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The Psychology of Money - Managing Billions - Inside Wall Street with Mark Putrino
" I had professors that were literally Nobel prize winners and I think Mario Gabelli is probably the smartest person I've ever met. "
"I've seen people get destroyed emotionally by trading. I've seen Steve Cohen make a $9 million profit In 5 minutes, both extremes, from the guy who gets actually crushed to the guy to become a billionaire and buy the New York Mets."
"I have traded through the .com bubble, 9/11, Commodities bubble the housing bubble and we've had the cannabis stock bubble a few years ago and then March 2020 Covid"
"What fascinates me about the markets is you see these historical things repeat themselves"
What does it take to trade with the likes of legendary Wall Street Traders Steve Cohen and Mario Gabelli?
Do you need to be a good chess player? Be great at poker? Have nerves of steel? Be smarter than Nobel Prize-Winning Professors?
In this episode, we take you inside famous hedge-funds like Steve Cohen's S.A.C Capital which the TV series Billions was based on, or Mario Gabelli's GAMCO Investors where 5 minutes can make you or break you.
Rodrigo Cerda speaks with Mark Putrino, former hedge-fund manager, Chief Market Technician, and Lead Educator at Benzinga Trading School about the rules of the game.
Guest:
Mark Putrino
Chief Market Technician, and Lead Educator at Benzinga Trading School
Host:
Rodrigo Cerda
Benzinga Pro Product Expert
Transcript:
R: Welcome to today's podcast Inside Wall Street, Mark. Putrino. How are you doing, man?
M:I'm doing great. Rodrigo. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
R: I know that you've had some experience trading in some really big funds with Steve Cohen and Mario Gabelli. Those are some legendary investors.
M: Mario Gabelli. He hired me. I met him when I was in business school. I was at the University of New York business school in the city. I'm in Greenwich village, but anyway, I met Mario make a long story short. He hired me when there was an opening on the trading desk and I went in there and at the time I don't this was a while ago. I don't remember how. Mario managed back then it was like maybe three to $5 billion. Now I think he manages an excess 50 billion, maybe like I had professors that were literally Nobel prize winners. Literally and I think like Gabelli is probably like the smartest person I've ever met. But anyway, I was fortunate enough that I had a spot there. He had a broker dealer and I went in there and I was a market. Making markets and penny stocks and some of the stocks that we were trading after a few years there, I decided to move basically to make more money. And I went over and that's when I joined Steve Cohen at SAC, which whenever I tell people I worked at SAC, the question is always, oh, is Billions realistic or is Billions real ? I haven't seen Billions, but I am making a promise to people that I will watch. Now when I was there, that's when I got my first exposure to charting and people looking at charts and technicals Gabelli was more of a traditional value manager. He's not really looking at charts. He's more of the Graham and Dodd school of looking at price, earnings, ratios, that kind of things. But when I was at SAC, a lot of the people that I saw around. We're really into trading off the charts. And that's where I really got to start to learn, to teach myself about it.
R:What actually got you into trading the first time? How did you get into it?
M: I grew up we weren't like poor or starving or anything like that, but I grew up pretty poor in a really wealthy town in Greenwich county. And when I was a kid I used to feel insecure about it. And I remember I used to ride my bike around or whatever, and I would look at all these big mansions and stuff. And I would think what do these people do that can make them live in these big mansions and these biggest states and everything. So that kind of brought me into wall street. Then once I got to wall street, it was very different than I thought it would be. But what I find fascinating about. Is at this point it's not really about money because I've learned that you can have a lot of money and still be a miserable person or vice versa have a little bit of money or no money and still be very nice person. But anyway, what fascinates me about the markets is one is I'm really into history and you see these historical things repeat themselves. In the market. Like for example, people ask me like, all right how do you know when the market is at a top? And I tell people the market is at a top. When people start saying this time, it's different, right? This time is different. Now think about this, right? In the 1920s in the booming twenties or the roaring twenties, the market was really ripping higher. There was this new terminology that got developed, where analysts talked about old era stocks and new era stock. People were saying this time it's different. The old stocks like say. Whatever United saddle maker or United or shoe maker, that's all. That's all. That's. We do that with traditional valuation. These new stocks are different. This time is different. They're new. It could have been, I don't know what was going on in the twenties. Maybe telephone or maybe radio. So what happened? Sure enough, the market collapses and great depression. Now you fast forward into the internet bubble. And that's right when I came in the late nineties and people started saying, this time is different. You have new economy stocks and old economy stocks. And if people that are listening to me, I've been in the markets and can remember them. I'm sure they will. And the whole thing was like Minnesota manufacturer mining, that's an old economy stock we use traditional valuations for that, but now we have pets dot. The same rules don't apply now it's different. We can instead of valuing a company on how much money they make, we can value company based on how many clicks are on their website. This time it's different, sure enough, the market blew up we've over the past couple of months, and this is one of the things that led me in the class. I've seen a couple articles where people say this time it's different and I've pointed them out in class. Like one particular article said that the rules are being rewritten in the VIX index for VIX trading. Now that was the article, right? The rules are being rewritten.When you say the rules are being rewritten, what are you saying? You're saying this time it's different. So this particular writer or analyst noted that. Even though the market was rallying, the VIX index was going higher. The VIX index is, it is what we call an implied volatility index of options. The easiest way to look at it is pretend it's insurance. A portfolio manager buys options to protect their portfolio. If a portfolio manager thinks the portfolio is going to go down, they may go and buy options as insurance. They would buy options or contracts that go up in value. If the portfolio goes down, it's a hedge. All right. So whenever we have these big blowups, like for instance, in the COVID crash and March of 20, the VIX index, the index, which measures essentially how much managers are willing to pay for that in short insurance goes sky. Because managers are panicking, they think the market is going to drop even farther. So they don't mind paying higher prices for insurance. Just I don't know if you live somewhere where there was where there was going to be a fire. You wouldn't mind paying more for insurance, traditionally analysts have called this VIX index, the fair index, but here's the thing. And here's where this analysis was wrong. And here's why it's not different. Even though people think it is in a moment of euphoria where markets are really booming. All right. And portfolio managers will pay higher premiums to get into those positions. If a market's is really taken off and a portfolio manager wants to perhaps buy some puts to lock in their gains, they're going to pay willing to pay a higher premium. So that VIX index is going to go up.
R:What would you say was one of the craziest things you saw there, like when you were working there, just things that you were like, wow, that just blew your mind off. Like when you were in the institutional world, things that you were like, wow, I didn't know. That's that work that way?
