142: Bert Mouler – Using Creative Thought and Automation to Bypass Human Flaws

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Hey guys, what's good? Right now you're plugged into episode 142 and I have a little fun fact for you and this was totally Unintentional, I promise. But exactly one hundred episodes ago I had Bert Moller on the podcast for episode forty-two. This week, one hundred episodes on, he joins us once again. Bert is an algorithmic trader with a serious focus on machine learning. His trading decisions are driven purely by data and he goes to great lengths to remove human flaws and human bias.

through the use of automation. So coming up over the next 60 minutes or so, you'll hear about Bert's increasing efforts to automate as many decisions as possible. the attraction of markets and areas with less sophisticated participants

other potential sources of edge beyond alpha, a peek into Bert's high frequency market making strategy, and that's certainly not all. Now I thought I should just throw this in there, but I can understand if some of Bert's ideas might seem a little abstract at first to some listeners. But one thing I would really like to encourage is that you do listen through this episode with an open mind, because that's what I like about Bird, his willingness to think differently and get creative.

And once you get to the end, if you have a question, you're welcome to post that question in the comments area on the website. at chatwithraders dot com slash one four two and Bert will do his best to respond with an answer for you, which is nice of him to offer. Anyway, ladies and gents, for a second time, here is Bert Moller.

You know, Bert, good to be speaking with you, man. You were first on the podcast, I think it was uh I think it was October two thousand and fifteen. Uh let me ask, how have you been? Uh how's things tracking? Absolutely. Super. I everything's been going really well. Been applying the same stuff we talked about back then. You know, learned many, many new things as well. And uh yeah.

And whereabouts are you living these days? I know you've sort of been bouncing back and forth between uh San Francisco and Russia and probably a couple other places. Whereabouts are you mainly set up now? Uh, in S F right now. Just um kind of focusing my time over here because there's so many opportunities. Um just in general the trading world and you know, and b and blockchain uh world and actually a lot of different markets opening up, uh, I think.

There's a couple of couple of things in the world going on that are kinda changing the uh the fabric of reality as I like to call it. Yeah, I mean if we have a bit of time at the end I'd love to talk to you about some of those things. Um but to start with, let's uh let's focus in on your trading, most important. Um so you know, last time you're on, I think it was the first time we really kind of got into machine learning on the podcast.

Um, I think that was episode forty two. So there's since been a few episodes where we've uh discussed machine learning at lengths as well. You know, I wanna ask, is machine learning still a key part of how you're developing your strategies today? Absolutely. Absolutely. We you know, I think I think when when we spoke last I was still maybe let's say in picking some instruments myself, picking maybe some features myself, doing certain stuff myself.

I mean, you know, m it's either someone on my team or or me doing it. But we've moved almost entirely away from any human decision making. The only thing that we decide um is the Uh kind of if we're trading equities, uh the sector that we're trading maybe, so that we you know don't end up randomly picking like ten stocks that are all in the silver mining space.

So how do you even begin to do that type of thing?

Uh, you know, you gotta lay out your process. I mean, actually the process is laid out uh for for like a single uh single ticker system. In in many books uh I mean there's different processes obviously, but uh you just write down your process for alpha generation, then your process for money management for for everything and you just see where you can automate where you're making decisions as a human being and which you know which ones of those which one of those

of those steps you can uh remove from kind of from yourself. So the computer will do it instead. So what's been the the driving factor for wanting to remove as much human decision as possible? I mean, I understand it to to a large extent, but Why do you even want to remove the type of symbols that you're picking? It's just'cause we're just there's so much bias and it's it's it's on a completely

m a lot of it is on a completely subconscious level. I'm sure you had the experience where all of a sudden you learn a new word, right? And you start seeing it everywhere. You know, and a lot of people would say that it's because you're now recognizing the familiar, right?

But that stuff definitely exists, that those kind of phenomena. And that kind of thing can You know, For example I today for the first time in the restaurant they ask you what kind of ketchup you want, Heinz or something else and you're like shit, you know, uh I you know that that

the the word Heinz, you know, the the the company name could just get stuck in the back of your mind and when you're picking equities it maybe it seems random out of sixty, but oops, you saw the Heinz sticker, you know, and you pick that. You don't know that that's not happening. And that's a bias. I mean it could be bad or good in in in that sense.

Uh it's you know the problem is I was gonna say, you know, that it's maybe harmless, but in my experience there's very few things that go wrong and are harmless. You know, it's it's better to take something random than something biased. Does that make any sense? It does, yeah. So ultimately you're just trying to remove as much bias as possible, yeah? Yeah. It's just no no outside information. Um

'Cause there's I mean, look, you you're still a person, right? You're talking to different people, you're going out socializing, maybe not even with trading people. Uh give you an example. I was speaking to uh my mother uh recently and you know Bitcoin was down and she's like you have to buy it. It's gonna go up. You have to buy it. It's gonna go up, you know. Just it's gonna don't be afraid. Just buy it, you know? And I'm like, that's crazy.

You know, a and obviously I sold it. Um But but but still, you know, like uh it's hard to use those things properly. Like as a like So so very disciplined people I guess with that are very are kind of curating their their human bias sources can do what I you know what I told you I did like systematically. But I don't think I could you know, th that bias still kinda creeps in my head. You know, maybe one day I will buy.

You know, because because so many people told me I should. So i it it's tough. Yeah. And the problem is you you don't answer it systematically yourself. Like it would be okay if you had a biased like input and then you always had a like way to answer it in a very specific way, like given it's like biased in a certain way.

But you you don't. You know, sometimes you can you're tired and you you know, you you give up to the bias. And sometimes you're not tired at all and you're like really vigilant about the way you're thinking. But you know, you can't bet on that. Okay, so I mean I guess there must be a point where you have to define the universe of

either stocks or various products or certain markets, which you are going to look at. Let's say you're trying to develop a single stock strategy. Okay. Just for argument's sake. There must be a point where you actually define from a very high level the type of universe to look through, to feed into your machine learning. algorithms, essentially. Does that make sense?

It does, absolutely. And it actually it's gonna touch on a topic that I hope we'll cover later, but uh it's you know, I I I look at it like this. Every single person has every market, you know, has different players, right? It's everything every every market is a different game, right?

Um and you have different uh you know different things that kind of go for you and against you in playing this game, right? So uh for example, you could be a really you know, you could be a Really good at programming FPGAs, right? Uh but you're not that good at trading, but you know there's arbitrage opportunities that exist, right? So going to the US and trading on the US markets would be difficult, you know, because a lot of people there trading

oh you know, a lot of capital, a lot of smart people. They have teams with people like you that just do the programming for the FG and then tons of PhDs that do all the other stuff, the alpha generation. But you know what, maybe in you know, maybe in India uh where not fifty percent of the trades are uh electronically executed, right? Uh or submitted, I guess. Maybe maybe there is no uh such competition over there. Maybe just being fast enough would allow you to do certain types of arbitrage.

