Chat With Traders

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....

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...