My Trading Algorithm Once Made $30k in 30 Seconds But I Still Had to Quit

Knowing When to Change Careers

When I was 26, I had built a trading algorithm that made $30k in 30 seconds one afternoon.

My first job out of college I was a young, naïve, ambitious day trader. With dreams of trading my own money (like I was) and being rich (like I wasn't). My days were spent staring at screens all day reading price action, charts, volume, order flow.

Not glamorous. But the shot at making it big seemed to sit just out of reach.

I thought I'd be a trader forever.

Early in my career, I was obsessed. As Naval Ravikant says, find the work that "will feel like play to you but look like work to others." This all felt like play to me. I enjoyed it immensely.

I had been dedicating my free time since sophomore year of college to studying chart patterns, reading books on trading psychology, reviewing my trading journals, and back testing exit strategies.

But over my 7 years there, the idea of trading your own money from anywhere in the world started to fade against the reality of how competitive, stressful, and boring trading full time can be.

My interests started to shift. Gradually at first, then faster.

It began with Code Academy learning Python. Which led to MOOCs on Coursera, then Udemy, then personal projects, then scripts to scan for stock signals, then access to our proprietary trading platforms API, then to searching for a profitable trading algorithm.

After 6 months of data mining, I found one. It was simple. The opportunity in this edge was small enough for hedge funds to not care but big enough for me to want it. Our speed and leverage meant we could maximize the opportunity there where retail traders could not. It was a tiny edge that we were perfectly positioned to exploit.

After live testing, I slowly ramped up the buying power, and finally on a quad-witching day after a quarter of running it live. It crushed. Exceeded expectations. Making 1% on $3M buying power trading in the last 30 seconds of the day. Success!

The reality though of making $30k in 30 seconds is that this strategy is not scalable, only finds it’s opportunity on 4 days of the year, and after taxes and profit sharing, I’m only getting maybe half of those profits.

It felt good to see months of hard work validated in the market with real money. But during this process, I had learned something about myself.

I discovered that coding and solving puzzles was way more fun and potentially useful to the world, than being good at the game of trading.

I lost the desire to improve my craft.

To succeed in the highly competitive world of trading you have to be good at it. To be good you need to be better than the competition. And to beat the competition you need to keep working, evolving, improving.

I lost that drive.

It slowly became replaced with learning to write code. It took about a year for this new identity to sink in. After college, I assumed I could do nothing else and would be a trader forever.

After constant reflection and many conversations with folks close to me, I began paying more attention to the the lack of interest in my craft and what that meant.

The lack of interest to improve was the key signal I had to leave.

If you’re unsure when to quit something, this should be a big signal. Yes, be practical about money and your best interests, especially if you support people.

But don't ignore your interests.

You'll only become great at something if you practice it a lot. And you'll only practice it a lot if you enjoy it to some extent.

If you are interested in something else, find the time to skill up while your on the job. How I went from day trader with no coding background to Staff Engineer in big tech is a story for another day.

Just remember, if you lose that drive to be great at something, no matter how long you've done it, be open to taking a new path.