Chat With Traders

Ryan Hasson’s a senior trader at Kershner Trading Group/SMB Capital—having joined the firm’s New York office in 2016, after booking a one-way flight from Cape Town, SA. Ryan may be best described as an intraday equities trader, however he’ll also put on swing positions when there’s a larger story/catalyst/theme at play. I was keen to learn more about how Ryan works these multi-day trades, so we st...

For more than a decade, Neeraj Monga was Head of Research at Veritas—a Canadian independent equity research firm—where he published numerous stock reports that garnered plenty of attention from investors, analysts and media… Although it’s not the case he’s most proud of, Neeraj is perhaps best-known for revealing the shady dealings of Kingfisher Airlines—founded and lead by the larger-than-life bi...

Having traded prop for a large part of his career, Brannigan Barrett has since branched out and backed himself by establishing Habitus Capital—a private, discretionary fund that trades select futures markets across multiple asset classes; commodities, currencies, indices, bonds. When Brannigan first appeared on Chat With Traders (114), we mostly covered his process orientated approach to becoming...

Rishi Narang’s the founding principal of T2AM, a fund-of-funds investment manager with a sole focus of allocating to quantitative strategies. He’s also the author of Inside the Black Box, an advisor to DARPA’s Financial Markets Vulnerabilities Project, and previously appeared on Chat With Traders in 2016. Given Rishi’s close contact with many quantitative managers—and being well-versed in the spac...

Dan David is the founder of Wolfpack Research, a short-biased firm that goes to great lengths to meticulously understand the business operations, technical aspects and financials of listed companies. When uncovering a disconnect between what a company announces to the market and what Wolfpack deems to be the truth, the firm may build a short position and publish their findings in a detailed resear...

Active equities trader and managing partner of proprietary trading firm Seven Points Capital, Michael Katz, returns for a third appearance on Chat With Traders. As we’ve previously done a 'regular' interview and an episode analysing how Mike traded the Lyft IPO, we’ve tweaked the format again and this time Mike’s answering questions submitted by listeners of the show. There were many brilliant que...

Three years ago, Brian Lee—a former esports professional—took a leap into day trading equities. Having since developed a talent for shorting the backside of inflated moves, paired with a great emphasis on risk management, Brian’s experienced tremendous growth, both financially and in terms of market knowledge. In this chat with Brian, we go over; his first year challenges and overcoming such chall...

Casino floor or trading floor, Bob Bright has forever sought an edge for favorable odds… Counting cards in Las Vegas at blackjack tables, calculating three-way options at the Pacific Exchange, pairs trading correlated stocks, exploiting the tracking error of leveraged ETFs; Bob’s always pursued a mathematical advantage to win the game. Also considered by many as a pioneer of proprietary trading, B...

Wayne Himelsein begun his career on a proprietary trading desk at Carlin Financial Group in the mid-90’s, doing statistical arbitrage—complimentary to his mathematical nature. Come 1999, Wayne launched his first fund to begin managing money for clients and institutions. Then in 2011, Wayne founded Logica Capital Advisers, where he currently takes the role of Chief Investment Officer. Logica, as a...

For the past 5-years, Hayden Beamish has been a portfolio manager and director at Endeavor Asset Management—a hedge fund based in Melbourne, with ~$300m AUM. The Hedge portfolio that Hayden manages ended the 2020 financial year up 28% after fees—in comparison, the benchmark Australian All Ordinaries ending down 7%. The main purpose of speaking with Hayden was to gain insight to his institutional i...

As an extension of the previous episode, I present to you the second installment for the ‘Best of Trading Psychology.’ Taken from past episodes of Chat With Traders, this is a compilation of snippets on psychology and mindset—an important topic to highlight, given the psychological aspect can truly make or break many traders. With any of the snippets, if you’d like to hear the full episode, direct...

Much like the recent Best of Risk Management episodes, here is another compilation. Except this time, I’ve compiled the best clips on trading psychology, for you to hear how varying types of traders deal with mindset maters to stay focused and competitive. Again, I dug up way too much from the back catalogue of almost 200-episodes to pack into a single episode, so this is only part one—part two wi...

