What is the best job in the financial sector? Balancing the major wants of good salary, stability, job market, stress level, and job satisfaction; what are some of the best jobs in finance? Especially for someone just entering the field and looking for a long career?

I have a feeling it might be mine. I'm CTO of a P2P lender in the UK. (I'm not giving away anything not publicly available on our website), but we recently passed the £20m lending milestone, and are have already (mid August) done twice the volume of business in 2015 (in 8 months) than we did in the whole of 2014 (which was, in turn, double what we did in 2013.) Obviously, only one person can be CTO of any given company, but there can be lots of innovative startups in the industry at any given time. Working at any startup isn't exactly low-stress, and for the first 2 years I was here, I got up at 0700 every morning and checked that the site was still running. (I don't any more, because I have a lot more in the way of monitoring, and more importantly, someone else who gets woken by such monitors at 0300 in the morning in the unlikely even we have problems.) You may say that this isn't a "finance" job, but when it comes to FinTech, the CTO has to understand the business as well as the technology, and I spend as much time talking about the internals of financial products than I do about CSS, or frameworks, or APIs. So, why do I think it's a good job? It pays "enough" for me to pay the mortgage, and with both my wife and me working, two sets of school fees. I get to work from home four days a week, so very little commute, and an incredibly relaxed dress code. I get to work with bright people. I get to make a dent in the (UK finance) universe. If the company reaches that critical threshold, then my options suddenly get worth "a fair amount of money." Bear in mind point 1 above, I've been paid from the day I joined, so while I took a pay cut to come here, I've not had to work for months for nothing. We are actually doing some stuff that is, for a geek like me, very cool. It may not be obvious to our customers the sorts of tech we need to run to make it all "just work", but it's intellectually stimulating to me as a computationalist. I don't have to work all the time. I'm a father as well as a professional. I took the decision, when my daughter was born, that I wasn't going to work full-time. I take every Wednesday afternoon during term time off to watch sports matches (Wednesday afternoon matches being part of the UK prep school culture.) I'm not the only dad there, but we're certainly outnumbered by the mums, some of whom have admitted that their husbands are more than a little envious of my ability to go and do this. Of course, unless it really is you and a mate in a spare room, you can't normally get hired to be a CTO until you've proven yourself, and it took 20 years of work to get to this place, but I do believe I've got the best job in the financial sector anywhere in the world.