Trading can be great because there is no BS of politics and you can measure what you've contributed every single day. You're out playing games for money, sometimes you're grinding, sometimes going on a raid...
To me the best side of finance is when you can go out and see something real and know you made it happen. When I worked for a major energy company as a side of the desk project I designed a very long term refinery margin lockin trade to enable a 100,000 barrel plus expansion of a refinery. It wasn't just going to the markets and doing some buy sell orders, but rather we went to a major Opec member and got them to sell us crude oil via a formula and then went to multiple fuel end users and got the to agree to buy fuel on a formula of crude oil + X. The difference between what we'd buy and sell less operating expenses was far greater than the cost to expand the refinery and we only had to lock up 10 years of the expected min 30 year lifespan of the equipment to do it.
All that being said, WAY too many people are going into whiteshirt wall street finance that should be out in the world making stuff happen. There is another world of steel toed boots on the ground working with engineers to figure out how to build stuff.
"Trading can be great because there is no BS of politics and you can measure what you've contributed every single day. You're out playing games for money, sometimes you're grinding, sometimes going on a raid..."
Proprietary trading is a pain, especially if you have no investors. You take on all kinds of unimaginable liabilities if you set up a self-clearing BD. Life is very stressful, because even problems with external agencies can cause problems. For example, suppose you were spread trading (buying one thing and selling the other, expecting the prices to converge) and one trade was broken. You could wake up the next morning with millions or billions of dollars in liabilities (this happened to many people in 2010).
The real problem is that, for most people, finance is interesting because they don't share in the downside. If you have a job as a trader for a bank or hedge fund, and you blow up (assuming, of course, you were not doing anything illegal) you merely lose your job. You aren't in the hole for the liability.
Most of finance operates in that mode, dealing with OPM (other people's money).
A broker-dealer (B-D) is a person authorised to trade securities on its own account (dealer capacity) or on behalf of fiduciaries (broker capacity).
Clearing refers to everything that takes a trade from transaction, e.g. a voice confirmation over the phone, to settlement, i.e. securities and cash having changed hands. Clearing involves such processes as making sure you (and your customers) remain within margin constraints, mailing tax documents, dealing with counter-parties messing up and sending you wrong securities/amounts of cash or forgetting to send you anything at all (a failed trade), etc.
A self-clearing B-D, instead of outsourcing this function to a bank's "prime brokerage" function or a dedicated clearing outsourcing firm, has its own operations department that takes care of these functions.
To me the best side of finance is when you can go out and see something real and know you made it happen. When I worked for a major energy company as a side of the desk project I designed a very long term refinery margin lockin trade to enable a 100,000 barrel plus expansion of a refinery. It wasn't just going to the markets and doing some buy sell orders, but rather we went to a major Opec member and got them to sell us crude oil via a formula and then went to multiple fuel end users and got the to agree to buy fuel on a formula of crude oil + X. The difference between what we'd buy and sell less operating expenses was far greater than the cost to expand the refinery and we only had to lock up 10 years of the expected min 30 year lifespan of the equipment to do it.
All that being said, WAY too many people are going into whiteshirt wall street finance that should be out in the world making stuff happen. There is another world of steel toed boots on the ground working with engineers to figure out how to build stuff.