[jetti]

I would add that the only other real market related finance jobs (that I know of) are in Chicago. There is a large commodity and futures market there as well as the Chicago Board of Trade. I worked at a clearing company there and it was really interesting and enjoyable. There are a bunch of prop trading firms here as well as execution services (which are interesting in their own right) and clearing firms.

Edit: I would note that there is a lot of C# work in the financial markets in Chicago. There is the C++ high performance stuff but there is also high performance C# as well as just plain ol' "normal" C# work.

[ccajas]

This is something that also interests me, as a web developer with a mostly LAMP background. I live in Chicago and getting tired of just doing web dev for small business clients. I have hobby experience with C# (3+ years, built several native apps).

I'd like to know how to break into the trading industry in Chicago with this background. So far I've been rejected to every C# job I've applied to and I cannot try C# at my job as I'm currently unemployed.

I'm not looking to do high frequency trading algorithms (seems well beyond my scope), but I'd be open to writing finance-related tools that aren't performance intensive, if that makes any sense.

[jetti]

What level are you applying for? What types of firms? Perhaps you should deal with a recruiter as that is how I was able to get into the industry.