i was a struggling trader, who went to work as a systems developer for a real trader. planned to be there maybe a year and go on my way but took longer than that. highly recommend this approach if you want to make it.
First, I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "systems developer" so I'll bet on "software developer". Secondly, "working for a real trader" is not something that's within my control, not more than winning the lottery or applying for a job at a big bank along with another 10,000 suckers. So I appreciate the advice that winning the lottery is a highly recommended approach but again... it's not within what I call reasonable odds for my side of controlling things.
And what about the opposite of the scenario you depict? The fact is if you are in the ATS scene you most likely going to come from 2 backgrounds. A developer learning to trade, or a trader learning to develop (or acquire/use) software. So whilst funny, it can easily be flipped on its head and their are funny stories/individuals coming from both sides. It's pretty silly to 'generalization' however to hit on software devs and brand them all like that considering the entire internet and infrastructure you use to trade manually is created by them (The engineers, the ones who create.) and none of us knew how these systems worked when we first started learning either skill tree.
I'm a developer learning to trade or rather to trade profitably, coze losing is easy. Especially with fully-automated systems. I suppose my main problem is lack of time (day job has nothing to do with trading) and there's no easy solution for that. Eventually I'll have enough savings to take a year off and go full throttle on trading strategy R&D, but before that I also have to be reasonably certain that I'll come up with something in less than a year. In the meantime, low efficiency but also low risk: I do less, when I find some free time.
Trading skill is very different from programming skill. It is not something you learn straight forward through books or lecture. I would say programming skills like C++, Java or Python can easily learned in a year or two by studying and practice daily. To acquire skill in trading, you easily spend five or ten years or even twenty years and might not learn anything. The market will still appear total chaotic and random to you just like day one. Have you wondered why many hedge funds went bankrupted in the last five years? I am sure they had tons of talented software developers, physicists and mathematicians, the best in the world, yet they failed to even to understand the market.
You know, I've been wandering about this. I've noticed that the gurus are almost always willing to share their knowledge. They don't try to hide anything. Why? The conclusion I came up with is that while the skill is transferable, the talent never is. I think this applies to any endeavor - trading, computers, medicine, etc.
Every talented person or organization has secrets, or proprietary data/information. They may be willing to freely share 'old' secrets, but not recent secrets that took a lot of talent, time, money, and/or other valuable resources to squire, imo. Old governmental top secrets and classified technologies become public domain when they become obsolete to the government. You can replace the word 'government' in the prior sentence with any 'individual' or 'organization.' It is also possible that an individual or organization may drop additional bread crumbs into the public domain with the hopes that it'll keep others, i.e. the competition, wondering around in the rabbit hole for a longer period of time--especially if they see that someone or some organization is 'on the right track.' For simple example, there may be public discourse about the effectiveness of the EMA5. An individual or organization may have recently discovered that the EMA6 beats all other indicators. So, that individual or organization may decide to "help" out the public, or academia, or individuals in chat forums, that seem to be on the right track by revealing that they (the individual or organization) discovered (long ago) that the SMA4 beats the EMA5! They may do this with the hope that attention will be diverted away from EMA's all together. This is a very simple and unrealistic example, but hopefully the point is clear. Everyone then wants to be their friend, calls them guru, and publicly appreciates their contribution to the discussion. Just a scenario to be aware of ... FWIW _________________ "There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch."
I do believe in mentors who share their proprietary knowledge to a limited numbers of insiders (often just one). Gurus who share to the world... like userque said.
Best idea I can think of (after many years of thought) is for trader and programmer to start hedge fund and trade together. I personally have been looking for a "programmer who wants to trade."