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Since I have been on other side, I can explain which are the points I would have look to.
As former proprietary trading firm manager, I would say that it's not difficult to get hired if you show to be as much profitable to earn your salary. It's all about risk management, I would never make someone start trading dax with 20 contracts if he shows he never did. but I would make him start with the amount needed to pay his paycheck.
But what I would ask myself is the return over the long term if he is profitable and if it is worth the investment.
A proprietary trading firm attracts traders not because pays a salary but because offer the chance to trade some markets at conditions you would not find as retail and off course risk free. Usually a trader earn as much as 40/50% of the profits between fixed + bonus for doing that.
But the question I would ask myself before hiring a future discretionary trader is: after I have invested on him and he is profitable at a very good level and I payed him large bonuses, what prevent him to do that at home with the same professional infrastructure I can offer him? With future infact the costs to build at home a professional infrastructure are very low compared to any other market and once you are sure you can do a minum P/L you better do your own.
Borrow: Generally people in your position enter some kind of trading arrangement with a prop group - mostly in Chicago near the CBOT building. Depending on the provisions, this often ends up being some tightly restricted form of …
For TS, it's nice that you're in Czech Republic, as the entrepreneurial and trading environment there is ripe. There are some wonderful prop shops springing up in apartment buildings. There's a very well-respected one that is pretty much on a single floor of an apartment complex, behind separate, unnamed doors. Pretty cool. I don't know answers specific to someone based in Czech Republic, so I will say a few general things that apply to those in the U.S.:
From your post alone, I have to guess that you still have a long way to go. You have to know that people invest in you based on your pedigree, which has practically nothing to do with whatever trading strategy you have developed.
- How do I know that you're not making personal transactions against trades that you've placed on my account?
- When you reconcile your trade reports for trades in another currency, how do you decide whether to dispute the FX rate with the broker?
- Who do I talk to to get my money back if you are hospitalized?
- What do you do for risk management?
- Are you licensed to manage my money?
I appear to have a very negative outlook when I ask these rhetorical questions, but the point I'm getting across is not that raising money is difficult. (In fact, I think these questions are easier to answer compared to fixing a broken pipe, or to figuring out how much taxes you have to pay each year, or to solving a 3 pulley physics textbook problem.) What I'm saying is that raising money is achievable, but make sure you are doing it the right way i.e. targeting these types of issues.
For starters, definitely figure out the legal implications of raising money before you ask on a forum. It doesn't hurt to get a job in this field first, you get to learn things on other people's money, that's better than learning things on money that you had to raise through your own sweat and tears. Wish I had done more of that sometimes.
Thank you all for your comments and recommendations. It really broaden my horizons regarding prop trading, investor's requirements, etc. I really appreciate all your effort.
I consider to start new trading journal next week (trading FDAX, CL, E-minis).
I think there isn't a standard definition and I can only talk about my experience. First of all the technical infrastructure, nothing is standard but everything is customized on client needs and you have a dedicated team of IT that work on your projects at the higher level.
Broker connection is totally different, you can connect directly to a broker anywhere in the world, let's say tomorrow you want to trade Thailand market, then you can negotiate the connection and fees with a local broker and connect to him through the same IT infrastructure you use for other markets.
Fees are totally different from what retail pays, I can say 10/20 times less in most case and most markets.
You don't need to deposit margin to a broker when you work as professional, so you settle all the transactions through your custodian bank on a daily basis at value date.
You can count on a very dynamic borrowing department, so if you need to go short on a market where there is a naked short ban, you can do it as long you have a borrowing in place somewhere, but you have no filters on your platform so you are responsable for what you do on the market.
This is all what come to mind at the moment, anyway the point is that you don't need all this with futures. The retail tools you can have on futures are more then enough to work professionally on your own, if your volumes are high enough and you need something more, you maybe can lease a seat on the exchange or lease a service at one of the professional brokers that serves also institutionals( to say one Marex )
This is one of the strategies I am working on actually; it is a work in progress using 1 or 2 FDAX contracts, 1 point slippage and 5€ commission per lot per share on a time frame close to 10 years of EUREX real data.