Is this your dream job? New traders are taught about risk and probability in a poker room in the companies head office.
The link between poker players and traders has been persistent for over two decades. There are great players who came from the world of trading, as well as great players who became traders.
Trading giant Susquehanna International understands this link all too well. A story in the Wall Street Journal this month has revealed that new recruits have to spend over 100 hours during a 10-week training programme playing poker.
The firm has a poker room of its own in the headquarters in Philadelphia. Poker is said to teach them about risk-taking and thinking of the world in probabilistic terms. The traders are judged based on their ability to pick up chips without taking risks, rather than by winning big all-ins, which is a metric used in trading called the Sharpe Ratio.
“A good model for imperfect information”
“It’s a very good model for making decisions with imperfect information,” Todd Simkin, an associate director, said of poker.
Jeremy Wien was another trader featured in the article who six years ago won a WSOP bracelet:
4 years ago today, my lifelong dream came true; hopefully we can get #2 at some point @WSOP https://t.co/Su1iwuWHlp
— Jeremy Wien (@wienjeremy) June 12, 2022
The article also cited a 2019 study which claimed that hedge fund managers who were good at poker tended to report better investment returns.
Does this make you want to become a trader? Let us know in the comments: