Guest: Agustin Lebron – author of book Laws of Trading
The more you trade the more you realize how hard it is to do well
Studied engineering in college
Former chip designer, online poker player
Went into finance – Jane Street
Recently started a crypto company – building protocol to improve crypto trading
Finance – jobs are more fungible, harder to explain why you work at a specific firm since most jobs are similar and primarily money-driven
If you want to be a trader, implicitly you’re saying you care most about money
But a lot of the job is having inherent curiosity about many things, and about enjoying game for its own sake
Jane Street would select against people with prior retail trading experience
Concept of domain is narrower than people understand it to be – Robinhood trading is even more different than you think of trading at a market maker, or a hedge fund
Takes 6-18 months to train a trader to be net-positive
Jane Street was mostly Socratic method – sit with senior trader and learn at desk
Now there’s more structured training, learning an iterative thinking process
Most common failure mode in tech hiring is hiring too much for skills, instead of for potential
One of best hiring arbitrages is to “go more junior” – hire younger and earlier in careers
Agustin wants to find smartest 0.1% of high school students around world – put them into bootcamps for 6 months, learn useful skills, provide high skill jobs to graduates
This could be a trillion dollar business
SBF @ FTX – Future Fund to scout for this kind of talent
Intelligence (“G” factor) strongly predicts outcomes across jobs, industries
Why brainteasers so common in tech hiring – proxy for IQ (even though explicit IQ testing for hiring is illegal in the US)
Great example – Wonderlic test for football
For job candidates:
One of most important things you can do is select your coworkers
During hiring, get good at evaluating your interviewers too
Sheepskin effect – last semester of college boosts earnings vastly more – because of signaling / certification
San Diego tech cos love to hire Intuit employees with 2-3 years experience, because Intuit does great training – but you don’t see the really good employees that Intuit retained
If Agustin was a regulator – would ban leveraged ETFs, further regulate all the volatility products
// Stopped ~45% of the way thru