Chat With Traders

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 returns only become more spectacular, once you discover that Renaissance investors pay a management and performance fee of 5 and 44—therefore bringing the gross annualized returns to 66%.

Due to the superior performance, today, Jim has an estimated net worth of $23-billion. Greg describes him as being, “The greatest money maker in modern financial history.”

Although journalists have previously covered the rise of Renaissance, for the longest time, much of it was still shrouded with mystery. But by gaining remarkable access to Jim and also many of the people around him, Greg has been able to tell the full story, in print, with detail and accuracy.

Pick up a copy of The Man Who Solved the Market, available on Amazon.

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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 late...

The most notable development being; after many years trading retail, Nico has gone into proprietary trading with Seven Points Capital. Going one step further, he has also established and heads up the firms' San Diego office.

During the second half of this episode (from 40:20), I ask Nico to share how he's evolved as a trader in recent years—or more specifically; what has changed, what remains the same and what's been fine tuned.

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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 moments and drastic actions, insight to Nasdaq's many acquisitions and its business model, plus lessons in leadership and career advice.

Having since stepped down from Nasdaq CEO, Bob's recently written a book that details his entire experience at the helm. The book is titled Market Mover, and you can get a copy here.

Today, Bob is the managing partner of Cornerstone Investment Capital—a fin-tech investment firm, and the Chairman of Virtu Financial—a prominent trading and technology firm.

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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 following.

By 1988, Mint achieved an average annual compounded return of over 30%—it’s best year being 60% (in 1987, the year of the stock market crash) and it’s worst year up 13%.

By 1990, Mint was the world’s largest hedge fund at the time, with $1-billion of assets under management. It was also around this time, that Mint’s performance caught the attention of Jack Schwager, as Larry was profiled and interviewed in the first book of the best-selling Market Wizards series.

Now almost 30-years on, Larry has written a book of his own titled The Rule. It reflects on life experiences, trading lessons, and pretty much, how the most unlikely kid in the classroom went on to generate a significant personal fortune.

During this episode, Larry and I discuss trading, risk philosophy and probability, life and memorable moments, and Larry’s work as a philanthropist too.

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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 cryptocurrency trading business Cumberland—which grew to become one of the world’s largest market makers.

After leaving the company in 2017 and a hiatus from active trading, Mike has returned as the founder and head of Grapefruit Trading.

Over the course of our conversation, we chat about; Mike’s distinguished trading career, the strange ways that he bought Bitcoin in the past (when it was far less accessible), Cumberland’s participation in the auction of seized Bitcoin from the Silk Road bust, Mike’s disdain for technical analysis, and plenty more…

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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 complete breakdown of Nick's process. This includes details about strategy objectives and idea generation, portfolio testing and analyzing results, position sizing and risk management, and execution in a live market.

This episode should be helpful for anyone interested in riding big market trends (regardless of asset class). And even if trend following doesn't overly appeal to you, then you'll still pick up useful insight to trading systems.

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This episode features Sam Bankman-Fried, who’s trading skill originated from 3-years at Jane Street—a proprietary trading firm renown for being one of the world’s largest ETF liquidity providers.

In late-2017, Sam relocated to Hong Kong and began his foray into the cryptocurrency market when he co-founded Alameda Research. Alameda trade a range of quantitative strategies—such as statistical arbitrage and market making—which are mostly automated, but with a layer of human intervention.

Within 2-years Alameda has grown to a point, where each day, it does approximately one billion dollars of turnover across 35 exchanges, accounting for somewhere near 5% of global crypto volume.

Sam and I got to discuss many aspects of how Alameda operate and how his team have found lucrative opportunity amongst a chaotic environment…

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This episode takes on a slightly different format to normal. Essentially, it’s a response to an email that I received from a listener…

The email comes from a gentleman who’s 38 years old with a full-time job, his wife is currently studying and he has three kids. He also has the goal to transition out of his current career into full-time trading, but he has a family who are dependent on his income. And that’s the part he has questions about.

Therefore, I asked Alex (@TAGRtrades) if he’d be willing to join me on this episode and share his thoughts on the matter. Alex is a full-time day trader, who has developed skill for trading long side momentum in U.S. equities. He’s also appeared previously on episodes 119 and 157.

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Jonathan Shapiro's a senior reporter at the Australian Financial Review. While he writes about a range of subjects from banking to hedge funds to private equity, he's renown for stories that uncover dishonesty and the crafty schemes of listed companies—for which, he's won several awards.

Our conversation begins with Jonathan telling the story of Blue Sky Alternative, a fund manager that came unstuck following the release of a short sellers research report. From there, we roll into a very detailed discussion about about Jonathan's investigative work on Big Un.

Without saying too much, Big was a video marketing company listed on the Australian stock market and a top performer in 2017. But as you'll soon hear, Jonathan discovered much of it was smoke in mirrors...

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’d like you to meet part-time Bollywood DJ, full-time equities trader: Nishant Porbanderwalla.

For the past 12-years and ever since leaving college, Nish has been a proprietary trader at Kershner Trading Group—KTG is a trading firm in Austin (Texas) founded by Andy Kershner, who appeared back on episode 128.

Nish was very open in talking about the ups and downs he’s endured throughout his career, including actual PnL and the psychological states. He also tells an incredible story from trading the Flash Crash of August 2015—although it was only a very short moment in time, it’s a perfect example of what happens when experience meets opportunity.

Additionally, Nish gives insight to his trading strategies (past and present), and you’ll pick up a few of his general trading thoughts for how to perform at a high level.

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