Chat With Traders

I’m not sure how to best say this, but Edward Thorp, is kind of a big deal… Not only in the world of financial markets, but he’s also a household name amongst the gambling scene. He’s the man who beat the dealer, and later, beat the market. It was during the late-50’s and early-60’s, when Ed, a math genius and professor at MIT, took on the challenge of discovering a way to get an edge playing gamb...

Throughout this series, which has been a window into the workflow of professional quant trading firms, we’ve encouraged you to submit questions and requests for further clarification. So, in this episode, being the final installment, Delaney answers as many of these questions as possible (within 80-mins). -- Sponsored by DataCamp.com – Once you commit to learning how to program—specifically for da...

John Netto, a former U.S. marine, describes himself as a high velocity, cross-asset class trader. He connects the ability to be versatile, adaptable, and interpret large amounts of information to be his greatest edge—for making lucrative returns. These are all things we cover during the interview, which includes discussion about; process, research, strategy, macro, and market regimes. We also talk...

For the great, Anthony Saliba, his initial 13-years in the field were spent as a market maker on the CBOE floor, where he made approximately $9,000,000 before 30 years old (and that was during the 80’s). At which point, he was one of the traders featured in Jack Schwager’s first Market Wizards’ book. Since then, Anthony’s continued to scale up—making major moves, both, through trading and through...

Turney Duff was a hedge fund trader on Wall Street who lead a truly excessive lifestyle. In 2013 he released a book about his experiences—titled, The Buy Side. And currently, Turney is a consultant on the Showtime TV series, Billions. On this episode we cover everything, from what it was like to trade more than one billion dollars at Galleon Group—which was the hedge fund run by Raj Rajaratnam, cu...

Brendan Poots is the founder of sports betting hedge fund, The Priomha Group, who mainly bet on football, cricket, golf and also horse racing and tennis. Priomha setup shop in Melbourne (Australia) in 2010, and more recently, have expanded with a second location in Gibraltar (Europe). From inception up to the release of this episode, Priomha’s Cloney fund has returned a little over 220%. From list...

Alex (@AT09_Trader) is a 22-year old, discretionary day trader, who’s seen great results in the few years he’s been grinding away at this. He trades small caps, and he trades aggressively—as you’ll soon hear, Alex is far from conservative. This conversation was recorded on the 16th of November (2016), right around the time when the madness in the shipping sector was unfolding. So we got talking ab...

Machine learning is a hot topic right now, with a lot of people wondering how it could be used in finance and trading. Used naively, machine learning poses a great deal of risk. We’ll discuss why that’s the case and also some good ways to use it carefully. -- Sponsored by DataCamp.com – Learning to code can be challenging, but with A-grade courses at your fingertips, things are a whole lot easier....

On this episode, I’m joined by a quant trader who works at a high frequency trading firm—though you might be surprised to hear, he started out on the same path that many retail traders do—his name is; Dave Bergstrom. The thing that makes Dave unique from most traders who’ve been on this podcast previously, is how he uses data-mining techniques to develop trading strategies. Though data-mining, in...

When one has a price model that they think will work well for forecasting returns, the next step is to actually trade it. This isn’t that simple for a variety of reasons. For one thing, you need to define how much risk you’re okay with taking on in a portfolio, and then try to maximize your returns while staying within those boundaries. This is the foundation of modern portfolio theory—we’ll discu...

Eugene Soltes is an author and finance professor at Harvard Business School. Over the past eight years, give or take, he’s spent a lot of time with many big-time executives and professionals who have been convicted of major financial crimes, such as; cooking the books, fraud, Ponzi schemes, and insider trading. What initially began as nothing other than self-interest has materialized into a 464-pa...

In practice, no one trading model will ever be that good on its own. Luckily statistics has come up with a lot of theory about how you can combine weaker models to create better overall predictions. We’ll discuss how to combine many different trading signals into overall models and some of the practical considerations in doing so. -- Sponsored by DataCamp.com – For new and intermediate programmers...

