I'm seriously thinking of also walking the path pioneered by Fan27. At the moment I'm employed with a good salary but in a domain completely unrelated to my interests, experience and drive. Perhaps it's possible to live a life of grindwork when you've got zero drive to it, but if I can help avoidig it, I'll give my best shot to escape from it. Question's how much of personal finances would you consider reasonable to risk into a self-employed venture and how long would that be reasonable to take? The question on how long is important: a woman won't give birth to a baby earlier than 9 months, if I could do the things I wanna do in 2-3 months, I wouldn't need to quit my job to work full time on that. I'd say 9 months - 2 years, problem's I've only got money for the lower estimate, so 9 months. On how much to risk: ideally less than 25% of savings, in my case it would be 50%. So sort of 4x more risky than my own conservative view. Yours might differ Final thoughts: why the heck would I (people in general) need to quit their job in order to make real progress on something meaningful, outside the soul-sucking corporate job? In my experience, the job only provides enough to live through, and in exchange asks for what is effectively all my available time and energy to work on crap that will never get me out of the hole, just provide enough so I don't succumb either. Of course it doesn't help at all having a wife and kid, as a bachelor at least I had full weekends to grind on my own stuff and 2x12 hours undisturbed makes wonders. Now when the job is not sucking my time, the family is. “A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” ( Bob Dylan ). I'm probably at the lowest point in my life from this definition of "success" and feel that if I don't do something about it I'm gonna get stuck here forever.
You have to calculate your unexpected payoff vs what your current job is paying you now. If you are in a first world country I think chances are you are reasonably well paid and trading is the last thing you should be thinking of doing. A good quant will be able to work out the payoffs =)
I gues additional questions are how much prep work you’ve already done, what are your results on paper, how soon could you go live, and whether you can get similar or better paid job if things don’t go as planned.
>> how much prep work you’ve already done I've a pretty good grasp of financial mathematics but I do notice I'm getting rusty unless I invest time into (re)learning it. Since I don't have much time for my stuff, I favored experimentation using what knowledge I got so far rather than learning new abstract theoretical masturbations. Other than that, I've my own backtester, an exhaustive collection of options marketdata and an auto-trader connected to Interactive Brokers for the strategies that might work. I've 18 years of software dev experience, 10 of them in finance (options market making) so I got to see how / what they do, what works and where they fuck up. >> how soon could you go live Immediately as researched strategy passes validation. It starts with some fundamental assumptions, then model building and calibration, tests on historical market data and nothing got past this point yet. It takes about one month of full time work for an R&D round but with a full time job + family taking the other time I got, that's 6 months to a year. I do notice I'm getting better and better results and going full time would be a 6x-12x increase in research productivity. There are no guarantees of course but I'd also add to my quant knowledge and developer prowess, certainly a lot more than what my job involves (mostly cleaning up the crap that others have shitted, i.e. bugfixing). >> whether you can get similar or better paid job if things don’t go as planned I can definitely get a job, there is and always will be high demand for low wage janitor type of stuff that I do. So fair chances are the new job will pay less and suck more - there must be some negative feedback in the loop I guess or else the choice would be a no brainer and everybody would do it. On the other hand I deeply hate the the finance industry and the fact that 99.9% of the jobs are posted invariably by "a leading investment bank" (Thanks for Submitting Your Résumé to This Black Hole : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13957790 ): who the fuck is trailing then, just me? So if I don't "succeed" (defined as coming up with a profitable trading strategy in the period of full time self employed work), I'm fully aware that the chances of getting a job for these fuckers will be just as abysmal if not lower than where I stand now, no matter how much additional theoretical knowledge and practical experience (another 6-9 research directions explored), I'm ultimately just a failure. So if I do it I'm doing it solely for myself. Of the large number of possible things to try and study, I gotta select those things which will help ME make a breaktrough after I return to my regular toilets cleaning job, save for another few years, work overtime on my strategies and eventually make another escape attempt (full time self employed work from my savings).
