Rhody Trader

I received a trading career email over the weekend.

Hi John,

I have recently began reading your book and this posed questions within myself. What makes a trader truly successful? Reading charts? partly so. Economics? I believe so. But more importantly the knowledge required to interpret the raw data &/or mews on a macro & microeconomics level.

Without this skill would be akin to a pilot flying without instruments? So I began looking for companies requirements of employing traders. They all seem to require a minimum of Bachelor in Business or Finance at university level.

My question is. To become part of the successful few would it be advisable to complete a Bachelor of Business or Finance?

Regards,

Darren D.

PS This book of yours has started me on a path.

I don’t claim to know how the programs of every university are structured, but as far as I understand it, most of them don’t specifically differentiate between a Business degree and a Finance degree. The latter is merely a subset concentration of the former. For example, I have a BSBA – a BS in Business Administration. My major (we still called them that back then) was Finance. I also have an MBA with a concentration in Finance. Again, Business is the degree, Finance is the concentration. So basically a Finance degree is the same thing as a Business degree (though not necessarily the other way around).

Of course traders don’t just have business degrees. Some of them have economics as not all universities offer business programs. Still others find their way into trading jobs from entirely different disciplines. It is probably that much easier going for a job in the markets coming out of a Finance/Economics program than something like English, though, for the simple reason that the programs in question are generally more geered to placing students within their field.

Having said all that, it could very well be what you do outside of your college classes which help you get your foot into the trading door. In my case, my understanding of technical analysis and membership in the Market Technicians Association went a long, long way toward landing me my first job out of college.

Be aware, however, that institutional trading is very different from individual trading. Recruiters probably are going to be less interested in your trading performance (unless you’re going to work in a position where you will specifically be running money yourself) than in your overall knowledge of the markets. This is even more the case with the first line of corporate recruiters who are HR people, not traders themselves.

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