Right. So you have to kind of evaluate your position, right? And the positions that uh the the exchanges, the venues, the games that you can play. And that includes, you know, what is your commission structure? You know, is it, for example, if you're comfortable holding overnight, that could be a source of huge return because you're comfortable taking the overnight risk, right? So your position does include your risk profile.

And so, you know, maybe it's the case that uh you have access to, you know, Australian Indian equities And yeah, their market size is not the same as the SPY, but unless I'm trying to manage, you know, ten billion dollars, does it really matter? And don't you want to go to the place with the, you know, highest risk reward? So you you have to you have to look at it like that. Maybe there's some other places that um maybe it's it's not so hard to earn money.

uh or as hard as it is in other markets. I mean I've definitely found that to to be the case. I mean there are markets that are easier or more difficult uh depending on what you're doing, right? For example. If you take like if you enter the S you know, any of the US indices randomly and hold for like three months, you know, uh like, you know, or hold for even a random number of bars. Uh, you know, all on a long term kind of scale, let's say a month and above.

you're gonna be like pretty positive on every equity curve because they're almost always, you know, go back up no matter what. If you get a little smarter and say, you know, add a X percent drawdown randomly buy, you're also gonna be doing pretty well.

Well on the short side it's gonna be the opposite because it's you know long biased. You gotta think about this stuff, right? Um maybe you don't want that maybe you're selling frickin', you know, straddles and options and you actually want something that doesn't move at all.

Or you want something that moves a ton but in a range. You know, so you gotta you gotta you gotta and and of course these is these are assumptions and there's no guarantee that any of these uh you know characteristics of any market that we're just uh talking about are gonna last into the future. However

It's fair to say that, you know, there's certain so people will take this to the extreme and say you, you know, you can't conclude anything, but you have to conclude something to play, right? So you gotta check the conclusions and the biases that are least detrimental, right? So like I can expect volatility in general to go to to be low to fall with time, you know, because that's how it works.

You know, na uh as in like if I short the VXX, right? So if I hold a uh an option and all else is equal, you know, it'll fall. I mean that's a structure of the instrument, the the price.

Sure. So just before we move too far away from what we're talking about initially, um, I just have another question around that. Uh uh, that's right. Okay. So y you are using computers and algos to go as far as pick the certain symbols that you are trading certain strategies with. Is there any human intervention before that strategy is actually live trading that symbol?

Well yeah, I we still look through all the I think it's important. So we can automate everything and we have automated everything. yet I still personally look through the um equity curve of every single strategy that we trade. Uh and I don't you know, I I do that because of course, you know, from a from a risk perspective is you know what what I should be saying. But

Unfortunately, you have no freaking clue, right? So people that tell you they look over it by you know, with their eyes because they uh you know, they can tell what's kinda BS, what's not, like They can't. And if they could, why are they using like computers and machine learning, right? But it does help you learn, right? And what it helps you learn is holy shit, you know, I've On all US equities, right? Buying when, you know, when there's uh I don't know.

when ninety percent of all liquidities post a down day is a good day holding for a day, right? because you saw that that's a feature that's in every single system that you've been generating in the past month as you've been focusing on equities, for example, right? I mean you s you gotta learn what it is that move mu moves markets. And it it's very often uh You know, it's very often like people talk about the truth. It's another thing. This all this all ties together. Um

you know, what's the truth, right? Do are we really looking for the truth? Uh imagine a uh analyst, right, that is he's n he's a bad guy, right? And he shorted Apple, you know, and then he sent out a rumor that, you know, Apple is bankrupt, let's say. I mean, whatever. And that's not true, right? And by like

efficient market hypothesis and whatnot, right? It should basically not be priced into the market or I mean it should have minimal impact because well it's just bullshit. Some guy just talking, right? It's the same thing as some guy in a forum saying something. But The price on many equities actually would move down in these cases, you know, even on a rumor of some totally false information, right? So to me that's reality, because that's all I care about.

Even though the information, you know, in the way that we would just you know talk about it in in our world, you know, it's it's not legitimate, it's not real, it's fake. But it's very real because it moved the price. And you know, you gotta distinguish between these two things. You know, people really talk about the stuff that they know as in, you know, gold and silver will be co integrated, right? But yeah.

Does does that doesn't that doesn't necessarily hold, you know? I mean there's a I mean I know these are outlandish scenarios, but let's say they became they found found out how to, you know, extract silver for free, or let's say a big meteorite of gold fell somewhere else.

uh in the world, you know, from the from the from the from space. You know? I mean we talked about this a little bit before, but those all those things should kind of uh or have the potential to break these uh you know relationships of correlation, co integration that

You know, been around. I mean look at L T C M. There you go. They also thought that all their relationships would hold until they didn't. Right? So i it's all about risk management in in that respect, you know, ha'cause you never know.

Okay. So ultimately before any strategy is live traded, you do decide Uh whether that's a symbol you wanna be participating in or not. Yeah. So I don't decide, right? I I the only thing I decide on is basically if I feel the the times I would reject is you know, is if I feel and and because we trade many, many strategies, this isn't that big of a deal. It is still introducing bias. But

Um let's say I feel that this strategy is a little lacking on the trade to parameter ratio, right? Uh maybe it's not I don't feel like it has as much uh you know, it it doesn't have as many trades out of a sample, I'm not as confident in the results that I'm gonna get, so maybe I don't necessarily wanna be, you know, trading that. Uh and maybe let's say uh

Pfft, I don't know. There's there come for example, StairCycle is a stock that went up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up and then like got sued or something like that and just goes down, down, down, down, down, down, down. It may happen because we don't look at the instruments that we're kind of working with beforehand. It may happen that that, you know, like

that became a really good ha candidate for a long only system, right? Because the in like the entire in sample for like thirty years it was just going up. But then the past five years it literally has just been going straight down. And it has legal troubles once you look at it. So that kind of stuff I'd like to remove. Uh if that's a long only system. If it's a long short system, no problem.

Now you mentioned in your answer there trade to parameter ratio. Mm-hmm. What sort of ratio do you look for, ideally? Um uh I don't know, uh thirty, probably, you know, twenty, thirty minimal. I I'd like to see fifty out of sample trades to a number of parameters. That's a lot. But uh, you know, yeah.

It's it's th the the mo I mean I I don't know. Mo most people I consult, uh so I I I do some consulting for some startups and some hedge funds and most of them I mean, obvious that their stuff doesn't work, right? But uh You know, they're using like, I don't know, uh sometimes three trades in the at a sample. uh for, you know, twenty parameters, for example, which is crazy. It's just the more the better, right? Because i if you have like a hundred strategies of sharp zero point one.

