Stock Trader

They come in lots of flavors. Hundreds or thousands of retail traders, who come from backgrounds as hobbyist poker players to barristers, who actually listen to the ads on television, telling them how awesome they could be, how much money they could be making, all presented as the optimal best theoretical trades, as if they were the one guy in the football stadium who flipped heads 37 times in a row. The retail investors pony up hundreds or thousands of dollars to buy the software snake oil being sold on TV guaranteed* to make them millionaires.

*guarantee not guaranteed.

Then we have the professionals. The people with two PhDs. One from MIT in physics. The other from Stanford. They then trained at Goldman for 5 years under the BSDs who work there. The best structured data feeds, the best access to the best quant analysis, the best camaraderie and sets of angles on highly opaque end points. They don’t buy 20,000 shares of KO at 10:32 and sell them at 2:28, usually. Instead, they short PEP with euros and buy calls on KO way out-of-the-money with cheap margin rates in British pounds. If they do this on volume of 18 million, they create for themselves a riskless arbitrage spread that locks them in with $863,134 in profits. Not bad work for the day.

So…retail stock traders? You guys really want to compete with all this? Yeah, we thought not.