Advice On a Career

Agree with LeveredBetaBoy - I think you've got an interesting (in a good way) profile and lots of firms would at the very least be willing to have a sit down with you. A lot of the big banks (Citi and CS immediately spring to mind) also have veterans programmes: even if you weren't a "front line" soldier per se, I'd imagine you'd probably still be eligible, so well worth having a look into that. I know a lot of firms also have "return to work" programmes - this would give you good insight into the different business areas of finance, providing valuable colour into what business function you might most want to pursue.

There are three roles that immediately spring to mind that I could see someone with a profile similar to yours occupying on a trading floor at a bank: i) Strategist; ii) Trader (or sales-trader, depending on what floats your boat); iii) Quant. The trading role is broadly what you'd expect it to be: actively engaging with the market of your asset class, dealing with brokers, managing risk, and providing prices to the sales team (who directly liaise with clients). If you perhaps wanted a more client facing role, you could opt for sales-trading: these are the people that talk with the traders at funds and the like, provide them with market colour, and communicate prices from the bank's traders to the fund's traders. Strategists act as the bridge between the research team and the bank's traders: they identify what they deem likely trends in the market (often off the back of research's intel and their own subsequent analysis) and advise the relevant desk(s) to either take a position on that theme or, at the very least, be vigilant of direct risk exposure. Quants do the heavy lifting in terms of data and, broadly, build trading models that help to interpret the market based on in-depth statistical analysis. These are then used by the traders to, again, inform their trading decisions and, hopefully, make money for the firm. These models can either be directly related to the markets themselves or can be more high-level (e.g. are concerned more so with the macro environment, what that means for investor capital allocation, and how this will affect flows).

As you can see, there's a lot of overlap in these roles with differing degrees of emphasis on numerical skills, risk tolerance, communication, and client relations depending on where exactly you sit - it's ultimately up to you to decide which skillsets you think: i) Are your strongest; and ii) You'd be willing to develop and focus on for the next 5, 10, 15yrs of your professional career.

Off the bat, if markets are the part of finance that most interest you and that you want to investigate, I'd start churning out as many applications to graduate and intern (be they summer or off-cycle) roles as soon as possible. I'd also make sure I'm always reading Bloomberg, Reuters, the FT, the WSJ, etc. to make sure I'm developing an idea of the market climate and what the in-vogue investments of present are - this will give you a good foundation of market colour to discuss at interview. It's also worthwhile developing an idea of what the basic asset classes in trading are (e.g. bonds vs FX vs equities) as well as - on a high level - how different derivatives work (e.g. futures / forwards, vanilla call and put options, swaps). Finally, start accumulating any relevant work experience you can. This could be "assisting" for free on Fridays for a small asset manager, doing research work for a local PWM shop - anything that shows you want to learn about markets and are doing all you can to develop your understanding. This will show recruiters that you have a sustained interest in the space and really, truly, sincerely want to work as a trader / quant / strategist, etc.