For anyone doing last-minute holiday shopping for the aspiring trader(s) on their list, some of the best books currently available on Amazon: The World for Sale Liar’s Poker The Man Who Solved the Market The Laws of Trading Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

Students attempting to get jobs at trading firms need to be aware of a couple of critical things: 1. You will almost certainly not be hired into a risk-taking position. You will start your career in some sort of support function, as an on-desk analyst, trader trainee, structurer, or fundamental analyst. 2. That job is effectively a self-directed training rotation for the job you actually want on the desk, and your primary goal is to learn as much as possible from within the information-rich environment of the trading company to make yourself a viable candidate for that role. 3. That evolution will be almost entirely self-directed. Some elite firms have recognized the value of internal trader development firms, but in most cases the trainee will have to figure out what they need to learn and accumulate the knowledge on their own. This will almost certainly involve a lot of proactive outreach to the trading desk. 4. The outreach also serves to let the members of the trading desk and its management know that the individual is interested in a trading job and proactively trying to evolve to meet the necessary standard. 5. The trader’s first job on the desk will not be to pursue some interest of theirs in the market, it will be to support another trader by expanding their capabilities or taking on lower value work. Understanding this, and showing the traders on the desk that you are capable of doing X to allow the desk to generate Y more revenue is the quickest path to a seat on the desk.

There is a lot of discussion at the moment about various types of trading firms one could potentially work at if a particular candidate cannot get a seat at an elite shop like Jane Street, Citadel, HRT, Tower, SIG, etc. In doing so, the trader is attempting to find a way to play in a game where the table stakes are custom silicon, Chess GM traders and data cleaned by MIT PhDs. They are effectively volunteering to be adversely selected against. I would suggest that anyone considering a career as a professional risk taker try to cast as wide a net as possible and also investigate emerging and non-traditional markets and products where the barriers to entry are lower and the established knowledge base is smaller. It gets back to table selection. Would you rather play against the tournament pros or the tourists trying to remember if a straight beats a flush?