Chat With Traders

Up until recently, James King was the Performance Director at a commodity trading firm in London, Mandara Capital. And it was here that he implemented scientific methods to stack probability in the favour of success—by using techniques he learned from his education in Applied Sports Science and Performance Psychology.

Now, James is setting out on a new venture, Project Thor, which aims to support talented retail traders with extra capital and other beneficial resources—which we discuss briefly towards the end of the episode.

But for the most part, we discuss; principals for success, testing for resilience, ensuring you’re motivated and focusing on the right things, how ‘stretch goals’ can be used to massively multiply results, routines and heaps more.

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Mark Gardner began working in the field at 17-years old, straight out of high school. Initially he began with back office duties, before broking on the floor of the Sydney Futures Exchange (SFE). Then later he was picked up by a large Bank Bills trader to exclusively execute trades, and who he learned a great deal from.

Around 2005, Mark started trading his own book. Over the 10-years that followed, Mark had only two losing months—and to date, he’s never encountered a losing year. Though in 2015 he did suffer a substantial blow, losing months and months worth of gains in the space of just a few short hours.

Today, Mark is also a partner and the chairman of Genesis Trading (one of the larger prop firms in Australia). He’s also leading a new venture, 42Trading, as a foray into quantitative trading. And to top it off, Mark is the president of the Australian Securities Traders Association too.

Throughout this episode we speak about Mark's insane work ethic (and no, that's not exaggeration!) We also get into lessons from his past, why he sees a future in quantitative trading and more...

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Morgan’s career as a trader and portfolio manager began 20-years back, and since then he’s worked at many prominent firms and funds—to name just a few; Millburn Ridgefield, Merrill Lynch, Citadel and Allston Trading.

He’s currently the CEO of CloudQuant, a cloud-based algo development platform and fund.

During our conversation, Morgan explains why he feels as though the ‘common’ approach to strategy development can be counter intuitive, and he gives an alternative 3-step formula. We also spend time discussing how machine learning fits into a traders toolbox

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Ben Mallah is a trader of a different kind—he doesn’t trade stocks and bonds, he trades in real estate. You could probably call him a property developer, although he doesn’t build from scratch; he buys distressed apartment buildings, hotels and shopping centers, fixes them up, and then sells to make a profit.

He grew up in one of the roughest areas of New York and had a very tough upbringing, but Ben is the true definition of a ‘rags to riches’ story…

During his early 20’s, as a side hustle while working in the military, Ben began getting into real estate. Thirty years have since passed, and in that time, he’s built up a real estate empire worth (approximately) $200,000,000.

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Victor Haghani began his career at Salomon Brothers in 1984, starting out in a research role before joining their prop trading desk. In 1992, Victor left Salomon to become one of the founding partners of Long Term Capital Management…

LTCM was an incredibly successful hedge fund, up until 1998, when it failed in a spectacular fashion. Causing the Federal Reserve to step in and organize a bailout, in order to prevent the possibility of a collapse in the global financial system.

Victor took a ten year sabbatical after the dust settled, and in 2010 he founded an active index investing fund, Elm Partners.

For this episode, much of our discussion is in reference to an experiment Victor carried out (with some involvement from Edward Thorp), on the patterns of how 61 participants would bet on a biased coin.

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Andy has been an active stock trader since the early 90’s, and in 2001 he founded Kershner Trading Group—a proprietary trading and technology firm in Austin (Texas) and, through a partnership with SMB Capital, Kershner Trading have a second office in Midtown (Manhattan) too.

So, what did we talk about? Andy's ability to take pain on adverse positions, whether or not this has been a key ingredient to his trading success, and do traders with higher risk tolerances make more money. Andy also shares his daily habits and critiques a trade which didn't go so well from the session prior to recording this episode. And naturally, we cover a few other things too...

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Though not a trader herself, Nell Sloane has been in and around markets and exchanges for roughly 30-years, mostly working in roles that assisted commodity traders and brokers in one way or another.

Then since 2006, Nell has been the Principal of Capital Trading Group—a Chicago investment firm, which she co-founded with Patrick Lafferty. And this is the reason why I asked Nell to come on the podcast; because the role of CTG is to support traders who wish to expand their operation by managing money for others as a CTA.

CTG do also offer services to professional and individual investors to help them navigate managed futures. But for this episode, we focus on…

What does it mean to be a CTA, the incentives to become a CTA and where to begin, fee structures, the requirements and regulations, how to attract capital from investors, and other related subjects.

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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 firms—for example; Tibra, Optiver, Tower Research, Citadel, Millennium Partners, amongst many others.

Matthew’s deeply knowledgeable on the industry, and he’s won many awards for doing what he does…

During this episode we get talking about; tips for getting hired, the skills which are most in demand, what firms are looking for, also, how firms attempt to attract and retain talent, various compensation structures – and everything in between!

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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 become very consistent and profitable. (If you’re interested, max regularly posts PnL on his Twitter account.)

To mention a few of the things we discussed; how traders can benefit from being independent thinkers, the nature of scalping strategies, optimizing your workflow, mindset and improving your psychological game, and plenty more.

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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; Cygnet Trading.

The main focus of this episode can be summarized with just a few words; grit, hustle and intent. Further, Darren speaks about paying your dues, why environment is everything, and a window into the life of a discretionary prop trader.

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