The AlphaMind Podcast

A young man amasses $70,000,000 in trading profits, is accused of causing one of the biggest Stock Market Crashes ever, is the subject of a major US govt investigation and a multimillion-dollar manhunt, and all from his upstairs bedroom, in his parent’s modest house, in an ordinary London suburb, without his family or friends having a clue. 

This week’s guest, Liam Vaughan, wrote the book ‘Flash Crash’, which tells the incredible story of Navinder Singh Sarao and the 2010 Flash-crash. 

In this modern Robin Hood tale, Vaughan tells how Sarao managed to become one of world’s top 5 trading participants by volume in the e-mini S&P futures globally. This futures contract is one of the world’s largest and most actively traded contracts, with other participants in this market include major investment banks, international investment firms and global hedge funds. 

Vaughan, who also wrote the book ’The Fix’, about the LIBOR scandal is a master story teller. In this interview, Steven Goldstein and Mark Randall, both market veterans, and former participants in the futures market, discuss with Liam in an open and frank manner a wide range of themes and topics about this incredible story including:

• Did Sarao’s obsession growing up playing computer games may have come to be a major advantage to his screen-based trading activities.
• The paradoxes in Sarao’s character traits and how these supported his success as a trader but at the same time left him vulnerable in other areas of his life.      
• How Navinder’s gifts and mental attributes, seen by some as learning difficulties, probably worked in his favour in his trading activities. 
• How Navinder’s mindset and very different relationship with money may have contributed to his fearlessness and his trading style. 
• Having a grudging admiration for what Sarao achieved
• How the laws changed after Sarao commenced his spoofing activities and after the Flashcrash. 
• How Navinder’s activity exposed the frailties within the Electronic Futures Trading system and how new platforms increasingly developed the ability to manipulate markets. 
• How Navinder had felt the market was rigged against him by other people who had unfair advantages, including other spoofers and HFT traders. 
• Debating whether his activities followed the failure of the authorities to act on his complaints about the activities of others, and whether by ignoring the authorities effectively green-lighted his activities.  
• The huge gulf which exists between the resources and level of expertise in those regulating and policing trading activities and those of the firms and people engaging in activities in markets.
• The importance of balance between your trading activities, and the other parts of your life.  
• Whether Navinder was ultimately a victim in this story. 

You can find our more about Liam on his website https://liamvaughan.co.uk/ and can order the book direct form there. - The book was released in May this year in Hardback, Audible or Kindle form iand s called Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History. 

AlphaMind: Powering Performance in Global Markets
AlphaMind brings powerful change, growth and development to people and businesses within global markets.

Driven by a deep understanding of how markets work, and how people and businesses function within them, we partner with clients to create personal performance improvements that elevate returns across their trading activities.

Go to the AlphaMind website to know more.

A winning mindset is at least as important to trading success as the strategies and tactics you deploy. But how much effort do put into developing a winning mindset?

Having a robust system or method for finding value, an appropriate philosophy to risk, a strong risk management practice, a thorough understanding of markets are all prerequisites for success. However, it is the combination of these factors allied to a winning mindset, which is where great performance occurs. This is the secret to success in financial markets. 

In this episode we chatted with Damian Hughes, one of the world’s leading experts on cultivating a high-performance mindset. Damian has worked with multiple Olympic medal winners, world champion boxers, and sports team such as Barcelona, Manchester United and the Scotland Rugby Team.

Damian also works with high performance teams in organisations and is a Professor of Organisational Psychology and Change at a leading British University. He has written extensively about developing a winner’s mindset, and his work is endorsed by many of the legends of high performance, including the late great Mohammad Ali, Tiger Woods, Dame Kelly Holmes, Johnny Wilkinson and many others.

You can find out more about this episode on our blogpage here: 

Damian’s books include: ‘

·        The Winning Mindset: What Sport Can Teach Us About Great Leadership.

·        Liquid Thinking: Inspirational Lessons from the World's Great Achievers

·        The Barcelona Way: How to Create a High-Performance Culture

Damian is co-host of the High Performance Podcast with Jake Humphries of BT Sport.

His website is http://www.liquidthinker.com/

AlphaMind: Powering Performance in Global Markets
AlphaMind brings powerful change, growth and development to people and businesses within global markets.

Driven by a deep understanding of how markets work, and how people and businesses function within them, we partner with clients to create personal performance improvements that elevate returns across their trading activities.

Go to the AlphaMind website to know more.

Brian is a retail trader who placed his first trade in 1967. Brian still actively trades, is a mentor at the Bear Bull Traders community and is author of ‘How To Swing Trade: A Beginner’s Guide to Trading Tools, Money Management, Rules, Routines and Strategies of a Swing Trader’. 