Right? You can make a really high sharp strategy uh portfolio of strategies out of that. So you're actually should be worried again, and we discussed this on our uh last time we spoke. You should be worried not about highest performance in the out of sample, not about highest performance in the in sample, but about

the highest so that the in sample and the outer sample always match as much as possible. As in the outer sample matches the in sample as much as possible. Right. Yeah. That's that's actually a really good point. And that's something that you don't actually hear many people talking about.

It is'cause you really want that consistency, right? Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to me. Like like it's compl like most people that I speak to, I feel like they're not even working like they're not they're never gonna find the solution'cause they're trying to solve like not the right problem.

Right. Uh it's pretty crazy. Uh uh I never I never see that. I never see like I tested all my machine learning by going back, let's say, and taking like I don't know, nin nineteen ninety to two thousand and kind of seeing what works from two thousand to twenty fifteen or twenty ten, right?

Just seeing what works. What were like the instruments that were reasonable to trade with using the methods that I'm using? What were the uh you know the features that were kind of reasonable to include? You know, what kind of performance degradation can I expect?

You know, I don't really see studies of that like anywhere. It kinda blows my mind. So if you were to say See something that performed well in sample and then you ran it out of sample and it performed uh spectacularly better, that would be a slight red flag for you. So not usually. Uh and usually those things are associated with like infrastructure changes.

Um so let's say let's say we're going back to that stereo cycle example where we went up up for a long time and then it's just starting going down down. So like it's very likely there was like a structural change in the in the in the instrument, right? Or on the you know, in the trading environment of the instrument.

So basically like there's a huge lawsuit, everyone's afraid, you know, went from holy shit the company is gonna be the number one, you know, ecological company in the world to oh my god, you know, we did you know, we're about to go bankrupt'cause we're gonna get sued. And then if you were trading a short system, let's say all the way up while it was going up and up and up and up. But it was, you know, it was short term, so it was making money. And then once it starts going down like crazy, uh

Obviously the short system is gonna really excel. And in fact I like so I do introduce a little bit of bias like this, but it's a bias that so for example, uh uh trading getting a system to work short only on like, you know Let's say you trade yeah, let's say the ES, it's an easier example, and everyone knows what the yes looks like, right? So you get it to work short only uh on uh you know let's say 1980 to 1999, right? Uh and then you test it during QE.

Right. And it still does really well. Right. So that's something that I wouldn't really discount. Right. That's because it's trading against the trend. You just basically have to You have to see what you know, is your strategy trading long breakouts, right, of A and D? Well yeah, AMD is up four hundred percent. You're gonna do really well. Right. Um you gotta see like what what it is you're trying to catch. What's the what's the what's the inefficiency?

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Practice on live data, master the platform, and build confidence risk-free before you even pay a cent. Click the link in the show notes to start trading with Trade the Pools Capital. Now, just going back to that trade to ratio uh uh sorry, trade to parameter ratio. Um just I just want to make sure we didn't lose anyone on that point. Uh so an example of that might be if you let's say you just

for argument's sake, a very basic strategy. Let's say you want price to be above the two hundred day moving average. That's one parameter. And then you also want today's close to be the highest close of the last ten days. That's a second parameter. So for something like that, if you wanted 50 trades per parameter. Then you'd want a hundred trades as a absolute minimum in your in sample testing. Did I understand that right?

At a sample. You want it out of sample. So fifty is pretty hard to get out of sample. But my out of samples are very large. So I only use about forty percent of my data in sample and sixty percent out of sample, which is also something that other people don't do. I think Like there's there are systems, as I said, that work uh over decades and uh that's what I'm looking for. I'm not looking for those ones that you have to re optimize every month to maybe get some you know, good sharp

I'd rather trade like one percent of the time. This is another thing, right? Most people try to predict like all the time, you know, long or short, but we're We're not running a business in the sense like we don't have we're not like hedging crude oil, so we always need a you know, we're always pumping crude oil, so we always need an estimate or where it's gonna be. We can say that like, you know what, I don't know how to trade on any day but Chinese New Year.

You know? And on Chinese newer I know I know that I need to buy the closes of every Chinese equity and then just sell the next day as open. If that's what you need to do, that's what you should do. You don't and just don't trade for the rest of the year. That's not that's fine. I don't see a problem with that.

Right. And people do weird stuff. I don't understand why to you know, to make these continuous bets. Right. And I was also just discussing this as you know. In in Forex and in futures, right, it's very common to do single uh single ticker systems, right? Single time series uh systems, or isn't trading one asset. And then in equities, it's very common to do a portfolio of assets, right? Um and so I don't understand why

you know, they like don't mix. You know, why wouldn't you would do a single stock, single asset systems and and equities? That's you know because if you say that they're all correlated, right? Then there's no reason to be playing the portfolio because that means you're saying they're all correlated. The diversification of portfolio is not going to do anything for you. If you're saying they're all uncorrelated,

Right, which is the reason you would be port doing a portfolio. Then if they're all incorrelated, they're all different, they should get in you should get your idiosyncratic returns by trading each asset with a system that's suited for it. No? So a lot of people I guess have an issue with single simple strategies because it's easier to over optimise and curve fit to those strategies. So I think by trading a portfolio it's probably an easier way for them to avoid uh those types of complications.

Yeah, but if they are they making money, right? Like and then like what then I have a question. Why don't you you know, what's the difference then if you like rank all your all your system let's say you're doing a long only portfolio, right? On like a hundred equities.

Well, you know, if you rank all the equities by performance and remove the bottom quartile, almost always your performance will get better, right? Even on a rolling basis. Because, you know, systems get kind of fit for the regime of the market and It's like a and then and then at which point do you stop? And then what is your point? Like the if the point's to make money, right?

But d like it look, again, if if if you believe, right, that that um the markets are uncorrel like they're moving uh the the equity markets are not correlated with each other, right? then you should try to get the you know, that's where the money is now, don't you think?

Not trading one one system for everything. Yeah. I mean I'm not disagreeing with you, just to be clear, I'm just throwing a counter argument because I myself, I'm mean, I'm trading like single well, I'm trading single ETF strategies. Yeah, that's which is fine. That's uh that's diversified. That's much what er w I I agree with that, you know. And the th look, the thing is I look at these things and I think

They are like this. It's uh every single every single one of these markets is a game. Like a like say it's like poker. It's a zero sum game and with its own players. Okay? And yes, there are major players that p trade like let's say the SPY, right? And because, you know Uh if you know, if any of the ETFs get misaligned with their equities, there's arbitrators that will come up and make everything like work properly, but uh be efficient, that is. But that doesn't mean that like

There's still different people like people trading AMD are not the same people. There are some of the same people that are trading Nvidia, but it's not all the same people, right? And you don't need to be the smartest guy in the room. You just need to be smarter than X amount of people. You need to take money from somebody.

