New / Younger traders with less than 4 years of "real" experience - have you found a strategy to prop trade yet (profitably) without the benefit of flow...or do you still feel like you are flying blind?

As the title says...how many younger sellside traders have actually "learned how to trade" ?

New / Younger traders with less than 4 years of real trading experience - have you found a strategy to prop trade yet (profitably) without the benefit of flow...or do you still feel like you are flying blind?

8 Comments
 

i'm talking about junior guys on a "manual" market making desk (for example, on any rates or credit, commodities or FX desk where prop trading still takes place).

By 4 years on a trading desk, you should have gotten the hang of things, be making markets to sophisticated clients on your own, and be trading a prop strategy in a separate book....so all the junior traders at the BB (JPM, Citi, BOA, MS, GS, UBS, CS, BNP, SocGen, Barc, DB, HSBC, TD, RBC, Nomura, etc...)  all these banks will have some junior traders (under 4 years on the desk..associate or maybe early VP)....but how many of them are profitable prop traders?

This was traditionally how traders were evolved...and how most trading orientated hedge funds were born.  Where are the new manual traders coming from?  

 

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