Pros
The pros to working here are many and varied. The firm's commitment to technology and programming development over the past 10 years (and counting) have put Trillium at the forefront of all prop trading firms in terms of trading technology and order execution. Their IT/programming guys are absolute masters with the capability to make absolutely any suggestion from the traders a reality with minimal turnaround time. To management's credit, the firm takes these suggestions seriously and implements as many as they can. This "open ear" works for the benefit of everyone and creates value add far beyond what would be possible in a top-down management strategy alone. To that end, management doesn't just interact with the traders on a superficial level; they genuinely care about each trader's success and will do whatever they can to put everyone in a position to succeed. I have seen some comments that suggest otherwise, but my personal experience was that when I had a rough month or two, our HR manager would call me in to discuss what was going on and try to find out if there was anything he could do to help me improve. Granted, I was a profitable trader fairly early on and I put in the effort on my end, but the feel of those meetings was never that I was on the edge of being fired. It was always a "what can we do to help?" assessment of what was and wasn't working for me. Even the most introspective person could use an outside opinion or two, and as prop trading is a career that relies substantially on self-reflection and observation, those meetings were crucial in helping right the ship for me. Beyond the technology and the management, the culture of the firm is fantastic. The traders are genuinely a great group of guys with a wide variety of backgrounds. The environment, although competitive, is definitely collaborative and everyone is usually willing to explain their trading style and help give pointers to junior guys. In the early days, this advice from senior traders proves invaluable to a new trader who has an infinite amount of new information to process and no idea how to sort or prioritize it. The office environment itself is unlike anything you will find in a so-called "high finance" career on Wall Street -- t-shirts, sweatpants, shorts, and flip flops abound on the trading floor. Likewise, the lifestyle this job provides blows anything else in this industry out of the water. If you want to leave at 4:00:01 pm, you can. You will never work a weekend unless you decide it's beneficial to come in and put in some extra time (lots of younger guys do this, but it's not required). This is not a face-time job where you have to leave your suit jacket on your chair just so your MD knows you're around. And unlike some IBD or S&T groups at the banks, everyone here is friends and genuinely enjoys each other's company. My takeaway from this job was it taught me the true meaning of being a self-starter: autonomous hard work, honest self-criticism, and the ability to create opportunities to better yourself out of mistakes that you make. I never had to work hard to get As in college or get great performance reviews in other jobs, but here you truly have no one to answer to but yourself. No one is going to make you stay late to learn the keystrokes or to study up on binary events coming up that will move markets. No one is going to tell you what you should have done in a specific trade or what you need to do better the next time (with the exception of your trainer, who is immensely helpful; I should note that the training itself is excellent and certainly positions all junior traders to succeed). The only way you see results here is through your own genuine hard work, and that for me was an incredibly important learning experience that will stick with me throughout my career.
Cons
The cons are more or less what you would expect from a career in prop trading, and although important to consider, are less reflective of the way the company is run and more so the industry itself. The first and most obvious is that there are no exit opportunities for a failed junior trader. The transferable skill set is minimal if it exists at all. There are plenty of experiences prior to becoming a prop trader that will make you a better trader; there are few experiences as a prop trader that will make you better at something else. This is a risk you should understand and seriously consider before taking a position at a prop trading firm. It has little to do with Trillium itself -- it is just a reality of the industry. Another con in the long term is the industry itself. The space has become orders of magnitude more competitive in just the last few years, and will continue to become exponentially more crowded as HFT and algo trading volume increases. I have to believe that at some point human prop traders will become obsolete. Whether that happens in five years or 50 depends on innumerable factors, but it is an eventuality for the profession. So, if you are a junior or senior in college right now, you have to think about what will happen to the industry itself. You might find that after a few years you're the #1 trader at the firm, but at some point even that person may not be able to make money. I think one con specific to Trillium would be the intense focus on risk parameters for trainees. I understand the need for risk management with younger traders, as everyone trades with real firm capital from day 1, but I think the tight lockouts (-$150 in one day to start) make it tough to take the risks initially that you need to take to become a better trader. Some new guys come in and just bleed money from the instant they touch the keys and then leave after 6 months. I didn't -- I respected my limits and I always traded with them in mind, but because they were so tight, it took me a lot longer to catch on and get those basic experiences under my belt. Again, it's something that needs to be in place, but while it protects the firm from some traders, it also limits the upside from others who are more cautious and risk management-minded.