Right? It's not um You know, you should you should be doing everything to maximize your possibility of being the smartest guy at the game that you're playing, which kind of leads me to my next point.

Uh it's which is uh two points, I guess. Two f twofold approach, right? It's uh two pronged approach. It's uh making synthetic instruments and trading outside of the US, you know. Uh most people are not managing a billion dollars. And in fact a billion dollars is You know, for other people it's not that much. But, you know, The point is y y you can go and go to Israel for example or go to India or go to Singapore and maybe maybe there's

you know, maybe there's dumber money out there. I mean in India as from the statistics I've seen, in the US it's like something like ninety percent now or even more of all the trades are electronic, right? Um in India it's not. I mean there are there are cer certain structural efficiencies inefficiencies that come out of that. If there's people sitting there market making by hand, you can go and do it with a computer and just be faster and already be better than them.

Right. You can do that. You can't do it in the US because there's a lot of people spending a lot of money to to do that here, you know, and you're not gonna outspend them or out compete them. Right? You make it sound very simple. It it you know, I it it actually is. To be honest, like the stuff that I do, the tr the systems that work now are you would not believe how simple they are. I mean, they're just so, so, so stupid.

And coupled couple that with literally the fact that not a single person I'm consulting in like machine learning for trading. I mean, these people have like some of them have like Tens, if not a hundred million dollars invested and they have nothing. They don't have a single thing that will work out a sample. It's crazy.

You know, they've written so much code, you know, sign I tell them, like, look, dude, what if you just buy on Monday and sell on Tuesday? And they're like, That would never work. I'm like, Okay, well you're done right there. You're basically saying that I know how the market will act. Well, if you know how the market will act and you don't need to test stuff, then you know, first of all, what am I doing here? And second of all, why aren't you a billionaire yet? You don't know, that's the point.

So you have to kind of, you have to... See what is the stuff that you really, really, really, truly know. Once again, there's not that many things, you know. Assets that cost the same, or the the sorry, assets that are the you know the same asset on different venues should cost the same price.

You know, uh there's put call parity because if there wasn't you could make a synthetic position with a put and a call to mimic another position and short that one and then you would have risk free profit. You know, but even that stuff isn't a given. That's the crazy thing. You know, if you look at, you know, some of these other markets, uh, even in Russia, right? Even in I I I saw I know some uh

So I I heard of a team in Ukraine that did something like this. They had so they had options on futures. And they bought the option to And then they bid up the future like a minute before settlement. And took like an out-of-the-money option up to like obviously an in-the-money one, made like ten thousand percent in like a minute. That's of course illegal on market manipulation. However, you know, you have no idea that's not going on.

You know, so uh It's uh y you gotta really w see what what you what you know and and it's very, very little.

So what markets are you trading? Like what countries are you trading most of your volume in? Uh I I'm still training mostly in the US, right? But um I'm trying to explore, as I said, India. Um I'm doing some stuff in China. I'm going to be going into South Korea soon. You know, there's there's just there's there really is an insane amount of opportunity. I mean, like even stuff that you would never think you'd you could do, like I don't know, futures spot arbitrage, right?

Like that's a strategy that literally has like tons of literature about it. I mean you can just look up on the internet how to do it. Most of that stuff is just taken up by other uh you know, other people. Or triangular arbitrage. right? Uh in in Forex. Right. So that's like when you uh you you you can buy the JPY Euro, right? And then uh sell the JPY USD and buy the your USD, right? Something like that.

I need to write it out to tell you the right stuff. But basically you have a net zero position, uh, and it's a risk free profit. I mean you have legging risk, I guess, but uh it's a profit between the synthetic or the native uh spread. That native inter intercountry or whatever, not intercommodity, the the native spread between like I don't know GBP JPY, right? And the GBP USD and USD JPY. Does that make sense?

Uh sort of. I'd have to breathe into that bit. Well b basically uh sometimes th it happens that there's certain comp more complex instruments Or even there's certain instruments. and positions that can be made with other instruments and positions, right? So for example, a calendar sp a exchange traded calendar spread in the VIX, right, can be made by selling one futures and buying one future, right? But there's also an exchange traded one like that. Does that make any sense?

So if those things are priced differently, you can buy one and sell the other and you'll lock in a risk free profit. Because it's the same exact instrument. So it's this okay, so like

Take the take the the very simple example of you know an ounce of gold, right? Let's say an ounce of gold and trading is trading in London for a hundred dollars and trading in New York for a hundred and two dollars. You can sell the one in New York, buy the one in London, you're net plus two dollars, you have no risk, right? Yeah. Okay, so now imagine doing the same thing except for instead of gold and gold, which is really simple, you can have like

you know, a long position in equities and a corresponding equ uh options position or a futures position. Basically these things that will make them identical. And you've got to look up the relationships. But there's certain relationships that are, you know, for example, a cal uh exchange trended calendar spread, let's say you know, long March, short September can be will be the exact same instrument as if you just bought the long, you know, the March futures and sold the September futures.

Except you would do that in two executions, but buying the exchange traded calendar spread you would do it in one. But it's like what if there's a mispricing between those, you know?

Now, just going back to an earlier comment you made about trading in or you you yourself are looking at opportunities in India, China, and I think you also mentioned South Korea, are there any complications for you to actually be able to trade those markets? Like i how easy is it for you to open an international equities account? Well, first of all, IB gives you access to a lot of stuff. So anything we could do through IB we do through them. Um but, you know, it it all depends on

You know, now there's so much data available, for example quandal or whatever, you know, you you you can test before uh kinda getting in there. But yes, i there are some difficulties in opening accounts. It depends on you know, where the what what accounts and and where, right? So I don't know, probably easier to open in London than it is in China, let's say, right? But um Again, there's providers in the US that give you access to some international markets and there are um

I don't know, there are uh you know, lawyers on the ground if you do have the capital to do something like that, uh, that can help you in any of these countries. And plus you gotta you gotta realize, right, like if we're talking about making I don't know. Let's say we're talking about spot futures arbitrage and we're gonna be making 0.1% on our capital per day, right? So In that case it's not Like the

You can pretty much I mean you you can tell how much you're gonna make more or less within some within some range,'cause it's like an arbitrage trade, right? And so you can say, you know, I can spend twenty percent on that lawyer's fees and I'll be okay.

kind of getting a little bit, you know, scaling my business uh a little bit growing is you can there's a lot of kind of outside of smarts alpha out there. Like obviously there's speed, right? There's also special relationships, there's geographical kind of considerations, right? Maybe there's special resources that you have, right? Maybe, maybe you can short uh, you know Let's say for example there's a strategy you can do and it'll make you uh you know x percent, right? But uh

uh it involves being short this whole time and the fees will like like basically also equal to x percent. What if you could, you know, short for point zero one of X percent? Would that change your ability to do that strategy, right?