In her early-20’s, after graduating from MIT, Christina Qi and two classmates; Luca Lin and Jonathan Wang—who had collectively been trading futures from a campus dorm room—founded Domeyard. It was 2012, and Domeyard was to be one of the few high frequency trading hedge funds… As Christina states during the interview, “By all means we should have failed,” given the three of them had little trading...

Featuring on this episode is Haim Ben Ami; CEO of Raft Technologies. Having constructed shortwave radio towers in Chicago, Frankfurt and London, Raft have established ultra-low latency connections between various exchanges, which are leased to algorithmic trading firms who seek a speed advantage. In talking with Haim, we discuss why some firms are prepared to pay big bucks in order to be a few mil...

For this third episode in the My First Year Trading Full-Time series, I speak with Ryan Trost. At the time of recording, Ryan had recently crossed 12-months as a junior equities trader at SMB Capital in New York City. Our conversation begins with Ryan speaking to how he was trading the massive intraday ranges of TSLA during it's parabolic run in February. From there we chat about Ryan’s trajectory...

Ilan Israelstam’s a co-founder of Australian ETF manager BetaShares and a principal at VC firm Apex Capital Partners. Betashares first begun trading in 2010, and currently, it manages approximately $10-billion dollars in assets, across 61 funds—all of which trade on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). The motive in asking Ilan to be on the podcast was to learn more about how ETF managers ope...

Liam Vaughan is a finance author and senior reporter for Bloomberg. His latest book Flash Crash tells the story of Navinder Singh Sarao, a London trader, living at his parents house, who made ~$70M from his bedroom and was later accused by the U.S. government of playing a role in the 2010 Flash Crash. For anyone unaware, this was a deeply perplexing event in which the U.S. stock market, one aftern...

Returning guest, Greg Newman, is a founding partner and the CEO of Onyx Commodities—a London-based proprietary trading firm, prominent in market making of oil derivatives. This episode focuses on recent events pertaining to the global oil market. More specifically, Greg talks through; key themes impacting prices, supply and demand dynamics, why Crude and Brent futures alone aren’t entirely a true...

As we’ve seen making headlines recently, reserve banks around the world have been adding liquidity to the market in an effort to stabilize economies. While some listeners will already understand how reserve banks conduct these operations, I figure there will be others who don’t completely grasp what takes place below the surface… To get clarity on the subject, I kindly asked Kevin Muir to appear o...

This is an episode to cover the extreme volatility in markets, following the recent outbreak of coronavirus… Joining me is Nishant Porbanderwalla, returning for a second time on Chat With Traders and here to discuss how he’s been navigating through the turmoil of a global pandemic. Nishant is a proprietary equities trader at Kershner Trading Group, with well over a decade of experience behind him....

In a recent episode, I mentioned that I'd be doing a few more interviews with less-experienced traders, who begun with $20,000 or more, have completed 12-months of full-time trading and are making a real effort to get better. Here's another one in the series... My guest is Christian Castillo, he resides in California and trades the foreign exchange market using methods of technical analysis. Altho...

Welcome back, as we continue from where we left off last time—here's the Best of Risk Management, Pt 2. Again, this is a compilation of highlights from past interviews, all of which are applicable to managing risk and staying in the game. My hopes in compiling this 'best of' episode is that you'll have a go-to reference for anytime your risk controls require attention, as well as drawing your focu...

After sifting through the archive of near-200 episodes, I’ve compiled some of the best bits pertaining to risk management. As there were many bits I deemed fitting for a ‘best of’ episode, it made sense to split the compilation across two parts—this is part one, and part two will follow next (Episode 189). The idea behind creating this compilation, is to reinforce the instrumental role that risk m...

I recently had an idea, I thought it may be an interesting exercise to have a few less-experienced traders on the show. On Twitter, I wrote that I’d like to chat with someone who: 1. Has just completed their 1st year of full-time trading 2. Started with a minimum of $20,000 3. Is or isn’t profitable (not important), as long as he/she is taking deliberate action to improve From this tweet I receive...

Joining me on this episode is Sudhu Arumugam, the co-founder and Chief Risk Officer of cryptocurrency futures exchange CoinFLEX. Though prior to this, Sudhu spent near 20-years in various trading roles for banks and hedge funds—mostly transacting in options on indices and single stocks, exotic derivatives and fixed income. We start things off by talking about Sudhu’s early days and experience in L...