"Where do you guys think the best salary and/or overall job opportunities in finance exist for a current physics student? A PhD, possibly in mathematical finance, or an MBA." That was the original question, Fx. He wants to know what can give him the best salar and job opportunites in finance and not which one would give him the most income from trading. I do agree that education cannot make you a successful trader but that wasn't the focal point of this discussion.
Look, this is a godam TRADERS' site! THIS IS ABOUT TRADING! His statement, "overall job opportunities in finance exist for a current physics student?" obviously is directly towards finance in the sense of TRADING the markets! Why ELSE would he post such a question on a TRADERS' SITE???? This is not some stupid fking college message board! Unless you think finance has nothing to do with TRADING! Why are godam PhDs the dumbest fks on the planet!
I'm no genius but here's my reply to your presumptious ass 1) He went to a trader's site because there are professional traders or people in the Financial services business that have MBA degrees that know and can give USEFUL advices rather than going "I got the biggest prick in the industry". 2) Not everyone thinks making $5,000 a month is OWNING the FX market, hence, they want to work for say.. JP Morgan or someone ang make millions as a career. 3) If you search for MBA in this forum, you'll see a lot of people talk about getting an MBA and getting advices from a lot of PROFESSIONALS about CAREERS in the financial services industry. 4) Making $5000 a month in their underwear while living with mom are not professionals. It may come as a surprise to you that the focal point of this message board is about the OP and not about you and your 250 pips. If you want to brag about your successes, take screenshots of your trading prog and post it on the discussion "Trading P&L" everyday.
It's hard. If you can make money off the currencies, you probably are taking money from some of my former hot shot professors and phd buddies
Get the bloody MBA or the Phd. Then get a job to make a living. Any bank or Wall St firm will hire you with something in finance. You then use your spare time to develop trading strategies in any of the markets. I like stocks. When you have a strategy that works, quit the job and trade your strategy, or take it to a hedge fund or some other place. That's when you will find unlimited upside to make money, not in a salaried job. Read trading books only for an introduction, they do not reveal the things that you need to know to make money in the markets, they'd be crazy to tell you. Just jump in and begin to wade around until you find things that work consistently. Do not back test, go forward, day by day, month by month. That's the longer route, but the surer route.
Begin to read current financial periodicals in order that you may acquaint yourself with the financial industry. Give yourself about two years of this to get to ground zero. Originally, you became a physics major for science reasons and now you are just dealing with scuttlebutt in your department associations and affiliations. Your department is not a feeder to the industry, presently. The aspect of life that relates to making money has to do mostly with the ability to conceive of how money works in a societal and cultural setting. Money is unique in how it is moved from one place to another and just how valuable shepparding that movement really is. Regardless of any prior work at dealing with this movement by others, it is possible to, in any 18 month period, to re-establish the contemporary modus if one wishes. On the other hand there are timeless fundamental approaches to maintaining the extant systems. They are tweeked continually, largely with technological refinements. See routing. What is the best education for doing either? Informal education where thinking smart far exceeds thinking for long hours. The formal education backup (that precedes informal education) is best accomplished in a setting that merges the theoretical (for its mature and pristine qualities) and the applied (for its shear power in addressing real opportunities). Obviously, the near miss is engineering education because engineering deals with materials iprimarily instead of money primarily. Another near miss is business administration thread. It deals with business instead of money. So to narrow the focus, we come to looking at using money as compared to moving money. Strangely the formal education available is focused on the use of money primarily. Too bad for those who wish to make money. By now it is obvious to most that formal education prior to going to work to make money, deals with the concepts of flow. The better flow fields are electrical engineering and physics where the common interest is stuff like entropy and fields most all related to energy. For me the key is using the first part of the 18 months to exact the rewards (just the method which is easily conceded to me) for what I am going to share or deliver to the needy (the outfit that wants to get the capital continually over time). I take several cuts it turns out and they are less and less obvious. The sequence I design for is as follows: comission units (x), market additions (xM), overrides (kxM), leverage(BkxM), and finally growth(nBkxM). X is in the range of .01 to .05; M builds up from the model (1) to 250 over the ramp up; K ranges between .15 and .30; B ranges between 12 and 20; and n is usually 4 per annum. Relative to the money flowing all seem to be neglible as the needy see and face me. My personal capacity is handling 5 needy's and my preference is about 3. To look at a current opportunity, I see the net commission varying by a factor od almost 3. I am using all of these by not working exclusively and this enables me to mix the commissions as I desire. I max "flow". In the 18 months ramp up, the K keeps advancing linearly with an advance at leat quarterly. Leveraging occurs only once and is not shared with the needy at all. n is the purpose of what I do. There is no way any quant (PhD) or MBA can do the n thing in a career working for a corporation. It is necessary for anyone who wnats max income to not be staff for a corporation. The corporation (needy) has to relate to you as the source for meeting their needs to inflow money. To use excerpts from this thread and provide examples. Gates is not the wealthiest. In contracting with the wealthiest, the hook had to be new markets. Two avenues were designed to create the flow. Both were "outreach" to a growing segment of the population. Key asked Q in the first two hour meeting: When to you start Germany? Health. SAT is contracted with one division of the largest. We commence a second division next week. One needy becomes two needies. We have unique single contract. The inital values were: x=.02; M=250;k=.167; B=TBD; and n>4. for parallel second division all values will be better. This is month 5. We have doubled the unit velocity during the pipeline filling. Since all staffing is salaried, the money making is done by C corp net profits in a closely held construct. Instead of the IPO thing a TFSE is used to affect the lone time leverage. To advance the n, the net x and all of k is throughput to the TFSE corp thus getting all increases in profits there at zero costs. The PE of the TFSE corp goes from nominal to "growth" within four quarters. Go to college to learn how to make money by providing money flow to corporations as a contracted activity. By being unique to the neediest (very large corporations) each minute of thinking smart is very valuable. We have applicants that are willing to work for no salary. as a finalist judge of the annual MBA schools shoot out, I get to see some prime candidates for employment. I will spent two days next week on a campus.
thank you. and just think, they went thru all that for their degrees, and I get all my trading results by LUCK! anyway, Mcclean, have you got any answers/ideas/directions yet? If you do, be sure to email me, because I'm off this thread. good luck, Mcclean. good fight, guys. good trading, theskalper