M:Oh man. I can tell you so many stories. There's a lot of stories I can't tell you until. Hanging out in Las Vegas together having a few beers. I I've seen some crazy stuff go on. I've seen people get destroyed emotionally by trading. I worked with this portfolio manager, he made all these, he he was managing probably a couple hundred million dollars at this particular firm that I worked at. He made all these bad decisions and. He got destroyed. He got, he just got wiped out. All the clients took the money out. So anyway, the guy disappears for three or four days and no one knows where he is. We contact the police and whatever cause we call all-knowing an honest answer turns out that he. Started having a case of hiccups. Now, I don't know. I don't want to make it sound funny, 'cause it's a serious illness, but he couldn't stop his hiccupping and he actually ended up in the hospital. I've seen people like destroyed like that. I've seen other times where, you know, one day where I was at SAC. SAC has all these different groups. And I remember one time where someone came in and they showed Steve, Hey man, look at this gold chart, Steve, back then, I he traded everything whatever market there was an opportunity, And it's it's like just insanity. And then when it was over, Steve said "Hey guys, I'm going to go get lunch. I'll be back in about 20 minutes." And when he left someone was like, "dude, he just made a $9 million. In five minutes, " of course he's trading big money in that five minutes, those of insanity, he was buying and buying it got up and then selling. I guess that's both extreme from the guy who gets actually crushed to the guy. To become a billionaire and buy the New York Mets. I've seen some shady things involved, which I've obviously never been involved with, but I know of a particular firm of a particular firm. Now keep in mind, this is a long time know. So dont try to figure out who it is. So when you're on what they call the buy side of wall street, the buy side is the side where you have to pay commission to execute a trade, just like a retail. They have to pay a commission to execute a trade. They have to go through a broker. That's the law. That's just how it works. If you want to trade on exchange, you got to go through a broker. So these hedge funds or these big institutional money managers pay out a lot of commissions, right? Because they're throwing around tens of millions of dollars. And brokers want that business because if they execute the trades, they get the commissions. So there have been cases and I'm sure not just on wall street, but in other businesses where there are kickbacks and people do shady things Hey, if you send me X amount of commissions, all give you this illegal kickback, it happens in other businesses too. So anyway, this one particular. This one trader was wrong. Wall, this business to one particular broker turns out that they proved that there was shady stuff going on, but here's the thing, Rodrigo, right? In a perfect world. What should that firm have done? The firms should have gone to the sec and said, we have illegal behavior going on here. We need to address it. What would happen? It would be in the news that from all their other clients would be like, oh, we're getting the hell out. So the firm would go under, everyone would lose their jobs. So what has. They left the manager resigned to pursue personal interests and say, oh, we wish them best of luck. And as a rule, I think most traders are pretty, pretty ethical, but there are certainly some shady people out there. So that was a pretty crazy.
R:Then you were trading right after the.com bubble. Take us back to those days. As the bubble was forming, where were you, what were you doing? Were you trading at a desk or what was going on?
M: That's right after I left SAC. So I was the head of trading at that fund down in New York city. It's hard for younger people to picture now, but it's like all of a sudden we had email and email never existed before. And I literally remember. When I was in business school, the first time I ever got on the internet did the assignment was like, get on the internet and open an account. So I remember going down to the computer lab at NYU. What the hell is this? And there was someone next to me like, Hey, do you know how to get on the internet? And they were like, oh yeah, sure, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was like the roaring twenties, I guess people were sending around emails of jokes and stuff that you now would probably have fired a hundred times. Everyone was making money. The broker dealers were making money because there was a lot of business. The buy-side firms were making money because stocks were going up, going out to dinners with the $500 bottles of wine or the thousand dollar old dollar bottles of wine where people calling a top there or where they were just like enjoying it. Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. Oh yeah, absolutely. The first time I ever heard the illusion to that, we were in a bubble. Was in the late nineties when Mari//o Gabelli going back to how smart he is, kept talking about the tulip mania, the tulip mania. He kept saying this is like the tulip mania . You got to remember for every buyer, there is a seller, right? When something is trading at the top, people are selling it going back to like where we talk about where history repeats, right?
There's a famous book about the stock market. That's called reminiscences of a stock operator. That's supposedly written about Jesse Livermore, who was a great trader in the 1920s. He would have been the equivalent of a hedge fund manager. So anyway, in the. He's at a party and he hears two people or two wealthy old ladies talk about the new stocks that they were just buying. So he took that as a negative sign and sure enough, the market went down. The patriarch of the Kennedy family, he was a wall street. What would you would call an operator back then, but like a hedge fund manager where it's 1929 and he's on his way to his office. And he gets his shoeshine and the shoeshine boy starts giving him stock tips. So anyway, he goes to the office and he sells all the stocks and the market crashes and the rest is history. So here's the thing when people that don't typically buy stock, Or buying stocks. There's no one left after them to keep the price going higher wall streets of food chain. The really smart people are buying say in March of 2020 then you get up to this food chain. And when you have people that all of a sudden aren't buying stocks anymore, start buying them well then there's only one way the market could go. In fast forward to 2000 and it was literally the same thing you could be out for dinner and your waiter and be like, oh, are you guys in the stock market? I just bought XYZ or you guys should look at ABC. That was like at this is like February or March right before the market just completely blows up. And I not to scare people now, but because the market's been going down, but we have. NASDAQ lost 80% of its value. That's pretty significant. What is, what have we lost now over the last month or two? I don't know, 15%. 20% NASDAQ was down 80%. And then you have the double whammy where 9/11 comes along. And I was in New York when that happened Cantor Fitzgerald were on the top of those towers. After that happened obviously was an attack on our country, but all his traders and all of a sudden the training community felt as though it was An attack on our way of life as well, because it's like America is great because of capitalism. It's amazing how things went from like such good times to bad times.
R: It's a crazy year. That's your first year, like couple of years of trading and you get all that at once.
M:That's a pretty well, yeah, so I saw the internet bubble and then we saw 9/11 and then we add fast-forward. Commodities bubble the housing bubble and we've had the cannabis stock bubble few years ago. So these bubbles come along every now.
R:And then how were rates when that happened?
M: I think that 9/11 was a Tuesday and the markets reopened the following Monday. And if I remember correctly, I think right before the markets opened, they came out and they said, we're cutting interest rates it was either 50 basis points or it was 100 basis points. And the markets went down and then they really rebounded, but then they continued to go low. And I actually can tell you this, and this is a true story. I'm not making this up. the Friday before 9/11. And I could even show you on a chart. one of the guys I worked with comes in and he was like, "Hey man, are you seeing what's going on with some of these airlines stocks?" So we started looking at them like, yeah, what the hell is going on here? The market was like really starting to come apart. Then Monday it fell even more. All right. Then of course Tuesday morning the attacks happened. It's almost like half of the sell off Happened before 9/11 even occurred. I think now it goes without saying that there are a lot of wealthy families in the middle east that knew it was going to happen. I think to this day, I don't know if there's still a bunch of pages redacted out of the 9/ 11 commission report. People knew it was coming. I am 100% convinced. We didn't know obviously that, oh, gee, we're about to have a terrorist attack. We knew that there was something weird going on in the stocks, they were just being sold too aggressively. And then sure enough, unfortunately the rest is history fast forward.