In this episode we had a rich conversation with Brian covering a wide range of themes including: 

• How Swing Trading enables a trader to take advantage of short-term trends, longer term trends, and over-extensions.
• How people can identify which trading style is best for them. 
• How swing-trading enables a thought out trade process that is easy to fit into a lifestyle where you have other priorities which require your time. 
• Fishing for ideas by using approaches which scan thousands of stocks using scanning tools and exchanging ideas with others whom you trust and identify with.
• How to make sense of the ideas by doing your homework, developing a fundamental understanding of markets and conceptualising plans for the trade.
• The importance of having a fundamental understanding of background and context to a market or sector, and understanding where and how money is rotating into and out of sectors. 
• The psychological challenges of sticking with trades and not taking profit early so that performance is compromised.
• Improving the psychological aspects of trading and working on fighting human nature and mental state. 
• The importance of balance in your life, healthy lifestyle, physical health, managing your day, staying mentally healthy.
• The huge importance of having a Risk Management process.  
• Being able to continually adapt strategies to whats working and current.

AlphaMind: Powering Performance in Global Markets
AlphaMind brings powerful change, growth and development to people and businesses within global markets.

Driven by a deep understanding of how markets work, and how people and businesses function within them, we partner with clients to create personal performance improvements that elevate returns across their trading activities.

Go to the AlphaMind website to know more.

The very essence of the challenge of trading and investing is making great decisions, under time pressured situations, when faced with extreme uncertainty. 

The very essence of the challenge of trading and investing is making great decisions, under time pressured situations, when faced with extreme uncertainty. Traders are making decisions in the moment, under-pressure, in the face of volatile and uncertain news flow, whilst battling their own fickle emotions and internal doubts. Success lies in the trader’s ability to make the right decision in these situations, no easy task.

Intuition lies at the root of great decision-making. And there is no person in the world more qualified to talk about Intuition and Decision-Making under pressure in uncertain and time limited situations than Dr Gary Klein. 

Dr Klein has studied and practiced in this field for almost 5 decades. He is credited with creating a whole new field of study, Naturalist Decision Making. And his work has been applied to help improve how people make choices in life and death studies.

Prior to Dr Klein’s Naturalistic Decision Making approach, psychologists used laboratory settings to study how people make decisions, with a heavy focus on human bias and errors in judgment. Dr Klein flipped the focus to conducting decision research in real world settings, studying how experts including firefighters, military battle commanders, and doctors use intuition and experience to engage in effective decision-making. 

Dr Klein has received praise from psychologists and researchers whose perspectives have differed dramatically from his own. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman wrote, "Gary Klein is a living example of how useful applied psychology can be when it is done well...Klein and I disagree on many things...But I am convinced that there should be more psychologists like him."

Amongst some of the innovations which have emerged from Dr Klein’s work is the Pre-Mortem tool. Dr Klein presented the ‘Pre-Mortem’ as a tool for improving thinking, planning and risk management of projects in a 2007 edition of the Harvard Business Review, which can be viewed here. He also founded a method of teaching expert decision-making used an approach called the shadowbox method. 

Among subjects discussed were:  

• How the Pre-Mortem tool improves decision-making. 
• Developing expert decision-making using the ‘Shadowbox’ method. 
• How the Recognition Primed Decision-Making model captures how experts make decisions.
• The role of intuition and pattern recognition in decision making. 
• Learning how to use AI tools to aid decision-making. 
• The Naturalistic Decision Making approach to Behavioural Finance compared to the Biases and Heuristics approach. 
• How experienced traders develop the ability to recognise patterns intuitively which enable them to anticipate price moves in ways which even machines have not yet been able to match. 

Dr Klein also shared some fascinating stories from his years in this field, told in his own inimitable style.

You can learn more about Dr Klein at the Shadowbox website: 
https://www.shadowboxtraining.com/ 

You can also follow Dr Klein on twitter @KleInsight and if you are interested in joining a live webcast event Dr Klein is running next week jointly with Bryce Hoffman of Red Team Training. Details of this can be found here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rtt-premortem-analysis-tickets-104166189878

AlphaMind: Powering Performance in Global Markets
AlphaMind brings powerful change, growth and development to people and businesses within global markets.

Driven by a deep understanding of how markets work, and how people and businesses function within them, we partner with clients to create personal performance improvements that elevate returns across their trading activities.

Go to the AlphaMind website to know more.

AlphaMind podcast host Steven Goldstein worked for almost 25 years as a professional trader at Investment Banks in both Market-Making and Proprietary Trading roles. In his battle to succeed, Steven was always looking to improve and find the secrets to success. To help him on this journey, Steven developed his own set of guiding principles which were personal to him. Over time these principles formed and emerged, and later in his career he collated them into a list of 15 principles and reminders, which he called his 'Golden Trading Guidelines'.

