215: William Beauchamp – Ex-Poker Player Assembles Team to Conquer Sports Markets

Trade the pool funds home-based stock traders with up to$200,000 in buying power. That means you can trade larger positions and scale your strategies without risking your own savings. It's time to trade with more capital, making it truly worth your time and effort. Ready to trade the pool? Click the link in the description and join the stock trading revolution today.

Seamless trades in sports betting markets, most notably Hong Kong horse racing, but also football and tennis matches too. However, Will didn't anticipate things would turn out this way. He spent his teenage years hellbent on becoming a professional poker player. It was only later when a buddy of his, who had recently left one of the larger high frequency trading firms pitched him with the idea of trying to apply similar HFT-like strategies on sports betting exchanges.

With time, the two developed several strategies generating six figures. Although Will's buddy would return to HFT, yet Will stuck with it and continued pushing on, and a bet that's truly paid off. As Will has since scaled his sports betting operation from being a one man band to a team of fifteen. Last year the firm did fifty million pounds in turnover and is annually netting seven figures in PL.

As you may have noticed, this is a slightly longer than usual episode, and although there aren't too many technical details inside, Will has a really cool story about his path to now and shares a lot of productive ideas. From the highs and lows of his teenage years trying to win at poker, to the origins and growth of Seamless, Will's thoughts on competition, markets, edge, and team building, it's all covered in this episode. Ladies, gents, here is William Beecham for two hundred fifteen. five.

But if we track it back, you know, it really all stems from you at fifteen years old playing poker. Can you tell me a little bit about your early poker days?

You know, it was back in it was like back in like two thousand, like mid two thousands and like there was a lot of like high stakes poker on TV, there was a lot of like um the World Series of poker and y you know, you could see all all these people just like making millions of dollars. And so I thought like, okay. uh let's give this a crack. And uh yeah, so I went out. I I got the you know, I I got all the books I could find on poker.

spent my pocket money and I read them all like basically like I read all these books and I studied it and then I started playing like um like you could play these free games so you know you just play with like pretend money.

Don't ask any questions. Um, I'll pay you back. And so, you know, the great mum that I've got, she said, All right, son, just, you know, don't spend more than the fifty quid and you know, that was all fine. And uh And so I deposit the the fifty quid and I started playing like um basically the very, very lowest stakes games there was. There was like once one cent, two cents sort of games. And um I was terrible. I was just like the worst.

The like I was worse than like the average bad poke player. I I really did start off as just like the worst poke player going. I would always bluff, I would always go line, I would like always be gambling. Um like I th I think like Like the the people who are naturally good poke players are quite cautious and quite um like calculated.

But my natural style was just very aggressive, taking loads of risks, trying to pull off bluffs left, right and centre. And I just I lost like the I I had fifty dollars and like I lost forty of it and I was like Like a at the time fifty dollars was a lot of money, you know. So, um so I thought, okay, look, I'm gonna this ten pounds left. I don't ask my mum to borrow a credit card again.

um, I've got this ten dollars. And so that was when I kind of had to really try to play as as like um disciplined as as possible. And I just, yeah, like I would every day after school I would just sit in front of the computer like reading these these poker forums and reading these poker um books.

And just doing maths and it it started off just like the very, very simplest sort of maths that you could do. If you've got aces and the other guy's got kings and you go all in, what's the probability that Aces is gonna win?

Right. If you've gone all in and I've got a flush drawer, what's the probability of me hitting that flush drawer and should I call? Right. And just learning about basic concepts and basic maths and um And yeah, you know, I I was good at maths at school and so If for me it was just this really fun game which you could keep playing and keep practicing and keep trying to get better at.

with the like the allure of like one day if you got really good at this game you could make a lot of money. Yeah. I I literally spent a summer doing that. I sp and then at the end of the summer holidays, every day after school, that's all I would do. And you know, I started to get I started to win money, I started to get better. And so like I would I'd turn the ten dollars into a hundred dollars. And the thing which I remember just like

uh so clearly is like the first time you you you run up your bankroll to a hundred dollars, that's like a big deal.'Cause it's like you had ten, you got to a hundred, that's like a milestone. It's like uh you know that you that you can make money. All right. And so I got two hundred dollars to say, okay, that's it. Now I'm ready for the for the big leagues. I'm gonna stop playing my one cent, two cent game, I'm gonna play two cent five cents I'm gonna play with the big boys.

Immediately I just get spanked. These guys are way better than me. Um, I basically lose$90 and I'm back to$10 again. All right, so I'm back to square one. I've got a I've got to go back down to to the low stakes of one cent, two cents. And uh and I'm playing just monkeys basically. Like the people playing one cent, two cent, they don't care about the money all that much. Like I cared about the money way more than anyone else. Um, so you know, I go back to my discipline players.

Um and yeah, like I managed to turn that ten dollars up to a hundred dollars again and I say, Okay, let's let's let's have another crack. And this time I stepped to$2,$5. And this time I actually managed to win money, right? And so like I've turned that$100 into$500. Okay, now I'm now I'm really am the best poker player on earth and I'm I move up to the next stakes, which is like five cents, ten cents.

And it's just the same pattern again and again. Like I move up, I get absolutely spanked, get totally out, outclassed, and have to move back down. But then I grind it out, I grind it out until I can have another shot. And so and it just moves up and up and up until when I was 16 years old, I'd made like 20, 20 like I'd made twenty thousand dollars in like in a summer.

And then and it's just the same story every time. Like I was so convinced when I'd won this twenty thousand dollars, I was just so convinced that I was just the best poker ever. That I took that twenty thousand dollars and I played literally the highest stakes poker that you can basically play. And so I basically sat at the so I was sixteen years old, I was sat at the table with like two thousand dollars in in front of me and I would just go all in, lose two thousand dollars.

reload my stack, another$2,000, go all, all in. I lost that$20,000 in like a day. Right. So I've I'm, you know, I'm 15, I've just spent the last year trying to earn this$20,000, lost it in a day. Back to square one. And so I basically kept doing this where I would I would really aggressively push myself, challenge myself, get myself into games, which I just had just no right being in. and uh and losing ev like pretty much with losing my shirt.

