Hi! I'm ex-finance, does that count?
So I spent nearly a decade trading FX options for a couple of banks in Singapore. And it was pretty awesome while I was doing it, but I don't miss it.
On the one hand, it's an incredibly stressful job. My hours were 6am to 6pm 5 days a week, and then I'd usually go out for drinks afterward and come into work the next morning with a splitting hangover (but then again, so did everyone else). I'd spend those twelve hours with a laser focus on a set of numbers on a screen, being yelled at by salespeople, and yelling right back at them, and the one and only performance measure is "did you make money this year?". And if things moved overnight, I'd get phone calls - doesn't matter whether it's 11pm or 1am or 3am, I'd get called.
And the markets are tough these days. In FX, volumes and spreads have collapsed, so there's fewer trades going on, and less profit per trade - but you're fighting with more and more banks for that smaller and smaller slice of profit. It's not an easy industry to be in these days.
On the other hand, the money was insane. It didn't hurt that my only vice was travel - I didn't drink it away or blow it on Louis Vuitton tat or snort it up my nose - but I ended up socking away a hell of a lot of money. I saved enough that I was able to pack it in before my 30th birthday and change industries; I'm now working in a software firm in SF, building the trading software that I used to use. It's a pretty substantial pay cut, but it's also a hell of a lot less stressful.
