MBA - Posting back later

First of all, really sorry about your ding. I know it must be extremely disappointing.

1. Did you apply columbia ED or RD? Did you get an interview?
2. Your numbers are fine, and although traders don't do well in top MBA admissions your track record is impressive. Do you know how strong your recommendations were? For traders, there's always the danger of getting recs where they talk about how good you are at analysis and making money but not enough on leadership, team work, and other soft skills that MBA programs want to see.
3. You're vague on what your extracurriculars were, but i will take your word for it that they're decent. Either way, I don't think that's why you got dinged.
4. I think the #1 reason you probably got dinged at columbia is your career goals/why MBA essay. Columbia in particular REALLY cares about this essay because they want to make sure that you have specific realistic goals AND that you can get a job coming out of school. Adcom know very well that columbia's strength in finance and NYC location are huge assets. They want to see if an applicant can effectively leverage that to achieve their goals. It seems like you wrote in that essay about wanting to transition from trading into marco research/strategy. Did you mention any specific firms you want to work at? How about asset class? There's a big difference between saying that you want to jump straight from columbia to a major macro fund such as soros/tudor/brevan howard/moore and saying that you want to do G10 currency research at a major investment bank with a strong currency research team, such as UBS or Morgan Stanley.

If you got dinged at columbia ED or this early in their RD process, your chances at wharton/booth/sloan are not looking that great. However, if you fix your career goals/why MBA essay, i still recommend you applying to booth since i know a lot of people there who got dinged at other M7 schools. Booth is sort of weird and less formulaic in their admissions process.

You have a good shot at stern. Also, why are you so opposed to LBS Mif? From what i heard, they have pretty good job placement. If not Mif, apply to LBS' MBA program, which has strong finance recruiting in london and hong kong.

Finally, although you are not interested in quant research you should look at top U.S. finance masters programs such as princeton, stanford, berkeley, nyu, mit. Although most of the grads go into sell side trading, quant research, prop trading, a decent number get buyside offers.