King Yao's thoughts on Poker/Trading skill overlap

As a daytrader, you don't need a degree. I think being a good poker player will help you more than a B.A. or B.S. from a top institution. That said, college courses will definitely help you. Take some classes in statistics and programming and psychology. Potential profits, while probably the last thing you should think of, have no cap. I have seen daily P&L averages of $500 - $5000.


Depending on what your strategy and product is, daytrading varies. For example, you have some intraday swing traders who look to go for the relatively larger intraday moves but still close out all positions by end of day. These guys are probably adjusting now though as intraday volatility is sucky, arguably partly due to the rise in program trading(basically mean reversion stuff that cuts short any move).
You have scalpers. Each has his/her own time frame. Some scalpers literally go for 1 or 2 ticks(in futures) or for a few pennies(in stocks) or a few pips(currencies) on huge size or try to play the (bid/ask) spread making game effectively acting like a mm. They do this over and over however typically they are most active during the first and last regular trading hour. I'd avoid this though, black boxes dominate this area. Other scalpers hold longer, tend to use 5 minute charts as their main screen. This is probably the best place for you to be as a daytrader now. I prefer technicals over fundamentals, particularly as I trade index futs.

At the end of the day, this game is mostly mental and nothing else.

I don't think a recruiter will be impressed by putting something like this on your resume, but I don't think it could hurt either. Most recruiters don't pay attention to these things, they screen you based on pre-set criteria like school name, major, GPA, impressive extracurriculars(i.e. played for univ football team), work experience. The poker thing might help you in an actual interview with a trader when he starts asking you about taking risks etc. I believe this helped me when I landed a job at a hedge fund(not there anymore).

As an aside, I think I listed "poker" as one of my hobbies toward the end of my resume. Maybe I even mentioned it in my cover letter for some trading jobs. Consequently, I had heard the Susq guys were pretty big on poker, and I was offered an interview there but never took it. Don't know if they cared about the poker thing or not.

[ccwhoelse?]

A friend of mine finished 5th in one of the WSOP NL hold'em events.

He put it on his resume and applied to Merrill Lynch. He got called for the interview and his interviewer told him it was the only reason he got called.

They interviewed him and gave him a bunch of quant tests and now he is trading equities.

[DeezNuts]

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I work for Susq. Everything he says there is accurate.

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Have you worked at Susq. for a long time? I interned on the options floor in SF during college. Do you know Rob Ring and the boys over there?

DN

[Paluka]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I work for Susq. Everything he says there is accurate.

[/ QUOTE ]

Have you worked at Susq. for a long time? I interned on the options floor in SF during college. Do you know Rob Ring and the boys over there?

DN

[/ QUOTE ]

I have never met Rob Ring, but his brother Howard just passed away this weekend. Very depressing for such a young guy to go.