It's my passion to work on Wall Street as a trader however...

Given I'm human I've come to accept the fact that I've made some errors during my career. I'm not here to bore you, I just want my fellow colleagues to see my situation and maybe relate if you've been in my shoes prior to where you stand now. Any advice would be welcome and well appreciated. What follows is my current situation in summary.

I graduated 5 years ago from a non target university with a BA in Finance I graduated with a sub 3.5 gpa overall but a 3.8 gpa in my finance concentrations. I realized that before I disliked all the unnecessary classes we were forced to take as electives because I wanted to solely focus on finance, therefore now I’m feeling the repercussions of allowing my gpa to deteriorate as it did. I did not intern because I was working full time in order to pay for school. Another mistake I realized that I am now paying for.

Regardless I was eventually forced to take on student loans because the tuition increases were too much for my current job to sustain. I was enraged and took on about $30k in debt to fund this education. This was during the beginning of the real estate crisis. During my finance classes I learned from a professor that school and loans are just another business in which you can’t default on the loan, so my mind started formulating ideas on exiting that trap, I hated the fact of owing individuals that I didn’t know.

During this time I was learning on my own about trading and investing. I opened FX Spot accounts along with a stock and options account. I funded this with the loans I undertook thus investing in an alternative yet applied form of education. Once more this was during the brink of the financial crisis. I saw fear, panic and chaos. What I learned during 2008 was to simplify the madness. Financial sector was bound to falter with the start of BSC selling off to JPM. Simple gravitational law; what goes up must come down. I deployed capital I had buying puts on what I can afford on anything financial for 3-6 months time. Volatility hasn’t spiked yet thus premiums were cheap and when it did during September of 2008 I closed all the positions I had and technically paid off 70% of my loans in 9 months time. This was a real experience in which academia couldn’t offer.

Moving forward to completing my education, I took leadership of 3 finance projects at the end of my undergrad semesters.

One project was a discretionary mutual fund in which we had 1 million AUM. There was a team of 5 analysts including myself covering multiple market sectors, 200k of capital was allocated evenly amongst all analysts to diversify risk of the portfolio and lower its overall volatility. Given we were a mutual fund we were allowed to only go long as dictated by our pitch book, however we were selective in our entries and this caused us to outperform the SP500 index by 13% during the holding period of the project.

A second project in which I am most proud of was an options and futures project in which 3 members helped engineer a position in which we hedged the SP500 index with a short ES contract along with a synthetic option strategy in which we bought and sold simultaneously the SPY index options to replicate the index. We constructed a model in which it tracked the daily performance of all 3 different asset classes, the underlying, the derivative and the future and tried to maintain a 1:1 hedge ratio as difficult as it may seem. We tried to capture a profit by closing all the positions simultaneously; however this wasn’t possible when transaction costs were priced in, the execution would have resulted in a loss. If I’m not mistaken this is similar to delta one trading? If anyone has info on that let me know because I’m interested in that as well.

The final project was a bond portfolio comprised of previous members of the equity mutual fund. In short we hedged interest rate risk and tried to capture a risk free rate of return once more through potential arbitrage between t bills and Eurodollar futures.

The collegiate journey ends here after I get my diploma. I landed a job as a Financial Advisor with a small firm that paid 100% commission and had me pay for my series 6 and 63 licenses. Other colleagues of mine that got into other Financial Advisor roles didn’t have to pay anything for their license. So I got out of that debacle along with insurance sales. So this was another mistake I made worth noting. Fast forward a few years, I’m still trading however not as profitable or as consistent due to myself utilizing the capital to pay for fixed expenses. I held numerous jobs in different industries doing what I can to recover myself. I have moved back east to be more positioned in the vicinity of Wall Street and its firms. I reduced my trading capital at risk and focused more on risk management. With the concept basically being, the upside will be there as long as you manage your exposure well. I have no audited track record of my trades to back my trading capability so I feel that is another error I have overlooked.

I have researched the target firms I’m looking to join and are as follows. For S&T/FX etc: Goldman Sachs, UBS, Citigroup, Barclays, BNY Mellon, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Nomura, Mitsubishi UFJ and Credit Suisse.

For Proprietary Trading: Trillium, First New York Securities, Susquehanna International Group, Chimera Securities, Wolverine Trading and Jane Street.

Given my dislocation to the industry, aside from myself still trading and staying in fine tune with the markets in the retail space along with seeking further education with regards to the market and its ever changing landscape, I know I am at a severe disadvantage compared to the fresh undergrad that just got out of a target ivy or whatnot.

However I do have attributes which would valuate me competitively versus new grads. My passion for the markets and the market experience I retained during the 8+ years of trading has taught me that adapting is crucial to market survival. I have survived for over 8 years trading my personal accounts, experienced bull markets, a couple of flash crashes and a recent “Swiss Shocker”, while a normal trader would blow up in less than 3 months or during those events. I firmly believe this shows persistence along with ability to take and manage risk under pressure in live market conditions. I always ask myself before I do anything; “What could go wrong?”

My ultimate question is what steps should I take to better position myself in breaking into institutional Sales & Trading or Proprietary Trading? Is interning still possible given the fact I’ve been graduated for 5 years now? I'll volunteer at a firm for free if I have to in order to gain relevant experience. I am networking on LinkedIn with other professionals in the field as well; I know there is more I can do. Feel free to PM me or provide your feedback, I value all of your inputs and advice.

All the best

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