Chat With Traders

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...

Jaime Rogozinski, a serial entrepreneur who resides in Mexico, is the man responsible for bringing WallStreetBets to life—the infamous and wildly popular subreddit, which proudly boasts the tagline, “Like 4Chan found a Bloomberg terminal.” In other words, WSB is an online forum (on Reddit) where the majority of it’s 700k+ members aren’t looking to establish long-term, sustainable trading careers....

Mike Mangieri’s a co-founder and managing partner of Seven Points Capital—a proprietary trading firm in New York, and with several smaller offices in other U.S. cities as well as Toronto. Although Mike occasionally trades in volatility products, his days mostly revolve around operations of the firm and overseeing the traders. Therefore he has a slightly unique perspective on things, compared to th...

Gregory Zuckerman is a writer at the Wall Street Journal and author of The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched The Quant Revolution. For anyone unfamiliar, Jim Simons is the brilliant-minded mathematician who founded hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. Using quantitative models and with billions in AUM, Renaissance has averaged annualized returns of net 39% since 1988. And these re...

Nico, who goes by @InefficientMrkt on Twitter, is an intraday equities trader. His area of expertise lies in low float, micro cap stocks, near-exclusively playing the short side of overextended moves. Nico and I spoke almost exactly 3 years ago on episode 96—which was memorably titled, "An 8-year overnight success story." Now picking up where we left off, we discuss what's been happening as of lat...

This episode features high-profile American businessman, Robert Greifeld, who from 2003-2017 served as the CEO at Nasdaq—one of the world's largest and widely known financial exchanges. Bob came into this role at a time when Nasdaq was on the verge of an internal crisis, he was tasked with turning it around and making transformational change. Throughout our conversation, he tells of the critical m...

There’s no other way to say it; Larry Hite is the definition of a market veteran, he’s someone who first developed an interest for trading and markets during the 60’s… Besides a reputation for extreme risk management, Larry is perhaps best known as co-founding Mint Investments—a hedge fund formed in 1981. He’s also considered to be one of the forefathers of trading systems and a pioneer of trend f...

For many, this will likely be the first time hearing about Mike Komaransky, but those who know him already, know him as a Bitcoin OG—and deservedly so, as he began accumulating the cryptocurrency around 2010. Though Mike has been a professional trader of fixed income derivatives since 2001, when he joined powerhouse trading firm DRW. Mike later became a partner at DRW, and in 2014 he launched its...

Returning guest Nick Radge is a systematic trader of trend following, momentum and mean reversion strategies—which he runs across Australian and U.S. equity markets. When I asked Nick if he'd be willing to do another podcast, I said to him, "This time around, I'd like to discuss something very specific with you; how to create a simple trend following system." So, that's exactly what we did; a comp...