And in fact th these kind of uh these kind of uh things prevent other entrants from coming in and if you can kind of secure a environment that allows maybe allows you to do uh to to to execute some of these uh strategies, it's gonna be much more difficult for people to come and push you up.

Let me put a question to you. You might laugh at this question, but really what you're looking at is you're looking at markets where there's less competition, okay? So where your competitors for the most part are less sophisticated, okay? Mm-hmm. How about US penny stocks? Yeah, you know, I was just uh I there I bet there's a bunch of stuff like uh look, US penny stocks are nice just because of the movement, right? So like um the minimum movement is significant.

Which is really nice for you if you are a um you know, a a scalper or like a market maker, right? So uh if your minimum tick is enough for you to eat, that's real good. And it they also have kind of implied uh implied bottom, depending of course what you're trading. You don't even need to go to penny stocks as like OTC stuff, just you know, cheap, cheap equities, right? Like just

equities under five dollars. They're not touched by uh institutional players very often, right? Um, so they're less efficient. Uh obviously penny stocks are not like OTC stuff is like really not played with uh in the institutional world. I mean relative to, you know, the more high grade investment uh investments. But um

Yeah, i i I think I think there's a lot of uh a lot to be done there, you know. And it's all about the risk, right? I mean if you're not tr trading on margin and if you put in ten dollars then the most you can lose is ten dollars. Like that's a truth, you know. You don't know where the price is gonna be. But uh you know, and actually on that point, think about you know making money off stuff that you do know. As in like maybe you can make money regardless of price, right?

Well, I don't know. For example, I we just launched a market making program that's just killing it. Like, you know, we're trading I don't even want to say it, but in the multiples of ten sharp, right? And uh So it makes more money when there's more volatility. Right? So it's depend its profits basically depend not on the direction of the market, but literally on the volatility. And that's it. So I'm not in any way tied to the

You know, direct directionality of the market I make. Although, right, if it goes down a lot, it becomes more liquid, right? Because the tick size becomes a larger portion of the instrument size, which is what we were talking about with the uh with the penny stocks. And if it goes up up very high, then the spread ge becomes wor very wide and uh that also will actually increase my profits. Well since it's a market making longer than that.

Well, I did want to ask you about that. So this could essentially be categorized as a high frequency trading strategy, yeah? Definitely. So typically when we hear about high frequency trading, we think that's something which is for the big boys with deep pockets, right? How is someone like you able to pull this off? I mean well first of all

Has there ever been anything that has really truly been for the big boys with the deep pockets? Obviously not,'cause that basically would mean that like whoever makes their money would always be there. And it's never like that. Literally it's always the opposite. There's always someone up and coming that's gonna kick your ass later.

That's just the truth. Like that's progress. Right? So that you know, that assumption in general is is not so accurate. And that's that's that's you know my first point. And and my second point is What I realized is like You know why you know why it's untouchable? Because what they're doing is like res just absolutely ridiculously simple. Okay? And the only way to maintain their edge is to make it faster, let's say.

Right. But you can be smarter in the same business, right? Um there's you know, you just gotta see what You know, for example, there's some options exchanges that will give you rebates when trading certain options. You know, maybe that's where you should be trading and just basically trying to trade those options, you know, market make those. I mean there's a like there's literally infinity markets, right? Especially if you consider the fact that you can trade like synthetic instruments, right?

So yeah, you you could always find a place that like you just stop playing the games that everybody else is playing, right? Like maybe you wanna trade all the time in one you know, one short your instrument will be one uh share of Johnson and Johnson and you know, long and one share of ExxonMobil short or something like that. I don't know. But

Well you say stop playing the games that everyone else is playing, but there's a lot of people playing the high frequency game, isn't there? But there's actually much it's it's I mean, there's actually not that many people, right? The the the players are actually pretty concentrated. the it's it's ac they do account for a good amount of the volume, but the number of individuals actually doing this is much less than almost every other business.

Or every other part of the market, right? So there's a lot of more people running mutual funds than there are people doing HFT. So for you to be able to participate in that space, I mean, how much of an issue has infrastructure and speed been for you? I mean, right, it's not it's not like

turn on train station, code up your algo and press play. Right? But uh you know, if if all right, so if I asked most people, and I didn't realize this'cause I didn't know the opportunity the opportunities basically are out there, just like everybody else, because everyone was just telling you they're not.

But if you like if someone come came and told me like, Yeah, you're trading like let's say two to five sharp right now and you could be trading thirty sharp, all you have to do is spend like twenty percent of your time building infrastructure. I would be like, hell yeah, no problem. That's a worth it enough uh increase in in you know in trading performance. So you know, it's all a trade-off.

And I mean I I mean l let me give you an example of something concrete, right? So there are right now like I mean a very, very simple example. You can go on the internet And find derivatives platforms for cryptocurrencies, for example, right? Their liquidity is not high. Um you know, don't get me wrong. But uh for retail traders, you can make money literally doing regular arbitrage. Buying and selling options and futures. You know, at the same time for different prices.

Pure ARP. That shouldn't exist. And when I say retail traders, I mean like you can do a good amount of volume through this, right? You can do, you know, I mean you can make, I don't know, five million dollars a year on a one million dollar account if you want. That's pretty good. And even if you do it for one year, it's not a problem. I mean like i as long as if you have like truly you know, truly you know, not like statistical opportunities but more deterministic opportunities.

Which exist. Like you know, in we are working with some spot futures arbitrage in India and some other places. What are deterministic opportunities? Well, if you so like, let's say you're actually looking at, you know, the spot uh the call, you know, uh a call an Apple Hundred dollar call costs ten dollars. And in another place, a hundred dollar call and Apple cost eight dollars. You i y i and if you hit the market on both sides, right, you are basically like you know you're gonna make money.

If you get filled. There's no that's it. The second you execute, you're in the money. You're profitable. Not in the money, but profitable. Does that make sense? So there's like like flow traders, you know? Flow traders they say their models are deterministic. I think they're training like super high frequency in the like uh ETFs and Thorex space. No? So like imagine like think about this, right? There's like five equities venues in the US or more. I don't I don't remember. There's a ton of them.

And some of them trade the same equities. You obviously have seen if you've ever traded that your execution price if you ever traded with like a, you know, I don't know, IB or like any like more serious broker that allows you to kind of route trades to different exchanges, you can see that your pricing

is actually different. Not only your pricing, but the actual price, the quote, is different and different exchanges. Like that doesn't make any sense. And basically if that delta becomes more than your commissions, right? it's uh very reasonable to go ahead and uh You know, take advantage of that for risk free profit. Again, risk free is very you know, there's exchange risk, there's all this other risk, but compared to like trading where you you know bet money and then the time goes by.

