Chat With Traders

After appearing on Chat With Traders last year for episode 156, Michael Katz returns: Mike’s a short-term equities trader and managing partner of proprietary trading firm Seven Points Capital.

The purpose of doing this episode was to have a very specific and detailed discussion about how Mike traded ride share company Lyft on the first day of its IPO (Mar 29).

And to make it easier for you to follow along with our discussion, I’ve included intraday charts with Mike’s entries and exits in the show notes—go to: chatwithtraders.com/173

Note: You are responsible for your own trading decisions. No recommendations given.

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Anthony is a proprietary futures trader from Sydney, with 10-years market experience. He's active—particularly during the night—in a range of products, such as; Australian and U.S. bonds, equity indices, currencies and a few commodities. While he's a click trader, Anthony is quite systematic with his processes and strategies—which are mostly trading spreads between correlated products.

Naturally, we speak about many things during this episode, but one of the highlights was hearing about how Anthony got himself into a six-figure drawdown and was able to claw it back in just one-month. We spend quite a bit of time breaking it down.

Anthony is also a budding podcaster, who hosts the show Minds of Motorsport. So, if you'd like to hear from people in the world of motorsport, be sure to give it a listen!

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It’s with great pleasure that I introduce to you, Stan Gluzman; an intraday equities trader at proprietary trading firm Seven Points Capital. Stan also heads up a small team of junior traders at one of the firms’ additional offices—outside of New York—in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

We discuss Stan’s path to consistent profitability as a prop trader, and then we get into specifics about the various strategies that Stan has traded in recent years—including the actual strategies that he implements today. I also ask Stan to share details about the various forms of analysis (statistical, fundamental and technical) that he uses to identify his best trading opportunities each day.

And if you like this episode, you should go back and listen to Mike Katz on episode 156. Because Mike’s the co-founder of Seven Points, and as you’ll hear, he was a mentor to Stan while he was still developing the skills to trade professionally.

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My guest on this episode is Joshua Greenwald, the CEO of a newly formed crypto derivatives exchange, LXDX. But the part that got me keen to speak with Josh, was the fact that he was a professional trader for more than 10-years prior…

Josh started his career at DRW Trading in Chicago, he then left after six years and went on to co-found Greenlight Trading—a proprietary firm specializing in low-latency options market making, almost exclusively for Asian markets. Greenlight grew to be a team of approximately 30-people, before it was acquired.

Over the next hour or so, we spoke a lot about Greenlight; the timeline from beginning development up to beginning to trade, the signals and the opportunities that they went after, and even the technology that they utilized (i.e. custom built FPGA chips).

Towards the end, we discuss what’s involved in starting an exchange, the functionality and features that are missing from most crypto exchanges but common in traditional markets. And how LXDX is using a security token offering for additional funding (not an endorsement).

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Jack Ma is a proprietary futures trader from Sydney and the head trader of Minter Capital—a firm he established this year, in which he currently mentors and backs a group of developing traders.

Jack trades an “inventory style” in the market of Australian 90-Day Bank Bills—continually working structures around his expectations of yield strip movements, with minimal exposure to outright risk. He also trades Australian 3-year and 10-year Government Bonds, but predominantly during rolls (contract expiry).

During this conversation, you’ll hear about Jack’s progression over the past 5-years—breakthroughs and lessons learned, plus his thoughts on trading as a skill (not a strategy), gaining an edge, mindset and competitiveness.

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Bobby Cho is the global head of trading at Cumberland—which is the crypto arm of Chicago trading firm, DRW and it’s one of the largest liquidity providers in the space. Prior to this, Bobby was director of trading at itBit and vice president of trading at Digital Currency Group (formerly known as SecondMarket).

After featuring on the podcast in August last year, I thought it would be fitting to check in with Bobby again, because of the events which have unfolded in cryptocurrency markets over the past 12 months…

Our conversation begins with some of the highlights from the recent Cumberland Summit—which was an industry event for insiders, and Cumberland’s international expansion. Then we get into Bitcoin’s sudden rise and decline from $20k, whether or not crypto markets have matured, decentralised exchanges, crypto’s value and use cases, institutional involvement and the bigger picture moving forward.

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For this episode, I speak with Hugo Bowne-Anderson; a data scientist at DataCamp (an educational platform for learning to code) and host of the DataFramed podcast.

The idea for asking Hugo to appear on this episode, was to chat about learning a programming language. Because for some traders, having the ability to write code can have great advantages—such as having the ability to collect stats on market behavior, perform research in a robust data-driven way, visualize large amounts of data, backtest and analyse trading ideas, implement algorithmic strategies, etc.

Plus more professional trading firms and finance related positions now require applicants to have some programming skills. And the same goes for many industries, which should be no surprise, considering a recent IBM study revealed that ‘90% of the world’s data has been created in the last two years alone.’

Hugo and I discuss when someone should consider learning to code, determining what’s relevant, the time it takes to become fluent in a programming language, working with new datasets, what to be wary of when using predictive models. And for fun, I ask Hugo (as a data scientist) how he’d go about creating a basic strategy…

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I was introduced to this weeks guest by an experienced trader and fund manager, who described him as being "hands down the best trader I know..."

Michael Samuels is an equities trader, who once traded for First New York and Apex Capital, he now trades his own money under the banner of Broome Street Capital.

Michael describes himself as being an 'event driven trader' with a primary focus on news flow surrounding mergers and acquisitions, shareholder activism and fundamentals—to seek out valuation disconnects.

During this episode you'll hear about merger-arb strategies (including examples), what happens during takeovers, a case of "excessive" due diligence, mistakes made and lessons learned during Michael's career, plus plenty more.

You should also note, Michael has recently begun hosting a podcast about M&A activity and the journalists who report on significant company news: According To Sources

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Nick Fabrio is an exceptional day trader. With a bias for short selling and playing catalysts on the Australian stock market, Nick had surpassed a million dollars in trading profits within his first three years. And all along, he’s been a self-directed ‘retail’ trader.

Although he currently lives in Texas, Nick and I were able to catch up, sit down and record this podcast while he was back in Sydney last month. We got talking about many things; from dealing chips at The Star casino to receiving threats from a company’s lawyers, analyzing market depth and everything in between.

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