you can trade for anyone or any fund if you can make money. it doesnt matter whether your 18 or 50. if you" made a lot of money" just keep doing it for yourself. but u most certainly dont need a degree. You said you dropped out after 3 yrs, then if you want a 9-5 job why not finish that one final year.
Let's see, I know this guy (Let's just call him R.M.)- Made his first million from trading at age 24 with no degree or even one single day of college. The highest level of English language education he achieved was the 5th grade. He went to high school overseas, but most of this 'education' was comprised of worthless theological crap. At age 18 he was handed a machine gun and bussed off to war. Yeah, I think you can do OK with no degree. Success in trading is more reliant on innate ability and an obsession to get rich than anything else.
I'm an engineer, and I'll admit that having a degree doesn't equate at all to trading talent. However, a degree in financial engineering, compsci, etc, is probably a sought after foundation for taking a quantitative/automated trading approach to the business. The thing is, there are probably much more dead beats without a college degree than there are entrepreneurial people without a college degree. For this reason, the degree serves as a filter. This is analogous to GPA. I can argue that GPA is not a good representation of how smart someone is. You can be a genius and have a very low GPA. However, over the whole population there is some degree of correlation of gpa to intelligence; you have the draw the line somewhere. That's the whole point with qualifying applicants based on college degree: you have to draw the line somewhere... and if not degree, nor gpa, then it will be done with standardized test scores. How else would you do it? When you want to hire someone, you want to hire the best or the most qualified. To individually interview 100+ applicants based on their qualitative and personal traits is a big waste of time.
I would also like to add that if you have some kind of audited or verified track record of your performance after you dropped out of school, firms would hire you. If you don't, imo you made a bad decision to drop out with only one year of school left and not build a track record with your future in mind. Don't worry though, we all make these kinds of mistakes...
I always get hung up on the fact that 90% of college students I see are a bunch of frat boy acting alcoholic drug addict morons... These people made a crash landing through school and may or may not have obtained their degree through legitimate means. Like me for instance, I went to the military at age 18, the USS Cole got bombed a week into basic...September 11th happened right at my 1 yr date being in...and I was gone almost the entire rest of my enlistment over in that shithole Middle East/East Africa... Meanwhile my "friends" back home were addicted to pain pills and throwing keggers every night and coasted through school, learning basically jack shit but one of them is now a pharmacist (talk about ironic) and others are in fairly well paying jobs based on their degrees...they are all about dumb as rocks, don't even know how they made it through school really. They thought they were hot shit, etc because of their degrees.....and then I started making more money than them between my salary and my trading, and am about to be able to quit my job to trade full time and live the good life.... Just weird, because even though I made made 10 times more actual progress in my life as far as learning and experience goes....they'd get hired over me in almost any job in a heart beat simply because I didn't get a degree...hell, I wouldn't even get an interview...lol Things like that make me realize how ignorant the whole degree thing is...not gonna play that game. My fate is sealed...I gotta trade.
A college degree is extremely important if you want to get decent employment. Employers view it as a strong indicator of many of the qualities they look for - general educational level, intelligence, ability to work hard, willingness to function in an institutional environment and so on. In general, they are right - people with college degrees have much higher lifetime earnings, on average, than people without. There are exceptions of course, just as not all 18 year old males are high motor insurance risks, and some 50 year old women are. But in general, that is not the way to bet. Now for some fields, such as trading by yourself, or being a professional golfer, or working in a mine, it is totally irrelevant. If you plan on *only* working in those fields, then you will not suffer from having no degree. The problem is that now you want to go into the conventional employment world. Well, without a degree, why would anyone take you over someone with a degree from a good university? Given the competitiveness of job applications in the industry, and the difficulty of distinguishing people just by a CV, other things being equal, the guy with the top degree from a top college will get the interview and you won't. This is a fact of life which you knew when you chose to drop out. Remember that self-employment is risky, insecure, and ultra-competitive in the trading field. IMO you need to make a choice now, realising that this will probably be a choice for life. Either you are going to be consistent with dropping out, and make it yourself no matter what. In that case, realise that the consequences of failure will be greater difficulty in getting any kind of decent job later on if you fail to make it alone. Or, you are going to give up on making it alone, and try to get employment in the trading field. In this case, recognize you made a mistake dropping out, go back to college asap while you are still young, complete that degree, and then go into the job market. You could actually spin that to your advantage - it is rare for a college dropout to go back and complete their degree, and it shows maturity and strength of character. As for the "screw the degree" posts here - that's fine ONLY IF you can be self-sufficient your entire life. The moment you ever want to interview for a job, you will feel that disadvantage. Right now you might be able to complete a degree with only another year or two of studies. Leave it longer and it will take 3-4 years again. Once you have that degree, you never need to do a day's studying again - it will be permanently on your record and you will carry it for life. That's a pretty appealing proposition IMO.