These principles and reminders helped him shape his philosophy to risk, kept him on a productive path, and brought him back to that path when he veered to far from it. 

In this episode, Steven, who now works as a Performance Coach for professional and retail traders, is interviewed by podcast co-host Mark Randall about these 15 guidelines. 

Steven and Mark engage in an in-depth and lively discussion about the Guidelines, with Mark asking probing questions and sharing his own thoughts brought up by Steven's responses.

This discussion will resonate with traders and investors from across the spectrum of markets as they recognise their own performance challenges that they themselves face as they seek to navigate their journey to success in financial markets. 

To find out more about Steven’s Golden Trading Guidelines, you can visit the AlphaMind Blog page https://alphamindblog.blogspot.com where an accompanying article to this episode can be found with a list of the guidelines. Alternatively, go direct to the article here:
https://alphamindblog.blogspot.com/2020/05/alphamind-blog-episode-steven-goldstein.html

AlphaMind: Powering Performance in Global Markets
AlphaMind brings powerful change, growth and development to people and businesses within global markets.

Driven by a deep understanding of how markets work, and how people and businesses function within them, we partner with clients to create personal performance improvements that elevate returns across their trading activities.

Go to the AlphaMind website to know more.

Bitcoin, and the world of cryptocurrency, divides opinion. At one end of the scale you’ll find the cynics and sceptics, at the other end those who are fascinated by all things crypto, and in between is everyone else, by varying degrees. 

The needle is however moving on this scale: Many cynics are becoming less cynical and more curious, and some of the more curious are starting to dabble in crypto as an investable asset class and a tradable instrument. 

In the past week, Paul Tudor-Jones has announced that he has a small proportion of his private assets invested in bitcoin, whilst Renaissance Technologies, the world’s most successful hedge fund, has started exploring the possibility of trading Bitcoin futures.

This week, there is a lot of excitement around the Bitcoin ‘halving’ event, and articles about Bitcoin ‘Stock to Flow’ have recently grabbed a lot of attention. 

In this episode, we have conducted our first interview with someone form the crypto world. We talk with Paul Gordon, founder of Coinscrum.

Paul is a former futures trader and broker who worked for major investment banks such as HSBC, and traded for himself. Paul become interested in Bitcoin well ahead of it gaining more widespread interest, and in 2012 founded Coinscrum, the world's first, and still the largest and most active, bitcoin/blockchain networking group. Soon afterwards, he left the world of futures trading to become involved in the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as an investor, advisor, consultant, and advocate.  

There are probably few people in the world who have the combined breadth of knowledge, and experience of markets and crypto that Paul has. He can seamlessly talk about the worlds of trading, broking, market analysis, and Bitcoin, crypto, and blockchain as well as their various technical aspects with a depth which will become clear as you listen to this episode.  

Paul talks about the rise of cryptocurrencies, how they derive value, some of the challenges they face in gaining wider acceptance and credibility, and where they are on the journey to becoming more accepted as investable assets and tradable currencies. 

Paul shares his knowledge and opinion in ways which will illuminate your understanding of cryptocurrencies in ways that few others can. 

This interview has something for the cynical, the curious and everyone in between. 

Paul also shares some of his own long-term analysis on the Bitcoin price and where it may be heading, though we would point out that Paul’s analysis and opinions, and those of all of us here at the AlphaMind podcast, do not constitute investment advice and are not to be taken as investment advice. 

To know more about the content of this podcast, please also visit the podcast episode page on our blog.

AlphaMind: Powering Performance in Global Markets
AlphaMind brings powerful change, growth and development to people and businesses within global markets.

Driven by a deep understanding of how markets work, and how people and businesses function within them, we partner with clients to create personal performance improvements that elevate returns across their trading activities.

Go to the AlphaMind website to know more.

This week’s guest is Dr Brian Keating, Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of California, San Diego.

In this podcast, we interview Dr Keating about some of the connections which bind trading, investing and science. Dr Keating talks about how scientists, despite being held on some sort of an intellectual pedestal, are human, and are just as prone to the foibles and behavioural errors which are common to people in all fields, including trading.

The theme, which resonates throughout this interview, alludes to the meta game of science and trading, something which was captured in a quote by Dr Keating, and which featured prominently in Greg Zuckerman’s 2019 book about the trading legend Jim Simons, ‘The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution.’ The quote is: 

‘Scientists are human, sometimes all too human. When desire and data are in collision, evidence sometimes loses out to emotion.’ 

Amongst main themes explored in this interview are; confirmation bias, ego, and our ability, or even inability, to separate our outcomes from our ego.

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Dr Keating's research area is the study of the cosmic microwave background and its relationship to the origin and evolution of the universe. In 2001 Dr Keating conceived the first Cosmic Microwave Background B-mode observing campaign, called BICEP, which sought to find evidence of what (and how) the universe looked a fraction of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang Explosion.

