Our Life

I've recently developed an interest in trading and believe a career in this business can potentially be exciting, lucrative, fast-paced, and fun.

After making a jump from a boring, back-office ops role at Prudential Financial, I landed myself a position at Deutsche Bank in their Wall Street Office. I have been here for a little over 2 months and work as a Controlling Associate within the Global Markets Equity division. I am involved with P&L across the GME desks and regulatory and credit risk reporting. My division can be described as the middle-man between front and middle office. Specifically, our bank refers to us as "Finance".

Now that I have gotten my foot in the door at one of the top I-banks and my current role is exposing me to the numerous equity products and derivatives, I feel that this can become one of the bulding blocks needed to eventually break into trading.

Some examples of questions I have for those with experience in this area are as follows:
1. How did your trading career begin? How did you get into the business?
2. Do you feel that my current position is a step in the right direction?
3. Is it a competitive and difficult interview process?
4. What are the training programs like?
5. Compensation?
6. What advice can you give to someone like me?
etc, etc….

Any insight that that you think may be useful would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike

proprietary or s&t?

I think I would prefer prop trading…but what are some of the advantages/disadvantages of both?

Heres a little rant I wrote up — if you have more questions regarding prop trading and the firms ask me and I'll answer to the best of my ability

heres the big breakdown of prop trading

There are the big proprietary trading desks at the big i-banks which generally you will start off as a trading assistant then move to junior trader and then 'full time' trader, each with different levels off responsibilities and capital which you will trade with — also usually segmented down to certain kinds of desks ie equities (and certain sectors as well perhaps) and then the debt desks and exotics etc. These places will give you a good chunk of money as a salary but will not let you trade immediately as you get a job as you learn the ropes

Then come the large independent proprietary trading desks and investment firms such as Bright Trading, Schonfeld (my firms parent company – we are the true prop end of them), First New York, DE Shaw, Susquehanna etc. These places will eithe rallow you to start trading right away or a much more accelerated path to executing your own trades versus the large i-banks. These places will give you a salary as you learn to trade – usually for the first year at the independent trading desks like Bright, Schonfeld, FNY, permanently for DE and Sus. The starting salary may or may not be a draw against future pulls, but usually the amount they give you (@ Trillium its 500 a week, FNY is 55k a year — they want you to learn to trade asap and make your bonuses, most guys under the first year trading structure (400k @ 25 percent profit) will start pulling 1-1.5k a day bonuses, one kid at Trillium is on fire and pulling 3-5k a day) is not large and just enough to survive and live in the city and come to work before you start swimming in $$

Then there are also the firms such as Chimera (who has a decently known name, I'm not sure as to the quality of that name though — not saying they're bad), RBC Carlin's desk etc who will hire you but won't pay you a salary or a draw until you start making money which can be a deterrent to many. There are also the 'retail' prop trading desks which will margin the amount of capital you deposit in them and let you trade but then will also be quick to close your account down if you go negative a value near the amount you deposited. Some of these places are sketchy some are legit, with the sketchy ones being coined 'chop shops' which really dont give a damn if you do well and will leverage your fees against your account to take your money and fire you if you dont do well.

When it comes to trying to find a boutique prop trading desks, important things to consider are 1- salaries/draws, 2- fees, 3- capital required, 4- technology (not everyone uses bloomberg :P a lot of the desks have prop programs and data services which are better than/worse than bloomberg), 5- TRAINING, 6- buying power and profit % allowed, and 7- the quality of the other people working there. @ Trillium the majority of individuals hired are from Ivy League backgrounds (I am one of the only non top 20 b-school hires, yay Uconn haha) and the very much same could be said for DE Shaw and the like (who requires 1500 sat minimum – oh yea on another note they like high SAT scores at a lot of prop desks be it equities or commodities (Sempra)). Some of the chop shops will offer very little training and are composed of a lot of people who walk in from the street (almost literally).

Don't know what else to write because I am tired and uh yea. So write back here if you have more questions lol

Nick that was very informative, thanks…I have a question, is it true a lot of these places require series 7?

Nick, do you have a similar rant for S&T? Thanks in advance.

Yea I was wondering about Sales/Trading as a c areer for myself. I go college in Florida number academically in the state compared to UF and wanted to get to trading in a NY firm. Any advice on how to get my foot in the door, thanks.

Yaser has a really good post on Sales and Trading, it's on this discussion board….go look for it.

yea i was going to say ask yaser, i dont know much about snt because i never was interested in doing snt :)