Trading with Academics

your father is working at one of these firms and you are not talking to him about it? don't be a fool, use his connections. "making it on your own steam" is not a possibility on wall street. you should know that the people at these firms are valued not because of their involvement with the firm but because of who they know.

 

Tonyzhou,
I plan on having an internship somewhere, but I am looking to transfer schools first. I am currently in a business program. I am unsatisfied with what goes on in-between the classroom walls. Every good question I ask is not answered and is pushed to the side because the teacher needs to complete his/her requirements. No child left behind, to me, also means no child able to advance. This is the main reason why I want to leave my current school and have looked to trading as education. My brain just is stimulated over it; all day, everyday.

I want to surround myself with people interested with investing and economics. I sent the recent Bank of England’s working paper “Will China Eat Our Lunch or Take Us to Dinner?” to my economics teacher. The paper discusses the effects on the world though the projected average person’s net capital and net investment capital if china’s government lets go of their grip on their society. Hence, no free trade or currency revaluation. The paper concludes that it is in the world’s best interest for china government to hold steady and not become a two way door. My economics teacher said this will not be discussed in class. It is too advanced for what the class covers.

 

What are you in ECO 3000, by your sophomore year. You will have to wait until the major, until this 'advanced' staff is going to be discussed.

 

I do not believe in teaching but I did teach at GA for five years. My orientation is to support learning and it is not in books as a rule. I just required a full class of questions for me to answer daily as a demo on how a person "processes"... "Environmental Math", which I brought to GA from AIZ (in Switzerland) which came from Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, was a Sixth Form financial math class. My other sixth form course FAV was a combined calc II and Physics II. I supported learning a combo of FA and TA and each year a student did trade their way to tuition for next year in college; this is no big deal because they had lots of capital usually and it was part of class to run either paper or cash. Your prep school ed did not go that far in Philly nor is it part of your current courses in any way.

The point of the above is to let you know, I am familiar with with the scholastic level where you presently reside. My affiliation with Wharton was through UCSC (where I ran 2 of the 5 divisions as was considered an Adj Prof at Penn). Wharton has a good tutorial staff. I was used to being in Wharton classrooms and I know how to support learning in that setting. Getting a seat in such a classroom absolutely requires excellence. Get a tutor as your alternative since you have already passed on this option.

There are many people who prevent themselves from being excellent traders. They do it in a variety of ways. One of the themes that I have seen for the past 49 years regarding supporting the learning process of traders is seeing people take something that they have found or have been given and, promptly, they set about "improving" it or think that they are "inventing" something from it. They are doing neither and they are also letting what was in the space pass them by by abrogating the opportunity it presented. This is a triad of conditions in a situation that is lethal because it is being built permanently in the mind and specifically in the memory. As a lens it will remain always as a distorting mechanism.

Your environment is conventional. The orthodoxy associated with it is pervasive in the financial industry. That is not going to change. Being excellent in the orthodox convention is one thing and how your learning is supported in that context is well evident as you look at the system. Bringing the mouse you caught to the classroom will always get recognition and then you get to eat it alone all by yourself. In the classroom and out, it is your job to support the learning of your peers by your excellence and how they come to you for collegual sustanence. I am speaking to you from the simple vantage point of running classrooms or lecturing at a lot of places where it is very hard to get a seat. If you want the current cell phone of a guy from Wharton who was quoted on the 19th of October in the Washington Post on the best pickers, I can could give it to you. But more important, is that you get orientated to getting fully in the groove to make the grade where you are paying tuition.

Lastly: you quote what I said to you and follow up:

“Making money is not staying up at night gambling on anything.” I don’t understand nor do I agree with this bold statement.

for your better understanding I was referring to this:

"I have been live trading retail spot FX for a little over two years and have had marginal positive success. ........... Staying up past 4:00am est. to watch European activities does not mesh well with late AM classes."

I surmize that you are looking at several currencies. I feel that you use a conventional orthodox orientation (Pascal, Fermat, et, al...). It looks like you have an orientation to real time data from a broad market selection. And you have the results to show for it:.. "marginal positive success" combined with dropping one course a semester and going to summer school to compensate.

I see you betting both time and money. You do not. I see you caught in the triad above spending non-recoverable time to "process" realtime data into a self invented winning strategy that has over two years been a "marginal positive success".

I see a net loss of time and a net loss of money. You do not.

In business parlance using MBA lingo "You made a bad bet and lost". You reply that you made a good bet and you won.

Now, I am making a bet with my time and my money. I'm not going to say anything bold to you or anything like that. My bet is placed with the simple idea that at some point you will remember this exchange and I get a payoff out there somewhere but not now. I know that there are no easy bets.

My reading list for the GA course was a zinger; we always had to oversupply at the bookstore.. It included beat the dealer and how to lie with stastics among other things but it also had rock solid other stuff that would last a life time. One GA student* who played basketbal for Princeton then graduated from Wharton sent me a letter on flowery stationary that started with: ..... Now, that we are married and we are doing some planning, we both wanted to do your reading list........

* Coincidentally his class had a fullblown S&P brokerage daily support system supplied free by the S&P eastern regional manager. This was way before PC's etc.

 

I think if you are in business/finance, you should definitly learn everything teaching in university. Trading/Investing is not all, and trader is not a high position. You should learn how to make profit for billions of dollars. Business school's object is not a personal trader to earn 200k for living.

I am not business student, i am engineering graduate. Just give out what I think

For me, trade to earn 200K a year is good for living. But my main interesting is in engineering field.

 

Don't spend so much time on personal trading. Your time should be on more other things.

 

By the way, you said you are tring to get GPA 3.0. I think as a business student , GPA 3.0 cannot understand well in your study.

Like I am a graduate engineering student, I have GPA 3.7, but I still don't understand everything very well. Only if I know why and how come, then I can have some my own advance idea.

Learning is good, but the purpose of learning is creation.

 

Interesting. Staying in a situation that is not performing the way that you expect is analogous to trading without a stop loss policy.

You might want to sit someplace quiet and think about what is preventing you from surrounding yourself with people interested with investing and economics.

You might also consider who you are accountable to, and who you are responsible to.

What is stopping you from getting a job NOW doing something that interests you?

 

there can only be 2 reasons for this.

1 - your school has massive grade inflation. just about everyone gets an A or B, so a student can get an A and still not understand the material very well. did you know that 1/2 of the students at Harvard graduate with Honors?

2 - there is no grade inflation and everything is graded on a strict curve. the average score on an exam is 40%, and anyone who got 60% of the questions correct got an A. an A means you did better than other students, but it also means you only understood 60% of what the professor wants you to understand.

 

I think you are underestimating the importance of your education and interaction with other people. You need to find a balance between the markets and classes but you can't ignore your classes. I understand you're still going to some of your classes but a 3.0 GPA in the business world (outside the trading world) isn't that great. Trading may be good now but there may come a time when you'll need your formal education.

I can't stress enough the importance of meeting people in college. If you haven't found people you click with, you may not be looking hard enough or in the right places. If you're not making friends in classes or dorms, join clubs. You need to find people you get along with and can have fun with (or get drunk with ), that doesn't mean they need to like the markets or trading! Some of my closest friends don't know a thing about finance but that doesn't mean we have nothing else in common.