Medicine or Wall Street?

Discussion in 'Professional Trading' started by dazed101, May 21, 2006.

  1. Hehe, don't trust your econ textbooks or your finance textbooks. Most likely, you will never learn anything that is beneficial to trading... Remember, in social sciences, go for the degree, trash the knowledge ;).
    The right path is to trading is to work on oneself finding something that fits you. Working on the psychology, working on the discipline, working on the system.
    There are other paths including insider trading, market manipulation(I just bought 1,000,000 shares of GOOG and it went up on the first day, I must be a genius!), and so on. Some are illegal, others are not.
    The ironic thing is that unless you prove solid results, you'll have to respect academicians(imagine what it would look like for you to go to a bank, and when asked about modern portoflio theory, blurb out THAT's TOTAL BULLSHIT. You need some strong proof that you aren't BS)
    Disclaimer:I'm strongly biased against academicians in finance and economics. Enough said.
     
    #21     May 22, 2006
  2. I agree with def.

    Most finance jobs do not actually require an education in finance. You don't have to decide now. Adding a few courses (math/stats/econ/compsci) would be helpful, but nothing is a prerequisite.

    Do not follow the advice of those that belittle the importance of a formal education at a top tier school in trading; it will benefit you greatly.

    Regards,
    Morgan
     
    #22     May 22, 2006
  3. jerryz

    jerryz

    lol wait till you take organic chemistry. we'll see if you still want the be a doctor.
     
    #23     May 22, 2006
  4. With medical costs so high...a more socialistic approach is more likely to happen ...than not happen......

    Furthermore medicine should not be a greed game...

    If you want money....then Wall Street is what greed is all about...

    GREED....at its finest hour....
     
    #24     May 22, 2006
  5. The only thing beneficial is the diploma, tell me how an institutionalized quantitative method of thinking is useful in the real world?(Unless you're doing complex derivatives and other stuff like that)
     
    #25     May 22, 2006
  6. dazed101

    dazed101

    It's funny how many opposing opinions surface on this website.:D

    Greed leads to death.
     
    #26     May 22, 2006
  7. I was surprised to hear from a good friend of mine at a top medical school that most students (in the early years) act like it is all about money, and show no real concern for doing good. However, he also says that most students change as they proceed further into it.

    I am also surprised to always see people on ET saying that trading is all about the $. For some, it certainly is – especially those that use unethical trading tactics to make money. However, I have never seen it in this light. Traders improve market efficiency through providing liquidity and appropriately pricing securities. It is a very indirect way to improve the world, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable.

    While he speaks of hedge funds in this quote, the arguments are more general… Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan:

    “If, somehow, hedge funds were barred worldwide, the American financial system would lose the benefits conveyed by their efforts, including arbitraging price differentials away. The resulting loss in efficiency and contribution to financial value added and the nation's standard of living would be a high price to pay--to my mind, too high a price.”
     
    #27     May 23, 2006
  8. Sorry about being so harsh in my first post. However, I hear a lot of negativity about academia from beginning traders, and it usually borne of an understanding of academia 10 or 20 years ago, and not an understanding of the current situation. 10 or 20 years ago, many academics were completely out to lunch. Today, most academics provide practical and well-founded insights into market mechanisms and techniques for evaluating investments; they are no longer blinded by “beautiful” hypotheses such as the EMH.

    If you aren’t convinced, I encourage you to check out the literature, sit in on a couple masters classes at a good school, or investigate top-notch hedge fund marketing materials (from PhD teams).
     
    #28     May 23, 2006
  9. Perhaps :), I know a sophisticated trader that majors in finance, and I know others majoring in finance that have no idea about trading. :D
    EDIT:perhaps me still in the school system makes me rather caustic about it since I hate its impracticality.
     
    #29     May 23, 2006
  10. Dude
    you can make big bucks in medicine, just become a plastic surgeon a.k.a. tit doctor, and move to some area with lots of beauty-obsessed boob-size-freak chicks, like Beverly Hills for example.
     
    #30     May 23, 2006