My guest for episode 1-0-1 is Siam Kidd, from Norwich in the UK. He’s a former-air force pilot, turned retail trader. He’s also a serial entrepreneur, and on a quest to dramatically improve the schooling system. We got to chat about his shaky beginnings as a trader, his rock bottom moment, and how he trades currency pairs—using a technical-driven approach, with the goal of catching major trends wh...

Factors are at the core of a modern quant equity workflow. This episode introduces the notion of alpha and risk factors at a high level, and delves into some of the use cases which include: understanding how the market is moving, understanding how a portfolio is exposed to sources of risk, and turning ideas for price forecasting into encapsulated alpha factors. -- Sponsored by DataCamp.com – DataC...

My guest for this special milestone (being episode 100!) is someone who I’ve been attempting to bring on since before episode one was even released… Folks, I’d like to introduce you to Bao—or better known as @Modern_Rock on Twitter. Bao is an independent day trader, and a former-Silicon Valley software engineer, who made the large majority of his fortune trading stocks on the OTC bulletin board ma...

The worst case in finance is when you think you’re right, but you’re actually wrong. This can be especially dangerous when you’ve used some methodology or statistics to justify a decision, but are unaware of all the subtle biases that can cause false results. In this episode we’ll cover many of the ways that you can be wrong without knowing it in trading and finance. -- Sponsored by DataCamp.com –...

My guest for this episode is Brynne Kelly; an electricity, natural gas, and crude oil trader who’s spent the majority of her career on merchant trading desks, for the likes of BP amongst others. She has also been a prop trader and has experience as a hedge fund portfolio manager. A few of the key topics we hit on include: Brynne’s responsibilities as head of trading desks, how she taught, trained...

Before day trading equities, Peter To played a lot of online poker and did fairly well for himself. He then dabbled in markets as an investor, but was soon attracted to OTC stocks after discovering a strange inefficiency… In this episode we spend quite a bit of time talking about Peter’s prop trading experience, both the good and the bad. Trading nihilism and doing everything you supposedly should...

On this episode, I have our very first guest from China; Derek Wong—he is the Director of Systematic Trading and Options at a private fund in Shanghai. Initially though, Derek got his start in the agricultural pits at the CBOT, then following on from this, he’s worked at various quant shops in Chicago, South Korea, and now days, mainland China. After discussing Derek’s backstory, we talk; emerging...

Nico (@InefficientMrkt on Twitter) is a day trader with a thirst for momentum. He predominately trades low-priced stocks that have a tendency to move fast and far—and roughly 90% of his positions are on the short side. But the main reason why I brought Nico onto the podcast, is I feel as though he has a story which many traders will be able to relate to, on one level or another… The short of it is...

For this episode, the trader who I had the opportunity to speak with, and who you’re about to hear from, is Adrian—or @AdeyF69 on Twitter. Adrian was a pro sailor for almost two decades, but for the past six years, he’s been on dry land, taking an income from financial markets as an independent day trader. Adrian primarily trades the Bund and the DAX, though he initially started out in foreign exc...

My guest on this episode is a former-stand up comedian, turned questionable stockbroker, turned day trader—folks, I’d like you to meet, Kenny Glick. During the 90’s, Kenny went from the stages of comedy clubs into a hyper-aggressive brokerage firm, which he describes as being identical to scenes from the movie, Boiler Room—and he has some wild stories to share, which you’ll hear very soon. Once Ke...

What you’re about to hear is a conversation I had with a short-term futures trader, Ben—whose last name we won’t mention only for privacy reasons, but he goes by @BLB_Capital on Twitter. Before entering the market, Ben previously ran a construction company until an injury put him out of action for a period of time, which is when a friend got him interested in trading. Developing his craft over rec...

For this episode I spoke with fund manager, Dario Mofardin. Dario went from a finance degree, straight into a market analyst and then trader position at a private global macro hedge fund, during the early 90’s. He then went into investment banking for 13 years, working with mergers and acquisitions from various locations around the globe. And since 2008, Dario has been trading independently, but h...

Craig Scott is someone who has been trading and investing for most of his life, first starting in school when he participated in a year long stock picking competition. Once completing a double major in finance and accounting, Craig spent many years as an auditor and an accountant, and later on, the entrepreneur within had him start and grow several businesses (doing similar things) along the way....