Chat With Traders

For this episode I’m joined by Michael Halls-Moore, who runs QuantStart.com—a site well-known by many algorithmic traders. Prior to trading, Michael studied computational fluid dynamics and was the co-founder of a tech startup, before getting involved a small equity fund as a quant developer—where his key role was cleansing data. Now, independently, Michael trades his own short-term algorithmic st...

Blake Morrow (otherwise known as @PipCzar on Twitter) started out as a stock broker in 1995, but this only lasted for a short period of time, before becoming a trader… A wealthy friend put up $50,000 in starting capital, which Blake lost about $30,000 of it within the first six months. Though, before wiping out, Blake was able to turn that remaining $20,000 into roughly $1.5M in the next few years...

Dave Lauer is a former-high frequency trader for firms such as Citadel and Allston Trading. He’s worked specifically in various areas of the HFT pipeline, including; research and modelling, building hardware, and programming and operating strategies—which are measured in millionths of a second (or microseconds). Following the Flash Crash, Dave left his role as a trader (for various reasons we disc...

This week on the podcast, I spoke with Tom Sosnoff, who many of you will already know—he’s pretty close to a household name name in this industry. But if you don’t… Tom was a floor trader at the CBOE for 20 years, later going on to co-found thinkorswim—a widely popular online brokerage. In 2009, thinkorswim was sold to TD Ameritrade for approximately $606M, and Tom left the company shortly after t...

Jared Tendler is an internationally recognized mental game coach. His clients include world champion poker players, the #1 ranked pool player in the world, professional golfers, and more recently, traders too. If Jared was to summarize exactly what he does (and what he specializes in), it would be; removing negative and excessive emotion from decision making. So naturally, this serves as the under...

Blair Hull has been labeled by Forbes as, “One of the most successful traders of the last 40 years,” and he was also profiled in Jack Schwager’s, The New Market Wizards. Prior to trading, Blair was a serious Blackjack player for 5-years during the 70’s. From there he took his winnings to the the Pacific Exchange to trade mispriced options, and in 1985, he founded one of the world’s premier market-...

This episode features Dr. Yves Hilpisch—the founder of The Python Quants. TPQ do a lot of good for those involved in quantitative finance, they; frequently host meet-ups and workshops, have developed platforms and analytics libraries, and often contract to exchanges, banks and hedge funds for custom Python development. Yves is also a three-time published author, with his most notable title probabl...

The trader I interviewed for this episode is; Ryan Moffett from Blackpier Capital. Having been involved with markets for about 12 years now, Ryan has experience in trading, strategy design, portfolio construction and even alternative investments—all, while working for several firms (one of which, managed upwards of $2B). More recently though, Ryan’s ventured out to start a fund of his own, where h...

This week, for the second time on Chat With Traders, my guest is Morad or better known as; Futures Trader 71. As you could imagine, FT is a futures trader, he’s also very short-term and has been trading for about 16 years now. During this time, he was the founder of a successful prop firm and more recently, has started a brokerage; Stage 5 Trading. First time around (on episode 37) we spoke extens...

Our guest this week is Alan Farley, who took his first trades in the late-80’s. Alan is an active swing trader, and most of his positions take place in the US equity market—although he occasionally trades index futures and currencies too. In 2001, Alan released his first book, The Master Swing Trader, which may be the best-selling book on the subject). He’s also a regular contributor to The Street...

Anthony Crudele started at a very young age on the CME floor, and he has one really interesting story about coming up as a trader… It does involve some pretty drastic failures, burning through significant amounts of cash, and a whole lot of perseverance. But, he eventually broke through and went on to have years of making six and seven-figures, while heavily trading the E-Mini S&P 500 from it’s in...

Raoul Pal has a history rooted in the hedge fund industry, and with him, he carries more than 25+ years of experience in financial markets. For a number of years he worked at Goldman Sachs where he co-managed the hedge fund sales business in equities and equity derivatives. He later moved on to GLG, one of the largest hedge fund groups in the world, where he launched their global macro fund in Lon...