And then just grinding it back and grinding it back. And so it was like, yeah, that that that twenty thousand dollars was the first big milestone. I remember getting up to like eighty thousand dollars at one point when I was like seventeen or something, and I so badly wanted to hit a hundred thousand. But when you're playing poker, like I don't know if you've ever played much poker. It's easy to get what they would call tilted. It's easy to get like kind of emotionally sucked into a game.

And so I would like I remember this one day, literally when I was seventeen years old, had eighty thousand dollars in my poker account. By the way, like I never ever withdrew the money. Like any profits I made, I would just be like, this is ammunition to play higher stake. Um, I never ever would do any money. Just all the money I want, I just put straight back into playing high estate.

And I had this 80K bank royal and I started playing this this guy and he was just like getting really lucky, really lucky. And like in a day he won like five thousand dollars off me. And I said to him,'like, let's play heads up, just you versus me. Uh, let's play heads up for like high stakes, and it's just the dumbest thing I've ever done. But like. Me and this guy were playing like eight tables of poker, um, going all in left, right and centre.

And yeah, I just I literally just went through the full ATK in a day. And and like to lose ATK, like a thousand dollars at a time, it actually takes a long amount of time. And so it was like a twelve hour session of just seventeen year old me. uh playing horrifically you know, horrific poker until it was literally like six o'clock in the morning.

I looked at my poker balance and it w it wasn't quite zero, but it I stopped at the point where I was like, If I I actually think he he quit. Like if he kept going, he would have busted me entirely. But like he he basically won $75,000 and left and it was like me, six o'clock in the morning, uh 5k left my account. I just like blown ninety percent of you know of my last two years work. And man, that is painful.

The funny thing is is like you know, like once you s once you're back down to five thousand dollars, like you know it's gonna take you six months or a year or even two years to get back to that eighty thousand point. So like that's the that's the thing which is so uh depressing. But I always knew I could get it back. At least I had that confidence. And so it was really like

Um, I I just knew that I had to learn and to never make that mistake again. Right. It's like so I would basically I kept playing poker until the top until I was about 18. And at that point I I had won like I had 250K in my in my account.

Um and I was routinely playing like the very high stakes um of poker and I was uh I was doing well. Right. Um and you know, I loved it. Like I it was just um it was just a really passionate thing. Like Um, to get better you really have to do the maths, you really have to

crunch the numbers, do the analysis, go away and do your homework. And so it was just like a great game where like to get better, you would just do loads of maths and study it. And then you would you would go and apply those lows lessons and make money. And so it's like it really is like the perfect education for anyone who wants to do trading. Because the feedback is just is there. Like you make a single mistake, boom, all your money is gone, and you go back to square one. And so

And so yeah, I got to 18 and I said to myself, all right, I want to be a professional poker player. Um, this is what I'm good at, this is what I like. And it's, you know, at the time like it will I was making way, way more money than anything else that I could have imagined doing. Um, but everyone kind of wanted me to apply to universities and stuff like that. So I said, listen, like, um I'll apply to university, but I'm only gonna go if I get into um Cambridge.

Um and I I don't really know my logic behind that. I think it was just like I'm just a super competitive person, I think. Like anything I do, like I just I I either wanna get I wanna win or it I don't care. So that's just the weird personality that I've got.

and you're and you wanna take risk, you're just drawn to these higher and higher stakes games. And at some point you're gonna be outclassed. Right. And so I would just move up and move up and move up until I was outclassed. And so The the downside to that is yeah, like there were people who were not as good at poker as I was. who made way more than I ever made. Right? Like compared to them, like I made one tenth of what some of my peers would have made in the same sort of time.

So there's a hard way to make m buddy at poker, which is like do loads and loads of math and loads of analysis and study the game really well. And take on anyone. That's the hard way to get to make money at poker. And then there's a kind of a different way, which is a bit easier in some sense, which is like, Just find terrible poker players and only play against them. It's right. And so I would play anyone.

Anyone in the world I would play and if you have that if you have that attitude, you're gonna you're gonna have a lot of good players that wanna play you, a lot of players that are better than you wanna play you, and they will take your money until you learn to get as good as them. Um so yeah, like I I try to teach myself a different variant of poker called so

My bread and butter was Texas Hold'em, which you know I'm sure you're familiar with, or like a l a lot of people will be. And there's another very popular form called Pot Limit Omaha. And it's a totally different game. Um But it's you know, it's it's still poker. And I tried to learn that and I honestly, like when I was eighteen years old, I've lost like at least two hundred thousand dollars playing playing pot Lima Omaha.

Which is uh which is like a game I should have never been playing to begin with. And so it's just this pattern of like of overconfidence, taking risks which don't really need to be taken, and then learning a good lesson from it. And I think as long as you as long as you can learn the lesson from it. It's it's pro like for me, I always I always felt like in the end at the end it was worth the price.

But it's not the easy way. Like it would have been I if I could if I could go back time, I would just say to myself, like, Will, you don't need to lose 90% of your bankroll to learn that particular lesson. There's actually a much easier way to learn it. Mm. And and so for example, if you play against someone better than you, you can just stop once you've lost ten percent of your bank call. You don't have to stop only after you've lost ninety percent, if that makes sense.

Start your evaluation, get funded with up to$200,000 in buying power so you can go big without risking your own savings. And now you can also have unlimited time to reach the profit target. It's a game changer. Not ready to trade yet? Trade the pool offers a free demo and educational resources. 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.