R:You think things are getting better and then we have the mortgage crisis
M:yeah. All so now it's 2005 and I'm still working at that same font. I'm you know, I'm still the head trader, but I don't remember when, but in between 2000 and 2005, that firm acquired. Affirm another money management firm that was out on the west coast then Pasadena. So the owner of that firm and the owner of the first firm became partners and there was this east coast, west coast battle. And it's like the like east coast, west coast rap battle, like we always make fun of it. It's like, all right. The west coast partner wins east coast burger was anyway. Finally, the west coast partner wins. They say, mark, we're shutting in New York city office. If you come to capacity and you can still be our head of trading it, this was a Friday. All right. Now this all goes down. My daughters, I have twin daughters were born on that Monday. So it's I literally lose my job out of Friday. And then my daughters are born on Monday. It was a pretty it was a pretty eventful week. Let's just put it that way the way things work when one door closes, another door opens within about two months, I found a position. At a startup hedge fund. And it was just good timing. And I ended up being the head trader. At that hedge fund by where I live, I could literally walk to work. So I was there all through the financial crisis. The financial crisis was crazy. All these big firms, these big institutions like Lehman brothers have been in business for 150 years. And Lehman brothers goes out of business it was crazy. interest rates were held artificially low in the late 1990s. So investors that typically looked for yield, meaning investors that wanted income. They want to buy stocks that pay high dividends or whatever. There weren't any real options interest rates for the ten-year had historically. Around 5% or 6% now they were below 1% similar to how the environment's been recently. So anyway, there was this demand for products that had yield. So wall street figured out how to take mortgages. And wrap them together and turn them into these tradable products called credit default swaps, where basically it made all this stuff seem artificially safer than it was all right. So the chickens are always going to come home to roost. And that finally started to happen in 2007. And then there was the election coming up and it was clear that the Republicans weren't going to win and. People were afraid whether rightly or wrongly, I'm not talking about politics. Then President Obama came in, then the healthcare sector would become socialized. So people are, were really like thinking about this kind of stuff. And the markets really went into these free falls. I have a good friend who worked at Lehman brothers for 30 years, man. He had $3 million of Lehman brothers stock in his retirement account. That was going to be what he retired on. He watched that stock go from whatever it was like, I don't know, $200 a share to wherever. And because he was an employee, he wasn't allowed to sell it. He ended up went by the time he could sell it, it was worth $10,000. So he had $3 million go to $10,000 in the. Maybe six or eight months. So there's literally people saying is our civilization collapsing. And I remember some of my friends asked me, should I put my money in the market? And me saying, yes, absolutely. And they're saying everyone's saying that the markets could collapse and all this stuff. And then I said your money wouldn't be worth anything anyway. So you got nothing to lose it's you got nothing to lose. If there's a lot society collapse, your money's not going to be worth anything. So you might as well put it in the market that was March of oh nine. And that's right around where president Obama started negotiating with the insurance companies and then people started.Healthcare is not going to be socialized. And just like things got to an extreme on the upside, they got to an extreme on the downside. I was very lucky in that time because I was working for a fund that did very well, but I know a lot of people lost their jobs for no no fault of their own all these big executives that get paid. All these, all this money. Yeah, Lehman brothers or Bear Stearns or real Merrill Lynch. They made all these bets and they were wrong and the whole company ends up suffering because of it going back to the internet bubble, it's similar to Enron and EnRon was one of the internet darlings. And the whole thing was a fraud. And there were people that worked there for their 20, 30 years, and these places blow up because of fraud and all these people lose their savings, their retirement accounts, their kid's college tuition. I think in my opinion, these white collar criminals, like in that case, it was Kenneth Lay was the CFO.
He went to jail, but he probably went to some Country club prison, right? It's like a low, like low end hotel. Yeah. They should treat these people just like they walked into your house and stole money from you at gunpoint it's like in the Godfather Don Corleone says "Go to law school. Cause you can steal more money with a briefcase than with a gun." Like Bernie Madoff Bernie Madoff. I used to trade with his firm a lot actually in the late nineties and this whole internet. The biggest over-the-counter trading firms, there were like Goldman Morgan Stanley, Cantor Fitzgerald, but Bernie Madoff Madoff was one of these firms I don't know, I'm not a psychologist, but what happened was made off was a market maker, and market makers make the spread. They buy a stock at 20 and they sell it at say 20 and a quarter. So back in the early seventies, there were these three pioneers. They didn't work together, but they all came out around the same time. So there was really no competition to the New York stock exchange up and through the up through from its beginning up until I say, I don't know, 1960, 1970. So then these three guys developed what we call the third. Or the over-the-counter market. So they formed their big firms. They all got unbelievably wealthy in the mid 1990s The rules change. The SEC has changed the rules instead of having fractions, like instead of trading four eighths or a quarter, obviously 25 cents, an eighth, 12.5 cents. They were going to go to decimals. And that changed everything because now the spreads got really narrow because of the competition. Now, there weren't eighth spreads anymore. There weren't 50 cents spreads anymore. Now things were a penny or even half a penny like they are now. So all of a sudden Bernie Madoff's business model didn't work anymore because the whole market-making model didn't work. So he could have just retired right there hung it up and he would be considered a wall street legend. And I don't know, I guess because of his ego, he just had to keep it going. And you talk about a crazy story, dude. It's like not only didn't it off burn all those people, like one of his sons committed suicide. I think it was other son died of cancer. I don't know. I guess there's, sleazebags in every industry, it's just, I find it utterly unbelievable that someone could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and they could have just retired and instead they decided to commit this elaborate fraud. But I actually know people that worked for Madoff. My friend was a market maker and after all this happened, we were out to dinner and my friend was like, man, he's I had a really bad quarter. And I went in there and I talked to Bernie and I'm like sorry, Bernie. I had a really bad quarter And Bernie was iike , "don't worry about it. Here's an extra $20,000 for your bonus." And I was like, yeah it's pretty easy to give away money when it's not yours. I hate to laugh because a lot of people got burned it made us have this reputation of being like very generous by it's easy to give away money if it's not yours.
R: It's 2017. I think there was something with rates.
