Getting Into Prop Trading or IB With No Work Experience and Non Target

Hello Wall Street Oasis, I recently found this board and thought I'd post and ask for a bit of advice. I know that my situation has been mocked to death on this board but here's a bit of background information about my situation before this forum completely tears me to shreds.

I graduated high school in 2017 and decided to go to Cal Poly Slo (Non-Target mid-tier state school) to play D1 baseball and study business finance, rather than some other target schools because I thought I was a baseball prodigy (threw low 90s). Long story short, I got injured at the start of my freshman year, but still thought I could rehab back. Because of that, I ended up playing summer baseball still instead of looking for a finance internship. I ended up rehabbing back to being as good as I was but the team wouldn't offer me any money and wanted me to commit to staying a full 4 more years to play. My parents weren't interested in me taking out any loans with them as cosigners, so that option was essentially out. Instead, I decided to load up on courses to cut costs and graduate in my second year.

I ended up just finishing my BS degree this summer, and have essentially just begun the job search, and applying process. I finished with a mediocre GPA and very little club experience, and am studying for the CFA level 1 exam.

The only things really exceptional about me are that I got in the 94th percentile on my GREs, graduated in two years, and made about 100k trading options, stocks, and cryptocurrencies since I graduated college, that I have good programming experience and exceptional recommendations from profs.

Basically I have three questions.

  1. Is it realistic for me to get into Prop Trading or IB at this point or should I focus on getting a grad degree and then trying.

  2. Should I put my trading experience, and potentially my trading history on my resume? I personally think it is impressive, and the percentages are very high, but I'm worried it will just be taken as speculation and make my resume more likely to be thrown out. Plus I have read that cryptocurrency, in particular, has a bad reputation in finance. In reality, there was some speculation but the majority of the money was made by model arbitrage for options pricing, triangular arbitrage on multiple exchanges for cryptocurrency, and then speculation, but I can justify and provide research/ a trading strategy for every trade.

  3. Is it a good idea to try and network into internships even though the recruiting season is essentially over and most of them only recruit for current students anyway?

Thanks for your time and honesty.

 
 

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