Anyone else worked at some and have personal knowledge of the culture there?
>Tons of standing desks >Every trader surrounded by 8 or even 12 monitors >Extravagant dinners with $1,000+ bottles of wine >Trips to the casino to count cards
>CEO gives speeches sometimes >Is a weird libertarian dude who professes views that are very anti-consumerist and anti-poor people, I won't get into detail because it will reveal information that can identify him >Thinks his firm contributes an extremely valuable service to society and acts as if it's almost a charity organization doing good in the world, despite extracting wealth from the market through high frequency trading algorithms and even algorithms meant to exploit the algorithms of other firms
>Very elitist, lots of my co-workers would often randomly bring up their time at MIT or Harvard when it's barely relevant, just because they wanted to mention the fact that they went there again
I don't like places like this, luckily I'm in low latency server engineering, not trading, so I moved out of this industry elsewhere and the pay is much better and people are less elitist, but it's a relief to know that there's always a demand for people like me in prop trading if I ever lost my job etc. I could easily get a new one
looks like this thread will probably go unnoticed, so ill ask a question anyway. did the office go crazy when the markets open? were there ever co-workers shouting at each other during heavy market volatility?
Jose Collins
Hypercompetitive
Unironically pretty brilliant people
Many can easily start their own fin service or fintech and succeed. Many in fact.
I live in los angeles, and they pretty much line across all the prime beachfront office properties
Legitimate all around. Your best bet is to know ur shit, have cfa, and also be a great salesperson.
Alexander Bennett
Did you overhear anyone planning to put their bonus check in bitcoin?
Cameron Jenkins
I wasn't on the trading floor very often, but it's actually pretty quiet most of the time and self contained. People would listen to music and try to get into a "zone" but for instance the AAPL traders would have their desks next to each other and the oil traders would do similar so they could converse. The only full-floor craziness was market-opening ceremonies which involved some funny memes but I can't reveal them or it would reveal the firm
Joshua Bell
can you drop some tools of the trade? im trying to get into this shit as i have a shit load of time and a 30k to fuck around with
Julian Gutierrez
This is actually one of the biggest regrets of my life. I worked there for a short period but I was not a trader, I was in software. So I didn't fully have an investment mindset yet. But they actually paid {VERY_PROMINENT_NOW-BILLIOANRE_BITCOIN_INVESTOR} to come give a talk on Bitcoin and it was my first real exposure to it except vaguely reading about it on articles. I should have dumped all my money into it then and I would have made big money. The sentiment was very positive, this is part of the reason I am now so pro-crypto, because this trading firm was so pro-crypto as well
Jason James
I have 6 years experience with big data and ETL systems but want to get into more runtime/low latency systems. Any good reading material? Can you describe your high frequency trading backend tech stack a bit?
Luke Clark
Sorry don't bother is my advice. You can't compete.
Camden Myers
I know a firm that invested 1% if their funds into bitcoin back in 2014.
