NYC Proprietary Trading Firms (2024)

8y

Best Response

The gist of it is, some "firms'" business model is built around collecting fees from you and shifting their risk onto you. They'll charge for their "education", collecting fees on your transactions and they push you to trade more... Others have you put up your money and give you leverage with theirs, but you take the losses and they take a huge cut of the upside if you have any. Nasty places.

I've discussed this before, though it was to some prospective college kids looking to forgo school in order to trade. Imagine 5-10 years down the road if you are only making OK money, not making money or even losing money. It gets to be a bleak picture pretty fast. As I stated above, the game changes when your sole income depends on your results.

Not to mention, if you're already consistently profitable, there is no reason you should change what you're doing. Take the S&P 500 emini for instance, 1pt on one contract is $50. If you can average 5-10pts per contract per week, you're doing very well; on 5 contracts that's $1,250-2,500 per week, but the product is so liquid you could easily (in time) scale up to 50 or even 120 contracts. Obviously, I'm not suggesting you just put on a huge position I'm just pointing out that so long as you're consistent you can build up to a point where it's worth your while and you don't have to give up your current salary or job security to do it.

As far as interest goes, trading is mundane, repetitious, tedious and boring as hell. If you don't think so, you haven't been trading long enough yet. Don't take this the wrong way, but I wonder why people who have made millions in other endeavors feel the need to give it away trying to learn how to trade. I call it being overcapitalized. More money than knowledge. Food for thought.