From the article: "And if you are careful enough to save money (for example living at home saves about 3K a month when all is said and done) and not increase your expenses too much (no need to get a Porsche when a BMW or VW suffices), it’s not hard to save 200K by the time you turn 24."
Uhh, sure? 200K at 24, in savings?
So that's about 250K pre-tax. Say you graduate high school at 18, find a magical job that gives a high school grad $42,000 a year, and spend /not one cent/ for six years, maybe... (or extrapolate outwards).
Or maybe you go to college. Graduate, let's say, age 21... In this economy, how many college graduates walk out of school into an $85,000/year job and no living expenses...
Never underestimate the value of a silver spoon in your mouth... and never underestimate the power of denial about just how silver your spoon is.
Due to family financial pressures, I had to graduate early. Fortunately I was taking enough credits to graduate a year early.
I really didnt want to discuss numbers, but I realize that the comment seems a bit misguided if not put in perspective. I started out with salary 250K (not including signing and year-end bonus), but most of my salary excess went to helping out my parents, so I really couldnt save much. Most of the savings came from saving bonus checks and not increasing spending when I was promoted.
My remark about the car specifically was to point to the fact that almost all of my coworkers were fortunate enough not to have that type of family pressure, so they could afford to get nicer cars (my BMW is a 40K 3-series, for which I could take a lot of deductions because I was running a startup at the time, compared to some of my subordinates driving 160K porsches). It's easy to say that you won't scale up your expenses when your income rises, but its hard to do so when your coworkers and social network are scaling up much faster than you.
And I can appreciate the response... the information you're providing is absolutely interesting... perspective is different, nothing more... Is hard to discuss such things without some numbers... keep writing. :)
If it is not too personal, why did you stop? Also, do you prefer comments here or on your blog? To answer your last question in the blog: yes please keep going!
Oh no the fund is still running. After building a ton of python and C programs to automate basic tasks, thanks to the magic of cron, I stopped doing a lot of the day-to-day work. And now I have some time on my hands :)
There was another discussion in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2828538 and I got the impression that people were interested in HFT, if not necessarily supporting it. Furthermore, I find that many people in the industry are surprisingly tight-lipped over the most mundane things (god forbid someone finds out about struct.unpack or RDTSC). My motives are fairly straightforward:
1) discuss some of my experiences for those who are interested in seeing how to bootstrap a trading operation;
2) convince people that finance startups exist and have interesting challenges; and
3) excite some people to the extent that they would like to work with me.
I'm honestly not excited by most of the traditional candidates from finance recruiters, mostly because the market is flooded with excel-happy windonauts that couldn't even do basic excel tasks (like calculating a pnl given a CSV -- I would use awk, but that's not a traditional windows thing) and "linux" developers who don't know how to use grep or perl/python.
Also, the last time some tried a retrospective [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2162346], I got the impression that he was looking for a job. And given that the blog was taken down, I'm guessing he found one :P
As far as comments are concerned, at least I get an email when a comment is made at the blog. I dont get an email here, and see an item like this if I happen to stumble upon the post.
Presumably, the kind of person who would start their own HFT company is earning more than 85K/year out of college. Close to double that if they're a trader at a bank, potentially more if they're at a smaller firm and do well.
Still, 200K after two years of work is a tall order after taxes and living expenses. But given four or five years, it's not that surprising.
> In this economy, how many college graduates walk out of school into an $85,000/year job and no living expenses...
Probably the same people actually able to set up a HFT shop. Let's face it, this isn't for everyone. I don't think we should be crucifying the author on this particular point, it seems like there is a lot of interesting information to be had here.
FTA: "Many successful people are persuaded not to try. For most people, a steady $500K/yr is enough to keep them happy, especially if they are protected from the risks of the business."
I'm pretty sure he's starting out making $500k (as a quant, I guess), not $42k. Other sections of the article imply that he was working at in finance and then decided to go out on his own.
Uhh, sure? 200K at 24, in savings?
So that's about 250K pre-tax. Say you graduate high school at 18, find a magical job that gives a high school grad $42,000 a year, and spend /not one cent/ for six years, maybe... (or extrapolate outwards).
Or maybe you go to college. Graduate, let's say, age 21... In this economy, how many college graduates walk out of school into an $85,000/year job and no living expenses...
Never underestimate the value of a silver spoon in your mouth... and never underestimate the power of denial about just how silver your spoon is.