Love of the dough

IlliniProgrammer

Yes, it's called ops, accounting, and risk management. Ok, maybe trading too, but that is a dying industry.

Also you can be a quant, but that is going to be tricky coming from the University of South Florida, and frankly it's a lot more efficient to just go work for Google at that point.

The average American earns about $20/hour. So becoming a millionaire, as you were trying to do in your other thread, entails creating the same amount of value that the average American takes 50,000 hours to create (that's about 25 years of work at 40 hours/week. However, this is pre-tax).

So do you feel that you can create more value per hour than the average American? Or are you going to have to work harder than the average American? Or is it going to be some combination of both.

Sorry, but money doesn't grow on trees and it doesn't just fall in your lap, either. You've got to find a way to convince people to give you this money, and if there were a simple idea out there that everybody could copy, we'd all be doing it right now.

I didn't know the average American was so good

IlliniProgrammer

I'm 50/50 on whether this is a troll account or these are just delusions of success from some naive college student.

Four years ago, this probably would have flown, but we have become an older, more realistic/pessimistic forum about careers. Every college student wants to be a bank CEO, but I'm not sure they realize yet that every other college student wants the same and the US can't create 100 million bank CEOs let alone 100. Every college student still also believes they're special. You have a better shot playing the lottery than you do of becoming a bank CEO. You have a better shot of having an airplane land on you than you do starting your own successful $1 Billion buyside fund. Frankly the kind of luck it takes to pull this off is quite scary.

So we have to temper our ambitions. Aim to be a manager in the FO or at a buyside shop some day. Aim to earn $500K/year, work fewer than 70 hours/week, and have a red brick house in Westchester county with a white picket fence and an old oak tree in the front yard. THAT's still difficult but attainable for most people.

You know what's really special? A college kid who knows he's not special. Maybe HE has a shot. Maybe he quietly has a few trading strategies that HE knows work and is applying them to the market. Maybe he believes the proof is in the pudding and doesn't want to wait around for a job or career- he just wants to build something. This kid has a better shot than the dreamers out there.

Looking back, I'm not sure the people who made it to the role of CEO or founder ever had to ask these kinds of questions. They had their idea, they knew the idea worked, they proved that it worked; they needed other people to help implement it, and they started a business.

So from now on I am boycotting giving a serious answer whenever someone is more ambitious than "How do I get to a red brick house in Westchester or Bergen County with a white picket fence?" For that matter, there's no serious answer to that question for someone who needs to ask it. The world's next billionaire is too busy working on solving the problem that will make him a billionaire to talk about it or ask questions.

I am content with my dream of a red brick house on Lake Michigan in Door County, WI. A rusty '67 Ford Mustang GT convertible and a white picket fence would also be nice, but I am not too picky.

Good post, though I find it interesting that over time you've progressed from a rusty honda to a red brick house in Westchester with a white picket fence...