Chat With Traders

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, Bob and a partner formed Bright Trading in 1992—at its peak, the firm was home to 490-traders across 42-offices in the U.S.

Today, at 80-years of age and undoubtedly a market legend, Bob remains an active trader and a serious high stakes poker player.

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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 quantitative investment firm, relies on rigorous research to develop its various model-driven strategies. For the most part, these are mean expansion strategies that generate alpha from being long volatility.

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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 investment process. This includes talk of; researching companies and prerequisites for investing, the role of analysts and brokers in providing information and flow, and managing investments.

It also includes a detailed discussion about the various types of execution algorithms he’ll use for buying and selling large volumes of stock.

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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 links are listed in the show notes at: chatwithtraders.com/200

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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 will follow shortly.

Besides creating a go-to trading psychology resource, I hope this might also highlight some past episodes that you’ve not yet heard. If you’d like to hear the full interview with any guest featured, you’ll find a link in the show notes: chatwithtraders.com/199

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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 experience and minimal insight to the hedge fund industry. Not to mention, the three had almost no money, so Domeyard is also one of the few hedge funds that went out and raised money from VC’s (such as Softbank and a RenTech co-founder) as a necessary means to launch.

Now eight years on, the Boston-based fund is well-established and well-passed the start-up phase. Domeyard trades thousands of times daily, sometimes exceeding 10,000 trades across various futures products. And during its single biggest day this year, the fund did turnover in excess of $7-billion dollars.

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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 milliseconds quicker than other market participants. Haim also draws comparisons of the various technologies used to transmit data (shortwave, microwave and fibre optic cable), and going beyond the connection, how firms further optimise for speed, plus what’s next in the race to zero.

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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 in life prior to trading, how he landed a seat on a proprietary trading desk, lessons from losing money month after month, how he began to develop an edge, Ryan’s take on trader psychology, a recap of his best and worst days, and ares in which he’s trying to improve upon.

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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 operate and to delve into some of the technical aspects of ETFs. In summary, the topics we cover: risks for ETF managers, how ETF managers make money, the necessity of designated market makers, how ‘short’ and ‘leveraged’ ETFs trade as intended, tips for investing in ETFs and researchable ideas for trading ETFs.

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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 afternoon, plunged approximately 9% and then almost completely rebounded, all in the space of just 30-minutes.

While Liam speaks on many interesting moments from Nav’s life in this episode—from beginning as prop trader in 2003, through to when he was extradited to the U.S. in 2016—it’s only a sample of what’s covered in the book (an absolute must-read!)

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