You know who : another wannabe trader

[Mloody2000]

Hi guys,



long story short : IT guy who wants to get into trading



For those more patient, first some raw facts on my situation (weaknesses first) :

- in Paris (and won't relocate for 2 more years, family reasons. No problem with moving to London or NY in 2 years though)

- weak academic background - ordinary french university (not Grande Ecole), master in finance / IT (kind of double diploma)

- works as IT support for HF desk for 3 years, where IT support means automatons / market access KPI analysis, market access software management (setup / troubleshooting), work with exchanges on existing setups, some dev (mainly scripts and VBA)

- need to quit this job very soon (contractor)

- quite broad range of competences :

- finance : usual graduate knowledge I guess, with no experience. Much more knowledge in investing (big fan of Graham here), but still with no experience. Big experience on exchange structures (from current job)

- IT : current job (a bit of everything, network, scripts, DB, infra) experience + very good VBA skills + some solid C++ skills, with no work experience though

- data mining / algo / machine learning : long time participant in algo competitions(TopCoder to be more precise), as well as their data mining contests

- very good numerical skills



And here comes the long story. 3 years ago, right after school, I took my job (first for all desks, flow and prop, then very quickly got dedicated to HF desk), with quite a clear goal - do such a great job on IT so people notice it on business side and give me a possibility to join their desk. This didn't happen. Almost, but not. Somewhere down the road i got too involved in the IT side of things (had to took team leadership for some months, with all the management stuff involved - less contact with trading desks). Still, when announced that I'll leave, I got some contacts from business side (HF desk boss actually) who proposed me to move closer to trading desk and do some dev on their statistical tools, given the great job I did (he didn't wanted to take me as trader for his team though, arguing that they take only people with extremely strong academic background - which is true).

This was a very good opportunity for me, but ... it didn't worked out, for 2 reasons: my potential future IT boss for this job said I don't have dev experience (which is true. As previously said, I did quite a lot of dev, but mostly for algo competitions, not as my primary job) and second, I clearly said that my goal is to go into trading (without rushing though - if I needed to stay 3-5 years as dev, no problem, as long as it's clear where I want to go).



So, my initial plan didn't work out (was very close too, and I must say I'm quite proud of it -in France it's very difficult to get noticed with weak academic background) and it seems that I'll have to take another IT job. As I need to stay in Paris, it will most probably be something similar to what I do now, maybe not for an HF desk though, as they're not to many here.



The question is : What kind of personal projects / skills should I focus on now, so in a year or two I manage to get a position on the desk, or an IT position where it's possible to move to trading afterwards. Given I've already done a lot of work on C++ and data mining techniques, I'm focusing on this right now, and want to push it to 'expert' level and capitalize on it. I'm not sure it's the right path though - my fear is that it's too much IT. Maybe I should focus more on personal research ?



Any insights are appreciated.

[Mloody2000]

Hi again,



I would really appreciate if you give me some insights on what I should focus in coming months. The way I see it now is that if I focus on personal research / trading project, I may get some interviews (if I have some significant results), but not be able to succeed at them. On the other hand, if I focus on C++ / data mining (+ stats, machine learning and other useful techniques) I may be very well prepared for an interview, but not be able to get one.