M: in late 2018, like September to December of 2018, there was a really nasty selloff at the time I was not trading. I was working as a consultant. I I tried to. I wanted to go out on my own to do like my consulting kind of thing. So I was following the markets then, but I wasn't actually trading, but yeah, that was a pretty hefty sell off. And then when we fast forward to the COVID crash, and this is something that I talk about in our lesson, number seven, which is tomorrow where, you know how you look into the past to figure out. What's going on now. So in March of 2020 the markets are in complete meltdown. People are totally panicking. It's COVID is at the end of civilization again, the S and P or the spy, which is, I use that as the market barometer, the S and P 500 got right down to around those same levels of the bottom of December of 2008. So I said we're getting down to an important support level here. There's a good chance that this is the bottom, right around 235 on spy. Now spies around four 30, we were talking about, so anyway, March 22nd, March 23rd, 2020 spy gets right down into there. Then it breaks its downtrend line.In other words, we have the downtrend and embrace it. So I say this is the. Right here and on the article that I wrote, I put I wanted to put the buyers have returned. Some of the people above me and the organization, we're still really bearer. So they made me, but the buyers have returned at least for now. But I talk about that article in my class seven nothing special Rodrigo nothing mysterious. It's just the market reached a level that was previously really important support and they say markets have memories. And that's what they mean. A level that is a support level. Or a resistance level. They can stay intact for a long time months, maybe even years even farther than that, I've seen levels that were important for 15 years. Like for instance, the XLF, the financial spider, right before the great recession or the financial crisis, it peaked at $31 in January of 18, 10 years. After that it reached $31 again. And guess what? It hit resistance. So we're talking about a level that was important here for years, but anyway, going back to the sell off in, or the bottom of March 2020 I didn't identify it because I'm like some great secret, super genius. That's got this secret model. It's just, Hey man, this thing had reached a level that was important support in the past. It's really oversold. And now it broke its downtrend. It looks like buyers are coming into the. And it turns out that was the bottom to like within a day. So by keeping it simple, by focusing on these basic fundamentals of which levels are important, which trends are important and what's the momentum driving the trends, we can make really accurate market calls after all those crashes that happen.
R: Not now COVID happened, you're heavier your layout ready? Cause you already been lived through that kind of stuff. That kind of market action.
M:that's, where you make your biggest profit in your quickest time. As soon as civilization doesn't collapse, a market like that comes along, I don't know, once a year, once every couple of years and you can get in there. And if you have a lot of confidence, so here's the secret. Like a lot of people try to catch the exact bottom when a stock is going down or when a market's going down, but they're typically just. That's the bottom. They don't have a logical reason for it. So what we want to do is we want to buy stuff after it's already reversed and started going up. So people think that's a little counterintuitive and I can understand why, because they would say why would I buy stock at a higher price than it is currently trading? The answer is because it stacks the risk reward ratio into your favor. You're not going to catch the exact bottom of. You might get on the train as it's already started to move so to speak. So you'll have more conviction, but I don't want to see the market go down because it hurts people. But when the markets go down and they have these really nasty sell-offs, there is really good opportunities to profit. And it's been the same way since the markets formed in the late 1700. So I don't think anything. I think it was opportunities will still exist going forward.
R:Which sounds like those are the wild west days, like the cowboy days fast forward now.
M: Okay. It's really changed, man. It's changed a lot because like, when I first started trading was still really a a human game. It was, you pick up the phone, he talked to people you learn at which, from who you can trust, like for instance, Cantor Fitzgerald. I had a guy there who I became really good friends with over the years. And he lived, he wasn't in there 9/11, so he's still alive and with us, but I got to know him and he became really good friends with, and, but there were other guys at that same firm that were real sleazebags that would try to rip you off if they could w how could they do that? Say they hear. Oh someone's coming into with a big order to buy XYZ. Maybe they might call one of their clients and be like, Hey, there's a big, there's a big order of X, Y, Z, or you go out and buy some or whatever. So it was a real relationship game. It was really think about it. I guess it's in a lot of ways it's like becoming a cop, right? It's like these people are your partners. You're at work for eight, nine hours a day. And in a typical trading day, I might talk to my guy over at cantor fitzgerald 10 times. Yeah. What are you seeing on this document? What are you seeing on that stock? Call me if you see this call me and if you see that, so it was a real like relationship game. And there was a lot of fraternizing, like going out to dinner, going to games, all that kind of stuff. But now it's all really computerized for the most part. Most traders now are computers. there's a type of training, That's called cash equities trader which is what I basically was when I first started in the late nineties, Goldman Sachs had 600 cash equity traders, 600, as far as I know now they have2, 2 from 600 to2. So it shows you the computerization has really taken over trading and the computers and the algorithms can do. The work of what used to be 10 humans, 20 people, 30 people. So trading has become much more of an operational thing. Now it's not the same game as it was when I was doing it. So that's another reason why I decided not to get back into it. It's just, it's not fun anymore.
R: It's fast forward to everything. Now you're the chief educator here at the Benzinga trading school. You are literally teaching thousands and thousands of traders. And investors how to responsibly trade, how to trade with a plan with a strategy all over the world.
M:Yeah. If you don't know what you're doing, you could lose a lot of money really fast. I think there are basically three things that make this school different than other schools that I've seen. All right. The first is that is me. I just happened to have a lot of experience. So I'm in a real.I have a really good background to be teaching younger traders, how to trade too is we don't do anything too esoteric or too crazy. A lot of these charters come up with these like far out really bizarro techniques there's come some kind of secret system or secret formula that works. And that's not the case. We talk about the basic fundamentals. So the second thing you know, is B one is by experience two is we keep it logical. We keep it when common sense, and we keep it in the sense of what are real institutional traders. How do they look at the market? The third thing is that, and this could be the most important is that we're actually looking at the markets in real time. What I just mentioned the 430 level on SPY. We were looking at that this morning as a class at our seven o'clock class. And as our noon class, anyone could be a genius if theyare , just using hindsight and saying, oh, look back in August. I said, this was going to happen. And sure enough, it did. And I was. I think by having this time application, it really makes it 100 times better than other things. if you want to learn karate, yeah. You can pick up a book and you could read about all the moves, but you're not really learning karate. It's really learning karate. You gotta go to a dojo and fight against other people, you could think you're you could be a boxer and you could think you're great. You're going to be ready to go and be a great boxer. And you could do a thousand pushups and you can run until you get in the ring with someone else. You don't really know what it is like ultimately trading is not chess. A lot of people think that trading is like a chess game, but it's. Because in chess, the rules are always the same. The Bishop always moves the same way. The Knight always moves the same way. Training is more like poker and I don't mean it in the sense of gambling, but poker is a skill because good poker players, they learn how to read Other people's signals, emotions, facial expressions whatever it is they do, they can keep track of the cards. I'm not a poker player myself, but the point is that in the market, there are humans on the other side of the trade. So things change what works today may not work tomorrow. You know what works tomorrow may not work the day after it. So we have to maintain this level of flexible. And I think that the way we have the class structured, I think it does that. And I think it does a good job at it. They tell people the only prerequisite for the class is someone who wants to learn. I don't care if you've never traded before, or if you've been experienced, you just have to want to learn. I don't want people thinking that this class is show up and here's your daily trade idea as we go through the markets sometimes. We come up with a lot of ideas. We might find four or five ideas. Sometimes we might not find any, although we usually find at least one or two. Yeah. I like teaching people that want to learn. So it's a good fit for me right now.