And then you either make money or you don't, you know before basically what price you will close your trade at and what price you will own the uh open the trade at and approximately how long it's gonna take to do both. Real fast, sorry, you had a guy, I forget, I listened to his um he's a very energetic guy. He's a hand trader. And he in in his podcast on on your podcast and in his interview

He said something about he was trading Forex and there was a broker that had like a one couple second lag uh against his other broker. And that's how he's first started to t to make money. Is it you know what I'm talking about? Yeah, that was Tom Dante. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And and and you think about that like that's crazy. Like, how is that true? How is that possible? Also, if you think about like that basically that that makes you realize that there are people making the market efficient.

You you get what I'm saying? And they also have limited capital and limited time. And like it takes a while to be a guy that like really makes the market more efficient, right? Like you have to make this your like business in your life. So there's a bunch of markets where there is not enough people making it efficient.

Maximally efficient, whatever way that is. This strategy that you're trading, this this high frequency strategy, which we're focusing on at the moment. Which markets is that trading? Is that in equities or is that in futures and also Uh second question, how frequently does it trade? It's in uh it's in equities and futures, although I'm doing similar things. As I said, I'm doing the options uh thing that I was telling you, the arbitrage.

So I mean there's there's a variety of different strategies, but uh how frequently it trades, it probably trades let's say, um, I don't know, probably like Let me see how many trades there are right now. So there were three thousand two hundred and twelve trades in the past two hours and fifty minutes. Wow. That's a lot. How much profit is it trying to take on each trade? So I bet about a thousand dollars a trade and I try to take like um

I don't know, like a dollar. A dollar profit. Yeah, a dollar profit. I try to go for zero point one percent is probably like the highest that it'll go, but if you trade a lot, it's okay.

And what sort of broker are you running with? Oh, you know, it it depends for for you know, for who you're uh working with, um or what you're trying to do, but uh You know, there's uh I I I uh I'm running with uh I B on special commissions through a relationship and um I have some other brokers I'm about to start working with in South Korea and in India. But uh that you know, those relationships haven't been set up yet. But basically um or finalized. Basically uh

You know, I I just shop the brokers to see who is gonna give me the best rates and the best connectivity and the best you know, the best opportunities, right? So maybe one costs ten times more than the other one, but it's gonna allow you to trade, you know, twenty times more.

And you know, speaking of that, there's people like there's there's ECNs of all types, Forex, non Forex, that offer rebates, which means if you're like good enough you can basically make zero money and just trade, you know, just like if you can determine, you know, y like

This is the time where markets will not move almost ever. Right? Maybe it's good to make markets then, right? Like overnight sessions when I was you know a long time ago, like in in the US Futures was like super it was like one of the best times for me, you know, like in the Yes or

uh the Euro futures, you know, and there's there's less uh less people trading, uh the price doesn't really move wildly. I mean that's an assumption that you gotta test what I just said and it has to be quantified. But You know, the price doesn't uh you know move wildly, maybe you could just kind of, you know, sit on the bin and ask and try to collect the spread, which you know, if it's a tick, it's can be significant.

Mm. There was a couple of things I did want to speak with you about, but uh one of those being other sources of edge, which I think you just touched on one of those there and you may have actually mentioned a couple others since we've been speaking. But do you wanna just speak to us about that? Because I know you've got a couple of thoughts around how You know, us as traders should be thinking about other sources of edge beyond simply thinking about alpha.

Yeah, absolutely. Right. So You know, I I I think I read somewhere that uh Renaissance Tech, one of the first things they started doing was just arbitrage in the in the equities market. So they they got a agreement with the exchange to basically trade for free. Now I don't know whether that's true or not. But that's definitely something that you can do, like one hundred percent. You know, an exchange is also a business, and especially since most of these exchanges nowadays are private.

So it's still a business, it still needs to make money. So if you bring like You know, if you just go to an exchange like an a a broker on an exchange and say, Look, you guys charge me ten cents, I trade a hundred million dollars a day. Right. I generate, you know,$100,000 in commissions, right? If you charge me, you know, five cents, I'll be able to trade$300,000 times a day and generate you$150,000 in commissions.

Right? Or something like that. Like they're just in it to make money. So if you just literally prove to them I mean it's like very simple, depending on what you're doing, right? But i if commissions is the problem, right? We're getting to the H of T space of course. Um you can uh

You know, you you can uh maybe get preferential treatment somewhere and and which allows you like a structural edge against other people. I mean if i i i if your commissions is if your commissions are zero basically, right, you can do a lot of stuff that you know, you wouldn't be able to do in in the regular markets because basically transacting you know, buying uh uh transacting to zero will be caught uh will have a cost, right? And in other markets it doesn't.

But I mean, even you know, these things you mentioned, that's maybe something you can chat about with an exchange when you're trading a hundred million dollars. I mean, most people listening to this certainly aren't trading that type of money. You know, some people certainly are, don't get me wrong. But For the most part, most of us aren't, but I think even a as you bring that up.

I think a lot of people forget that it's it is possible still to negotiate better commission rates with your broker, regardless of how much capital you have. Uh, you know, I'm sure that probably plays a part in it, but you do have some negotiating power when you're talking with your your own broker, even with a small account, true?

Absolutely. Well look, it's not it's not real I look, it it's a personal thing, right? So some people I know can go, you know, can go into kind of negotiations with nothing and come out with, you know Ten million dollar business. Other people come with they have the largest account on the exchange and they're, you know, they're the number one trader, but they're I don't know, they can't do it. They're too afraid or they're not comfortable asking for a discount or whatever. I don't know.

But these are still these are the same inefficiencies that we're discussing, you know, just in a more human form. Hmm. Now one of the other things I wanted to bring up with you is I'm not sure the best way to phrase this question. But you know, we we were speaking a little bit beforehand off air. Um actually no, it was the other day, wasn't it? And you were talking about how everyone's looking at the same types of data. So everyone's looking at the same time series.

You wanna and we've spoken about this already, you wanna try and look where other people aren't. And I think this is where you start thinking about synthetic instruments. Uh using data from other instruments to trade different instruments and getting signals from different time series to trade different markets and I don't know if I'm making any sense right now, but I think You you probably get where I'm going with this. Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean look, almost everything we trade looks at other other markets. And which comes, you know, comes back to the point. I discuss this now all the time. Like people think machine learning, I mean that's great, right? Like you can learn, you know kind of more stationary stuff with a lot of examples pretty well, right?