Um but then one once I got to college, so in the UK you go to college from 16 to 18 years old, and it's kind of like well, anyway. And I really kind of knuckled down because I just said, if I'm here, I may as well try my best to get into Cambridge. Um and I studied super hard and I actually did pretty well and like a lot of like the math tests I I did well.

I remember struggling so hard with economics and writing essays. Just terrible, terrible at writing any essays. But the maths was always quite easy. Um, and so somehow I I like I got rejected from loads of universities, but then Cambridge, the one I actually wanted, somehow managed to like accept me.

Um so I you know, that was just really, really lucky. And uh, you know, they send you a letter when you get accepted and I still remember like opening up the letter thinking like, Oh god, is this gonna be like a rejection? or um but yeah, so so I got accepted there. And, you know, I went to Cambridge to study economics and I kinda said to myself, like

I'm still very interested in being a professional poker player. For me, being a professional poke player was my number one goal in life at 18 years old. And I kind of thought Cambridge is just a really cool experience, which I just want to do and see what it's like.

And I turned up and I was, you know, just overconfident. I thought, you know, I can handle this, you know, uh and man, like that first that first term at Cambridge, like I was in like when it like it didn't matter which room I was in, I was always the dumbest person in the room. Like they would set you um like uh homeworks or like worksheets and I would just always just do terrible and

I was trying to play poker at the same time as do my studies. So I would like study for two hours and play poker for six. And I was just doing terrible, terrible, terrible. And then at one point, like I think like my supervisor came up to me and she was very concerned. Sh she was like, Will, like, if you keep it at this rate, you're not gonna be in Cambridge a year from now. And so at that point I like I kind of realised like if I've come to Cambridge, I should give it my honest effort.

And so I try to put poker on pause and just focused on with my studies. And I'm not a very good student. I kind of I worked. It didn't matter how hard I worked, I would always just get a two one. Um, after three years of working as hard as I possibly could, I ended up getting a two one, which isn't bad, but yeah.

And yeah, like that was just a great experience. Um they taught me they taught me more maths, more more economics, more game theory, which are all really powerful tools for um for solving poker. Um, and I was really excited. Like by the time I finished my economics degree, I felt like I I really had a clear path to to to reaching the top ranks of poker.

At that time, you know, I made a lot of a lot of friends, a lot of really, really smart, creative, clever people. And they were all going off to work at banks, hedge funds, quant firms. And um And I remember sort of hearing about the very best ones, like the very, very best firms. And they were saying, Okay, my first year I'm gonna get, I'm gonna earn six figures, but like you can earn so much more. And so I thought, okay.

This is interesting. I will apply to a few of these very, very top, top fans and no one was interested. I got like I basically got zero zero interviews, zero job offers, no one wanted uh to even reply to my application. Um so I said uh uh yeah, I said fine, all right, there's some I guess the world wants me to be a poker player. So once I finished Cambridge, I went back home to live with my dad.

And I just got the laptop out and, you know, I it was like it was like nothing had changed, you know. I was straight back to to playing poker, um, to trying to build a bankroll and keep moving up stakes. And it was going pretty well. I'd do that for about six months and then I had a really in interesting call. So

When I was at poker, I had one best friend, his name is George, and I would spend all day with him and we were like just totally, totally thick as thieves. Um and he and I both ran the poker society together. And he and he was like a legit maths genius. Like he was just Like I when I was doing my economics, like homework and stuff, and I'd get stuck on the mats, I would just go to him and he would just know the answer uh straight away. And so after playing pain poker for about six months,

He had a situation where he was leaving his firm in London to go to New York. And when he was gonna go to New York, he was gonna kinda start his own team. He he was he was really, really good at

gardening leave. And so so for six months he wasn't able to do anything on a financial exchange.

Um, and one day he c he called me up, he said, Well listen, I wanna take these algorithmic strategies that they've been applying to financial exchanges and I wanna try and run it on a sports exchange. Right. So in the UK, they've got it in Australia too. Betfair is a is a really big sports exchange. Um And and I said, George, listen, I don't know any coding.

I wasn't very good at stats. Like, how am I going to help you to make algorithmic trading strategies for BetFair? And he said, Well, like you want it bad enough, you love making money. You've got that right sort of brain, just give it a go and we'll see what happens. And it really sounded very, very interesting to me. And I sort of thought at the time I kind of thought, listen, like with this poker stuff, you can lose like a year's

income in a day. And so I thought even if this thing doesn't do very well, it could at least like diversify my risk a bit. Where if I just build a black box or, you know, have a share of a black box, which is just generating some some profit. That's kind of like some form of insurance or something. It's a form of diversification. So I said, all right, let's let's do it.

Um, where you've basically got a data set or a back tester or a sim a simulator and you kind of just have to try and figure out how to make money. And if you've got something which makes money, how are you gonna make more? And so with this thing. It's kind of like it's not really in the textbooks. Like how to make money trading is not really like a textbook question, right? Like

Um you know, obviously if it was in the textbooks, people would do it and uh the money wouldn't be there anymore. So you've kind of it takes It takes a certain attitude, a certain set of skills, a certain approach and determination to kind of figure out like where the money is and then how to get more of it.

Um and so yeah, like he just I I think I think this is kind of where poker actually serves as like an amazing training background where I literally spent the last five years thinking nothing other than expected value, um random outcomes, understanding the probability of events and like how that links back to making money, managing a bankroll, managing risk, to not go bust, um, and all of these sorts of concepts. So I had, I probably had like 80% of it was already there.

But and so I kind of think he he he saw that and said, listen, like he he gave me that final twenty percent, if that makes sense.

