I'm trying to get a clearer picture of some firms in Chicago. I just don't understand the landscape in Chicago, and Google proves to be useless. I found some employee home pages, but they're college kids who blog more about their escapades in Africa or World of Warcraft than anything about the prop-scape.
Anyone care to rank the following firms in terms of best places to work for and best places to make money?
1) Best place to work for
2) Market share in equities, fixed income, futures, energy, etc. (estimates/guesses, don't expect people to dump the real numbers)
3) Profitability for an employee (again, guesses)
4) Easiest place to get angry and burn out (this is BY FAR the most important metric for me, as I am a happy person now and never wish to be burned out again)
5) Management
Feel free to add your own firms, but please tell me of all the rumors you know either through private messages or here in this thread.
Not many good trading firms here in Chicago but plenty of great traders. Six of us trade out of a nice office on State. Have been here for 3 years. Make you own way and tell the prop firms to "take a hike".
I am sorry, but I couldn't resist. As a former academic myself (handful of journal publications to my name, and most not related to finance), I am curious to what your actual academic background is. What's your area of mathematical research?
Your posts has been remarkably lacking in any intellectual depth and analytical abilities. Instead, you just want to "jump" to some easy conclusion, without any rigorous kind of "background research", and formulating a methodology. In fact, since you are still a student, doing a SCI search on the firm names you mentioned, would be an excellent way to get an idea of what kind of problems they are abstracting out.
Your inability to abstract and have an analytical discussion (when if you are getting your phd, is something that is drilled into you, for 10+ yrs), makes me wonder if you have had any real academic background at all (especially mathematics! one of the most rigorous sciences). I apologize if this seems insulting in advance. You also mentioned you are asian, and the asian graduate students I have met / talked to, tend to "overly analytical", and even more reluctant to "jump to some unproven conclusions without stating their assumptions".
This is all I will say on this matter, just an intellectual curiosity (you know what that is like), that's all.
