Stock Broker and forex

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Does anyone here trade stocks? I think that would make an interesting career. Pity my degree isn't in economics.

Interested to hear more about the industry.

Hale Bopp, if you are thinking about pursuing a career in finance, you should first read the book "Liar's Poker", by Michael Lewis. Two other books about the financial industry are "Fiasco: The Inside Story of a Wall Street Trader", by Frank Partnoy (1999; it looks like this book was re-issued in 2009 with a different subtitle), and "Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives", by Satyajit Das.

My impression of the financial industry is that it is the NT corporate world on steroids. Nevertheless, I have heard of people on the autism spectrum working in the field. Perhaps the best known example is Michael Burry. Michael Lewis wrote a piece about him a couple of years ago:
"Betting on the Blind Side"
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/feat ... rpt-201004
Also see this related piece from the television show, 60 Minutes,
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/ ... bsCarousel

I will second the rec for "Liars' Poker". One caveat: Liars' Poker concerns Lewis' life as a fixed income (i.e. bonds) trader as opposed to an equity (i.e. stocks) trader. Before the 1980s, it was commonly thought that bonds were a safe investment and stocks a risky one. The Treasury interest rate soared over 10% in the late 70s/early 80s, though, which ended up having the result that bonds ended up not only being riskier than expected, but ended up a lot more mathematically-intensive than equity.

In particular, you will learn about the trading of mortgage bonds, which is probably one of the most important developments in fixed-income finance. Mortgages are interesting from a mathematical perspective because if you take out a mortgage, you have a "call" option (a right, but not an obligation) to pay back the remainder of your mortgage at its "face" value (i.e. if you have $100k left in principal to pay, you pay back $100k). This is exercised due to moving or refinancing at a lower rate. In the 1980s there was a ton of research done into both the mathematics of modelling this prepayment as well as the (irrational) psychology of prepayments. It's fascinating stuff and the analytic nature of it is quite appealing.

Forex is a lot like fixed-income. Very mathematical, very analytical.

I've heard that the sheer amount of social interaction if you go work in the "front office" for one of the "bulge bracket" type investment banks is pretty immense. I would imagine a "back office" job would be more AS-friendly. My understanding is the back office deals with stuff more like risk management -- i.e. hedging (hedging is kind of like performing an "opposite" trade to get rid of one or many risk factors you might not want), scenario analysis (what happens if interest rates go up, etc?), model validations, etc... My understanding is pretty much you need a technical degree -- math, physics, engineering, etc... to do this nowadays. We work with risk management/back-office type people where I work and you definitely need some mathematical maturity to deal with some of the basic risk-management concepts.

The short answer hale bopp is you can do it without question, at least that's my opinion. Your natural aspieness gives you a large natural edge over neurotypicals who stay focused on obtaining there masters degree in brown nosing and passing the blame onto others.

It will take years of obsessive focus. Spreadsheets are required.
You can join this site for free,
http://www.svog.org/
And check out the knowledge archives. Its a place to start.

I took a class on it and think actually hedging and those kinds of strtategies are more fun then speculating. Back office is something I would be more interested in.

The average investor is commonly faces with choices like these examples:

http://www.worldfinancialgroup.com/ WFG and many other like them.
It consist of MLM hard sales, emotional manipulation, relational aggression and of coarse plenty of lying. A near cult like experience. Really you could consider this more or less a legal scam. Real returns: Small to break even or a net loss after all the fees and hidden expenses.

They have company 401Ks which few people actually understand but are far far better than things like WFG

There is the self directed investing, they certainly can do ok but it takes time.

And you have the kind of stuff I showed which is getting into the hedge fund category. Few can do it well, real returns are much higher. The average investor will rarely if ever run across this.

If you can actually consistently bring in the money you have a job, you can invest other peoples money. Really the money will find you in this era of financial repression as Bill Gross says. You can do a you-tube search on "Karen the super trader'. I think the short version of her business is she does naked strangles on cash settled indexes. Obviously going naked has some issues.

Just short strangles alone, its naked by definition of coarse. It is what I heard through the grapevine that shes selling strangles without any long options.

You can check out the movie Floored for more stuff about trading.

i'm researching forex stratgies, but i want to warn you stocks markets is full of sharks. no winners without losers, don't go unless you know your s**t. i'm trying to find a stratgey at the moment. i want to warn you about ea stratgies they give you. those programs are designed so you lose and the distributor of that program making opposite bets to you so they win. i only learn the rules of the game, i don't have someone teaching me how to play the game because i suspect they will opposite bet me.