You're a smart teen fascinated by the markets and have the dream of going to NYU. I think that is all great. You can enjoy learning about the markets and doing some investing or even trading without looking to do it as a career. I started the same way you are. I was 16, in 1976, and saw an ad in the New York Times that I could order annual reports from over 150 companies by just checking a box and mailing it in. I loved it when they came in the mail a few everyday and read through everyone of them. I became fascinated by the markets especially over the counter stocks and decided I wanted to be an OTC market maker one day. I went to NYU undergraduate (was not called STERN back then) and grad school and started at an OTC Firm on Wall Street, while still at NYU at 20. After graduating, I decided to go down to the American Stock Exchange and start as a clerk then executing broker then started my own option trading business. Choose your own path, don't get stressed out, work hard and have FUN! The best advice I can give any student looking for any career in business is to learn and know Excel cold. After your freshman year, take every opportunity to get internships in the industry you think you want to end up in. You might learn you want another path. Those internships with be your best source of possible employment after graduation. My daughter went to NYU Stern too. She was sure she wanted a career in the music industry. I insisted she get an internship to see if that was really what she wanted. In her freshman year, she worked every friday at a PR firm in the music industry for a semester. She had fun but realized that unless you managed the clients, they made very little money. She got another internship with a firm the focus on market risk. Worked there part time, then the owner insisted they needed her full time a semester before she graduated. In the middle of the financial crisis, she had a VERY good paying job, was able to hire another student at NYU, at a time when many others with better grades at better schools took almost a year to find a job that paid half of what she earned, she found what she wanted. That internship was more important that being at NYU. Her knowledge of Statistics and Excel got the the internship. Good luck to you...Bob
Read books, watch videos, and be on the lookout for someone who is willing to be your mentor. When you really want to make money, you'll need to change brokers. That can wait, though.
You have time on your side. Look into blue chips and momentum in emerging companies. Imagine being on the ground floor with MSFT, AMZN, AAPL, TSLA, NVDA, or even KO at 16. Learn options well, use them to buy at discount and sell at premium. Learn how dividends work with compounding and dollar cost average on the best companies. It's boring but it'll get you there. Go to university and study financial engineering and compsci. Network, you never know who's sitting next to you...
So unlike most people who chimed in, I actually gone down the "high-end" institutional road and still plodding along. So I can share some first hand insight to complete the picture. First and foremost, decide if the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is worth the sacrifices you have to make. This business robs you of your soul and to stay true to yourself, you need to make a conscious effort. Second, go to good school. Your chances of getting a job on a good desk at a top name IB increase dramatically if you are coming from the top 10-15 schools. If you can still enroll in Preparation H, go for it - it will open all sorts of doors for you. Sounds like you're young enough, as the song goes "no digas siempre, no digas nunca" Third, figure out where your passion lies, but learn everything. If your passion is in figuring out fundamentals, learn the quant skills. If you're a quant, learn accounting and macro economics. There is no such thing is a useless skill. Fourth, learn to network and keep in touch (I am pretty bad at it, so I can see how it hampered my career). Your ability to generate money is what gets you paid, but it's your connections that will get you hired. Learn to swallow your pride and work with others. In short, develop your interpersonal skills, you will not regret it. Fifth and probably most important one is - learn to think, keep an open mind and assimilate new knowledge. Finance is a vast and complex field, if you know how to use your brain, you'll find a way to make money. Don't fall into a trap of only wanting to do one thing because that's where your current skills are.
"Knowing" is different from "doing". For example a good journalist may "know" many things in and around politics more than a politician. That doesn't make the journalist a better politician. On the other hand the politician may not know many happenings around politics but can "do" reasonably better with whatever he knows. A "doer" knows what to do and what not to do. A "knower" NEITHER know what to do with what he knows NOR he knows the priorities within what he knows. Beginners should not keep on pursuing trading like a "knower". He should at some point of time converge his knowledge to become a "doer" by prioritising what he knows or in other words throw away what is useless. Of course to prioritise things one must have insights. Brokers or books wont give us insights. In fact they will try to steal our insights. We need to wait for insights to pop up out of us and then test the insights. Insight is the genius residing inside us. Robots wont have insights. Robots can trade but cannot beat a trader with an insight. When we depend purely on our analytical thinking then we are thinking like a robot and will produce ordinary result. Nurturing insights makes us a professional trader.
I kind of like to pretend it's (trading) a video game too...also a movie, and a song too All kind of combined into one ....you have action, suspense, drama, emotions, random variables and characters, economic facts etc etc Because in essence, that's what Trading is -- Atleast in the relatively crazy shorter timeframe/day it is, It truly takes a skilled trader to decipher what the broad market is doing in the day -- and being able to act, or trade, on it, and Succeed doing this in the longer run,
Very True When you become skilled trader, you hear sweet music amidst the market noises. This music can be heard only when reading the chart and not when analysing the data. Because chart alone can display all data in a simple and conceivable way.