While this is true I would recommend using IT because you have to consider what the competition is doing and they definitely use more than a pen and a piece of paper. The best thing that happened to my trading career was a Master's in Quantitative Finance.
The biggest mistake people make who want to make it in the trading business is they assume the only way to make money is to be long or short something. What about exploring something as simple as the correlation between say...the 5-year and 30-year. Is there something to be had by being long one and short the other? What about the correlation between Oil and Gold? And then there's managing your risk with options, which are highly mathematical and require IT if you want to explore the inefficiencies of this market. The opportunities the market offers are limited only by your imagination and your mathematical acumen. A little programming knowledge and a lot of math goes a long way!
The biggest mistake people make who want to make it in the trading business is they assume the only way to make money is to be long or short something. What about exploring something as simple as the correlation between say...the 5-year and 30-year. Is there something to be had by being long one and short the other? What about the correlation between Oil and Gold? And then there's managing your risk with options, which are highly mathematical and require IT if you want to explore the inefficiencies of this market. The opportunities the market offers are limited only by your imagination and your mathematical acumen. A little programming knowledge and a lot of math goes a long way!
Quote from HATEtheRisk:
You dont need any IT knowledge.
Just use paper, pen and your brain.