I know there are a few people on here with great knowledge of the trading industry and I am seeking your opinions. Here is my background in a nutshell: 7 years online poker full time earning around 120k a year average At the soonest I could get out, 10 years army special forces medic, ranger school grad, speak 3 languages 1 taught in the SF course and 2 self-taught. 15 years experience trading my piker accounts. Several blowouts and now marginally profitable once I realized that I have no business trading my own money given capital and life situation. I currently track and trade gold on a when I have time basis using a combo of acd, volume profile, and candlestick entries. (Sorry Mav) In all honestly it is working well enough that I am seriously considering getting out at 10 years to trade it. Do you guys think people would have any interest in someone like me? I'll be pushing 40 by the time I could get out. What skills or degree would pair well with my background from the point of view of a trading firm? I have a bachelors in business and am willing to get an MBA, programming cert, or whatever else might help me out. I think my background shows that I work hard, study hard, and consider sleep a luxury. Thanks for any input.
Where are you based ? What languages you speak ? Go work as a Salesperson for a hedge fund, they like the army background because pension funds clients are patriotic + if you have a math / stats mindset (hence poker), you should do better than other army guys. You can expect 300k £ / 500k $ if you're in NYC / London after 5 years.
I don't want to narrow in my location too much but my languages are better for working with people that live in mud huts than they are for doing international business. I think they show that I am a diligent student more than any value they bring to a trading firm.
Not sure what you mean by mud huts... places where there are mud huts: MENA: I learned classical arabic and lebanese and I've impressed many clients from the middle-east. Africa: There are private equity funds that invest heavily in Africa. South-America: There are both funds that invest in SA and plenty of wealthy family offices who enjoy speaking spanish.
I would look into private executive security. My brother in-law is Colonel in Special Forces. I advised him the same. Kinda like the career path below. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Prince
Given the military background and poker skills, which indicate both discipline and a good head for numbers/risk, I am sure many shops would be happy to have you as a trader. Might want to poke around the prop industry. I suggest taking time to brush up on advanced math and learn a programming language (Python is probably a good start). And by prop industry I mean top shops (Jane street, jump, etc) not trade arcade stuff.
In my opinion, trading is not a wise career choice for people who "consider sleep a luxury". (I wouldn't expect that to be a beneficial belief for a military career, either, but I have no experience of one, myself, so that's only a guess.)
I'm not sure I understand, "consider sleep a luxury" implies that one is used to not getting much sleep or does not require it. Sounds like a beneficial trait for the military and trading to me.
My contention is that it's terribly easy and very common for people to imagine that they don't require it (to the same extent as others), whereas in reality decades of psychological experimentation and analysis consistently demonstrate that without it, everyone's performance declines, whether they acknowledge it or not. Failure to acknowledge things like this is very counter-productive to traders, and people who profess to "consider sleep a luxury" are people who do fail to acknowledge things like this. In my opinion. It's one of these things a little like driving skills: about 95% of people asked will specify that their own skills are "above average", and by definition, 47.3% (45 out of 95) of them are wrong. (Sources all cited in the book "A Mind of its Own" by Cordelia Fine Ph.D.)
This is starting to drift but performance under stress is an interesting topic to me and the military. A lot of my training is based on the concept of performing tasks under stress due to sleep and food deprivation, and various other physical and psychological methods. In fact some of the schools I've gone through have psychologists observing to keep things going just the way they are supposed to. You learn the importance of having a solid framework that you use to make decisions because you understand that performance suffers under any kind of stress, created by any means and measured by stress hormone levels in the body.