The Daily Life of a Trader at Firms like IMC
Prop trading days are structured around the market, and the structure is remarkably consistent across firms.
Before the open
The desk meets to review what happened overnight, what economic data or earnings are scheduled, and where the book currently sits. Overnight positions are checked against risk limits, and anything unusual gets discussed.
Junior traders often prepare a piece of this: summarising overnight moves in the products they cover, or flagging events that could widen spreads. It is a low-risk way to demonstrate you understand what drives your products.
During the session
The core loop is short and repeats all day:
- Watch the market and the flow arriving.
- Update your estimate of fair value.
- Adjust quotes to reflect it and to manage inventory.
- Hedge what you have accumulated.
Around that loop sit the exceptions, which is where most of the day's real decisions live. A news headline arrives and you widen or pull quotes. A large order fills you on one side and now you are long, so you skew. Volatility rises and your spreads need to reflect it. Something breaks, and you make a fast decision with incomplete information.
The quoting section covers the mechanics of each of those responses.
What the work actually feels like
Two things surprise people.
Most of it is uneventful. Long periods of monitoring, punctuated by short bursts requiring immediate decisions. The skill is staying alert during the quiet so you react well during the busy, which is why simulation and reaction drills feature so heavily in training.
It is collaborative. The image of the lone trader is wrong. Traders work continuously with researchers refining pricing models, with developers on execution tooling, and with risk managers. A junior trader who cannot explain their thinking clearly to a researcher is limited regardless of instinct.
After the close
The desk reviews the session: what the P&L was and, more importantly, why. Which decisions were good and got a bad result, and which were bad and got away with it. Those are different things, and separating them is the central discipline of trading, because with small edges and high variance the outcome of any single decision says very little.
Process is judged separately from outcome. A trade that lost money after correct reasoning is a good trade. This distinction is why firms evaluate juniors on decision quality long before P&L becomes statistically meaningful.
How juniors are evaluated
Not by P&L, at least not early. A new trader's P&L is dominated by noise, and the statistics make this unavoidable: it takes a very large number of decisions before performance separates from luck.
Instead firms look at whether your quotes are sensibly placed, whether you manage inventory rather than accumulating it, how quickly and calmly you react, whether you learn from mistakes, and whether you escalate what you should escalate.
Continuous training
Traders train throughout their careers with market simulations, mental arithmetic drills and reaction-time exercises. This is not a graduate-programme formality: pricing speed decays without practice, and half a second matters.
That is precisely what our trainers and market games are built to replicate, and why the math trainer is the single most useful preparation for both the interview and the job itself.