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By Benzinga" I had professors that were literally Nobel prize winners and I think Mario Gabelli is probably the smartest person I've ever met. "
"I've seen people get destroyed emotionally by trading. I've seen Steve Cohen make a $9 million profit In 5 minutes, both extremes, from the guy who gets actually crushed to the guy to become a billionaire and buy the New York Mets."
"I have traded through the .com bubble, 9/11, Commodities bubble the housing bubble and we've had the cannabis stock bubble a few years ago and then March 2020 Covid"
"What fascinates me about the markets is you see these historical things repeat themselves"
What does it take to trade with the likes of legendary Wall Street Traders Steve Cohen and Mario Gabelli?
Do you need to be a good chess player? Be great at poker? Have nerves of steel? Be smarter than Nobel Prize-Winning Professors?
In this episode, we take you inside famous hedge-funds like Steve Cohen's S.A.C Capital which the TV series Billions was based on, or Mario Gabelli's GAMCO Investors where 5 minutes can make you or break you.
Rodrigo Cerda speaks with Mark Putrino, former hedge-fund manager, Chief Market Technician, and Lead Educator at Benzinga Trading School about the rules of the game.
Guest:
Mark Putrino
Chief Market Technician, and Lead Educator at Benzinga Trading School
Host:
Rodrigo Cerda
Benzinga Pro Product Expert
Transcript:
R: Welcome to today's podcast Inside Wall Street, Mark. Putrino. How are you doing, man?
M:I'm doing great. Rodrigo. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
R: I know that you've had some experience trading in some really big funds with Steve Cohen and Mario Gabelli. Those are some legendary investors.
M: Mario Gabelli. He hired me. I met him when I was in business school. I was at the University of New York business school in the city. I'm in Greenwich village, but anyway, I met Mario make a long story short. He hired me when there was an opening on the trading desk and I went in there and at the time I don't this was a while ago. I don't remember how. Mario managed back then it was like maybe three to $5 billion. Now I think he manages an excess 50 billion, maybe like I had professors that were literally Nobel prize winners. Literally and I think like Gabelli is probably like the smartest person I've ever met. But anyway, I was fortunate enough that I had a spot there. He had a broker dealer and I went in there and I was a market. Making markets and penny stocks and some of the stocks that we were trading after a few years there, I decided to move basically to make more money. And I went over and that's when I joined Steve Cohen at SAC, which whenever I tell people I worked at SAC, the question is always, oh, is Billions realistic or is Billions real ? I haven't seen Billions, but I am making a promise to people that I will watch. Now when I was there, that's when I got my first exposure to charting and people looking at charts and technicals Gabelli was more of a traditional value manager. He's not really looking at charts. He's more of the Graham and Dodd school of looking at price, earnings, ratios, that kind of things. But when I was at SAC, a lot of the people that I saw around. We're really into trading off the charts. And that's where I really got to start to learn, to teach myself about it.
R:What actually got you into trading the first time? How did you get into it?
M: I grew up we weren't like poor or starving or anything like that, but I grew up pretty poor in a really wealthy town in Greenwich county. And when I was a kid I used to feel insecure about it. And I remember I used to ride my bike around or whatever, and I would look at all these big mansions and stuff. And I would think what do these people do that can make them live in these big mansions and these biggest states and everything. So that kind of brought me into wall street. Then once I got to wall street, it was very different than I thought it would be. But what I find fascinating about. Is at this point it's not really about money because I've learned that you can have a lot of money and still be a miserable person or vice versa have a little bit of money or no money and still be very nice person. But anyway, what fascinates me about the markets is one is I'm really into history and you see these historical things repeat themselves. In the market. Like for example, people ask me like, all right how do you know when the market is at a top? And I tell people the market is at a top. When people start saying this time, it's different, right? This time is different. Now think about this, right? In the 1920s in the booming twenties or the roaring twenties, the market was really ripping higher. There was this new terminology that got developed, where analysts talked about old era stocks and new era stock. People were saying this time it's different. The old stocks like say. Whatever United saddle maker or United or shoe maker, that's all. That's all. That's. We do that with traditional valuation. These new stocks are different. This time is different. They're new. It could have been, I don't know what was going on in the twenties. Maybe telephone or maybe radio. So what happened? Sure enough, the market collapses and great depression. Now you fast forward into the internet bubble. And that's right when I came in the late nineties and people started saying, this time is different. You have new economy stocks and old economy stocks. And if people that are listening to me, I've been in the markets and can remember them. I'm sure they will. And the whole thing was like Minnesota manufacturer mining, that's an old economy stock we use traditional valuations for that, but now we have pets dot. The same rules don't apply now it's different. We can instead of valuing a company on how much money they make, we can value company based on how many clicks are on their website. This time it's different, sure enough, the market blew up we've over the past couple of months, and this is one of the things that led me in the class. I've seen a couple articles where people say this time it's different and I've pointed them out in class. Like one particular article said that the rules are being rewritten in the VIX index for VIX trading. Now that was the article, right? The rules are being rewritten.When you say the rules are being rewritten, what are you saying? You're saying this time it's different. So this particular writer or analyst noted that. Even though the market was rallying, the VIX index was going higher. The VIX index is, it is what we call an implied volatility index of options. The easiest way to look at it is pretend it's insurance. A portfolio manager buys options to protect their portfolio. If a portfolio manager thinks the portfolio is going to go down, they may go and buy options as insurance. They would buy options or contracts that go up in value. If the portfolio goes down, it's a hedge. All right. So whenever we have these big blowups, like for instance, in the COVID crash and March of 20, the VIX index, the index, which measures essentially how much managers are willing to pay for that in short insurance goes sky. Because managers are panicking, they think the market is going to drop even farther. So they don't mind paying higher prices for insurance. Just I don't know if you live somewhere where there was where there was going to be a fire. You wouldn't mind paying more for insurance, traditionally analysts have called this VIX index, the fair index, but here's the thing. And here's where this analysis was wrong. And here's why it's not different. Even though people think it is in a moment of euphoria where markets are really booming. All right. And portfolio managers will pay higher premiums to get into those positions. If a market's is really taken off and a portfolio manager wants to perhaps buy some puts to lock in their gains, they're going to pay willing to pay a higher premium. So that VIX index is going to go up.
R:What would you say was one of the craziest things you saw there, like when you were working there, just things that you were like, wow, that just blew your mind off. Like when you were in the institutional world, things that you were like, wow, I didn't know. That's that work that way?
