I found out quite quickly during my studies that continuing the natural path of becoming a PhD was not for me. I really liked the content, as both physics and mathematics basically presented complicated puzzles that I wanted to solve, but there were a couple of specific things about a PhD which really irked me. Spending four years -a long time!- on a single topic, mostly by yourself, with relatively little reward for doing great as opposed to scraping by; it had a lot of things that I really did not want in a job. Instead, I flipped them around: what jobs are out there that are fast-paced, very diverse, team-based, where there is a clear feedback loop and you can get a lot of responsibility fast if you do very well? With these job traits to look for, I landed on two possible career paths: strategy consulting, and trading. I sent out some messages to members of my study association who were working in those fields, and after a lot of chats with them I was convinced I should at least try my hand at getting into trading. Now I am coming up to four years as a trader at Flow Traders and I'm still very happy being here.

I think trading is a lot of fun, and that fun comes from the freedom you get to try and optimise your trading/trading system, and the responsibility that comes with it. Every day can be completely different, especially with all the geopolitical tensions going on, which means you have to be able to adjust on the fly based on whatever information is shot your way. On a given day, I might come to the office with my mind set on finishing automating a specific process or investigating how a new algorithm is doing, and halfway through the day those plans are completely thrown out of the window, and instead the entire floor is watching live news coverage and coming up with possible market implications together. I know that for some, this unpredictability doesn't sound appealing, and that is understandable. If you are anything like me, though, these moments will be some of the most fun and exciting times you're going to encounter at any job throughout your career.  

There are a couple of traits that I think really help out if you want to start a career in trading. You'll learn whatever financial knowledge you need in the first couple of months in the graduate program, which was great as I had little idea about anything finance when I started out. What does matter, however, is 1) whether or not you can be really honest about what you know and don't know, and 2) how you handle (instant) feedback. For the first one: everyone in the market is basically playing a massive incomplete information game, and to get the best results you have to be really good communicating your view and confidence to your team. If I explain to you my reasoning for doing a particular trade, and you do not understand it, there is no value in you just nodding along with me. I might be wrong and I am counting on you to 'check my work'. On the other side, being overly confident is a surefire way of losing money, which makes balancing this quite an important and necessary skill. A quick note on the second point I mentioned: almost any decision you make as a trader gives you near-instant feedback, i.e. you making or losing money. This can be both very rewarding and very rough, and being able to quickly learn from your mistakes without feeling too down about it is really a necessary skill in trading.