“Option Trading” and “Marketing” sounds completely unrelated? Actually, there are a lot of similarities between them.
I always say bidding Ads on Google and Facebook is like bidding the options, $1.35..$3.55…$2.42…. Need to be quick and dynamic.
And managing different marketing campaigns under the whole account is like a fund manager managing a fund. We have to calculate the ROI of each campaign and assign the weighting on each of them. Of course, there are other factors we have to consider, like correlation, systematic risk in the financial market.
Yes, the branding and design part under marketing is something new for me and I have to pick up quickly. The important point of changing industry in your career is to know how to transform your experience into the new field. By doing this and with luck and a lot of help from my bosses and people, I have been working in 7 different roles in the past 12 years and each time I did not need to downgrade to continue the career path.
When we studied Quantitative Finance Degree more than a decade ago, most of us were aiming to enter investment banks or trading firms. Perhaps we were misled by the exciting scenes in the movies “Liar Pokers” or “The Wolf of Wall Street”, or attracted by the fat bonus (actually golden age has passed when we graduate). In reality, working at investment or retail banks involves a lot of paperwork, compliance, and changing the Font size of the PowerPoint instead of trading stocks all the time.
Until a few years after I graduated, I still could never imagine working in a completely different role and different industry after years after graduation and the joy is actually even greater.
Around 9 months after I graduated, I achieved my “dream” to become an equity option trader in a market making firm. However, it was not a smooth journey. People are too smart, the skills required are too harsh for me, and the pressure and environment made me leave the company before the probation period ended. The next job was also a trader job in a less tense environment. However, the company was not doing well, myself was not doing well, and the whole team got dissolved after a year. Then I have to realize this path may not really suitable for me.
I was unemployed for a few months. It’s difficult to find a job with a resume that I was laid off in two of the three jobs after graduation. Luckily, I managed to find a job outside finance field, as an internal consultant under a strategy team of an e-commerce (job portal) website. At that time, digital transformation emerged and was getting popular. And I found that a lot of skills in finance are transferable to the digital field like data analytics, SEM, product design etc.
When I look back, if I worked in a bank or finance field, the corporate culture, slow development pace of new products due to strict compliance and bureaucracy probably does not suit me, but it was unlikely for me to give up the considerable salary and welfare to join the digital field which a lot of finance people jumped into in later years, not to mention the low-paid, high risk start-up journey afterwards.
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