Hi all, a pretty emotional AMA today as I finally achieved a goal I have been working on for over ten years. Today, I retired with around $5M liquid net worth, which with my current portfolio means I can have fixed withdrawals for the rest of my life while continuing to grow the portfolio. I'm here to share how I got to this point, and how I meticulously planned this since high school.

My family is middle class, with both of them commuting 2 hours a day for almost 25 years to soul-sucking jobs just so we could live. I was very fortunate they were very loving growing up, and were always encouraging me to achieve my goals. They would always share how they regret they didn't do more with their lives, and how they feel they have given up their freedom to their offices and their bosses since the beginning. Knowing that was the fate that awaited me as an adult terrified me. I knew I couldn't handle it and even thought I would rather be dead than live that way.

I was very good at math since I was a kid, and was terminally online playing MMO's such as WoW, Runescape, and others while I was a teenager. I loved to hack on things, so I would build my own mods following janky tutorials and would be extremely curious about how things worked. While I would be powerleveling a character or AFK'ing, I would stumble upon more computer science videos and coding tips. Soon, I was in the part of youtube that was speaking about coding interviews and landing a job in tech. I did my research and realized that it's a very profitable avenue, and seemed like it had a lot of entrypoints. Some even mentioned that they didn't even need a college degree to get into some of their companies, so I became addicted to researching the heck of this.

By the time I was 17, I realized there was a whole online culture of competitive programming and algorithms questions that would be great entry points into employment at these top firms. I also learned from those forums that certain firms, called High Frequency Trading (HFT) companies would pay eye-watering salaries and bonuses to kids right out of college ($300k base cash salary, not including commissions and bonuses from trading). I spent almost half a year researching how to get into these firms and how much money people actually make from them. I realized that having a specialized skillset in programming and being a "quant" were the keys to getting in. I found forums full of interview questions, ranging from probability, to brain teasers, to programming, that were meant for training folks to join HFT firms.

I only attended a community college given financial constraints, so I focused most of my time on perfecting my answers to quant interviews when I was 20-21, and also honing programming skills through a competitive programming portal. It became an obsession. After almost a year of grinding and perfecting my answers, I was able to land an internship at a big tech firm, and eventually landed the job as the questions were easy for me at that point. I had been training for those exact questions since I was 17, and I had seen almost every question they could throw at me for the last 3 years.

After the internship, I focused again on my goal of landing an HFT firm. I networked, cold emailed, and tried to showcase my skillset to folks working there until I got connected to a recruiter. The big tech internship helped a lot, as I had a reference from my boss there to help land a new gig. Long-story short, I landed a job at a top HFT in NYC. Base was $280k to start, but not including commissions from trades as bonuses. By the time I was 25, I was earning around $900k including salary and bonuses from commissions, and I could see my exit in a few years. I found a special edge while at the firm that made my performance particularly good compared to peers, because I had developed my own infra at home to make better decisions on trades in the market. I would outperform peers by a wide-margin, and take home a lot more as a result.

I had reinvested almost all my salary and lived quite frugal since I landed my first job, and by the time I reached 27 I was already at $4.3M mark. Today, finally retired and abandoned the grind. My plan is to just relax, play games, and have fun for the rest of my life. Would love to answer any questions to anyone that plans to follow a similar path

EDIT: some grammar