Hello I'm a young Java/J2EE ingineer / developper, who would like to work in a financial/trading env. To give me some chances to find a good job in IT/finance i'm trying to learn finance by myself but i must admit i don't really know how to start... Just wanted to know if some of you have advices... Has someone here also learnt by himself finance while he was a developper? How? And then how to valorize what you learn by yourself?
1) Get a copy of Joshua Bloch's book "Effective Java" second edition and learn it like the back of your hand. 2) Companies are crazy for Spring / Hibernate these days, so contributing to an open source project that has these dependencies will help your marketability. 3) Make friends in the industry. After about 5 years, you'll know half the developers in town, or it'll feel that way anyhow. If you have no experience and aren't getting any bites, you could try for an internship, and definitely attend your local Java Users Group. 4) Pair program every chance you get. The quality of your experience matters more than the quantity of it. Programming is a craft of immense proportions and this is the quickest way to achieve a strong proficiency. Forget about hacking fantasy and who is the best in your group of friends. 5) Learning the markets is even harder and will take longer than anything you might try to learn about programming (it was for me). A great book that almost never gets mentioned is "Capital Ideas" by Peter L. Bernstein. The material in that book will give you a background in the academic history that has driven computerized quantitative trading for the last decade and a half.