M:Oh man. I can tell you so many stories. There's a lot of stories I can't tell you until. Hanging out in Las Vegas together having a few beers. I I've seen some crazy stuff go on. I've seen people get destroyed emotionally by trading. I worked with this portfolio manager, he made all these, he he was managing probably a couple hundred million dollars at this particular firm that I worked at. He made all these bad decisions and. He got destroyed. He got, he just got wiped out. All the clients took the money out. So anyway, the guy disappears for three or four days and no one knows where he is. We contact the police and whatever cause we call all-knowing an honest answer turns out that he. Started having a case of hiccups. Now, I don't know. I don't want to make it sound funny, 'cause it's a serious illness, but he couldn't stop his hiccupping and he actually ended up in the hospital. I've seen people like destroyed like that. I've seen other times where, you know, one day where I was at SAC. SAC has all these different groups. And I remember one time where someone came in and they showed Steve, Hey man, look at this gold chart, Steve, back then, I he traded everything whatever market there was an opportunity, And it's it's like just insanity. And then when it was over, Steve said "Hey guys, I'm going to go get lunch. I'll be back in about 20 minutes." And when he left someone was like, "dude, he just made a $9 million. In five minutes, " of course he's trading big money in that five minutes, those of insanity, he was buying and buying it got up and then selling. I guess that's both extreme from the guy who gets actually crushed to the guy. To become a billionaire and buy the New York Mets. I've seen some shady things involved, which I've obviously never been involved with, but I know of a particular firm of a particular firm. Now keep in mind, this is a long time know. So dont try to figure out who it is. So when you're on what they call the buy side of wall street, the buy side is the side where you have to pay commission to execute a trade, just like a retail. They have to pay a commission to execute a trade. They have to go through a broker. That's the law. That's just how it works. If you want to trade on exchange, you got to go through a broker. So these hedge funds or these big institutional money managers pay out a lot of commissions, right? Because they're throwing around tens of millions of dollars. And brokers want that business because if they execute the trades, they get the commissions. So there have been cases and I'm sure not just on wall street, but in other businesses where there are kickbacks and people do shady things Hey, if you send me X amount of commissions, all give you this illegal kickback, it happens in other businesses too. So anyway, this one particular. This one trader was wrong. Wall, this business to one particular broker turns out that they proved that there was shady stuff going on, but here's the thing, Rodrigo, right? In a perfect world. What should that firm have done? The firms should have gone to the sec and said, we have illegal behavior going on here. We need to address it. What would happen? It would be in the news that from all their other clients would be like, oh, we're getting the hell out. So the firm would go under, everyone would lose their jobs. So what has. They left the manager resigned to pursue personal interests and say, oh, we wish them best of luck. And as a rule, I think most traders are pretty, pretty ethical, but there are certainly some shady people out there. So that was a pretty crazy.
R:Then you were trading right after the.com bubble. Take us back to those days. As the bubble was forming, where were you, what were you doing? Were you trading at a desk or what was going on?
M: That's right after I left SAC. So I was the head of trading at that fund down in New York city. It's hard for younger people to picture now, but it's like all of a sudden we had email and email never existed before. And I literally remember. When I was in business school, the first time I ever got on the internet did the assignment was like, get on the internet and open an account. So I remember going down to the computer lab at NYU. What the hell is this? And there was someone next to me like, Hey, do you know how to get on the internet? And they were like, oh yeah, sure, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was like the roaring twenties, I guess people were sending around emails of jokes and stuff that you now would probably have fired a hundred times. Everyone was making money. The broker dealers were making money because there was a lot of business. The buy-side firms were making money because stocks were going up, going out to dinners with the $500 bottles of wine or the thousand dollar old dollar bottles of wine where people calling a top there or where they were just like enjoying it. Oh yeah. Oh, absolutely. Oh yeah, absolutely. The first time I ever heard the illusion to that, we were in a bubble. Was in the late nineties when Mari//o Gabelli going back to how smart he is, kept talking about the tulip mania, the tulip mania. He kept saying this is like the tulip mania . You got to remember for every buyer, there is a seller, right? When something is trading at the top, people are selling it going back to like where we talk about where history repeats, right?
There's a famous book about the stock market. That's called reminiscences of a stock operator. That's supposedly written about Jesse Livermore, who was a great trader in the 1920s. He would have been the equivalent of a hedge fund manager. So anyway, in the. He's at a party and he hears two people or two wealthy old ladies talk about the new stocks that they were just buying. So he took that as a negative sign and sure enough, the market went down. The patriarch of the Kennedy family, he was a wall street. What would you would call an operator back then, but like a hedge fund manager where it's 1929 and he's on his way to his office. And he gets his shoeshine and the shoeshine boy starts giving him stock tips. So anyway, he goes to the office and he sells all the stocks and the market crashes and the rest is history. So here's the thing when people that don't typically buy stock, Or buying stocks. There's no one left after them to keep the price going higher wall streets of food chain. The really smart people are buying say in March of 2020 then you get up to this food chain. And when you have people that all of a sudden aren't buying stocks anymore, start buying them well then there's only one way the market could go. In fast forward to 2000 and it was literally the same thing you could be out for dinner and your waiter and be like, oh, are you guys in the stock market? I just bought XYZ or you guys should look at ABC. That was like at this is like February or March right before the market just completely blows up. And I not to scare people now, but because the market's been going down, but we have. NASDAQ lost 80% of its value. That's pretty significant. What is, what have we lost now over the last month or two? I don't know, 15%. 20% NASDAQ was down 80%. And then you have the double whammy where 9/11 comes along. And I was in New York when that happened Cantor Fitzgerald were on the top of those towers. After that happened obviously was an attack on our country, but all his traders and all of a sudden the training community felt as though it was An attack on our way of life as well, because it's like America is great because of capitalism. It's amazing how things went from like such good times to bad times.
R: It's a crazy year. That's your first year, like couple of years of trading and you get all that at once.
M:That's a pretty well, yeah, so I saw the internet bubble and then we saw 9/11 and then we add fast-forward. Commodities bubble the housing bubble and we've had the cannabis stock bubble few years ago. So these bubbles come along every now.
R:And then how were rates when that happened?
M: I think that 9/11 was a Tuesday and the markets reopened the following Monday. And if I remember correctly, I think right before the markets opened, they came out and they said, we're cutting interest rates it was either 50 basis points or it was 100 basis points. And the markets went down and then they really rebounded, but then they continued to go low. And I actually can tell you this, and this is a true story. I'm not making this up. the Friday before 9/11. And I could even show you on a chart. one of the guys I worked with comes in and he was like, "Hey man, are you seeing what's going on with some of these airlines stocks?" So we started looking at them like, yeah, what the hell is going on here? The market was like really starting to come apart. Then Monday it fell even more. All right. Then of course Tuesday morning the attacks happened. It's almost like half of the sell off Happened before 9/11 even occurred. I think now it goes without saying that there are a lot of wealthy families in the middle east that knew it was going to happen. I think to this day, I don't know if there's still a bunch of pages redacted out of the 9/ 11 commission report. People knew it was coming. I am 100% convinced. We didn't know obviously that, oh, gee, we're about to have a terrorist attack. We knew that there was something weird going on in the stocks, they were just being sold too aggressively. And then sure enough, unfortunately the rest is history fast forward.
