When I graduated from NYU's mathematical finance program with a Master's, I thought I'd be a quant. I thought they make the big bucks. Nope, that was traders and they didn't even need a bachelor's degree sometimes. I never quite figured out how traders get into those positions where they make multi million dollar annual commissions, but I realized early on I like to create social web apps and left finance.
I still always joked about the idea of myself and a friend becoming traders and trading opposite strategies, then splitting the bonus one of us is bound to get. Obviously we'd need to obfuscate that the expectations on our ambitious strategies would be roughly mirror images of each other -- one would get fired, the other may get a few million.
Haha, it doesn't work that way, unfortunately. If you have any strategy that's statistically different to zero, you have a winning strategy; if it's loosing money, you can just trade the opposite strategy yourself!
The problem is, that most strategies are zero, on average. You win some, lose some with your trades, but what eats your capital is the trading costs. Then even trading the opposite trade would still diminish your capital.
No, you don't know whether it will win or lose ahead of time. You just trade opposite strategies in an ambitious way so you are GUARANTEED to have a large chance of winning a lot ... the arbitrage is that one trader gets fired and the other gets a large bonus for being right!
I still always joked about the idea of myself and a friend becoming traders and trading opposite strategies, then splitting the bonus one of us is bound to get. Obviously we'd need to obfuscate that the expectations on our ambitious strategies would be roughly mirror images of each other -- one would get fired, the other may get a few million.