As I’m sure you already well aware, Jack Schwager has been involved with financial markets for many years, he’s the author of the acclaimed Market Wizards series and others, and he’s also the co-founder of FundSeeder. During our talk, we go behind the scenes of the Market Wizards and Jack shares his experiences from conducting interviews with trading royalty and some of his most memorable moments....

You’re about to hear a really interesting conversation I had with Dennis Dick. Dennis first started out meddling with penny stocks, before soon joining a well-established prop firm known as; Bright Trading—this was in the late 90’s. To this day Dennis remains with the same firm, still as an active short-term equities trader, but also as their Market Structure Analyst. If his voice sounds familiar,...

Our featured guest for this weeks interview is, Saul Knapp. Saul originally started out as a runner on the floor of the LIFFE exchange (in London), when he was just 16 years old. Later moving on from there, he’s had various roles as a risk manager for proprietary trading firms, at times, monitoring positions for as many as 120+ traders. Today, Saul lives in Spain where he runs a small prop firm of...

For this episode, I had the great pleasure of speaking with Dan Aisen—one of the co-founders of IEX, and one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Finance (2015). Dan got his start at RBC where he developed their flagship execution algorithm, THOR. This was also where he met and worked under Brad Katsuyama—one of the other co-founders and CEO of IEX, who was heavily profiled in Flash Boys. As many of you may...

My guest this week is John Walsh, aka The Black Cabbie Trader. The backstory of John; in 2012 he entered a competition—the City Index Trading Academy. The idea was to take a group of people with very little market experience to see how well they would perform as active traders, over the span of 5 weeks. John came out on top and won the £100,000 prize money which was up for grabs. He’s of course co...

For Charlie Bathgate, trading has been a part of his life since as far back as he can remember—his father was an options market maker, and not to mention his brothers and sister work major-roles in the industry too. Today, Charlie is a partner and the CEO of two operations; Sang Lucci and Flammarion. Sang Lucci being a provider of trader education, and Flammarion being a hedge fund (which mostly c...

This weeks guest preferred to remain somewhat anonymous, although his name is Rob – others know him as RG, and he’s a part of Discovery Trading Group. Rob is an active futures traders and is what most people would call a pure scalper, but he refers to himself as a “street level gambler with an appetite for risk”. Either way, he is very short-term and often just trading for a couple ticks at a time...

A big guest on the podcast this week—a man who for many won’t need any introduction, he is; Eric Scott Hunsader. Eric started out as an algorithmic trader in the early 80’s, soon after became a self-taught programmer, and since then he’s written many software applications for financial data. But today, Eric is the founder of Nanex, a whole market streaming data feed, which transmits 20 billion dat...

Jeff is a day trader who specializes in the S&P futures, and predominately trades a mean-reversion strategy which is built upon data and statistical probabilities. Across his 20+ year trading career, Jeff has also been heavily involved in the process of developing and deploying algorithmic strategies—but slightly less these days. In this interview we talk about Jeff’s prop days, risks of being a o...

Welcome back for another installment of the Chat With Traders podcast. I’ve got an awesome guest lined up for you, John Carter, from Austin Texas. In short; John is an options trader (and also futures, to a slightly lesser extent), he’s been trading for around about 25 years now. His typical holding time for any given trade is just a couple days, and he classifies himself as an aggressive trader –...

For this episode, we have our very first guest from Sweden—big shout out to Sweden! I spoke with Mikael Syding; a value investor who spent 15 years in the hedge fund business, and in 2009, he was awarded European Hedge Fund Manger of the Decade before retiring shortly after. During the interview, I ask Mikael to share his three greatest lessons for traders and investors, how he spotted growth oppo...

We have a very special guest on the podcast right now; Jerry Parker. For those who don’t know, Jerry is one of the original widely-recognized, Turtle Traders. The Turtles were a small (somewhat secretive) group of traders who were mentored and trained by Richard Dennis, a big time commodities trader, in the 80’s. It’s an interesting story and you’ll hear more about this in just a moment. Today, Je...

This week we have returning guest, Dan Shapiro, who was first on episode 32. And after receiving a lot of really great feedback from that interview, I knew I would have to have him back on, so here we are… Dan works on an intraday timeframe and predominately trades high beta stocks. He’s been trading for 16 years, and during this time has experienced the extreme highs and lows that this business c...