R:You think things are getting better and then we have the mortgage crisis
M:yeah. All so now it's 2005 and I'm still working at that same font. I'm you know, I'm still the head trader, but I don't remember when, but in between 2000 and 2005, that firm acquired. Affirm another money management firm that was out on the west coast then Pasadena. So the owner of that firm and the owner of the first firm became partners and there was this east coast, west coast battle. And it's like the like east coast, west coast rap battle, like we always make fun of it. It's like, all right. The west coast partner wins east coast burger was anyway. Finally, the west coast partner wins. They say, mark, we're shutting in New York city office. If you come to capacity and you can still be our head of trading it, this was a Friday. All right. Now this all goes down. My daughters, I have twin daughters were born on that Monday. So it's I literally lose my job out of Friday. And then my daughters are born on Monday. It was a pretty it was a pretty eventful week. Let's just put it that way the way things work when one door closes, another door opens within about two months, I found a position. At a startup hedge fund. And it was just good timing. And I ended up being the head trader. At that hedge fund by where I live, I could literally walk to work. So I was there all through the financial crisis. The financial crisis was crazy. All these big firms, these big institutions like Lehman brothers have been in business for 150 years. And Lehman brothers goes out of business it was crazy. interest rates were held artificially low in the late 1990s. So investors that typically looked for yield, meaning investors that wanted income. They want to buy stocks that pay high dividends or whatever. There weren't any real options interest rates for the ten-year had historically. Around 5% or 6% now they were below 1% similar to how the environment's been recently. So anyway, there was this demand for products that had yield. So wall street figured out how to take mortgages. And wrap them together and turn them into these tradable products called credit default swaps, where basically it made all this stuff seem artificially safer than it was all right. So the chickens are always going to come home to roost. And that finally started to happen in 2007. And then there was the election coming up and it was clear that the Republicans weren't going to win and. People were afraid whether rightly or wrongly, I'm not talking about politics. Then President Obama came in, then the healthcare sector would become socialized. So people are, were really like thinking about this kind of stuff. And the markets really went into these free falls. I have a good friend who worked at Lehman brothers for 30 years, man. He had $3 million of Lehman brothers stock in his retirement account. That was going to be what he retired on. He watched that stock go from whatever it was like, I don't know, $200 a share to wherever. And because he was an employee, he wasn't allowed to sell it. He ended up went by the time he could sell it, it was worth $10,000. So he had $3 million go to $10,000 in the. Maybe six or eight months. So there's literally people saying is our civilization collapsing. And I remember some of my friends asked me, should I put my money in the market? And me saying, yes, absolutely. And they're saying everyone's saying that the markets could collapse and all this stuff. And then I said your money wouldn't be worth anything anyway. So you got nothing to lose it's you got nothing to lose. If there's a lot society collapse, your money's not going to be worth anything. So you might as well put it in the market that was March of oh nine. And that's right around where president Obama started negotiating with the insurance companies and then people started.Healthcare is not going to be socialized. And just like things got to an extreme on the upside, they got to an extreme on the downside. I was very lucky in that time because I was working for a fund that did very well, but I know a lot of people lost their jobs for no no fault of their own all these big executives that get paid. All these, all this money. Yeah, Lehman brothers or Bear Stearns or real Merrill Lynch. They made all these bets and they were wrong and the whole company ends up suffering because of it going back to the internet bubble, it's similar to Enron and EnRon was one of the internet darlings. And the whole thing was a fraud. And there were people that worked there for their 20, 30 years, and these places blow up because of fraud and all these people lose their savings, their retirement accounts, their kid's college tuition. I think in my opinion, these white collar criminals, like in that case, it was Kenneth Lay was the CFO.
He went to jail, but he probably went to some Country club prison, right? It's like a low, like low end hotel. Yeah. They should treat these people just like they walked into your house and stole money from you at gunpoint it's like in the Godfather Don Corleone says "Go to law school. Cause you can steal more money with a briefcase than with a gun." Like Bernie Madoff Bernie Madoff. I used to trade with his firm a lot actually in the late nineties and this whole internet. The biggest over-the-counter trading firms, there were like Goldman Morgan Stanley, Cantor Fitzgerald, but Bernie Madoff Madoff was one of these firms I don't know, I'm not a psychologist, but what happened was made off was a market maker, and market makers make the spread. They buy a stock at 20 and they sell it at say 20 and a quarter. So back in the early seventies, there were these three pioneers. They didn't work together, but they all came out around the same time. So there was really no competition to the New York stock exchange up and through the up through from its beginning up until I say, I don't know, 1960, 1970. So then these three guys developed what we call the third. Or the over-the-counter market. So they formed their big firms. They all got unbelievably wealthy in the mid 1990s The rules change. The SEC has changed the rules instead of having fractions, like instead of trading four eighths or a quarter, obviously 25 cents, an eighth, 12.5 cents. They were going to go to decimals. And that changed everything because now the spreads got really narrow because of the competition. Now, there weren't eighth spreads anymore. There weren't 50 cents spreads anymore. Now things were a penny or even half a penny like they are now. So all of a sudden Bernie Madoff's business model didn't work anymore because the whole market-making model didn't work. So he could have just retired right there hung it up and he would be considered a wall street legend. And I don't know, I guess because of his ego, he just had to keep it going. And you talk about a crazy story, dude. It's like not only didn't it off burn all those people, like one of his sons committed suicide. I think it was other son died of cancer. I don't know. I guess there's, sleazebags in every industry, it's just, I find it utterly unbelievable that someone could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars and they could have just retired and instead they decided to commit this elaborate fraud. But I actually know people that worked for Madoff. My friend was a market maker and after all this happened, we were out to dinner and my friend was like, man, he's I had a really bad quarter. And I went in there and I talked to Bernie and I'm like sorry, Bernie. I had a really bad quarter And Bernie was iike , "don't worry about it. Here's an extra $20,000 for your bonus." And I was like, yeah it's pretty easy to give away money when it's not yours. I hate to laugh because a lot of people got burned it made us have this reputation of being like very generous by it's easy to give away money if it's not yours.
R: It's 2017. I think there was something with rates.