But when it came down to it, when it was like the only way you're gonna make money is to get good at coding. I bought a bunch. It was the exact same thing I did with poker. I just bought every textbook that I could find on coding and I read it. And I guess what I stuck like when I started, I sucked. I was terrible. I was like the worst coder ever. But if you keep at it and you keep studying and keep learning and keep pushing yourself, you will get better, right?

And it's actually it's not that hard. Like if you it's it's really scary when you start, but if you just keep at it and keep at it and keep at it. And I would like at this stage in my life, I would have my laptop with me like 247. If I went to a restaurant, I'd have my laptop. If we if it was Christmas Day, my laptop would be open and I would be coding. And so I literally just spent non stop the next three years just coding and coding and coding and coding.

that these approaches to what would traditionally have been uh statistical and like mathematically uh based approaches to questions of like understanding data. Um people getting switched on to the fact that like machine learning was producing amazing results. Like in places where uh traditional stat

wasn't getting very good results, machine learning was doing it incredible. And so I always kind of feel like I guess in the nineties you kind of had a big um there was a big quant revolution in finance. And that was

That was kind of people realizing you can take this data and you can take stats and you can find a lot of edge, right? Which which before people were doing stuff based on gut. Um And and they they were using stats and that was like what the quant revolution of like the the nineties and the two thousands was all about.

But I was just there in the early twenty tens when actually you had this brand new breakthrough technology of AI and machine learning. And my first eighteen months I just read so much about machine learning, so many textbooks and papers and like

I think I think the thing which is so funny is I'm just a terrible student. Like I'm so bad at it. And so having to read these textbooks and having to read to read these papers was a real like chore, real challenge. I had to sort of push myself to do it. But That if I wanted to be a great trader and I wanted to do as well as I could, I had to learn this stuff.

Right. And and you know, everyone learns in different ways. So for me it was like I would watch YouTube videos, I would read textbooks, I would speak to my friends, and I would just try and just submerge myself in it. And I'm actually not a very fast learner. And so like

Um, yeah, like it was literally my life. Like I feel sorry for my family, my friends, my girlfriend, because like they would invite me, right? Like my girlfriend would invite me to meet her parents, right? And like I would take my laptop Just I would always have my laptop wi uh with me and so I'd be like, Hi, you know, I met a dad, hi, I met a mum and I'd say, Okay, I'm gonna go sit in the living room now and crack open my laptop and play

and play around with machine learning algorithms. And I was always fitting models, always tuning stuff. And it was again like I look back on it and I think it's just a really great experience that I was able to just devote as much time as I wanted because I felt like um at twenty one years old, twenty two years old, took twenty years old, I just felt like I could take as long as I needed to learn this skill really, really well.

And so I I really just devote myself to learning everything I could about machine learning and how to do it. And and and to do it you've got to know a bit of software engineering as well. And so Fast forward to about three three years, he and I together had made strategies which were making decent six figures, right? And

I was making decent six six figures. And it's always the case with me. I can always see like the next big thing. I'm always thinking like, man, if if this is making six figures, why can't it make it seven? You know, like how am I going to get it to that next level? And so he had sort of gone off to to New York and was running a really successful um team over there in high frequency trading. And I had sort of continued doing these sort of strategies myself. on BetFair in London.

There's miss there's mispricings. And so you can kind of buy in one market, sell in another, and that will make you money. Now, arbitrage is one of these things which if you can see it, everyone else can see it. And it's not that hard to spot. And so arbitrage is one of these kind of these textbook HFT strategies where the person who gets that edge

is the fastest. So the first person to spot the mispricing, buy where it's undervalued, sell, where it's o where, you know, where it's it's it's overvalued, um, that's the guy who's going to make the money on that trade. And so that's But that's the first place where high frequency trading is really important, right? Because it's all about speed.

Okay. So those arbitrage statues were something that we we never devoted much time to because um we were never the very fastest, which is like takes a lot of coding expertise. All right, so then what's the next sort of HFT ish strategies? Okay, well the next one is If you look at the limit order book, which is if you're not familiar with it, like when you go on an exchange, you can see what all the all the offers are and all the bids are on whatever it is that you're trading, right? So

As time goes by, people are always buying and selling and buying and selling. Um, and there's all this data that's coming through. Okay, so if you see that um someone has just posted a huge bid and and and that's and let's just say someone's trying to buy, you can see that someone's trying to buy a load of stock.

And let's just say it's Apple, right? If you know that someone's trying to buy a load of stock of Apple, what do you think is going to happen to the share price? Right? It's probably going to go up. So what should you do? Well, before it goes up, you buy it. Then as this person who's trying to buy loads more pushes the price up, once once they're done, then you sell.

Right. That's another um high frequency type strategy where it's about getting in and identifying that someone wants to buy loads before they finish their order and then exiting it as soon as they're done with their selling. Right. And so and so that's another sort of high frequency style trading strategy. And and I and I always called that um a like like like a price based.

um trading strategy because you're looking at the price, you're looking at price movements, you're looking at the limit order book. And so this was the the the the the sort of strategies which we were looking at. And there there is some overlap with like momentum trade uh trading and swing trading in this category of HFT. Does that make sense?

predict uh if if you're predicting that the price is going to go down, then you wanna sell. And so it's all about predicting the price, which at the end of the day, that's all trading, all of trading is about. It's just predicting the price. And then the difference is is time scales. So if you want to predict where the price is going to be in 60 seconds. you're kind of in the world of of HFT.

But if you're predicting where the price is going to be in three years, well then you're a value investor, right? And in sports, um, where the the like the analogue to where the price is gonna be in three years is Who's going to win the match or who's going to win the race? Right. So and then to make trading decisions based on that. So After my friend George went off to New York.

Um, I decided to look into these value um style strategies, right? So I kind of felt like we were doing all we could do in in in with with HFT and with my sort of skill set. And I knew that with kind of value investing style strategies, you've got much more scale. So What does that mean? It means with HFT, any single opportunity is actually quite small.

