Work life balance for a High Frequency Trader in India

If you are thinking of working in an HFT, there are a few things that you should know about. The pay might seem to be very good especially if you are a fresher but you will soon realise that it comes at the cost of your time. If you are planning to join a HFT or are already working in one, you will find this post really helpful.

Usual Work Timing / Schedule

This might depend upon the specific role. I have already written a post which talks about the various roles in a HFT and their pay structure.

In general for a trader the schedule looks like this.

The trader in most cases has to run his strategy in the live market himself/herself. This means that he has to be active and focussed for the entire duration of the market for which the strategy is written. Apart from the market hours, now the trader is required to work on his existing strategies as well as some other strategies in the pipeline or other features.

This generally means that the trader might have to easily work for 10-12 hours on average or more than that depending upon the task at hand.

Culture at a HFT

Usually the structure in a HFT is mostly multiple teams which don't share information across the teams and work on various different strategies. The interation within the team is very frequent and hence people within a team are connected and know each other very well.

But people accross teams have very less interaction and collaboration and hence one might feel that their colleague circle is too small in size. 

Even after that there are various programmes and meets organised but the HR department for the purpose of enjoyment and celebrations where people get to know each other well.