Quote:
Originally Posted by JoeC2012
Good bump, very interesting to hear about the process.
Can you share a little more about the interview process with Akuna and SIG? Those are definitely not easy places to get interviews AFAIK (especially SIG). At a high level what did your resume look like?
Best of luck with 7 points or whatever you decide on!
Agree-- I've never heard of this firm but as long as you aren't putting up any capital, this is decent pay to start out. Living in NYC for $45k/year isn't ideal but it's definitely doable.
SIG/Cutlergroup started with a phone interview. I rely HEAVILY on my success at poker to obtain interviews. My resume is pretty standard, I have a 3.5GPA from a state school in finance, I worked in Mortgage for 2 years then transitioned into Medical Underwriting and recently transitioned into a role with the same company where I negotiate our contracts with hospitals and doctors. It totally sucks, and I wish I could have my old job back but they're sour that I left and that opportunity is gone.
tradertest.org is what I used to prepare for the tests. They're nearly identical, i'd say it's the medium math test and the hard sequence test you need to be prepared for. It threw me off because in the actual tests they'd have some things I didn't prepare for, like lettering sequences of the alphabet instead of numbers, or some difficult multi-decimal division problems that took up way too much of my time. it's timed, 7 minutes math and 15 minutes of sequencing. I answered probably 20 math questions, and about 15 sequencing questions. I skipped 10 of the sequences entirely.
The phone interviews focus quite heavily on my poker experience and success, they seem to care less about my ho hum finance career. It gets tricky whey they start asking the probability type problems, eg: 2 bullets are loaded into a gun consecutively and fired at you, nothing happens, would you rather the gun be fired again or have the chamber spun and fired and why? what are the odds for each?
What's 3^8?
Or, "make me a market based on the size of NYC at an 85% confidence interval, I did so, he took the ask and said okay make me a new market based on me buying your entire ask, what volume do you offer and what's the new market range?"
These are questions I feel like i'm probably answering right (I look up the answers after i'm done) but I take too long to think through things perhaps. I don't know.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jb514
That is interesting. 81k in his first 3 quarters is impressive. I'm having trouble picturing exactly what they are doing when you say "lots of trades on 1-5 penny moves with large share size". At my firm, and I've heard similar stories from people at other firms, a lot of the older traders made most of their money from inefficiencies that are disappearing.
I'd just be a little worried about a firm trying to assert that they've got lots of profitable traders. I know a lot of traders that were touted as being good 7 figure traders that are now struggling to really make anything. A lot of people who started pre 2008 learned to trade inefficiencies that rarely occur anymore. Unfortunately those skills aren't really transferable. On top of that they never developed the work ethic necessary to make money in today's environment. A lot of those guys are content with being mildly profitable with the expectation that they will crush the next flash crash, or volatility will pick up and make old strategies profitable again.
I'd also want to know how their payouts work since you are trading their money. At a BYOC firm, you want to retain a very large % of your profits when you first start. How do the payouts at 7 Points affect your bankroll? I have a friend that trades firm capital at a very successful firm, but the payout seems very unfair to me. When new traders start, the firm takes 100% of the risk. Once the trader makes even as little as $20k, the firm then segregates, $10k is the firm's profits, and the other $10k is the trader's profit and now their bankroll. At that point the trader is, in reality, trading their own money. All the firm capital did was get them off the ground.
There are other places that trade firm capital that will let you cash out your entire cut of the profits with out cutting your risk or BP. That seems like a fairer trade off for a lower profit split, but firms are hesitant to do that because that leaves them exposed. Especially since guys will try to risk more than their whole bankroll since the firm will cover the excess losses.
Sounds like it's +ev to me, considering you know a guy there who's gotten a good start. If he's made 81k in first year, I'd like to think he has a decent shot of making many multiples of that per year down the road. You also have to consider how enjoyable this is compared to whatever sort of other job you'd have.
It sounds like they use huge orders to manipulate the price up or down a few pennies and then lock in the the profit after a penny or two of movement. My friend says he trades millions of shares a day, often for just seconds at a time. The 60/40 split seems entirely ridiculous to me, and if you're not profitable they're just letting you go anyway. He justifies the split because of some sort of rebate deal they get on commission for trading so many shares, but it still sounds like the burnout rate is over 80%. apparently he lost 6K yesterday on a black swan spike in AYI (take a look at about 1PM MST it spiked $2 and back down in the about 2 minutes).
I asked him about the payouts, apparently they reconcile monthly, which seems to me like you're incentivized to risk heavily towards the end of month in lots of situations since the upside is only 40% if you win and the downside is 100% of losses...
He told me he doesn't think anyone that's joined after him has made as much as he has, I know some of it is ego driven but he's a smart dude, PHD in mathematics and quick on his feet. It's not the trading i'm used to which is generally holding for 30 mins-48 hours, this is not algorithmic based but still what I would consider "HFT" because of how many trades he's making and the amount of time the trades are held. It's definitely a lower tier shop, they recently updated the website but a month ago I noted two spelling errors on the main screen which is just sloppy and makes me think twice about joining (amongst the many other variables).
What's the success rate like at BYOC? I'm seriously considering these shops, but I have almost no basis on which to consider my success rate. I understand the basics etc. but I really want more of a feel for how i'm going to turn 70k into a sustainable career trading off my own capital. I have the drive to succeed but I don't want to play the lottery with my future based on a potentially outdated dream that I can trade manually based on trends and instinct and soaking up knowledge if it's not really going to work out. I definitely will put in the time to learning EVERYTHING I can if I go this route, it's pretty all in which scares me quite a bit.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Clayton
you probably need to expand on this, i'd see it as a relatively large red flag without knowing further details. success is more likely the more work you put into it, which implies more time in front of screens. if you can't handle that, find a different job.
Obviously i'd be putting in a TON of screen time. What i'm saying is that I also need time either observing others during active time or mentorship/speaking with successful traders rather than an environment where they just tell you to "figure it out" which is what it sounds like at 7 points. I get that practice and screen time make perfect, but I want to be somewhere where I can see what others are doing, discuss the actions I made, etc.
Last edited by Smokey_The_Bear; 04-05-2017 at 09:59 PM.