Personal Trading Experience on Resume

SirTradesaLot:

What kind of position are you applying for?

In most cases, people are going to discount the returns you mention for something like this. But, at least it shows you have interest in the market. If you feel compelled to include returns, I would annualize the returns. It would be more interesting to me if you showed what sort of vol you had to achieve that return. Instead of showing the absolute return, you could say you outperformed the S&P 500 by X%, just so they know you didn't just get lucky as to when you bought into the market.

I'm applying for pretty much anything and everything I can find at this point. I'd love love an ER/HF/IB summer internship and I'd be willing to work for free, but I'd be willing to settle for a PWM internship, delaying my graduation and trying again next year. My main concern is that I'm a lower level Junior (transferred twice) and have zero finance experience (unless an inside sales job at a credit card processing company counts,) so I'm trying to mention as much personal finance experience as possible on my resume, with the hope that the interviewer will start talking to me about stocks and hopefully I can prove to someone that I have a brain.

Unfortunately, I did not have much volume to achieve those returns. I am a concentrated value investor and only invested in a handful of companies throughout this time period. My plan to take down the "you got lucky argument" is to know my investments in and out and master my pitch on those companies. I feel most undergrad students have no idea what actually moves stock prices and generates alpha. I feel if I can clearly demonstrate I know the answers to the three golden questions of investing 1)What is the instrinsic value of the asset? 2) Why has the market mispriced it? 3)What catalysts need to occur for it to reach its intrinsic value? I can convince the interviewer I am more than lucky.

Note: I'm pretty sure I stole those three questions from somebody on this website. Whoever it was... thank you. They've changed my life

SirTradesaLot:

Sounds like you have a good story. Annualize the returns is my main suggestion.

I never worked in banking, so take this with a grain of salt, but I would be worried that the interviewer in banking might be concerned that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of their business if you are touting your stock picks. Maybe someone from banking could comment on that.

Thanks for the help.

And haha, I can definitely see that being a banker's interpretation. I'm considering using different resumes for IB than ER and HF internships. I honestly don't have much of an interest in IB, my passion lies in investment management and I'd much rather go the ER route than IB, but like many others on this forum I'll do an IB stint for the sake of resume building, if it is the best option on the table.

Spot on, this...

Why should it change my answer? Why would anyone be impressed with just being able to open an account and randomly punt around?

While interviewing for prop firms, I was asked in most interview processes if I traded for myself. I told them all how I didn't think I could beat the market sufficiently (if at all) on my own after taxes and other costs on my fairly small capital base, so I did not try and instead put my savings in low expense index funds. I did, however mention my involvement with the student managed investment fund at my university.

This answer seemed to go over very well with most interviewers and I ended up receiving several offers at legit firms.

i realize this guy is an outlier case so i wouldnt expect u to believe me. from what ive heard he maxed out leverage and often risked 25% of his acct on a trade to just make 5-10pips. so i can't give the guy credit for risk control, esp during those initial years. he was a discretionary trader but fairly methodical, ran an intraday mean-reversion type strategy which perfectly fit the regime of '10-'13. after punting around as a retail trader for 5y, he now trades on a bank fx platform (not Citi, DB, UBS etc but close).

my main point was that having a great track record, even if a PA, is incredibly valuable when trying to transition to the buyside. i actually agree with you - in most cases it would be bizarre for a person to get hired because of their retail trading experience.... and while it would be ideal if a person could craft a tight story about their investment philosophy, risk management approach and all that jazz, if a person has an exceptional track record that spans for a few yrs then i believe that one could potentially skip all of that, particularly for trading oriented roles. you'd be surprised how many discretionary macro types largely place trades based on 'intuition', and manage risk with fixed trade sizes and tight stops...

"Intelligent insight with no returns is meaningless"

I HEAVILY disagree. Just because a trade loses money post fact, doesnt mean it was a bad trade pre fact. Now if a strategy has bad returns for an extended period of time, then clearly there is something wrong with it, but as long as that is then taken as experience of what doesnt work then its still useful knowledge. You go through a lot of stuff that doesnt work before you find something that works in trading.

Describe the nuts and bolts.

I respect if someone wants to keep their trade secrets private but I do expect you to be able to describe the general edge and how you developed the strategy / think about risk. I have yet to come across a strategy that can't be described in general terms to a satisfactory extent without divulging too much info. That being said, if you supposedly have an amazing strategy and you won't tell me anything at all about how/why it works or how you developed it, I'm probably going to write you off completely.