Chat With Traders

Sheelah Kolhatkar is a writer at the The New Yorker, who was previously a journalist at Bloomberg Businessweek, and prior to that, a hedge fund analyst. She’s also the author of New York Times bestseller, Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street. Of course, the most wanted man being referred to, is the ultra-wealthy hedge fund legen...

On this episode, I have a returning guest—who first appeared on episode 53. His name is a mystery, but he goes by the handle: @BTCVIX Episode 53 was the first time I covered Bitcoin on this podcast, and that was at the very end of 2015. As you’re probably aware, the cryptocurrency markets have evolved a lot since then, so BTCVIX is here to fill us in on what’s been happening and, potentially, what...

Up until recently, James King was the Performance Director at a commodity trading firm in London, Mandara Capital. And it was here that he implemented scientific methods to stack probability in the favour of success—by using techniques he learned from his education in Applied Sports Science and Performance Psychology. Now, James is setting out on a new venture, Project Thor, which aims to support...

Mark Gardner began working in the field at 17-years old, straight out of high school. Initially he began with back office duties, before broking on the floor of the Sydney Futures Exchange (SFE). Then later he was picked up by a large Bank Bills trader to exclusively execute trades, and who he learned a great deal from. Around 2005, Mark started trading his own book. Over the 10-years that followe...

Morgan’s career as a trader and portfolio manager began 20-years back, and since then he’s worked at many prominent firms and funds—to name just a few; Millburn Ridgefield, Merrill Lynch, Citadel and Allston Trading. He’s currently the CEO of CloudQuant, a cloud-based algo development platform and fund. During our conversation, Morgan explains why he feels as though the ‘common’ approach to strate...

Ben Mallah is a trader of a different kind—he doesn’t trade stocks and bonds, he trades in real estate. You could probably call him a property developer, although he doesn’t build from scratch; he buys distressed apartment buildings, hotels and shopping centers, fixes them up, and then sells to make a profit. He grew up in one of the roughest areas of New York and had a very tough upbringing, but...

Victor Haghani began his career at Salomon Brothers in 1984, starting out in a research role before joining their prop trading desk. In 1992, Victor left Salomon to become one of the founding partners of Long Term Capital Management… LTCM was an incredibly successful hedge fund, up until 1998, when it failed in a spectacular fashion. Causing the Federal Reserve to step in and organize a bailout, i...

Andy has been an active stock trader since the early 90’s, and in 2001 he founded Kershner Trading Group—a proprietary trading and technology firm in Austin (Texas) and, through a partnership with SMB Capital, Kershner Trading have a second office in Midtown (Manhattan) too. So, what did we talk about? Andy's ability to take pain on adverse positions, whether or not this has been a key ingredient...

Though not a trader herself, Nell Sloane has been in and around markets and exchanges for roughly 30-years, mostly working in roles that assisted commodity traders and brokers in one way or another. Then since 2006, Nell has been the Principal of Capital Trading Group—a Chicago investment firm, which she co-founded with Patrick Lafferty. And this is the reason why I asked Nell to come on the podca...

Matthew Hoyle was once a trader, or more specifically, an options market maker. And he started at a very young age, on the exchange floor in Amsterdam. But since 2003, he’s been in the headhunting (or recruiting) business. His firm, Matthew Hoyle Financial Markets. Essentially, Matthew finds the best candidates for hard to fill roles. He’s contracted by banks, hedge funds and all sorts of trading...

Max got into trading about six years ago, after a co-worker pulled up in a brand new Lotus Elise—paid for with gains from trading BP stock. Working as an engineer at the time, with average pay, it wasn’t long before Max opened his first trading account and got to work… Having now developed a unique style of his own, which he describes as a scalping method—focusing on NASDAQ listed stocks, Max has...

Darren Reed (@LiftTheOffer) has been a stock broker, the head trader at a $300M hedge fund, and an active prop trader at Australian firms, Propex, Aliom and Gensis. At the later two, he also mentored traders as part of his role in trader development. But this year (2017), Darren has returned to Perth—on the west coast of Australia, to establish a new proprietary trading firm with a few partners; C...