And they come about really quickly and it's a race to get to that opportunity. And it it it kind of took a lot of work to identify a single strategy. And then it took a lot of work to keep it running. And at the time I was just one guy, not that great at coding, still learning. And I kind of said, well, if I did value based trading, I could just place one huge bet and I could scale my bets. I could bet as much as I wanted.

And as long as I had an edge, that could grow into something much bigger with just a as a single guy. And so I started trying to predict.

the outcome of sports events. Who was gonna win, who was gonna lose, what their probability was. And it was it was more successful than the HFT stuff. Like That was something that I was very good at. I was able to kind of find my edge. I kind of feel like I'd taken all those skills from poker, from doing the HFT style algorithms. And I'd kind of found something which just I was very good at. And so I developed a lot of um a lot of innovative techniques to predict which team was going to win.

Right. Now this is something which you have to have a bit of creativity to do. So it kind of goes back to with poker where everyone is different and everyone's got their niche. And and and actually a lot of life is about just discovering what is your niche. And so If you're a bit creative and you're a bit of a wild card and you want to take risks, you've got to find what niche most rewards those traits, right? And so with poker.

you've got to find the the the right games and you've got to approach it in the right way. And with trading, HFT is actually a ver you you really have to be very diligent. You've got to be very consistent. You've got to But have a great infrastructure to be the fastest guy.

But with value-based investing, if you can come up with a good idea, if you can just come up with a different way of thinking about this problem or just a different way to model it than what everyone else is seeing. If you can just see something different that the market isn't seeing. you've you'll get a big edge. And and so I came up with a few different um perspectives, a lot of them just really, really based on machine learning. So I would take a machine learning technique

Like um there would be machine learning tech techniques which work amazing for images. Right. And I would go away and I'd think like, how can I use this technique for images to predict a football match?

people in in America uh a z a zip code is like six digits or something. And people would would write down the six digits and then at the post office they would scan all of these postcodes And they would try to identify what these six handwritten digits are. And so if you show that to like a human, they'll score like 97% accuracy. Whereas the machine learning techniques would get up to like ninety-nine percent. They would they would surpass the human.

And so I would I would read their papers and I would say, okay, how are they recognizing these images so well? What techniques are they using? Okay, how can I use these techniques? uh to predict who's gonna win a sports event. Right. And so from this, there is a really great general principle. There is a really great lesson, which is like see what works in other fields, right? Copy it, try it. Like, does that work in your field?

And that's the sort of questions that I'll sort of ask myself and and I'll try to come up with good answers. And it worked. Like I had a lot of really a lot of um good early success and And I remember having a friend who was so Anthony um was the smartest guy in the economic statistics uh

uh lab or whatever and and he was just amazing at stats, loved, loved doing stats and was really interested in machine learning. And I said to him, like, this is what I'm doing. He thought it sounded super cool. And I said, Listen, like Why don't you join me? Right. We'll spit the profits and you can help me with the machine learning stuff. And then he he had another friend, Mauritz. Mauritz is like this dark

kind of like maths genius again and he just loves stats, loved opt optimization problems. And and me, Anthony and Maritz were kind of just those two guys I would leave the machine learning to. And then I would focus on the trading and the execution. So When you if you think this particular team is gonna win, that's only half half half the problem. Like

How are you going to bet and how much to bet is still a very big and very important problem to have a good answer to. Um, you know, to anyone who doesn't know about like the Kelly criterion and like the appropriate way to scale bets. Um, if you don't scale your bets appropriately, it's very, very easy to go bankrupt. And so it doesn't help you that.

Um if your betting strategy is such that 99% of the time you're bankrupt and 1% of the time you're the richest man in the world, that's not a good betting strategy. Right. And so the Kelly criterion is just a really great first answer to sort of say how should we be betting given we've found this sort of edge? And this is something which I learned from my poker day. Because again, if you don't take risks appropriately, either A, you're going to be stagnant. B you're going to blow up

Right. And that's what I would do a lot. Now we would do these this sort of trading and it was going well. And as it went more well, we would make more money. And then I would kind of get someone else involved. And, you know, there came a time after like four or five, five people were involved, you kind of run out of friends. And then we said, Okay, like let's form a company, let's try and hire someone, let's get someone to help us with the research.

And and that was kind of how it how it all grew. And so you would hire someone and honestly, like every single mistake you could make, I would make. I would hire like the wrong people, I'd give them the wrong job. And and but through all of these these painful mistakes I would learn a lesson.

Right. I would I would learn every lesson in the most painful way possible, but I would still learn a lesson. And I would slowly get better and I'd slowly get better. And the the trading would continue to make more and more money. And then I think there was a point in like There was one point when we first made eight figures in a year. You know, that that was like a big milestone. Um

And so we all celebrated, that was great. And I said, guys, like we're making eight figures, let's keep betting more. Like I've I think it's good. We bet more. And uh and then what would happen is we'd scale up and then suddenly the profits would be much less consistent. And I'd say, Oh, that kinda hurt. Like we just lost a hundred K in a day. That was painful.

or or we'd scale we'd scale up a bit more and I go, Ooh, we've just lost two hundred K in a day. That's the most we've ever lost. That that kind of is a bit concerning. But I was always I was always too optimistic and I was always too overconfident. And I remember one time I scaled up and we ended up losing

Again, literally about seventy percent of our bankroll. So we lost pretty much a million pounds in about a two week period. Now, I mean, looking back on it, it's just I kind of laugh, but it was just the dumbest, dumbest, dumbest thing like ever. Like To spend like I'd literally spent probably six or seven years trying to build up this million pound bankroll and then to literally lose it in two weeks.