I don't see like we don't have enough data for machine learning to just learn from scratch, in my opinion. Depends on what you're doing. Okay. But from let's say you're doing daily equities trading, right? You don't want machine learning to to to like what is you know, learn what is a trader. You just want want the machine learning to do what a trader does just like faster, better all the time. Alright.

Who are the people making money? Like prop traders, you know, they trade relative value. They don't say like, oh you know. I mean not all of them obviously, but the more successful ones I know are looking at all the kind of not all the assets, but a collection of assets that basically, you know, th they they can tell they say stuff like this. I don't know, like, these three assets are strong.

Which means these three assets should be weak because they have like usually an inverse relationship. But out of these three this one actually wasn't that weak. So maybe it's a good idea to buy it because uh you know, because it's showing strength when it should show weakness.

You know, I don't know. But the point is like you should look it just thinking even about the informational content of a time series, right? So like a lot of work by like John Ellers has a lot of good stuff about this, right? So like filtering And and and you know, we we're reducing the noise, but we're also reducing the signal. And how much signal is there? You know, and is there any way to supplement that signal, right? And if you think about equities, for example, right?

If you realize that most equities are still really correlated, that means they still move together. Maybe it's a good idea, you know, why are they correlated?'Cause you would think like, oh, they're correlated because everything kind of moves for us in the same kind of at the same time. But what's possible is like, you know Someone bids up the SBY, right?

And well, because more people are pr trading the SPY. And the SPY starts going up, but then if you think about it like, oh the SPI the SPY like is up, but the uh the other the other equities that are making you know cons they're constituents of the SPY or not, which means like there's arbitrage opportunity, let's say, right? So that means that all those equities will follow the the SPY. And yeah, you're not gonna notice that. The the lag is like I think milliseconds, if not nanoseconds. But

There's a flow of how things work. You know, people move money from place to place. Bye. And you gotta like you gotta t you can't you you can't look at anything uh you know on its own. I mean there's you know, if you're trading equities there because there's a like long bias, you can you can say like like basically any time the US market is down fifty percent is a good buy, right? Sure. Okay, but, you know.

It's may maybe there's a relationship between well there's not maybe. There's definitely relationships between like, you know, US equities and foreign exchange and US bonds, right? Why not try to quantify them? I mean that stuff is also way more robust and works in the out of sample extremely well. compared to just like single asset, single data fr uh series trading systems.

Are you ever concerned about Some of your strategies might be built upon spurious correlations, like the signals are coming from spurious correlations. Absolutely not. And I g and you know why? I mean they are for sure, but what is a spurious correlation, right? Like again, we're discussing the the the problem with uh bad analyst, right, that let uh that uh spread some bad rumors about a stock, right? Like

You know, so like you can say that a spurious correlation is every time this guy releases a report, the stock goes down. Like, you know, but he's lying. But like, is he? Right? And who do you care about? Like, what if Bangladeshi du butter prices, you know, affected, you know, Indian GDP and India happened to be the biggest buyer of US equities during that time?

Uh so there was a big correlation between Bangladeshi butter prices and uh you know, US equities. So like you don't know what the relationships are, right? And you don't know that the ones that you think are there, like gold and silver like we discussed, are gonna last. So I think it's, you know, I again you're s like people say this is spurious because what they do is they it's it all they're saying is it doesn't make sense giving their like logical apparatus.

and an informational base. However, if you could evaluate opportunities based on your logical apparatus and informational base, then you should be a billionaire. And then why are you doing algorithmic trading? You get what I'm saying? Like you they contradict uh you contradict yourself when you when you say some of these not you, like we people when they say some of this stuff, right? Like uh if you work from the fur like platform that like we don't know anything, right?

See how you can make money. Like you write down on a piece of paper what you know. And I mean it's crazy. You don't really know that much. I mean, we know like even as humans, right? Like, I know that you know, uh s like there's gravity, right? There's like death, right? And, you know, there you can make babies if you don't want protection. Like that's that's pretty much it for all humans, you know. I know that's oversimplifying it, but

Yeah, if if you work from that frame of reference, it uh really helps you kind of view the financial markets in a more objective manner, in my opinion. I mean.

Mm, I see where you're going with this. I see where you're going with this. But let's change gas for a moment just to take us out here. And I was actually... I I thought I'd ask you about this concern. I read uh a write up on you in the Huffington Post uh must have been a couple of weeks back. And I thought it was pretty interesting actually and probably something that a lot of us can well, I'm sure we can take something from it.

You spoke a lot about uh your routine and how you structure your day and that sort of thing. So uh I'd be keen to hear you Or keen to have you share that uh with listeners. So can you tell us a bit about how you structure your day? You've obviously got a lot going on. Um, so it you know, it it it it depends uh how much work I'm doing with uh who and who I'm doing it with, right? So there's times where

Um I'm doing a lot of work internationally, so I have to be up for the, you know, the other side of the world. So I'll usually do you know, I'll sleep like I'll do a tw twice a day sleep wake cycle if that makes any sense. So like let's say there's twenty four hours in a day and I need to sleep, I don't know, ten hours, then I sleep for five hours, and then I do stuff for

However hours makes it to twelve, uh seven, right? Um and then I sleep for another five hours and do it again. Right? And that way I can kinda get the morning of each place or something like that, or maybe the evening, I don't know. Um I try to kind of keep everything

structured, keep uh you know, do the everything is on lists, everything is organized. I mean I'm what right now we're managing, you know, a good amount of money. Uh I'm managing overall in my office uh overseas about three dollars of assets. It's basically me and a couple guys that are just you know, they just program for me more or less. So I have to be very, very, very, very organized. I have to have systems for pretty much everything. I mean, from you know, what I read to what I eat.

Um but having said that, it's really I found uh and I read also, but I found for myself it's very important for creativity to kind of have like unstructured time. So uh very often I'll have just you know, I'll finish a big push in a project and for three days I'll just kind of do whatever, you know, walk my dog like four times as much or just go explore a different uh you know, a different restaurant or different you know, just something different. Go to the museum. It's always good to kinda

Yeah, the the the structure is really good for kind of powering through things, but for creativity you need to kind of remove the uh have have less structured time. Absolutely. And that sleeping pattern of yours

Did that take a bit of getting used to? To be honest, it just happened. Like, you know,'cause like I'm I'm trading all all day now and for some of this high frequency stuff, the way I look at it, and again this is silly, I don't recommend people doing this, but I just program it and let it go live.

Right. And I can do that because it's basically like I'm the I'm the main guy doing, you know, writing the code, so I I know what it is, you know. I there would be no chance for someone else to have added like something that I don't know about. uh it's still dangerous, uh and I've lost money doing it. But at the point it's like

uh you just you just go because the if you're not trading you're basically like missing out on making money. So it's more you know, I found that it's in the that your net wealth will be higher if you just kinda start. than if you uh wait and wait and start and test. And also obviously the bugs would be No, you you you you fix them much faster when you lost money because of something.

