What’s the best route to become a trader

Thanks for the silver banana. The articulation part is important and also one thing, about the "dream" you have and a comment on the choice of wording. My view is that the framing of this is better in the long-term view as a "goal" because dreams, in essence, are fickle and the population that have yet to enter the industry see it through rose-tinted glasses. This is a full-time job that carries a lot of responsibilities that is often overshadowed by the glamour of the title. All upside and little downside in industry vernacular, might as well go read a sell-side report, or suggest there's a mispriced option value for the stock, with the latter being the better alternative. Kudos to anyone that got that.

HF managers don't get seeded because it's their "dream" to manage other people's money. They get investors because they are good at what they do, and getting good at this requires steps 1-3 from my experience. Once this process becomes a daily battle against yourself and the market, it becomes much less like a dream but just plain reality.

There tends to be a proportion of the population where the actual dream is to just get rich, which is the absolute wrong way to look at the industry. Deep introspection in what money and wealth means to you on a deeper level is important and should be thought through in for a long and fulfilling career. The guys that are in it for themselves usually don't last long because when shit hits the fan, and it will, they tend to be the first ones to leave.

A few take-home thoughts that I think can help anyone that wants to develop a career in the alternative investment space, or any career for that matter

1. How do you deal with failure?
2. What was your biggest failure and what did you learn from it?
3. Do you love it enough, that even in the darkest times, the journey to absolute truth is worth more than material remuneration?

These three questions recur frequently and being able to articulate the exact cause and solution to remediate them is the core essence to me.

Some last words: Fundamentals and research, and this is the board sense across all types of assets traded and not limited to equities, in my experience tend to be spot on if done properly in varying time-frames. Without it, there's no place for you here, so do the work thoroughly and be open to your own blind spots. Second, people in the industry tend to second guess themselves when volatility hits and mess up on the execution.

One last piece of advice to the guys reading this and also a reminder to myself: I think this is absolutely vital for the buy-side and investing in general to ask yourself this question: If money wasn't a motivator, would you still be doing this? Think hard about this question because skewed alignments and biases occur when large sums of money come into play (for the experienced guys, think about the signs of bad management and pump and dump schemes). Are you in it for the money or for the truth that is the real, sustainable value creation? The latter part, that value creation is a perpetual machine of karma seeping through multi-layers and reaching those that will benefit from it most, and then cycles back, inadvertently, to yourself and those in your immediate circle.

Hopefully, this was able to help anyone out there. Misaligned expectations tend to be a common reason for lots of pain and suffering, and hope I was able to alleviate a bit of it. To the original poster of the tread: in no way am I pointing fingers to you or anyone that has a goal to be a money manager in the future and alleging your motivations are malaligned. I'm in the same boat, working towards the same goals, but it's always a good idea to reassess such core, fundamental issues periodically.