Um, was again it's just so it's like it's it's like embarrassing as well. Like when it's just when it was just me doing poker. I didn't I didn't feel embarrassed when I lost money because it was kind of my money to lose. It wasn't such a big deal. But when you're on a team and you've got three or four guys doing great with their models and their predictions and then you're the trader of the group and you go out and you trade it and you just lose all the money, that's embarrassing. And so

Oh man, just so, so painful, so much embarrassment. And I would just say like, this has got to never happen again.

And I would well I'd say I think we're just being unlucky. I think it's okay. I think we should bet more. Which is just insanity when you think about it, but that's exactly what we which is exactly what we would do. And so at some point I kind of like the penny dropped in a really, really big way. Like I discovered so Ray Dalio is the founder of Bridgewater, which is uh the world's most successful hedge fund, and he wrote a book called Principles and it's literally a manual for

um how he runs his hedge fund. And so I pretty much recommend this book to anyone that that will listen to me, but you especially need to read it if you're interested in trading. Um, and he really, really talks about this idea of um of kind of understanding what your strengths are and understanding what your weaknesses are. And only once you really understand what your strengths are and your weaknesses are, can you begin to avoid these pitfalls.

And so I came to realise like, what was I doing again and again and again? I was being overconfident, then I was taking too much risk. And then I was getting outclassed and losing. Which which was which was working to some degree because I would learn these lessons and I'd continue to grow. But it was just ridiculously painful, right? It was unnecessary. It was dumb. And so then I kind of realized like wait a second, like I'm too optimistic.

I'm not looking at the details in a in the right way to see to see when we're about to blow up. And so at that point I said, I need to hire the most pessimistic um the most pessimistic, intelligent, detailed, focused person.

And as soon as we started having that sort of approach was the day we stopped blowing up. Because when I would be optimistic and he'd be pessimistic, we would have a debate and a discussion and we'd figure out like who of us, which of us was right. fifty percent of the time I would be right. But fifty percent of the time he'd be right. And so He was bringing to my attention all of my weaknesses, all of my weak spots. He was pointing it out. And so through that we were able to

to not lose in such a big way, to not make such big mistakes, because I had someone else who was um complementing my weak spots. And so it's it's exactly the same as like a football team where you might have someone who's an amazing defender.

But they're gonna make a rubbish striker. And you might have an amazing striker and they're gonna make a rubbish defender. And so With George and I, we were just this great team where you've got someone who's really quick, really aggressive, but then you've got someone who's working defense and is stopping any big mistakes from happening. Um and and once we had that, that was really um the solid foundation where

If you think you're right, find someone that's going to disagree with you. It doesn't really if it's an important question, find someone who will disagree with you and understand where they're coming from. Because a lot of the time they'll see something that you don't see. And and it can be a simple fix and you reduce your chance of being wrong, even if you're only wrong twenty percent of the time, if you can reduce that from twenty percent to two percent.

You've just made your life a hell of a lot easier.

And everyone in the country bets on horses. And so that's like, as far as sports betting goes, that's the biggest market in the world. And so at seamless and my own personal philosophy is you need to go to where the liquidity is. You need to go to the biggest markets. Um and I would rather have a small edge in the biggest market. Which we can we can grow and we can keep pushing ourselves and keep challenging ourselves and and and always grow into.

rather than an easy, alluring thing a lot of people do is they they find an easy market where they can get a big edge, but it's a small market. Right?

Which really comes down to how big, how big is the upside, right? Some people are are happy being one man bands, right? And I actually I like I interview a lot of traders and I and I speak to a lot of them and I kind of say to them, Listen, like

Either you should be a one man band and just do it by yourself at home and actually picking an easy market is a great idea. And the way to spot an easy market is simple. Like find a market which is small enough such that bigger institutional players won't have time for it. Right. And there are these markets left, right, and center. And so just find a market that's small enough that big institutional players won't be interested in it. And you will find a niche.

You've got to be willing to look about to try to try a few things. Like we've traded football, we've traded tennis, we've traded horse racing, we've done the high frequency trading strategies, we've done the value-based strategies, um, we've traded crypto.

Always always so I've got an eighty twenty rule, which is spend eighty percent of your time on your bread and butter and twenty percent of your time on wildcards. Right. Do things where you can be surprised. If you think something if you think this thing isn't gonna work, but it just might and you'd be sub and you're not sure, give it a go.

Spend one day a week or one week a month or a couple of months a year on these wildcard projects and it's just an option. You're you're opening up the door to opportunity.

And so instead, if an opportunity c comes comes your way, you can try it out and you can you can see how it fits. And uh and you know, ninety percent of the time you'll be disappointed. But uh but ten percent of the time you'll be you'll be amazed.

a few hundred positions a day. But to achieve those positions, because they're so big, because they're such a big part of the market, we have to place thousands and thousands of trades, if that makes sense.

Okay, so you bet a thousand pounds for Chelsea to win. And then you wait and you wait ten minutes. And then someone comes and then someone's willing to offer a thousand pound bet again. And you take it and then you wait. And then and by betting a thousand pounds and waiting for the l the liquidity to come back and betting again and betting again, you avoid scaring off the liquidity and you're able to accumulate really big positions, if that makes sense.

So as a single guy, you're looking for opportunities where you're not competing like you wanna stack the odds in your favor, right? Like if you can find a market which no one's really looking at because it's a bit too small for for big inst in in institutions. And you and you find that if you're competing in that market, you're probably only competing against guys like you, like you, right? Like guys who are just

one man bands. Like it's a fair fight. But if you pick a market, if you pick like the biggest market in the world, like you're gonna be competing against literally hundreds of like teams of tens of people. Um, you're not gonna win that fight. Does that make sense?

research. Like can you speak on the research aspect, maybe how you like generate ideas and how you try to seek out or maybe discover other edges.

