| The OP you asked worked at an Investment Bank. This is not exactly the pinnacle of algo trading (at least in US/Europe) as they are hampered by regulations about prop trading etc. I work at a big quant/algo prop trading firm. The reason you can't compete is that most successful algorithmic trading relies on economy of scale. Yes capital to trade with is one aspect, but more importantly is the amount of knowledge needed to carry this off. Building a safe, robust strategy is hard even if you have a working idea. It requires probably top 1% knowledge in distributed systems, Linux admin, networking, database administration, security and more.
The chance that any individual (or even team of less than 5 people) has those skills covered in addition to the quantitative know how to actually come up with a strategy is quite small. There is a reason why algo trading is dominated by large firms. Working at somebody like Citadel or Optiver, if you say "oh damn, there's this weird effect on our server. When x happens I get a period of noticeable slowdown" they will turn around and say "Ok, well John here is a core dev on the Linux kernel, he'll come to your desk and help you figure it out". Imagine that but with every problem pretty much. Running trading strategies you will hit problems. The level of work to overcome all of them satisfactorily whilst not degrading your edge is so much work for an individual I suspect you would burn out pretty sharply. |