The Prop Trader's Chronicles: Short-Term Proprietary Trading Strategies for Both Bull and Bear Markets

CHAPTER 2

A Swift Reality Check

When I was called in to my interview at Swift, I was prepared to sell the experience I had at the time in the finance industry in as many ways as I could imagine. Essentially, I was prepared to emphasize my perceived strengths. I was prepared for a typical job interview.

“Do you play video games?” Liz asked with a straight face. She was the branch manager.

I paused and hesitated to answer. For a moment, I had considered that maybe this was a trick question, like the infamous puzzle questions that Goldman Sachs interviews were notorious for.

“Yes,” I replied. All the while, I quickly ran through in my head all the possible ways this answer might have actually been detrimental to my success as a trader—and I came up empty. Mostly, I was confused and surprised that I had to enter a gray area of honesty on a question like this—the fact was that I had once been a gamer, but not regularly for the seven years leading up to this interview.

As it turned out, experience in video games, while not entirely a prerequisite, was actually considered a practical advantage in the style of frequent scalping that Swift Trade Securities specialized in at the time. The key to efficiently executing manual high-volume scalping was accurate hand-eye coordination, quick reaction time, and preferably the ability to read and react to the visual cues of opponents (and occasionally read between the lines for the true intention of an opponent attempting to veil it with bluffs ...