Think what your dream job is and find out how people got there. MFE is not a bad degree I think if you want to be a quant.
You are well underway. Congrats. Deciding to be wealthy is a great decision. Deciding to live in NYC is a great decision too. An especially neat thing is that there are others who were in your position in the near past and they are also just ahead of you and going the same route. They are in NYC too. I checked out your HV (high velocity) build from scratch software and skipped commenting. If you review the compound interest formula, there are a couple of points that it makes to you. 1. At 27, you can be wealthy in very little time since, you have not built up a lot of personal memory by making trading mistakes. 2. You may be able to figure out, still, that there are many ways to make money in trading. If you can sit down with a pad and pen, see what you come up with in two areas: See how much money you can have in hand as a consequence of saving some of your income from your job. See if you can figure out how to be self employed and trading at some point in the future. Here is what you don't know how to figure out as yet. The reason I say this is because it is normal for people who are young to latch on to an idea and that idea makes it easy for them to exclude all other ideas. Here are a few facts. You can compound a stream of money fairly easily about 60 times a year if you are working and just trading on the side. Ordinarily, a person would use several streams side by side. Later, you can trade much faster and at that time, you set your own schedule for everything. The frequency of trading is much much slower than you think about for High Velocity Trading. What to you have to figure out to make get the pieces to fit together? Skip the technicalities of the mechanics of trading for a while. Look at the pertinent thing that is left to consider. If you just used this item to label the top of each page of your pad for a few pages, then you would have a series of scenarios. Go to the P/L thread here and write down the %'s the posters are making per print. Most of them are for a day's work. Some cannot be expressed as a % since they are incomplete. Do 50 or so to get clusters of results for different ways of making money. Check out how it will go for you on separate pages. Most people cannot look at alternatives for making money. The reasons why not are aloong the lines of not being able to envision dfferent possiilities. High velocity trading makes some percent per trade in aggregate and that tuns out to generate an annual ROI. Most of these practicitioners are highly leveraged so they have to work somewhere to get the leveraging. What would the deal be to do an alternative to HVT where it was 4 streams of capital and each one was traded only 60 times a year? Probably we will never know until someone does it for us. Trading on the side as you work and save for a while can allow you to not have to seek leveraged capital ever. This means you get to be self employed and just trade to your heart's content. Revving up to any given % for the 60 trades a year per stream is not an educational hazard. If you have 25,000 and you want to double it per year, then each trade has to make____% if you do swings 60 times a year. That % is quite low isn't it? Either you can pick a method to get a given % or you can just pick the best method and go for broke to be wealthy. Now take 100,000 and repeat. So you see getting rich is there to do. When the transition to self employment occurs, then you get to trade faster and the money accumulates a lot faster too. some faster trading methods are leveraged from the start. These are popular for full time traders who use large exponents and also collect good %'s. Life style is just a fixed cost. There are few variable costs for self employment. I didn't figure it out vey well when I was young. I just found out what the numbers were as I looked back. Now I know what is optimum, too. As it turns out, a person can have their cake and eat it too. The cake is doing what you want with yourtime for most of your life. The way wealth works is such that it's nature is such that the pile can be built fast and then money makes money for the rest of your life. Money making money frees you to do what you want in NYC or elsewhere. what not being able to decide means is this: you have to think up and get on paper what the choices and possibilities are. They are limitless it turns out. Once you decide it happens. so you are rich and you live in NYC; fill in the details and decide the path.
What MFE program are you looking at? I can tell you that a lot will be left up to you after you get your degree.
look back on your life. if you have always been a go getter then you will continue to be; if you have always been dumb you will continue; if you have always been indecisive and coasting you will continue that path. people don't change too much from how they are when they were growing up
This isn't really true, because you can be a go-getter within a framework and not be a go-getter when the framework is removed. Case in point? I was a total machine in school, doing projects and running the show non-stop. The corporate world presents less of a framework than academia for excellent, because what constitutes "A-level" work is totally arbitrary and not presented to you in the form of a syllabus and course policy. In some cases, "A-Level" work can never be achieved because of the ineptitude of management. In other words, there's less going on in the way of defining a real goal out here in the job market. The point of this post is to figure out how to define goals so I'm not indecisive.
Well, I don't know. That's why I'm asking people who've gotten there. I have one part of it -- the technical side [software/hardware.] I am trying to figure out whether the investment in the advanced mathematics and finance education is necessary. Is it?
I do not have an MFE degree, nor do I work in the financial industry, so I may not have the answers you're looking for. My post was to try to help you work through the process of mapping out what you need to learn. If you can clearly identify what you need to get to your goal, the decisions along the way are much easier to work through.