Trader
Taking, pricing and hedging risk for a firm's own account — where being right about direction matters far less than surviving the path.
What the job actually is
A trader runs a book: a live portfolio of positions whose value moves every second, financed with someone else's balance sheet and constrained by limits somebody else set. The job is not forecasting. It is deciding what risk to hold, what to lay off, and at what size — continuously, while the price of being wrong changes underneath you.
In derivatives this becomes explicit. You are rarely betting that a stock rises; you are long or short volatility, convexity, time. A position can be right about the direction and still lose money because you were short gamma into a move, or because the hedge you put on stopped correlating at the worst possible moment.
The constraint that ends careers is not a bad view — it is margin. A book can be correct on a three-month horizon and be closed out in a week because it could not fund the mark-to-market in between. Size is the discipline; everything else is opinion.
The calls that define it
- Which risk to keep and which to hedge away — and what the hedge really costs
- How big is too big, given financing and the worst plausible week
- Whether to trade the flow in front of you or stand aside
- When to cut a position that is still, technically, right
Sits on a desk inside a bank, market maker or fund; answers to a head of desk and, more consequentially, to a risk manager with the authority to shrink the book without asking.
What you'd need to know
The concepts this chair runs on — each one links to a plain-English definition.
Sit in the chair
Reading about a job is the trailer. These simulations make you do it — free, in the browser, nothing locked.
Where you learn it
The courses behind these chairs — bite-size levels that teach exactly what the job is tested on.
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