Average pre-tax monthly salary in Romania: $1000. Taxes are about 40% so take home is about $600. 
Average pre-tax yearly salary for a software dev in Romania, according to PayScale: about $26000 / year. For a junior with 2-3 years of experience, to my knowledge, it's more like the sum I quoted ($36000). But those $36000 if I'd be paying them, would be saved from a pre-tax amount of $60000. And if I'd be paying a guy here *on salary* (there are other methods too), they'd be taxed again, so the take-home amount would be around $20000, the state would effectively engulf 2 / 3rds of the original amount.

But for the business I described here and at this stage, I've no use for a code monkey. And besides the few finance/capital market companies here who only employ, ahem, programmers, in 10 years of looking sporadically at local job boards, I've never, I repeat: NEVER saw a quant job. For all I know I may be the only quant in the country, certainly the only options-specialized quant, and that only by accident. The domain just doesn't exist here.

I like some parts of your idea. Especially the working together part. I believe there are easier ways to do this though, e.g. hire university students/graduates or any people with serious technical/analytical credentials who can spare some time (let's say 20 hours per week, but more is fine too) without getting employment status with fixed salary. Maybe to get experience/internship and obviously if the team makes money they get a cut of the profits and eventually can become partner. I can set this up with say, 35-50k upfront investment in a low-cost town such as Bucharest or even better Cluj maybe with relations to a backer with "unlimited" intraday capital with API to ~zero transactions costs. No options though. Obviously you will have to mentor the team members in the beginning as they are not experienced quants.

I've also been thinking on hiring students / recent graduates. One problem is that by my own, I'd only be having money to pay them for part time work. But the main challenge is finding people who are not doing this for the money in their hand now but for the end goal: money they're getting when and if they beat the market. The fact that in order to do that they also need significant competence / analytical credentials adds further strain to the already almost impossible challenge of finding them.

I live in Cluj (scoring for "even better", right? ). Currently do some teaching at the Babeș-Bolyai University as part of the math PhD I'm doing here and probably the most profitable result I could extract from this situation is recruiting one or a few students for quant research.

And yes, I could mentor them into what I know. But after putting more than 10 years of effort into this field, I don't really have an expiration date like startups / businesses do. I'll continue to invest time and work as long as it takes until I'm breaking through and become profitable. If I involve others, apart from chances of them being just the regular "fu** you, pay me" type, once I'm not paying them anymore or worse, competition pays them better, they're out. A lot worse since they're out with whatever competitive advantage I managed to build, pushing through ignorance, discouragement and plain hostility from the environment surrounding me.

That's why my idea of *working together* with someone already skilled and involved in this like myself.

Uuu... very interesting. What Great Schism?

It was the night of the Big Wind. But you are too young for that nonsense.It will be declassified in 2030.

mbunea, would you mind sending me a private message? I'd like to run something by you (but can't send you a message as I am a new user).

Sent.

Uuu... very interesting. What Great Schism?

It was the night of the Big Wind. But you are too young for that nonsense.It will be declassified in 2030.

You're not the first board who I witnessed getting divided, the schism seems like an inevitable asymptotic law of politics. Usually the same parishioners populate BOTH the resulting orthodox and the catholic boards. Not the high priests though (unless incognito), they can't stand each other

>> RE: my own title.

I started this thread when? About 6 months ago it seems. Good opportunity to figure out what changed in the meantime. One thing that still surprises me is how I still accumulate knowledge, although I'm tempted to rather call it "wisdom" at this point.

Like the observation that "technical skills are highly overrated". And inflationary. (Which gives another perspective to the "overrated" characteristic). And the reason they're inflationary is because for all their "difficulty", they're the easy stuff. And in this cutthroat competition if all you can throw is technical skill then you've already lost.