Could I land a wallstreet trading/quant gig based on my trades?
I’m a software engineer at a tech company and I trade 100% options on the side. Stanford CS alum… Could I land a wallstreet gig with my trading result? Pretty much profiting on 90% of my options since April.
Likely not. For one, 6 months is an extremely short time period to judge someone's actual results. For another, most hedge funds and trading shops operate on alpha and sharpe ratios, and considering your options plays and such, I would guess your risk adjusted return is likely very low. I'm guessing you took short term calls or puts and managed to get lucky around 2 major catalysts, and while sometimes getting things right is good, you also need proper risk management and the ability to replacate strategies to some extent.
I would say on 80% of my calls/ CSPs had 2- 4 months time but yeah I also fear the same that I’m just riding off the recent catalysts which is new presidency and tariff drama. I’m mostly cash now for same reason but hopefully my strategy stays consistent from here.
What ranges of risk adjusted profits would be considered you think?
is 25 sharpe ratio and 1700% alpha too low?
A Sharpe ratio of 25 would either imply A) You've found the holy grail of investments that are low volatility and high returns B) The calculation is wrong or C) It's HFT so Sharpe ratio is very different. It's statistically improbable to have and maintain a sharpe ratio of 25 over any time period without HFT strategies.
Yes that Sharpe is way too low. There is no chance you will ever find a job on Wall Street unless you can already generate a Sharpe of at least 99
>is 25 sharpe ratio and 1700% alpha too low?
Your chart shows what appears to a drawdown from ~30k down to ~5k -- that's over 80% drawdown. Who told you your sharpe was 25?
Imagine if someone said to you; "I know how to setup my own home WiFi can I become a software engineer at a tech company?" Your options portfolio outcomes are like winning at roulette because there isn't enough data to demonstrate value at reasonable scale for professional trading.
If you didn't graduate too long ago you may qualify for entry level training or new analyst programs, many of which are receptive to computer science majors. Some proprietary trading firms, quantitative funds, and multi managers have early career opportunities like that. If your graduation date makes you ineligible for this the next thing would be to look at places that have lateral entry level roles targeting computer science majors but you probably won't hit a trading desk directly; if you do sometimes it may be a year or more until you are actually making trades.
No.
For now, no. The capital you're using to "demonstrate" your strategy and performance is too small to have merit, but even if the above was from 30 million to 75 million in a 6 month period, the initial draw down to ~5k or "5 million" would be a big red flag for most risk managers. In our world we are trying to achieve maximum risk adjusted returns. For the risk you are seemingly taking, a ~200% annualized return is not good "enough".
Additionally managing 30,000 is much different from managing 300 million, so without knowing what names and strategies you're deploying to have a 90% hit rate, I wouldn't be able to say if your returns are attractive enough for a HF manager to take a deeper look.
Ideally you're trading liquid names. But if these returns come from trading microcap, small cap options with very low liquidity then its not scalable. For example, when VFS went public via de-SPAC and crested above $80 there was no borrow at scale, and no broker was willing to make us a market on put options because they couldn't delta hedge. However, on certain retail brokerage accounts you could buy small lots of OTM puts at 30-40% premium for October expiry. At the time I had 95% confidence that trade would make money but it wasn't deployable at scale so it didn't matter.
Keep at it though, if you continue to refine your strategy and capital base and continue the last 3 months of trend performance over a longer duration, it is reasonable that a PM could be convinced to get one of his analysts to take a look at your trading history and strategy and start a conversation at least.
Grok says my sharpe ratio is 25 and alpha at 1700%, although it made a bunch of assumptions. What values are considered good?
look up what a sharpe ratio is via google and don't ask grok, and you'll realize why that comment you just wrote makes you look very dumb.
Kind of hard to take you seriously as a potential candidate to transition to the industry if you can't even be bothered to look up and understand a common industry metric that is relatively easy to understand.
Its kind of wild to throw out a number that wasn't even calculated by you... especially when eyeballing the chart you put up, I have a hard time getting to 25 by screwing with the numerator and denominator.
You took the initiative to ask this forum for some advice, and I made an honest effort to give you an opinion and advice / direction. it's up to you to make a conscious and genuine effort to learn and be proactive if you're actually serious about joining the industry.
Yeah no, your vol is way too high to have a 25 sharpe, firstly.
Secondly, a 25 sharpe is bullshit. That's just complete nonsense.
Yes. Quant firms love to give jobs to people who have massive drawdowns in their first month and nearly lose all their capital. Clearly your recovery was all skill and no luck involved whatsoever.
If you believe you can maintain this performance, why do you need a job at all?
No, absolutely not.
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