Who has the toughest job in finance?

I'm talking specific people. I would think the CEOs of major banks and megafund PE would be up there due to the complexity and scope of the business.

Jamie Dimon David Solomon Brian Moynihan Henry Kravis Stephen Schwarzman Ray Dalio

16 Comments
 

I would imagine Michael Grimes at Morgan Stanley is up there in terms of key man risk. He basically has a mandate that he has to lead-left every single tech deal, and has his hands deep in all of those pitches to actually micro-manage the work. Tremendous and increasing competition not only from other banks and elite boutiques but also his own clients, as tech companies want to do IPOs themselves and disrupt the whole finance process. He can't take a week off (or even a day off) the way Dimon could and let the infrastructure run itself just fine. Tech banking in general is a tough business.

Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes.
 
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Kind of hard to answer this unless the person working in various roles. For me, out of all the jobs that I've had over the years was definitely trading. I've worked in back office, moved to middle office trade support then worked as a trader.

I was trading on the screen and making market for the brokers OTC. As a trader, I had to learn how to price something (You mess this up and you're fucked), quickly, whether it was on RFQ or if a broker reached out to me and asked me to make a market for something back of the curve and if I wanted to skew my price or not. On top of that, I had to put it in algos on the pricing mechanism, the hedges, safeties and execution (Definitely the hardest) because you need to differentiate the trader's thought from reality... On top of that, I have to manage my risk, where are my biggest risk exposures, how am I going to flatten my inventory, what are the news outlook, if any... Why is the curve shaped like that? Is anything I can pick off from the brokers with what they know? Why is it trading like this on the screen??

For example, I see someone on screen executing something TWAP every 5 seconds... Is it because he know somethings or is he trying to get rid of size? Or someone is iceberging a huge size and I can't get the fuck out of position to break even because I forced into the trade on the screen... (Forced to quote, electronically, per agreement to CME)

On top of all this, I have to make money for myself and prop trade and I constantly have to find new strategies. One thing I did was during TAS, I build a macro to gather data of how the spreads were behaving day to day and see if there was some pattern and guess what... We made money from that.

Personally for me, out of all the jobs I've had... trading/market making was the hardest.

I remember when I was a junior trader, I wanted to prove my strategy and the other traders were looking at a chart a certain way and I was ignorant and was using their charts but I amended using my strategy on top of the chart but I didn't understand fully what the parameters were and I lost money... As a trader, YOU CANNOT BE IGNORANT... Learn everything of what it does before you use it... I'm talking about the actual formula of the indicators...

 

have you tried trading futures outright on your own from home, just using 1-2 contracts...with a broker like AMP? With a 5k account, you can trade and see if you are able to pull money out of the market. Not talking about spreads or "investing"...but semi-high frequency day trading...and 1-2 contracts is enough to make (or lose) $1000 a day...

just google it...you're welcome
 

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