College Graduates Should Think Twice Before Accepting a Job Here - Anonymous employee Consolidated Trading Employee Review

For the majority of people who would consider a job at this firm, their interests would better be served going elsewhere. There are very talented young traders who make a lot of money, but more who don't. For an incoming group of college graduates to the firm, probably 50% will still have a job by the end of the first year and 25% will by the end of the second year. This is by design and unfortunately is not unique to this firm. What is even more troubling is that exit opportunities are very weak, unlike a job in investment banking where it is common for analysts to go on to work for a private equity firm or hedge fund. Options market making is only becoming more driven by technology and algorithms, and firms like Citadel and Jump Trading are so far ahead of Consolidated that it would almost be an insult to Jump to call Consolidated a competitor. The idea that Consolidated would want to protect its "trade secrets" is laughable. There is nothing that Consolidated is doing that the top firms would find valuable. If you are young cannot code, it's unlikely you will have much of a future in this industry. Learn to code or do something else. Some of the traders are good coders, but this is completely due to their own background and education and has nothing to do with the (lack of) strategic vision in senior management. The day to day work is kind of like being in the military without the patriotism or solidarity among your unit. Almost everyone you will work with will be men. There is a culture of hazing and intimidation. Yelling and profanity are accepted as in nearly no other professional environment. The environment is very Darwinian, winner take all, dog eat dog. The nature of market making can be very adversarial like a war where whether one will survive the day in combat is uncertain. The firm is run like a military unit where the bosses give orders and the rest are expected to fall in line. Discipline is valued above all other traits and subservience is preferable to creativity and innovation. However, there are no Saving Private Ryan moments. If you are a casualty, nobody is coming back for you. You will be fired. You are not fighting for freedom or independence; you are trying to make money. The day to day work can get very repetitive and monotonous. The job of the clerk at the beginning is like one of a secretary, mostly manual checks of positions and reconciling with brokers and counterparties. It is far more important not to make mistakes than it is to contribute anything positive. Almost all of this can be done by a computer, but the firm has not invested the technology resources to make it happen. Being a market maker is very different than being a "real" investor. The business is getting the implied volatility surface (often using an unsophisticated off-the-shelf algorithm), moving it by hand (other firms have software do this), buying options that are cheaper than fair value, and selling options that are more expensive than fair value. There used to be thousands of equity traders on the floor of the NYSE; now it's mostly a TV studio and the trades are executed by computers. The future of this business belongs to those who spend their time building smarter models and faster and more scalable technology, not those who spend their time clicking orders and writing text in a chat room. Many of the senior management started at a time when a truck driver could become a futures or options trader in the pit and their thinking hasn't progressed much. With increasing liquidity and competition, spreads will continue to tighten to even more razor thin levels, especially in big products like SPX. It would be in the interest of the firm to look into less liquid products like more obscure single name options where the spread is larger. There seems to be no interest in liquidity taking strategies or in trying to predict any kind of economic outcomes or asset price changes as one would do at a hedge fund. Bottom line for college students interviewing at this firm: If you can't code, do something other than trading. If you can code and want to get a job at a trading firm, go to a better trading firm. If you are interested in investing and not market making, go to a bank or a hedge fund. If you think it's acceptable to make less money than your friends at Goldman Sachs for less job security and far worse career options doing something miles from the cutting edge at a firm most people have never heard of while being subject to a disrespectful and threatening environment, take a job here. Granted there are a lot of successful and talented young traders here, but they would probably be successful anywhere.