A year ago i started working at a big wall street bank, giving up pro poker to see what it would be like to work in the real world. A few words of advice for anyone thinking about the field...

- options are an absolutely incredible and fascinating thing. for someone who has no idea what they are, they are contracts that allow you to either buy or sell a stock for a certain price that expire at a determined date. the good thing about them is that once you get your head around them, they give you different ways to make lots of interesting bets. you can bet on how much something will move, whether they will increase/decrease its dividend, etc. The first 4-6 months in my job (and i am 14 months in), i spent learning how to understand options. It was a hard time because I spent a ton of hours @ the office just trying to become useful (80-85 a week?). Those days were by far the hardest and it was a very hard transition to go from poker baller @ college to bottom of the totem pole at work. I have moved past the initial painful phase of getting used to work and learning something completely new.

- poker skills are incredibly useful in my job.... and im not talking about finding the perfect 4 betting frequency... the amount of results oriented thinking that happens on wall street is remarkable. if you were up 10k on a different table and used that fact to dictate decisions on a different table, everyone would call you stupid.... but you would be surprised how much stuff like that happens.... turn on that show on MSNBC called Fast Money, that is prety much equivalent to the begginers questions or micro stakes forum in 2004 "I cant believe I folded Q6o UTG because the flop came QQ6!". Wall St hires a ton of super book smart kids from super good schools with super good grades, but for the roll of trader, most of you reading this post understand making bets better than them. Chances are you are also more comfortable with making/losing money and also less shy about pulling the trigger or making a quick big decision. Poker players are deliberate about having a reason why they make bets and that is really a good skill to have on a trading desk. If you ever want to leverage poker in a wall st interview it is important that you highlight this type of stuff and not the "oh i can calculate pot odds!" aspect of poker.

- i work around 55-70 hours a week.

- i make way less than i would if i played poker fulltime (or way way less than i made in 2005 and 2006.... yes i understand i am a washed up dinosaur and would get schooled these days if i was a fulltime player....) but if i keep doing well at work I will make more than i could ever make playing poker. but a lot has to go right for me to make tons of money trading... i make significantly more money than my friends who are in consulting or engineering type jobs and can live comfortably in a nice part of manhattan on my salary. I plan on moving to my own 1 bedroom next year and should be able to afford it on my work salary.

- socially work is a pretty enjoyable place. the crowd is pretty young (my boss is 29 and his boss is mid 30s, most traders are mid 20s) and there are a lot of work events and stuff like that.

- mentally its less draining than poker. the fundamental reason for this is that you cant lose money at work. you might make a few terrible trades and not get paid anything, but its different than the mental drain of losing 20% of your net worth in a night. that being said, trading is by far on the higher end of stressful jobs, but in my mind its not as stressful as fulltime pro poker.

- my job forces me to understand the basics about what is happening in the world. right now i am 100x more aware of the news and things going in the world that matter than I was at college. it is one thing to read the news, but imagine if news was the flop... you'd really be on top of it.

- i have had very little time off and definitely miss traveling and having more time to myself. As time goes on i think I will be able to take a bit more time off but there is no question that this is the biggest sacrifice I have made, in addition to the near term cash i could be making @ poker.

the bottom line is that I think if this type of opportunity is open to you it is definitely worth looking at.... Poker will always be there but the older you get the harder it is to get involved in trading. if i took a year or two off to play poker it wouldve been very hard to get back in the door. who knows if i made the right decision but i feel like I made the right one for me.

Good points, I use my poker making decision skills a hundred times a day, often everywhere except when I'm actually at the "felt".

For all the tl;dr, give it a shot it's a good outlook on how even you degenerate gamblers can find ulterior uses for your poker skillz.

great post jason, thanks


sweet, wall street fish

very enticing. i feel bad about how ignorant i've become about the world outside of poker and my friends/family since i've been out of school

i feel like i'll probably want to do something similar in the near future once i'm tired of (hmm...) all the free(down)time that comes with being a poker pro

cool post jason, thanks for the update.

you never stop contributing

thanks for the insight.. I thought finance was all like IB, where everyone gets their souls burned out of but you make it sound alright. I'll definitely look into it this year@ school.

Great post, thank you!

it's not my thing, the work, but it's definitely admirable that you're all about it and it sounds like it's gone well for you.

i saw you sitting 5-10 on stars today, and i thought about playing a 5-10 sesh just to rub elbows with a legend.

ib is a different beast and i dont think i'd like it at all

lol... u dont have to rub it in... when i play these days its more just because i want to play some cards.... cant really justify playing 25-50 these days u guys too good

Thanks a lot strassa

i'm not rubbing it in you're playing stakes that are probably in the top 2% that run online these days, and it's your hobby.

Very good post "turn on that show on MSNBC called Fast Money, that is prety much equivalent to the begginers questions or micro stakes forum in 2004 "I cant believe I folded Q6o UTG because the flop came QQ6!" thats good 2 know I have to get away from watching and listening to these types of shows people.

And I folded Kings to you that one hand at 10-20 lol

Very nice post

OK can you give us a guide on transitioning from a poker player to your first day of training. Thanks man.

win a wcoop for 440k and on the same day interview on campus for a job you know nothing about then go to vegas for the summer and then show up to work and get your face pounded in

nice post

Very good post - but you basically said that if you stop playing poker your game will deteriorate into the level of 5/10 nl grinder :0

I spent like 3k on some optionetics thinking it would be terrific but I haven't really gotten into it. Maybe I should. You mentioned a lot of fish in the market but you also mentioned you're not making as much as you were making playing poker. Do you think you'll be making lots of money in the future? When I went to the optionetics seminar there were millionaires and billionaires interested in it. I think overall you have more control over your luck in poker than you would in the stock market. Definitely interesting hearing about all the fish in the stock market because it's been around for such a long time.

Thanks for the update Jason I have one question...

Where does the falling asleep at the wheel theorem fall into the world of options trading?

good to hear you are doing well and liking the job strassa

i think i just value my unlimited free time too highly for something like that (translation: im incredibly lazy and enjoy having little responsibility)

did devin teach you that or was that not his original idea?

Its from an old HSNL thread posted by Jason about FWF (I think)

Strassa, can you ballpark your salary? Upwards of 70 hours a week on a somewhat regular basis seems like quite the dedication.

edit: not a ballpark obviously of your salary in particular just a sort of range; I just want to gauge the profitability of anything besides poker.

very nice post op! I started playing poker coz I love trading and I'm studying it.

gl for the future and for ur bonus!

How easy is it to predict whether you'll be able to make >poker money at this?

You mention that the beginning is hard work slaving away for decent pay (100-150k ish?) but nowhere near poker esp. considering the hours. I imagine that if your career prospects were basically this, plus a few percents extra every year, maybe a bigger promotion once every five or ten, you wouldn't do it. I also imagine though that there are a lot out there than can expect basically that. And while you know you're not stupid, you probably can't know whether you'll be really good at this stuff right off the bat.

Also, how much luck is involved? From reading Black Swan I gather that a lot of higher up people are results oriented as well like you mention. It would suck to make 10 times less than the next guy just because you had a bad run and he didn't..

im not a real poster here but ive learned alot from your old posts.
Cool to see that you are trading now.
What kind of people are your colleagues? Do you think there is a lot of 'variance' in your job or will you almost certainly make it to the top when you have got the skills?
Do you think you still have to work so much in 5 years?
Im thinking about going to be a trader too but wanna play poker a few years during college too.