#106 - Do You Have To Work In Finance To Trade Options Or Stocks For A Living?
Hey everyone, Kirk here again and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we are going to answer a big question that I get often which is – “Do you have to work in finance to trade options or stocks for a living?” The simple answer to this is absolutely, emphatically 110% no. You don't have to work in finance. You don’t have to have a finance background by any stretch to learn how to trade options successfully or learn how to trade stocks. In fact, to just even prove this point a little bit further, when I first got hired to work in New York for Deutsche Bank in their Mergers and Acquisitions Department, we were all brought in… Everyone who was hired basically for Deutsche Bank was brought into a huge room because there’s a lot of hires in New York at that time and everyone was brought into a huge room and they basically had us put our hands up based on degrees. They said, “Hey. How many people are finance degrees?” I do have a finance degree, so I put my hand up and I said, “I have a finance degree.” And then they said, “How many people have a history degree?” Some hands went up. “How many people have a psychology?” Hands went up. “And English and Phys Ed and Engineering?” I learned in that exact moment and what they even reinforced us that I’ll say here in a second. But what I learned in that exact moment is that nobody actually really cared when it came to that type of level of I guess, corporate finance, investing management, MaA type stuff. Nobody really cared what your background was, what you actually studied because they re-taught it the way that they wanted us to learn when we got there. When I got to New York and started working for Deutsche Bank… I think you'll find this wherever you work. It doesn't matter wherever you work. You have an onboarding process, you have an education process that you go through and ultimately, companies will tell you how they want things run. That’s what happened when I worked in New York, is they basically said, “Okay, look. The next three weeks of your life, you’re going to be back in the classroom and you’re going to relearn everything that you learned before, but you’re going to learn it the way we want it to be done.” That’s literally what it was. We were all back on the same level playing field and then from there, it was how many people can take what they learn in their education, whether it was engineering or finance or physics or whatever it was and apply it to the current job better, like who could do the best at taking their background and their current experience in training and apply it best. Those are the people who ultimately would rise to the top. In our little group that we were in for mergers and acquisitions, we had two people in finance, myself and one other guy. We had a girl who is in history, so had absolutely… I’m telling you, absolutely, emphatically no finance background whatsoever. She just ended up being very good at historical analysis and analytics ultimately which was her strong suite, but she had a background in history and found herself in the middle of corporate finance in Wall Street. And then we had a guy who had a degree in physics and I think one other person actually had a double degree, one in Spanish as a second language and then I think it was engineering. I mean, look, ultimately, very similar, finance, engineering, physics, a lot of math, but history? Come on. You don’t need to work in finance to be able to trade options successfully. Now more than ever… I mentioned this I think back on Show 100 or somewhere around Christmas last year. Now more than ever, the playing field is so level in the options trading space that you can literally get the same information that somebody can on Wall Street that wasn't available 10 years ago. The playing field is so level, the fees are coming down, the networks are so fast, the models and systems are becoming so much more mature that it is the person who just literally starts taking action every single day and starts working the numbers and working the system that find success. It’s really nothing more than that. Don't have any preconceived notions that you have to work in finance or you have to be strong in math. Look. Does that stuff help? Absolutely! That absolutely helps. There’s no doubt about it. But it is not a surefire requirement to be successful trading in options. I think that that helps out. Maybe if you have that question or had that question before, maybe today’s answer gives a little bit more clarity on it. As always, hopefully you guys enjoy these. If you have any comments or questions, let me know. If you do not work in finance and you do trade options and you’ve been doing really good at it, let me know. Shoot me an email. Shoot us a message on Twitter or Facebook. That’s probably the best way to get a hold of us. Just help other people understand that you don’t have to be in finance to be successful doing this. I think there’s a lot of people out there who even in our community at Option Alpha don’t work in finance and oftentimes find very, very good success trading options for a living and they still work their regular day jobs. As always, hopefully you guys enjoy these and until next time, happy trading!
