Chat With Traders

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...

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...