Work has been going fine, a load of new assistant traders and interns have just started, there's 5 new assistant traders and 3 new interns so it's great having people around the same experience level to talk to. We started the mock training which is pretty tough, basically we're given a stock price and fair prices in a couple of options and have to make call and put markets in all the strikes around the stock price, then the guys teaching the class will act as brokers and put in bids and offers and it's up to us to trade with them and try to make money by arbitrage, hedging our position or just taking positions based on order flow.
The game is relatively simple, once you understand the relationships between the various options the game breaks down to simple algebra and arithmetic. The problem is that you're competing with 5+ other people who are trying to do exactly the same thing and it comes down to who can add and subtract the fastest, something that nobody's really done since they were like 8 years old. Then there's the problem of making sure you're doing the trades in the right direction and not costing yourself money, as well as getting all the terminology right. It should be a lot of fun once everybody's reasonably advanced, at the moment we're mostly still getting used to the relationships and all the mechanics.
Besides that I've mostly been doing coding, which I'm getting pretty good at now. Knowing lots of different things I can do makes it more enjoyable.
I'm going to the head office in Philadelphia with the other Assistant Traders for two weeks tomorrow for a training course. I've been hearing loads of great stuff about it so it should be a lot of fun. We don't start until 8.30 so I'll get to have a bit of a lie in as well
. I'm not sure how much internet access I'll have while I'm there so don't feel insulted if it takes me a while to reply to comments/PMs/posts in the stats thread.
My graduation is on the Wednesday after I get back so I'm looking forward to that and seeing my college friends again.
