Hello fellow traders,
I've been working at a discretionary prop trading shop for about 4 months now, relatively new to the industry and still trying to learn the ropes. Our firm is relatively tight knit, only about 20-30 of us, so we all know each other quite well and the office environment is very friendly.
Thing is, one of my bosses, also undoubtedly our top trader, is a very nice, down to earth guy, and he said he'd be willing to give me an extra lesson/tutorial for 3 hours a day (just a note, he didn't offer me this, I reached out to him). Naturally, I think it's a phenomenal opportunity to be learning from the best, and am grateful for my boss for going out of his way to do this. However, I've tried a few days of it and feel very burnt out and out of tune with balancing my life; my mandatory work hours are 13, and adding on another 3, can be very tiring and even more stressful with some of the swings I've experienced in the markets lately.
I don't mean to sound like I have the busiest life; I'm fully aware there are many others who endure much more rigorous hours (hello ibankers!). I'm a big proponent of work/life balance as well as maintaining health. I guess the ultimate question is, would you say I should just buckle down, try readjusting even more to the longer hours and take on these lessons or am I fine with the pace I'm going now, and I shouldn't push myself too much? Obviously, it's a choice I'm going to have to make on my own ultimately, but I wanted to hear some thoughts and insight from those who have trekked down their career paths a few years longer than I have. Perhaps some of you regret overworking so much in your earlier years? Or maybe others are wishing that you made that small sacrifice and believe all that effort will pay off in the end?
I would say, just train a few days a week. Not every day.
Sounds like an easy way to get burned out. Then again, it's a valuable skill to learn how to concentrate for an extended period of time and decompress afterwards.
The approach to teaching might also matter. My approach to those who shadow us (sometimes for as little as 45 min to an hour) is to teach them the basic definitions and work with them through a slew of examples directly relevant to our trading. At the end they probably feel grilled a bit because I'd rather them attempt to figure it out than me doing all the talking. But all things considered it's probably a bit overkill since the shadowees often have little time to process things. My approach to learning other products has generally been to do my own homework and then bounce questions/ideas off of someone knowledgeable in that area. The upside is you learn the basics pretty well this way, but this still has to be supplemented by practical aspects e.g. trading tools.
My suggestion would be to figure out what you're trying to achieve through these lessons and try to modify the approach accordingly.
trading takes a long time...some people take years to get the handle of it.
suck it up - the guy is willing to give you his time so you should appreciate it and push yourself further. You still have weekends, and it wont last forever. take the opportunity no one else does
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