A trading friend on twitter asked:
and then followed up with:
@MikeBellafiore
Of course we have traders who do not make it with our trading desk and transition into a new job. One thing very important to our firm is to “love them on the way in” and “love them on the way out”. When someone is not successful on our desk we seek to help them transition into a new job or phase of their life, with as much effort, as we exerted for them to trade with us.
There have been numerous traders, who have not made it with us, who have transitioned into excellent jobs at Hedge Funds, Institutional Firms, Tier 1 Sell Side opportunities, research, other trading firms, graduate school, asset management, teaching, financial operations, etc.
Often we hear back from these traders that what they learned with us helped them significantly in their new job.
I have written about the failure rate of a proprietary trader here. It is the highest read post I have ever written. I hope it speaks to how we share what it is really like to be a professional proprietary trader.
I have said and written often that we do not have all the answers. We are one firm, focusing on short-term active trading, in one moment in time, working like heck to continue having years of outperformance like 2017. As I write, it is Saturday. I am in the office over a holiday weekend. I will be in Monday as well. And when I finish this post, I am going to spend a few hours thinking about how our guys can make more and offer them feedback. And the things we need to be doing as firm to offer our guys more opportunities to make more.
Yes! we are performing. But we need to keep performing or else someone else is gonna come and take my spot.
This is a performance sport. The mindset of those working to becoming a CPT (Consistently Profitable Trader) ought to be aligned with those trying to become a pro athlete, professional musician, small business owner, actor, model, writer, filmmaker, and crafts like these. There is no shame in failing. In fact, I am not even sure failure is the best way to describe not making it. More like, the experience of trying to do something really hard that is important to you.
My experience has been challenging yourself to do something hard that is important to you are experiences worthy of pursuit.
Trading is hard. It is not impossible. We share our success stories from the firm so that the trading community can see those who thrive and how. Yes! there are 7-figure traders walking our halls in NYC and Austin and other trading firms. And they are doing so as discretionary traders, hybrid traders, automated traders, and quantitative traders.
In preparing a presentation for a speaking event, I thought it would be fun to create a template for the 7-figure trader. It might offer you a guideline of what it takes to be an elite trader:
I spoke in more detail about this in my podcast with Chat with Traders here. Might be worth a listen over the long holiday weekend.
Also, we produced a short video on this idea here.
Elite traders come in all shapes and sizes, personalities, and intellectual fire power. But, I like the template above for those most interested in improving their chances of success.
*no relevant positions