Now you've mentioned it a couple of times and you referenced it just then. Like you have a team, like you have a few people working with you now. How has that come about? Like how have you met these people and how did you start working together?

To be honest, I hired like a ton not a ton, but like I don't know, probably like twenty different people, you know. And people people hit me up from like Google and Facebook, you know, saying that like to work for me for free just to learn. And I found that like You know, like people just don't they don't like think properly. Like just they just they refuse to think properly. I don't know how to explain it. Like I'll come to people and I asked, you know

They don't uh, you know, they'll hire me, for example, and I'll ask them like, okay, how are you validating your systems? And like ninety nine percent of the answers I get is like, what do you mean? I'm I just like Graduated Harvard in computer science. What is that? What like are you like just like that person is like really stupid because they basically didn't even understand the question I asked them.

Like I just, you know, and this is the kind of stuff I hear all the time. They're like, I've been doing math for, you know, I've been a math professor for 40 years. Like, and?

That like y you know, people come to me and they're like, you know, I I wanna I wanna make more money in my business. I'm like, Okay, so what did you do in the past three months? He's like, Well, what do you mean? I hired fifty people. I'm like, Cool dude, like Do you not see that like one of like you're like I wanna make more money, so I went out and I spend all this money.

Like does not not make any s like what, you know? Come on, man. Correlate the things that you're say like literally they don't uh you know, there's no plan. They don't write like if you write stuff down and look at it yourself, it's really useful.

You know, when you write down, I would like to make more money in my business, you go and like go through your business. What makes money that I do? Which of those makes the most money for the least amount of time spent? Maybe I should focus there. You know, it's almost never let me hire more people. Right? So you gotta just be clear about like what is your objective, you know, where you're going. I have a dog, you know, and I

I like sometimes I wish he could just talk and I would just hire him, you know? Shit.'Cause like i if he needs to go somewhere, he'll go somewhere. You know, if he needs that piece of food, like

He will just you know, he's like a genius, you know, he'll he'll open this and go through there and whatever. And it's just very clear I can tell that that, you know, he's just doing they have like one thing on their mind and then when it switches to another thing, they just focus a hundred percent on that thing and they just go.

And that's that's like what you need. That's very true. That's very true. You know? Um yeah, I mean'cause like you're competing with some really smart people. I mean, there's tons and tons of people like way smarter than me in this field, right? The problem is smart and making money have nothing to do with each other. Not nothing, but it's like, you know, you have to be a

s like a certain you have to be like X amount, you know, you have a IQ of one twenty or, you know, X X kinda like you have to know how to do basic linear algebra, let's say or something like that. But beyond that, it's not really you know No one knows. No one knows what they're doing. You know, I I had the chance when doing some more just work and business, I had the m chance to meet, you know, some some pretty serious people, you know, from presidents of countries, you know, people that work

you know, up high in the world. Uh different world, you know, uh different worlds, political world, you know, business world, whatever. And you see you just realize like shit, dude, no one knows anything. Like no one knows anything. They're like everyone's just guessing. You know, there's so so so little like objective process, it's it's like insane.

You know? You never think like you always think like the the the the president, right? Oh, you know, he became the president, what a boss. You have no idea that it wasn't like, oh shit, like Like elections are soon, right? Like fuck, someone needs to be a president, right? Like who's like the guy that everyone thinks is gonna be least damaging to the country? Let's go with him.

You don't know that that's like the process they're not u they're using, right? Like I mean y you think it's you know I I'm reading a book that my brother recommended to me and he does consumer products. An awesome book, I think uh I forget what it's called. It's by Ryan

Yeah. Yeah, what is it? Yeah, it's thank you for lying or something like that. What is it? No, that's thank you for smoking. That's a different movie. But it's something about lying. But it talks about the media and how it works. And it's crazy. I mean, like it talks about like um

you know, political blogs. They need like information to post so that they have stuff, you know, viewers. So they just pick like a candidate and like say like, oh look at this guy's obviously getting ready to be president. But he's right, like sometimes that stuff will make the person like a legitimate, you know, a legitimate uh presidential candidate.

You know, because if everyone is ever ever everyone is thinking, you know, uh basically that that that all the media is showing him as a candidate, then everyone will treat him seriously. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. For sure, man.

Well, let's uh let's that wrap things up here. Um, as we're talking about books and that type of thing, I know you're a big reader yourself. Do you wanna just, for the fun of it, recommend a title that someone should check out? You know, uh Carl Popper is someone to people should be reading, I think, a little bit. Um I think it's important. It's a good kind of what is information, you know, what is science and whatnot. Um I I just made a list of books and uh

Let's see. Yeah, Thinking Fast and Slow by It Condeman, uh Bla you know Black Swan. I don't know if I recommend this before Drunkards Walk, How Randomness Rules or Lies with Leonard Waddenau, that's kind of like a less sciencey, more pop pop kinda pop science uh book about randomness, it's really nice. Uh yeah, in terms of more, you know, focused on trading stuff, um David Aronson uh is good for the

kind of the process of of viewing uh results and and extracting useful kind of the the validation process, let's say. Ralph Vince for position sizing. Um you know. Yeah, that's about it. Obviously the market was his books that I recommended before and everyone's recommended again. But all they show you basically is that money can be made like like you can make money however you want to make money essentially.

Exactly, yeah. Yeah. I appreciate you saying that. Like I I say that to a lot of people all the time as well. Like you just need to think about the sort of trader you want to become and then almost like reverse engineer it in some ways. So if anyone listening wants to follow along with you, Bert, or find out more about you, whereabouts can they go? I'm on LinkedIn, Burt Moller, my Twitter, and you put the links in the bottom of the page, I guess, and my my website, uh ProfluentCapital.com.

Um I was gonna say, you know, we do do some we've been doing some consulting, so we look like we uh We've been like designing trading systems for people. uh for for for money, which is another thing, like people tell you like, oh that's so like you know, you run a you run a fund. How can you do that? That's like beneath you. But like we have, I don't know, millions of systems.

You know? And so providing that to other people if we're not using them I don't see that's a problem. Like they're being made in the process anyway. But the thing is th the demand for that has actually been so high that uh the pricing we have to charge now is probably unreasonable for retail traders. Okay. And just because a lot of people are probably listening to this not on the website, you know, iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, et cetera, uh, what is your Twitter handle?

It's uh B M O U L E R like uh my first initial and my last name. M like Mary. Appreciate it, man. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast for round two. I hope to have you back again sometime soon. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was a awesome time. You've reached the end of this episode of Chat with Traders, but rest assured there are more apps. And zero. soon.