three attachments After I go to a computer now in repair (monsoon electrical failure took out the computer guts.) that will allow be to do acut an past on the three bibliographies you will require.

Iright now our place has verious technicans and power people reconstructing things.
 
jack hershey said:
You are asking for three sets of books.

Group A deals with information

Group B deals with how your mind works.

Group C deals with the programming.

Since I am writing books on this I will post three attachments After I go to a computer now in repair (monsoon electrical failure took out the computer guts.) that will allow be to do acut an past on the three bibliographies you will require.

Iright now our place has verious technicans and power people reconstructing things.
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I only need "Group A deals with information" XD LOL.

By the way, there are so many kind of information that can be processed, like price, volume, GDP, interest rate and so on...what should we process? And what time frame do you believe having much better chance to have good earning? Interday or Intraday? Hold for days, weeks, months!?
 
GloriaBrown said:
I only need "Group A deals with information" XD LOL.

By the way, there are so many kind of information that can be processed, like price, volume, GDP, interest rate and so on...what should we process? And what time frame do you believe having much better chance to have good earning? Interday or Intraday? Hold for days, weeks, months!?
More...

I typed up a response to this and ET told me I could not post it.

Sorry about that .
 
Thread TL & DL

I say no degree other than you are smart enough to learn everything about finance yourself and understand how the industry works.

But if you must, I'd say a finance degree helps because it provides you with the background and theory necessary for you to jump right in with less catching up. A person who is totally green or who studied something else at uni will have to learn all this by themselves, such as all the terminology, how to read financial statements etc. So a degree will give you this background right away. But it can also give you biases because clearly stock prices are driven by sentiment and momentum and money flow, more so than the fundamentals more often than not, hence why "the market can stay irrational longer than u can stay solvent". Stubborn people who short based on "fundamentals" often get steam rolled because of this. "oh but AAPL is so undervalued and XYZ stock is 200 P/E so I'm shorting" then next day XYZ gaps up another 20%... "man so overvalued so I'm doubling down!".

I think in this modern age, a math or statistics degree will help too. You can approach trading with mathematical or statistical models to look for correlation and find trading strategies. These are much more advanced than mom and pop style buy and hold of what you know. This is rigorous statistically backed trading plans and what some of the top quant hedge funds use.

Then I think a computer science or programming experience can help with algorithmic trading. But before you can do that you still need a trading plan. Just being able to program something isn't helpful at all if you don't have the trading plan.

I don't think you really need advanced degrees except if the work or techniques you have used in those fields of study can be directly implemented in the trading plan. For example if you did machine learning work for your robotics research, you can probably apply that to your algo. Also, I've been around people with advanced degrees and one common thing I notice personality-wise is most of them are very confident in themselves (not in a good way) and are very linear thinking. I don't think these are particularly good traits of a human trader because it will often lead them to be stubborn too thinking they have everything figured out and they are the smartest in the room; and the last thing you need is to be stubborn in a losing trade. Unless they use this personality into developing an algorithm then that is helpful because an algo sticks to a trading plan and their skills are in programming a robust algo and their personality helps them get the job done (job being the programming or the statistical analysis).

Mostly, I think the super successful traders like billionnaire futures trader John Arnold, etc, have a winning combination of knowledge of the industry, knack of the trade, lots of guts and lots of luck. You don't need fancy education for any of it when you do 1000 lot NG futures and a few minutes later you walk away with 1% gain on the notional that you sell after. They are immediately a lot richer just because they make the right trade.
 
butterfacetrader said:
Mostly, I think the super successful traders like billionnaire futures trader John Arnold, etc, have a winning combination of knowledge of the industry, knack of the trade, lots of guts and lots of luck. You don't need fancy education for any of it when you do 1000 lot NG futures and a few minutes later you walk away with 1% gain on the notional that you sell after. They are immediately a lot richer just because they make the right trade.
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it seems John Arnold was lucky enough to have access to huge amount of capital which is vital for trading .the fact is that (due to his biography) he did not changed his 5k $ account into billions.he traded billions to make billions .
 
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