Hello and welcome. I'm Patrick Curtis, your host and Chief Monkey, and this is the Wall Street Oasis podcast. Join me as I talk to some of the community's most successful and inspirational members to gain valuable insight into different career paths and life in general.

Let's get to it.

In this episode, member Nightshade shares his winding road to working at one of the top

proprietary trading shops in the world. We cover how he continually took on a lot of risk and

bet on himself, what he did when he was unemployed for months

at a time, more than once in the first few years out of school, and how he prepared for the tricky

brain teasers and mental math that can rattle joining the Wall Street Oasis podcast.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

So it'd be great if you could just walk the listeners through your background.

Yeah, yeah.

So my current role right now is, I guess you can give it a few names.

Trader, portfolio manager, market maker, of options.

So we're trading the implied volatility of options on fixed income products.

I know on the website you guys like to distinguish whether it's a

buy side or sell side role. So technically this would be a buy side role. And so the

function of my job and my business is to provide liquidity on exchange traded products.

And again, we're in the fixed income portion of the of the merch. So yeah. Cool cool and so did you go to school for this

how did you kind of how did you do an undergrad and then how did that kind of proceed to you getting

this job yeah so you know I went to I went to a U I University of Illinois, studied economics and got a minor in informatics, which is kind of like, I don't know, computer science-ish.

And I, you know, I had buddies in college that, you know, they had always been talking about finance and trading and all that.

But to be honest, you know, I didn't really know too much about financial markets. I just knew that, you know, coming out of college, I wanted, you know, I wanted to create the best life for myself. And I knew that finance and trading was something that can definitely, you know, you can make a little bit money quicker than everybody else. So I kind of just, I stuck to the idea of becoming a trader. And was kind of it. So it was kind of it was kind of it was kind of it. You feel like, or like an upperclassman or something? Or were you trading your own accounts and stuff? Yeah, friends they grew up with like in high school and college, you know, their parents were more in like the finance world. Now that's kind of like the kid on the side, you know, listening quietly. So, you know, I took their passions and kind of made it my own. Got it. Was your family not in the finance space at all? Like your parents? No, not really. My mom's a teacher. My dad works for an engineering firm. Got it. I really had no connection in besides just like my friends talking about it. Okay, so you get to you get to college, you're kind of like, you know you kind of want to go into finance right from the get-go, right? You're just not too sure about what specifically, or you're thinking trading side? Yeah, I mean, even throughout college, I hadn't, you know, econ major, that's kind of, you know,

it's broad.

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