Thoughts / advice warmly appreciated

driven

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Hi all,

What are my chances of getting into a trading firm /hedge fund/ investment bank without a degree?

I am studying accounting and finance, but find the pace of lectures slow and I am very impatient with study. I have excellent A levels.

If I were to approach various firms / hedge funds, what are my chances of being given an opportunity? How likely would I be given an opportunity without a degree?

I know what qualities I need to become a good trader, and I want to get involved /fully stuck in / addicted to the job.

Any thoughts warmly appreciated.

Best,

David
 
Hi all,

What are my chances of getting into a trading firm /hedge fund/ investment bank without a degree?

Practicly zero I would imagine.

I am studying accounting and finance, but find the pace of lectures slow and I am very impatient with study. I have excellent A levels.

If I were to approach various firms / hedge funds, what are my chances of being given an opportunity? How likely would I be given an opportunity without a degree?

1) As above unless you are prepared to do work experience for free.
2) Trade your own account and have a minimum of 2 years verifiable trading track record

I know what qualities I need to become a good trader, and I want to get involved /fully stuck in / addicted to the job.

No you don't...you probably just like to think so !

Any thoughts warmly appreciated.

Best,

David

Good luck.
 
"No you don't...you probably just like to think so !"

My father was a broker. I had an assessment centre with top ib last year. I was insufficiently prepared and as a result, didn't get internship.

I also had a week at an AM firm shadowing a trader and visiting IBs observing different roles...i feel I have a decent enough knowledge of what I need to do over the next couple of months before approaching the City.

Thank you for your comments, most appreciated.

Best,

David
 
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Why don’t you approach your shortlist of firms and find out? You have absolutely nothing to lose.

My intuitions are that you’ll totally strike out with Investment Banks, but try it anyway. If nothing else it will help you understand why they only hire retards to do the hiring and keep the less retarded for trading operations. Forget research.

Trading Firms? Which ones or what sort? Chalk & Cheese. Possible.

Hedge Funds. You’ll be mightily surprised. There are some rather non-aligned characters running some of these and providing you hit enough of them, your probabilities aren’t zero of crossing paths with one or more of the genuinely enlightened ones. Don’t forget the VC and PE outfits. There are some really very good ones in every sense of the word run by characters for which non-aligned is simply insufficient description – out there really. These far outpace any of the other categories for breadth and depth of involvement in The Biz and for sheer belly scrunching swash buckling day-to-day excitement. They are the maverick, cavalier end of the Mayfair spectrum.

All of the above uncharacteristic positivity based on the assumption you can knock their socks off with your encyclopaedic knowledge of the World, the financial markets, commodities, complex derivatives, currencies, bonds, options, futures, likely forward trends in the cultural and social sectors, an intuitive grasp of probabilities; a steel-like grip on reality and your own abilities – and limitations, an interest in and demonstrable knowledge of economics, politics, law, geography, history, media, new technologies and psychology and be able to work a reasonable hypothetical case from all of these as to what probabilities can be assigned to any one of a dozen potential outcomes from any given starting scenario and any given desired outcome. You’ll also need to be able to demonstrate lightning fast mental arithmetic and exposure to and genuine comprehension of the more esoteric financial models currently being utilised. You’ll also need to be socially acceptable and reasonably polished intellectually in addition to being articulate, intelligent and personally engaging.

Be prepared to fetch coffee and work for pratically nothing (or actually nothing) until you've proven you can be of use.
 
"You’ll also need to be able to demonstrate lightning fast mental arithmetic and exposure to and genuine comprehension of the more esoteric financial models currently being utilised. You’ll also need to be socially acceptable and reasonably polished intellectually in addition to being articulate, intelligent and personally engaging."

Awaiting delivery of Trachtenberg system book for the maths. Thank you for your encouraging reply, most appreciated.
 
Awaiting delivery of Trachtenberg system book for the maths.
No. That's a system of mental computational methods. I was thinking more of an inherent ability to ‘do math quickly’ which pretty much comes as standard within the more Universal model of ‘make obscure and/or obvious connections quickly’ and happens largely automatically rather than as a process of conscious thought. I don’t suppose Trachtenberg would hurt, but then again it might.

I was thinking more something that you already had rather than something you feel you can develop. If it’s the latter you’ll need to wait until you developed all of it. Don’t expect to be even offered a chair much less be paid a salary while you’re doing that.
 
I can do math quickly. Whilst shadowing, I was tested at 7am every morning and asked to do simple arithmetic calculations quickly..it made me realize that I needed to pull socks up as it were, so I hope the book can be of some use...
 
Hi driven,
Welcome to T2W.

Have a gander at this FAQ - there may be a one or two useful ideas in there:
How Do I get a Job Trading?
Post #3 contains links to directories of prop' firms. One idea you might like to consider is to use them as a way of preparing yourself mentally for the rigors and questioning you might encounter at the IBs and hedge funds. Also, if you have prop' shops queuing up to hire you, it'll do your confidence no end of good if / when you get interview offers with the big guns.

The other thought is to cut your losses and switch courses - just a thought?
Good luck!
Tim.
 
I agree with Counter Violent's post.

Having a degree nowadays simply means your application wont be thrown in the bin straight away. It's a foot in the door, that's all it is. And even then, the top companies will demand your degree to be from a top university as well. So I imagine you will struggle without a degree. It's all very easy to think you're the right man for the job, but why dont you actually setup an account and trade with your own money? Then you will have a proven track record that speaks volumes.
 
I am not at a top university. I want to set up an account and start trading, have looked at spread betting, IG index but read some negative comments about both IG and City Index.

I do have capital to start trading, but currently do not have access as it is in trust. Believe me, I would love to but not until I have educated myself properly, I will be teaching myself over the next month or two, in addition to cold calling hedge funds, AM firms for an opportunity.
 
I am not at a top university. I want to set up an account and start trading, have looked at spread betting, IG index but read some negative comments about both IG and City Index.

I do have capital to start trading, but currently do not have access as it is in trust. Believe me, I would love to but not until I have educated myself properly, I will be teaching myself over the next month or two, in addition to cold calling hedge funds, AM firms for an opportunity.

sure ....a month or to should do it .....9 weeks tops ....;)
 
sure ....a month or to should do it .....9 weeks tops ....;)

The hedge funds would have got wind of him after only a couple of weeks and will be waiting for that cold call to offer him head of trading posn.
 
"So why try to buck the trend, do what daddy did."

I studied science A level, have an interest in financial markets and I like analysis, so why not?

"sure ....a month or to should do it .....9 weeks tops ...."

Its what i want to do as a chosen career, and like anything in life, its hard work, and looking forward to it, no matter how long it takes to become good.

Both of you, thanks for the vote of confidence, with those messages. Slight immaturity, but there we are.

@TheBramble...I checked out the Trachtenberg book, you were right, no use to me!

Cheers

David
 
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky - I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Read more at: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish: Steve Jobs' famous speech
 
"So why try to buck the trend, do what daddy did."

I studied science A level, have an interest in financial markets and I like analysis, so why not?

"sure ....a month or to should do it .....9 weeks tops ...."

Its what i want to do as a chosen career, and like anything in life, its hard work, and looking forward to it, no matter how long it takes to become good.

Both of you, thanks for the vote of confidence, with those messages. Slight immaturity, but there we are.

@TheBramble...I checked out the Trachtenberg book, you were right, no use to me!

Cheers

David

Get a proper job and stop daydreaming.
 
I think he can open an account and prove himself. Why not try?
However, it is harder than normal way, maybe than you thought.
 
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