Doug Cifu is the co-founder and CEO of Virtu Financial, one of the largest electronic market making firms in the world. Around the clock, Virtu are trading in 12,000 instruments, across 235 markets and 36 countries, with only 140 staff. Virtu often trade more than 4.5 million times a day, and prior to their IPO in 2015, Virtu reported the firm had made a profit 1,277 out of 1,278 days—losing money...

Michael Mauboussin is a Managing Director and Head of Global Financial Strategies at Credit Suisse. He’s also a professor of finance at Columbia Business School, and the author of several books, such as; The Success Equation and More Than You Know. Michael is widely-recognized as a thought leader on the subject of decision making, as well as thinking about things in the way of process over outcome...

Mebane Faber is the founder and CIO at Cambria Investment Management, where he manages Cambria’s ETFs, separate accounts and private investment funds. He’s also authored numerous white papers and five books now, on various investing subjects. Meb’s a budding podcaster too, his podcast; The Meb Faber Show. The main reason why I asked Meb to join me for this episode, was to share some simple ways th...

Alex (@TAGRtrades) is a 27-year old day trader, from Texas. He’s been trading full-time for four years, and has really begun to hit his stride. Alex closed Q1 of 2017 with a $49,000 gain, after going into the year with an account balance of $32,000. He’s a small-cap momentum trader, but unlike most guests who I’ve had on previously that play in this space, Alex takes the majority of his trades on...

High-speed trading veteran, Manoj Narang, originally worked on Wall St for the likes of Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs prior to founding Tradeworx, which became one of the larger trading firms in the U.S. (in terms of volume). He’s since parted ways with Tradeworx to start MANA Partners—an innovative quant fund which raised almost one billion dollars for it’s launch in January this year (2017). A...

Larry Alintoff was a prop trader for Paul Tudor Jones, before running the largest group of traders on the AMEX (at the time). When he later went over to the NYBOT, Larry became the largest trader in the Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice pit, and now days, he’s CIO of The Toro Fund. During this episode, we cover; the thing which helped Larry to become consistent, why there’s great opportunity in kno...

Sean Hendelman is the co-founder and CEO of T3 Companies. T3 is one of the larger proprietary trading firms in the U.S. And incase you’re curious, the three T’s of T3 stand for; trading, training and technology. A few of the things Sean and I spoke about, include; how he got his start, how he lost all his money twice—and why it was a worthwhile experience (in hindsight), and some of the great less...

Adam Grimes has been a trader for more than 20-years, he’s traded all major asset classes, across various timeframes. He’s traded independently, with a prop firm, and he’s run other trading businesses also. The main focus of this episode is to explore some of the things which discretionary traders can adapt from quantitative traders, and vice versa—meaning, what things can quants take from those w...

Brannigan Barrett is a futures day trader—who trades a total of eight markets, across; bonds, equity indices, currencies and commodities. He was previously a trader at prop firm, Futex, but is now part of Axia Futures. The subjects we cover during this conversation, include; how to progressively become a bigger (and better) trader, how a “dogfight” attitude has helped Brannigan’s trading career, h...

Benjamin Small is an electrical engineering PhD. He’s worked in quantitative research roles since 2006, at UBS, Citadel, Credit Suisse and the stock exchange, IEX. Today though, Ben is head of market structure at Gemini—the world’s first fully licensed and fully regulated Bitcoin exchange, which is based in New York. During this chat, we get into; payment for order flow and high frequency trading,...

Jorge Soltero began as a floor trader in Chicago, where he was an options market maker. A few years into his career, he landed a position at Hull Trading Company (the renowned firm of legendary trader, Blair Hull). After Hull Trading was bought by Goldman Sachs in 1999, Jorge became more of an institutional trader—not only working at Goldman, but later, UBS and Merrill Lynch too, where he speciali...

Returning to Chat With Traders for a second time is David Bush—first on episode 23. David began as a discretionary trader, more than 20-years ago, but over time he’s developed into a quant trader. And he’s exceptionally good at what he does; David’s been the first place winner of two (real money) trading competitions in recent years. Last time David was on we spoke fairly extensively about his pat...

On this episode, I’m joined by George—who goes by @RollyTrader on Twitter. George is an Australian equities trader, with a momentum/swing trading type of approach. In the past, George has held a few finance-related positions, but since late-2009 he’s mostly traded independently. During the interview, George and I got speaking about; lessons he learned early on, the effect that coaching and mentori...