Yeah that sounds like complete bullshit to me. I know some top quant traders who make high-six/low-seven figure comp consistently at that point in their careers, but they're nowhere near able to retire with a comfortable lifestyle, and that's an extremely biased sample. For every person like them, 100 others fail early on, 10 stick around making a nice but not much higher than Google salary, and 5 have a couple busy high comp years then get pushed out by greedy management, have their edge eaten by competitors, or quit when the markets slow down.

Getting to that level is like making partner in a law firm. You have to do much better than "well" and anyone who gets there would be a fool to retire and likely wouldn't want to anyway due to the personality traits/defects required to get there in the first place.

Yeah, I feel like "As a founder, if you do well, you will retire before you turn 30" is the sort of thing I could totally expect to read here, even though there would be plenty of "what are you talking about" replies.

For what it's worth, I have seen couple of such traders, below 30 and able to retire (as in couple millions in the bank).

The thing is, what you mean by "if you do well". In the cases I observed, for every trader that did well for themselves there were 49 that did not.

You might think that you're joking, but I agree with you. A pox on both their houses.