They'll just get a stack of academic papers and they'll just go off to the park, they'll go off to the woods, they'll go off to the library, and they'll just read it for a day or two days or a week. Right, and go for a walk and have a shower and have a few beers, right? And you just gotta come up with these ideas and As you come up with ideas, you just need time, inspiration, immersion, no distraction. And so as I was kind of saying with uh image classification.

Right. So as I was doing this thing I I would say to myself, All right, well Who is the best predictor in the world? Like who's who's the best at doing this kind of machine learning in the world? All right, fine. Like let's let's read some of DeepMind's papers and let's see what Deep Mind's doing. Like how is DeepMind been so successful at um playing Atari games using AI. All right, so understand those techniques, see what techniques they're they're doing.

Can you apply any of them to your problem? Or maybe if you can't apply them exactly, is there a kind of um analogue that you can kind of apply the same sort of thing? And I would get these ideas and I would I would apply them. So In machine learning, sometimes it might be some little trick, something you do to your data, like you can augment your data in some way. Right. There's some clever stuff that you can do.

Or maybe it's uh it's just a simple transformation. Like maybe you you just wanna transform the odds in in in some clever way, right? To to make them more informative on who's gonna win. And you go away and you try these ideas. And just like any new idea, 80% do not work. 80% of my new ideas are rubbish. But every so often you come across a gem and you go, Wow, I can't believe that this thing works and this thing works great.

That is one little gem and you keep that. And month by month, year by year, you just keep accumulating these gems, these gems, these gems until you're gonna be the best trader in your market.

uh aspect to generating good trades, but actually just as important is is executing them well and refining ideas and maximizing them. Right? And so I would have these t I would have these these these ten gems, but I would only be trading them to maybe one tenth their capacity. Right. Finding people that compliment you and finding people that you compliment is the key to um to building great teams where um you get you get way more out than anyone's putting in.

And so I just paired up with people who would say, wow, that's a great idea, Will. Did you know that if you um if you optimize this component of it? You get twice the result. And someone else would say, Oh, and if you optimize this component, you get twice, twice the result. And once you multiply all these people's efforts, you end up with something which is 10 times more valuable than the thing that I was doing.

So it's sim it's simple stuff. Like I would like a simple a a a a simple example might be you discover an idea for one market. But someone else might take that idea and investigate and say, well, wait a second. This actually applies to all the markets that we're trading if you just do this one clever trick.

Or I might come up with a rough idea. Like I might say, This this thing works and it and and it makes more money and I don't really fully understand it, but I just know it kind of works. And then some someone else will say, Well, wait a second, Will. You know, this is this is there's a general this is like a specific um this is a specific formulation of a general

uh category of things and you can optimize over all the possibilities and if you do that your idea is actually is is twice as good and so that's that's like working with someone who like is way better at maths than I am. They do that sort of thing. Or another thing which happens a lot is I'll have an idea and the idea will work well. But someone will come along and say, hey Will, like there's a problem with your idea, which you didn't see. You overlooked it.

And actually if you address this problem, like maybe there's a simple a simple way to change your idea to address this this problem. And once you fix this this problem, your idea is now twice as good. So like a simple example is like I might come up with an idea or someone on the team comes up with an idea and it ends up just overvaluing long shots. That's a simple way to go wrong, right? You do something, it works, it works great.

for favorites, but it just it overweights long shots. And so just a simple rule is like don't trade um if the odds of that event is more than twenty. That's a really, really simple rule. And it's something which I would overlook. But if you get someone great with details and they spot that, they've now increased your PL by fifty percent. And it all comes from having complimentary people on a team.

What would you say are like the biggest barriers preventing competition from replicating what you've built?

the way I take that question is kind of like how is it that we're able to penetrate markets which are mature? And how is it that we we're able to kind of eat other people's lunches who have been doing it for a long, long time? And I think I think two answers I think the number one answer comes down to just complacency. It's n it's human nature to become complacent.

We you know, we all know like your first day, you know, you you do your hair, you shave, you wear your best outfit. By the tenth day, you're you're, you know, you're unshaven, you're wearing your scruffy clothes, you become complacent. And so I think a lot of people say it, but if you have that attitude that you had on your first date or your first day in the office. where you had something to prove. You wanted to get everything done as best as you could. If you have that attitude every day.

You're going to come out on top. Right. You're gonna you're gonna you're gonna beat the team which doesn't have that attitude. That team which is just turning up. It's you know, they're just treating every day like it's like the day before. It's no big deal. They are not going to outperform or outclass the team which has the hunger, which has the energy, which says, we have to win this game. We can't lose.

And and if you lose, they ha they they say to themselves, This can't happen again. How are we gonna win the next game? How are we gonna maximize our chance of success? And you do that day in, day out, day in, day out, and slowly you're gonna accumulate the lessons, you're gonna accumulate the experience, and you're gonna catch up and pretty soon you're gonna be overtaking.

The easiest th the easiest analogy is like consider go going to the gym. You know, we all go to the gym and you start off and it's a bit of a challenge and pretty soon it's w so easy to just Sink into the old routine and you just do the same thing you did the week before. You jump on the treadmill for the same amount of time. And all of a sudden it's easy. It's not scaring you. You've stopped growing.

Do something which scares you. If doing a marathon scares you, by the time you've done that, you're gonna be fitter, stronger, faster than you've ever been, right? Keep picking things which are gonna scare you. Keep picking things which are gonna get you out of your comfort zone. And it's a balance. Um you want to push yourself

to the place where it's a it's a it's it's it's just a small stress. You don't wanna go crazy where you just have a breakdown, right? You wanna you wanna push yourself just enough that it's uncomfortable. But you can just about figure out what's going on. You're learning, you're growing, you're adapting. Don't be complacent.

is perhaps the cost involved. So I'll ask you like how did you justify the cost of hiring someone? Like how did you go about that? Did you Did you offer that first person or those first couple of people uh was it a salary plus uh some equity in the company or how did you approach that step?