The BICEP project has been an outstanding success, and is still on-going today, however, it has never quite been able to achieve, unequivocally, its main and original purpose. Had it done so, we would almost certainly be talking to Dr Brian Keating, Nobel Laureate. 

Dr Keating is the author of the popular science book ‘Losing the Nobel Prize’, which was selected by Amazon as one of the top science books of 2018.

AlphaMind: Powering Performance in Global Markets
AlphaMind brings powerful change, growth and development to people and businesses within global markets.

Driven by a deep understanding of how markets work, and how people and businesses function within them, we partner with clients to create personal performance improvements that elevate returns across their trading activities.

Go to the AlphaMind website to know more.

Andrew Aziz is a Retail Trader, Founder of the Bear Bull Community of Traders and is author of Amazon top-selling book, ‘How to Day Trade for a Living: Tools, Tactics, Money Management, Discipline and Trading Psychology’. 

Andrew talks about his journey into trading after completing a PhD in Chemical Engineering, then abandoning a career in that field to focus on becoming a trader. 

In this excellent interview Andrew opens up and shares his views on a wide range of themes, including how easy it is for traders to access markets but equally how difficult it is for traders due to the lack of mentors and guides, and how little good advice is available, allied to people’s over-optimism with regard to the realities of trading.  

Themes discussed in this podcast include self-awareness, and how this leads to greater self-confidence, self-management, growth and progress. We also talk about the dreaded ego enemy and Andrew shares stories of when ego got the better of him in his trading in ways that were to prove extremely costly. 

Andrews own humility shines through clearly in this podcast.

AlphaMind: Powering Performance in Global Markets
AlphaMind brings powerful change, growth and development to people and businesses within global markets.

Driven by a deep understanding of how markets work, and how people and businesses function within them, we partner with clients to create personal performance improvements that elevate returns across their trading activities.

Go to the AlphaMind website to know more.

Mark Randall is Co-Host of the AlphaMind Podcast, but this week he becomes the interview guest. 

Mark is one of the world’s leaders in the delivery of Performance-Based Mindfulness. He works primarily with corporates, including board-level leaders and people in senior management roles, as well as with traders and investors. 

Mark’s outlook and perspectives with regard to mindfulness have evolved from over 30 years working as a broker in the International Futures and Options markets for some of the world’s leading investment firms, where he developed his own mindfulness skills and practice to enable him to self-manage and thrive in this challenging and highly pressurised world. 

In this podcast, Mark shares his thought and reflections on how Mindfulness enables people to be ‘” Fully Present’ and at the "Top of Their Game" when their work and their job requires them to be so. He sees Mindfulness as adding both ‘a coat of armour’, a shield and a weapon, with which to go into battle daily in the highly challenging and uncertain world of Financial Markets. 

Mark moves beyond the more traditional, and what some would call the softer aspects of Mindfulness, to look at it as a tool to weaponize the mind. 

AlphaMind: Powering Performance in Global Markets
AlphaMind brings powerful change, growth and development to people and businesses within global markets.

Driven by a deep understanding of how markets work, and how people and businesses function within them, we partner with clients to create personal performance improvements that elevate returns across their trading activities.

Go to the AlphaMind website to know more.

The last few weeks have seen traumatic times in the financial markets. Trading conditions in all markets have seen unparalleled volatility and liquidity levels in excess of the worst of 2008 and which few have ever experienced. 

In this special one-off episode we hear from 4 'Masters of the Markets, who each have been previous guests on the AlphaMind podcast and who have agreed to share their reflections and experiences of the past few week's violent market conditions.

The guests are :

Anthoney Crudele: Veteran S&P futures trader, and host of The Futures Radio Show podcast.

Brett Steenbarger: Trading Psychologist, Author and Coach to Hedge Fund Portfolio Managers and a market investor.

Adam Nash: A highly successful and distinguised trader with over 3 decades trading European Rates & Bond Markets futures. 

Greg Gossett: Greg has spent over 23 years as US Equities Retail Trader and has established an excellent track record in that time.  

These distinguished guests possess vast amounts of experience in financial markets and represent a range of styles, markets, and areas of expertise. 

Over the course of these 4 ten minute interviews, each of these guests share valuable advice insights and perspectives of the past few weeks volatile and highly challenging market price actions. 

Listeners will find this episode a tremendous resource to help them navigate these wild and unprecedented market conditions, which may be a more frequent feature of the markets as this crisis continues to unfold.

AlphaMind: Powering Performance in Global Markets
AlphaMind brings powerful change, growth and development to people and businesses within global markets.

Driven by a deep understanding of how markets work, and how people and businesses function within them, we partner with clients to create personal performance improvements that elevate returns across their trading activities.

Go to the AlphaMind website to know more.