M: in late 2018, like September to December of 2018, there was a really nasty selloff at the time I was not trading. I was working as a consultant. I I tried to. I wanted to go out on my own to do like my consulting kind of thing. So I was following the markets then, but I wasn't actually trading, but yeah, that was a pretty hefty sell off. And then when we fast forward to the COVID crash, and this is something that I talk about in our lesson, number seven, which is tomorrow where, you know how you look into the past to figure out. What's going on now. So in March of 2020 the markets are in complete meltdown. People are totally panicking. It's COVID is at the end of civilization again, the S and P or the spy, which is, I use that as the market barometer, the S and P 500 got right down to around those same levels of the bottom of December of 2008. So I said we're getting down to an important support level here. There's a good chance that this is the bottom, right around 235 on spy. Now spies around four 30, we were talking about, so anyway, March 22nd, March 23rd, 2020 spy gets right down into there. Then it breaks its downtrend line.In other words, we have the downtrend and embrace it. So I say this is the. Right here and on the article that I wrote, I put I wanted to put the buyers have returned. Some of the people above me and the organization, we're still really bearer. So they made me, but the buyers have returned at least for now. But I talk about that article in my class seven nothing special Rodrigo nothing mysterious. It's just the market reached a level that was previously really important support and they say markets have memories. And that's what they mean. A level that is a support level. Or a resistance level. They can stay intact for a long time months, maybe even years even farther than that, I've seen levels that were important for 15 years. Like for instance, the XLF, the financial spider, right before the great recession or the financial crisis, it peaked at $31 in January of 18, 10 years. After that it reached $31 again. And guess what? It hit resistance. So we're talking about a level that was important here for years, but anyway, going back to the sell off in, or the bottom of March 2020 I didn't identify it because I'm like some great secret, super genius. That's got this secret model. It's just, Hey man, this thing had reached a level that was important support in the past. It's really oversold. And now it broke its downtrend. It looks like buyers are coming into the. And it turns out that was the bottom to like within a day. So by keeping it simple, by focusing on these basic fundamentals of which levels are important, which trends are important and what's the momentum driving the trends, we can make really accurate market calls after all those crashes that happen.
R: Not now COVID happened, you're heavier your layout ready? Cause you already been lived through that kind of stuff. That kind of market action.
M:that's, where you make your biggest profit in your quickest time. As soon as civilization doesn't collapse, a market like that comes along, I don't know, once a year, once every couple of years and you can get in there. And if you have a lot of confidence, so here's the secret. Like a lot of people try to catch the exact bottom when a stock is going down or when a market's going down, but they're typically just. That's the bottom. They don't have a logical reason for it. So what we want to do is we want to buy stuff after it's already reversed and started going up. So people think that's a little counterintuitive and I can understand why, because they would say why would I buy stock at a higher price than it is currently trading? The answer is because it stacks the risk reward ratio into your favor. You're not going to catch the exact bottom of. You might get on the train as it's already started to move so to speak. So you'll have more conviction, but I don't want to see the market go down because it hurts people. But when the markets go down and they have these really nasty sell-offs, there is really good opportunities to profit. And it's been the same way since the markets formed in the late 1700. So I don't think anything. I think it was opportunities will still exist going forward.
R:Which sounds like those are the wild west days, like the cowboy days fast forward now.
M: Okay. It's really changed, man. It's changed a lot because like, when I first started trading was still really a a human game. It was, you pick up the phone, he talked to people you learn at which, from who you can trust, like for instance, Cantor Fitzgerald. I had a guy there who I became really good friends with over the years. And he lived, he wasn't in there 9/11, so he's still alive and with us, but I got to know him and he became really good friends with, and, but there were other guys at that same firm that were real sleazebags that would try to rip you off if they could w how could they do that? Say they hear. Oh someone's coming into with a big order to buy XYZ. Maybe they might call one of their clients and be like, Hey, there's a big, there's a big order of X, Y, Z, or you go out and buy some or whatever. So it was a real relationship game. It was really think about it. I guess it's in a lot of ways it's like becoming a cop, right? It's like these people are your partners. You're at work for eight, nine hours a day. And in a typical trading day, I might talk to my guy over at cantor fitzgerald 10 times. Yeah. What are you seeing on this document? What are you seeing on that stock? Call me if you see this call me and if you see that, so it was a real like relationship game. And there was a lot of fraternizing, like going out to dinner, going to games, all that kind of stuff. But now it's all really computerized for the most part. Most traders now are computers. there's a type of training, That's called cash equities trader which is what I basically was when I first started in the late nineties, Goldman Sachs had 600 cash equity traders, 600, as far as I know now they have2, 2 from 600 to2. So it shows you the computerization has really taken over trading and the computers and the algorithms can do. The work of what used to be 10 humans, 20 people, 30 people. So trading has become much more of an operational thing. Now it's not the same game as it was when I was doing it. So that's another reason why I decided not to get back into it. It's just, it's not fun anymore.
R: It's fast forward to everything. Now you're the chief educator here at the Benzinga trading school. You are literally teaching thousands and thousands of traders. And investors how to responsibly trade, how to trade with a plan with a strategy all over the world.
M:Yeah. If you don't know what you're doing, you could lose a lot of money really fast. I think there are basically three things that make this school different than other schools that I've seen. All right. The first is that is me. I just happened to have a lot of experience. So I'm in a real.I have a really good background to be teaching younger traders, how to trade too is we don't do anything too esoteric or too crazy. A lot of these charters come up with these like far out really bizarro techniques there's come some kind of secret system or secret formula that works. And that's not the case. We talk about the basic fundamentals. So the second thing you know, is B one is by experience two is we keep it logical. We keep it when common sense, and we keep it in the sense of what are real institutional traders. How do they look at the market? The third thing is that, and this could be the most important is that we're actually looking at the markets in real time. What I just mentioned the 430 level on SPY. We were looking at that this morning as a class at our seven o'clock class. And as our noon class, anyone could be a genius if theyare , just using hindsight and saying, oh, look back in August. I said, this was going to happen. And sure enough, it did. And I was. I think by having this time application, it really makes it 100 times better than other things. if you want to learn karate, yeah. You can pick up a book and you could read about all the moves, but you're not really learning karate. It's really learning karate. You gotta go to a dojo and fight against other people, you could think you're you could be a boxer and you could think you're great. You're going to be ready to go and be a great boxer. And you could do a thousand pushups and you can run until you get in the ring with someone else. You don't really know what it is like ultimately trading is not chess. A lot of people think that trading is like a chess game, but it's. Because in chess, the rules are always the same. The Bishop always moves the same way. The Knight always moves the same way. Training is more like poker and I don't mean it in the sense of gambling, but poker is a skill because good poker players, they learn how to read Other people's signals, emotions, facial expressions whatever it is they do, they can keep track of the cards. I'm not a poker player myself, but the point is that in the market, there are humans on the other side of the trade. So things change what works today may not work tomorrow. You know what works tomorrow may not work the day after it. So we have to maintain this level of flexible. And I think that the way we have the class structured, I think it does that. And I think it does a good job at it. They tell people the only prerequisite for the class is someone who wants to learn. I don't care if you've never traded before, or if you've been experienced, you just have to want to learn. I don't want people thinking that this class is show up and here's your daily trade idea as we go through the markets sometimes. We come up with a lot of ideas. We might find four or five ideas. Sometimes we might not find any, although we usually find at least one or two. Yeah. I like teaching people that want to learn. So it's a good fit for me right now.
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