You are at the infamous mid-life crisis stage. What could have been... What could have been... Find peace in where you are, no matter what that is and what you want to do will become possible. Until then, you will just cause yourself and your family unnecessary pain. Are you trying to be practical? As in the scene in Gattaca: you cannot leave anything for the swim back. This is a fact for anyone who wants to be successful. But you cannot do this unless you can be at peace with wherever you are.
Listen, I feel your pain, but here are only two practical choices available: 1. Get a job in the industry which may open new doors. 2. Continue "slaving" and prove you can convert your financial knowledge to money via trading. I may be wrong, but I think fan27 has done both and indicated that if it doesn't pay bills he is going right back. Anything else is putting too much pressure on yourself and the family. If you can't do either of the above, than maybe you need to accept you are not that good at either. (I hope you realize I am talking to myself as well).
I think that fan27 has done more prep-work part-time and already developed majority of his tech prior to quitting. And it does seem safer to quit after you are 75% ready with the tech you plan to use. Quitting a job should be a move to something already waiting to act as replacement. But I think that you have an advantage by already working with options, since most people trade stocks and futures while options may still have more opportunities to make money, especially if you go outside market making and get into actual trading. I just see how little room is there for mistakes, and how many people sell various signals and strategies because they aren’t making enough from trading (although I’m not totally against both). But there is no success without risk, so good luck. I just hope you’ll find time to validate your ideas prior to quitting.
@qlai , before I quit my job I had an application that found profitable strategies with EOD ETF data but the unknown was whether I could find profitable intra-day futures strategies. My minimum objective to accomplish after quitting my job was to be able to find profitable intra-day futures strategies, integrate with an existing ATS (i.e. AlgoTerminal) and deploy to the cloud with robust monitoring in place. I am wrapping up the cloud deployment and monitoring part now so I now have the option of declaring victory and getting a job while I build a track record and my account, or I can license my tech if people are interested in what I have. @Aquarians, based on your previous post, you already have an options backtester, options data and auto trader set up to IB. What needs work is your R&D pipeline as you mentioned one round takes one month of full time work. So rather than framing the problem that you need more time for your R&D cycle, look for ways to drastically shorten the cycle. So the trigger for you removing the golden handcuffs could be a prototype or proven approach to dramatically reduce your R&D cycle time and maybe one decent strategy that resulted from the new approach. Of course this might not be the strategy that you ultimately trade, but you proved to yourself that you have a process going forward. If you get to this point, it will be very clear to what work needs to be done and you will have high confidence of victory. Seems like you have to make the move at some point as you will never be satisfied until you do. It's just a matter of timing.
It looks like you are just frustrated that you don't have any time for yourself to do something that you want outside of your work and your family. I don't know why everybody who's bored with their work thinks that trading is the answer to alleviate that boredom that somehow trading is so exciting that once they start trading, they will magically be happier. You think just because your corporate job is a bore that's unrelated to your interest or experience that trading by yourself would be actually better? Money will be raining down your head and you will be a success? If it's winning more money that you are after, you will be better off going to a casino where it's lot more exciting and lot more entertaining with better food, drinks, rooms and everything and potentially lot more profitable than trading. If you think your corporate job is a grind, I will tell you trading is an even bigger grind and you grind alone and you are not even guaranteed to win but with every risk of losing. At least when you work, you have people to socialize with and you are guaranteed a paycheque. If it's your family that you feel is sucking the life out of you, then you are not with the right woman. If you still want to stay with her for the children's sake, then you need marriage counseling. If you don't, then the solution is even easier, dissolve the marriage. Children will suffer a bit but at least you will be happier and you won't be getting into trading for the wrong reason. “A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” ( Bob Dylan ) but if you don't know what is it that you want to do, Wall Street is a very expensive place to find out. My advice: Find out the real reason WHY it is making you think you are at the lowest point in your life. Is it psychological or real? Tackle the reason and then find the solution to resolve it first. Then decide whether you want to throw away your corporate job to venture into trading. Trust me if the real reason why it is making you unhappy is unresolved, you won't be successful in trading either; it will affect every single aspect of your trading too.