Chat With Traders

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 just one day between 2009 and 2014.

And in recent news, Virtu made headlines 20th April (2017), after announcing their acquisition of rival, Knight Capital Group for $1.4 billion.

Doug is also the co-owner of NHL team, Florida Panthers—with the second owner, being none other than his Virtu co-founder, Vincent Viola.

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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, and skill vs luck.

And it’s these three things which are the over-arching theme of this episode. So hopefully, you’ll pick up a few good tips from Michael, that will help to improve your ability of making better decisions (and creating better processes) as a trader.

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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 that active traders can capitalize on the opportunity and compounding effect that (somewhat passive) longer-term investing has to offer.

So, I ask Meb about; where to start out, how to set expectations, various types of portfolios, when to enter the market, what to do during drawdown, what things new investors struggle with most, so on and so forth…

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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 the long side. So naturally, we chat about his reasons for this…

We also chat about; the leap into full-time trading, key lessons Alex learned in the early stages of his development, how he manages trades, and why journaling has been immensely helpful.

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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).

As a brief summary for some of the things we got to chat about; the value of technology which drives some trading operations, capitalizing on the explosion of data, plus why aspiring traders should be willing to buck the trend and think freely.

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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 knowing when things that “should” happen, don’t happen, and how he’s been able to successfully apply a similar trading style from the floor to the screens. Plus, how a market obsession has carried him this far…

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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 lessons he’s learned from the business of trading.

Even as CEO today, Sean is still very hands on with T3’s automated trading, so we also had an interesting conversation around this—some of his comments and views may actually surprise you. And hand traders, need not feel neglected, because there’s something in this for you to!

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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 who rely on discretion.

Then in the later part of this episode, Adam lays out a solid framework which can help struggling traders to move forward. As well as, the types of questions you should ask when you don’t know what you don’t know.

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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, how he prepares going into major news announcements, his daily process for journaling and being ready for “one good trade.” Plus, how to think about and achieve your trading goals.

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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, why there’s an incentive to normalize Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency ecosystem, potential outcomes for the future of Bitcoin, and becoming a cashless society.

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