End of Week 3

I haven't been able to blog this week as someone who moved out the flat cancelled BT, so I have had to reconnect but will hopefully have it soon.

The last week was spent mostly on the simulator and even though there were long periods of waiting for opportunities, it was pretty fun. It is really rewarding as a scalper when you take a tick out of the market although right now it feels like quite a challenge. I made the cut this week and will be back for the final week and at the end of next week they will decide if they will take me onto the their trading floor. Next week we will go live with real money, which will be exciting and hopefully I don't lose as much as I did on the simulator lol.

Training course: day 7

Wow, I just realised I forgot to blog yesterday, I was aiming to blog each day and it's proving hard. The course is really demanding and I had some problems with my new flat and personal matters too. Even though I am putting so much effort right now I am not sure it's good enough. I am doing well but not out performing the group. I really feel quite tired from everything and gonna get some sleep right now and will try post a more informative post tomorrow.

Training course: day 5

I am now into the 2nd week and getting closer to the first round of elimination. There are 3 rounds of eliminations, the first being at the end of this week and then 1 each week onwards. Looking at it now it does sound a bit crazy to put all my hopes on such a small chance, but the chance seems totally worth the risk. Firstly there is intense competition to get an interview and then it seems about 10% of the people seen are taken on for the training course. Then once on the trading course you have to survive three rounds of eliminations to get a place on their trading floor and be backed by them. Then those select few have a chance just less than 50% of being profitable, based on this companies performance. lol?

Then again this job really does pull together a lot of what I am good at and things I enjoy. To be honest if I don't succeed here I am going to keep trying it's just too perfect. I love the way people trade here and although it's very repetitive, it's also really amazing. I am trying to improve on what I suck at and it looks like the time spent practising my mental maths paid off as I improved my score quite substantially today. Also feel like I am understanding everything we are doing and just can improve on the speed and make sure I can remember all the facts, sometimes it's hard to remember everything in such a short space of time.

Training Course: Day 4

Yesterday was fun, we finished early and hit the pub and then met up with a friend for drinks afterwards and got back at 2.30am, what made for a long day after a heavy week. The atmosphere at this company is just amazing, I don't know how I could possibly go back to being a software developer, where no one has anything to talk about, you can't really get that excited about code... If this job works out for me, it's going to be pretty full on, but I can't see what else I would enjoy doing. It's going to be tough to get a place with them after training so I just have to go for it and hopefully hard work will pay off.

We set up our trading environments yesterday and watched the bond markets at the moment when it was announced that Greece was downgraded, which was pretty cool to watch. We generally spent the day being tested and improving our skills of quoting the market and different spreads and butterfly's. My keyboard and mental maths scores marginally improved and I am reasonably pleased with my other scores. I have a fair bit going on this weekend but will have to find a fair bit of time to study and read the news.