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>Nothing. Trading is one of the most open, meritocratic and low barrier to entry fields out there. Just google how easy it is to get a Robin Hood or Interactive

>Nothing. Trading is one of the most open, meritocratic and low barrier to entry fields out there. Just google how easy it is to get a Robin Hood or Interactive Brokers account [1]. In terms of barrier to entry, it's far lower than something like building a SAAS app. That gave me a chuckle (though I suspect you're trying to bait me -- you seem to have a background in finance and would know this all very well). The one obvious barrier to entry is access to capital. It is a lot easier (or at least possible) to play with different strategies with more than less. Even a brilliant trader would have a hard time playing different strategies with, say, $10K. Or even $100K. They'd quickly hit a bad play or a down trade and lose beyond the capacity to absorb with a chance of bouncing back. Game over. But the capital is out there so that's not really the issue. And that capital is paying traders $20/mil per year. That is what I mean by competing...not competing on trading talent but competing for the jobs. Its not like hedge funds are scanning Robin Hood for diamond in the rough trading talent...if they did, it would be a mistake since they would be nearly guaranteed to find people who do very well up until they point they hire them then they crash back to earth through regression to the mean. >The only thing that prevents more people from doing it is the fact that predicting the future is hard. I doubt that is the reason. Predicting the future is hard for everyone, including top-flight traders, as has been shown year after year, study after study. What is easier, and a skill (though, granted, a challenging skill to master and one that is still, even after some level of mastery, subject to more luck than most people are comfortable with), is using all of the tools at one's disposal to win more than you lose. Or rely on luck. That works sometimes, too -- for a while. I'm just saying -- if there's a great amount of money being reaped year after year, decade after decade, the system surrounding that activity is probably worth a careful look.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
The one obvious barrier to entry is access to capital. It is a lot easier (or at least possible) to play with different strategies with more than less. Even a brilliant trader would have a hard time playing different strategies with, say, $10K. Or even $100K. They'd quickly hit a bad play or a down trade and lose beyond the capacity to absorb with a chance of bouncing back. Game over. This is completely backwards. Every strategy has a capacity and most of them have a very low capacity. I'm currently just a hobbyist trader. I've got a strategy or two, but I can't even put all of my (software engineer level) savings into it - additional marginal dollars will lose money. My current strategy never does more than pick off the top level of the order book - it can't, and if I try my additional dollars will lose money according to my simulations. A bigger strategy might need to not just buy from deeper in the order book, but actually make repeated purchases and face market impact. That's way harder. The book "Flash Boys" is all about how market makers try to give you and me a better price than big players trying to do this. The only strategy I run which has enough capacity for me to really put money in it is my "reason from first principles to figure out when everyone has gone insane" strategy. E.g., that's what made me a bunch of money from Brexit. But that's a pretty risky strategy involving only a few big bets/year. (Next one will be about $50-100k on "stop overreacting, Trump won't be that bad", conditional on him winning the election.) Trading a big book is vastly harder, not easier, than trading a small one. Its not like hedge funds are scanning Robin Hood for diamond in the rough trading talent...if they did, it would be a mistake since they would be nearly guaranteed to find people who do very well up until they point they hire them then they crash back to earth through regression to the mean. I'm confused. I'm arguing that top talent is uncommon and hard to find. Your tone suggests you are disagreeing with me, yet you just agreed. Can you clarify?
- clavalle 10y ago
  Let's take the example analog of poker. There are good poker players. They win more than they lose over relatively large time frames. That is not talent. That is skill. It is a skill that can be learned. A large part of the skill of poker is calculation. There are people who back into that skill by sheer volume of playing -- they develop an intuition based on facts repeated over and over more or less haphazardly. This important probabilistic intuition can be greatly expedited with some mathematical training. It is possible to learn this skill. It is also possible to learn some rudimentary information and game theory to help with those aspects of poker. All teachable skills. There are soft skills that are also teachable like controlling one's emotions when dealing with large amounts of money. If I wanted to go out and find a team of poker players to bankroll, I might go and find people who tend to win (longer time frame observation under similar high stakes conditions would be preferred) but I would add the additional filter of testing their skill in those areas. This is opposed to observing a handful of low stakes games and picking those that do best and running with that group. That would be a mistake. I might get some of the same people. But I would also sweep up people who merely got lucky. I'd also miss some people that got unlucky. Picking stock traders from their performance on their Robin Hood accounts would be a similar mistake. It is subtle, I know, but critical.

yummyfajitas 10y ago

The one obvious barrier to entry is access to capital. It is a lot easier (or at least possible) to play with different strategies with more than less. Even a brilliant trader would have a hard time playing different strategies with, say, $10K. Or even $100K. They'd quickly hit a bad play or a down trade and lose beyond the capacity to absorb with a chance of bouncing back. Game over. This is completely backwards. Every strategy has a capacity and most of them have a very low capacity. I'm currently just a hobbyist trader. I've got a strategy or two, but I can't even put all of my (software engineer level) savings into it - additional marginal dollars will lose money. My current strategy never does more than pick off the top level of the order book - it can't, and if I try my additional dollars will lose money according to my simulations. A bigger strategy might need to not just buy from deeper in the order book, but actually make repeated purchases and face market impact. That's way harder. The book "Flash Boys" is all about how market makers try to give you and me a better price than big players trying to do this. The only strategy I run which has enough capacity for me to really put money in it is my "reason from first principles to figure out when everyone has gone insane" strategy. E.g., that's what made me a bunch of money from Brexit. But that's a pretty risky strategy involving only a few big bets/year. (Next one will be about $50-100k on "stop overreacting, Trump won't be that bad", conditional on him winning the election.) Trading a big book is vastly harder, not easier, than trading a small one. Its not like hedge funds are scanning Robin Hood for diamond in the rough trading talent...if they did, it would be a mistake since they would be nearly guaranteed to find people who do very well up until they point they hire them then they crash back to earth through regression to the mean. I'm confused. I'm arguing that top talent is uncommon and hard to find. Your tone suggests you are disagreeing with me, yet you just agreed. Can you clarify?

clavalle 10y ago
Let's take the example analog of poker. There are good poker players. They win more than they lose over relatively large time frames. That is not talent. That is skill. It is a skill that can be learned. A large part of the skill of poker is calculation. There are people who back into that skill by sheer volume of playing -- they develop an intuition based on facts repeated over and over more or less haphazardly. This important probabilistic intuition can be greatly expedited with some mathematical training. It is possible to learn this skill. It is also possible to learn some rudimentary information and game theory to help with those aspects of poker. All teachable skills. There are soft skills that are also teachable like controlling one's emotions when dealing with large amounts of money. If I wanted to go out and find a team of poker players to bankroll, I might go and find people who tend to win (longer time frame observation under similar high stakes conditions would be preferred) but I would add the additional filter of testing their skill in those areas. This is opposed to observing a handful of low stakes games and picking those that do best and running with that group. That would be a mistake. I might get some of the same people. But I would also sweep up people who merely got lucky. I'd also miss some people that got unlucky. Picking stock traders from their performance on their Robin Hood accounts would be a similar mistake. It is subtle, I know, but critical.