HAM Finance
I've come to realize a disturbing truth: I'm a HAM quant
Like there is amateur radio, I think there is amateur finance.
In fact I have a long history in HAM radio, my interest for electronics and particularly radio started in gymnasium, around 5'th grade.
I was fascinated by the radio and perfectly understood the QUALITATIVE principle of operation of an electrical oscillator, the LC series circuit. The capacitor stores energy as electic field, discharges on the inductor which stores energy as magnetic field, then discharges back on the capacitor, all while losing some of it due to friction on the residual resistance of the circuit, unless an active element is introduced.
There were electronic kits to buy and assemble radios from, or ready-made formulas to customize parameters such as oscillating frequency.
But I wanted to understand and be ready to design / change stuff at will, not just to solder stuff or monkey-copy formulas. And understanding was a painfully slow process, took roughly 10 years.
Within gymnasium I got the Ohm's law (Kirchhoff's voltage law) and could work some particular configurations of Kirchhoff's current law but it was obvious to me that I'm missing the mathematical apparatus (systems of equations) to help me work with arbitrary networks. Took until 11'th class in high school to learn about systems of equations, which clarified things for circuits containing only "static" components - resistors and sources, but it didn't shed any mistery on the "dynamic" ones: capacitors and inductors. It killed me that I didn't have a clue why the oscillating frequency is 1 / (2*PI*sqrt(LC)). Only in the 2'nd year of electical engineering-based university I finally understood, and it's all differential equations.
So it fucking took 10 years to get from QUALITATIVE to a QUANTITATIVE grasp of things, but I got to it. I freely designed and built my oscillators and they worked as predicted!
Of course I was no match for the professional telecom industry, but I knew how things worked and that oscillator design at the level of arbitrary networks was something very few of even my enginner colleagues could do.
And now, the same thing with finance. I'm working since 10 years as a developer moving shit around (messaging), and occasionally monkey-copying and soldering some ready-made formula into the application.
All while struggling to actually UNDERSTAND, but having noone to talk to or care about.
And I understood. I built my "electrical oscillator", or options trading engine in my case. I can't compete with the professional telecom industry but at least I'm not losing money, and actually am making a little bit.
It's hard because consistent margins for retail traders like me happen very rarely and if I'd enter into lower probability trades, I'd lose my capital.
And I'm caught into the worst world possible, the world of HAM finance. I'm too inquisitive and knowledgeable of the fundamentals to be happy with being just a developer and at the same time I'm too chaotically self-taught and lacking any form of reputable credentials (not even my employer wants to hand me the official title of quant because in their saying a quant is nothing but a glorified developer and they don't need that). So in all my applications to a quant position I've never ever gotten an interview.
But I'm getting plenty of interviews as a plain developer in the finance industry, and I think I'll take one. At least it's in London, as opposed to Eastern Europe, where I'm currently located.
Right now I'm fairly pissed on the local developer material and reckoned that just like you can't reason about software development with pig farmers, the same you can't talk quant finance with local software developers.
I hope London is different, or at least I'll meet some real quants.