When I graduated from NYU&#x27;s mathematical finance program with a Master&#x27;s, I thought I&#x27;d be a quant. I thought they make the big bucks. Nope, that was traders and they didn&#x27;t even need a bachelor&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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.