Right. So The number of people that I reach out to and I just say to them, Listen, um, you don't know me, um, but I've got a problem and I'm looking for someone who can give some great advice and I'm looking for someone who's a little bit more experienced than me. probably a little bit more successful than I am. And I just want some help along the way. And if you can give me a few pointers and if it's a 15-minute chat or a half an hour chat, that would be amazing.

the number of people that reply to that sort of message will flaw you. Right. So first of all, you don't actually have to hire people to get help. You don't have to have people working for you or working with you to get help. You can actually just reach out and ask people for advice. So so that's like the first biggest thing is Find people who are that step ahead of you or maybe two steps ahead of you.

And reach out to them and ask them for advice. It doesn't matter if you're playing like if I was playing poker at the one cent, two cent stakes, you can find someone who's playing five cent, ten cents, and they're going to give you amazing advice. And it works all the way up to the very highest stakes. Find that person who's one step or two steps ahead of you and just ask them, how did you do it? What am I missing? What what am I not seeing? And that is the biggest.

most helpful thing that anyone that's here in this can concretely do. You can just set yourself the task of reaching out to five people who are just two steps ahead of you and just ask them for a chat, ask them for advice. And people are generous. People are way more generous than is routinely acknowledged.

People will get back to you. They will give you their time for free just because they want to help you. And yeah, do it, just do it in the right way. Be respectful, be nice, appreciate their time, and they're gonna They're gonna want to help you, they're gonna want to see you be successful. Um, so that's like the first the first biggest thing. The second thing is.

You know, you always have to take things like it's always baby steps, right? You're not gonna go from crawling to sprinting. So forget about like don't don't try and hire three amazing developers. That's that's not the baby step. The baby step is like Do you have a friend who might be interested in this as a side project? Right. Like we've all got friends. So find find someone that you know who will be interested in doing this as a side project.

Or or if if you're at that side project stage and you've been doing it as a side project, maybe you can find someone who's a freelancer, right? And you can give them a little bit of money to work on it for a little bit of time and see what happens. And you are gonna make mistakes and things are gonna go wrong and you're gonna learn.

And some things are going to go well and you're and you're going to keep those little gems. And so it's all about how can you grow, how can you move just outside your comfort zone? How can you take those right challenges, those baby steps, um to just keep moving forward. Does that make sense?

What would you say are some of the biggest mistakes or, you know, the lessons you learned with regard to hiring and growing a team?

That's not their strength. That's not their weak point. You might be, you might be the strongest guy in the gym, but you you're not gonna have the best endurance. Or you might have the best endurance, but you're not gonna be the strongest. Right. And if you ex if you push.

There's there's there's a point where pushing people is no longer productive. And it's better to to recognize that like, okay, you've got this guy who's great at endurance running. If you need someone to lift something heavy, you need a new guy. Right. Or or actually maybe you just got someone who's not a good athlete at all. And it doesn't matter how much you push them, how much they train, they're not gonna be a good athlete, right?

Some people they turn up to the gym and it's just easy. They like they squat two hundred kilos within a year. I'm right, I'm not very good at squatting. I've been squatting for years and years and years and my numbers just aren't aren't very good. And it's just about acknowledging like what is it that you're very good at? What is it that they're very good at? And finding that out and then

and then working with it rather than working against it, if that makes sense. So so that was like a very big hiring mistake that I made um to start off with, where I would I would kind of expect people to be good at everything. Um or I would expect someone who who's maybe not a superstar to to to like become one through sheer hard work. That's not a good idea either either. So

That was the first mistake is kind of know exactly what people are like, know what to expect from them. And then the second thing is and and by the way, like uh my favorite example of that is like We've got people at work who are very thorough and then you've got people at work who are very quick. Now, if you need a job to be done quickly and you ask someone who's very thorough to do it,

You're an idiot. Because what is going to happen is the third person's going to spend ages on it, is going to do it very thoroughly, and you'll just have wasted their time and you'll be frustrated because they did it longer. It took them longer than you wanted it to get done. Likewise, when you've got someone who's very quick. If you need a job to be done thoroughly and you are someone who's very quick to do it,

Again, you're an idiot because you've just wasted like they're not going to give you the quad the quality of answer that was necessary. Right. So that's a great example of just knowing what people are like. Now The second biggest one, and this one's so important, is like hire po people, find people that you want to spend time with, that you enjoy spending time with. It's not you know, it's no good.

Um making like building a strategy which makes loads of money if every day you go to the office you kind of are miserable because you're working with people who don't make you smile. Right. Is like you can have both. Find someone that is talented, find someone that you enjoy working with, find someone that you're going to be successful with, and that you enjoy their company, that you both get along, you have fun with.

I always I always like draw parallels between hiring and like growing a team as they Um, it's not just about having the two most attractive people in the room or finding the most attractive person that'll accept, you know, going out on a date. It's about finding someone you've got chemistry with. It's about finding someone who

makes you smile and laughs at your jokes, right? Like you might have a dumb sense of humor and ninety percent of people just cringe, but you've got to find that person who likes your who likes your joke. Um, and so I think I think that's so important because at the end of the day you're always gonna fail, right? You're gonna push yourself and you're gonna fail. You're gonna push yourself and you're gonna fail. And it's those days when you failed that like

having someone that's gonna make you smile, you kind of think, do you know what? It doesn't even matter if you, if you, you know, you don't have to win every game if you're enjoying the process and so enjoy it.

At least enough of them will, right? If you say if you reach out to ten people, one of them is gonna get back to you and one of them, even if it's just ten minutes, because they've traveled that path that you're going down. they can help you avoid some pitfalls. So just reach out to people for help. Go on LinkedIn. Send emails to people, like see who's in your own network. You'll be surprised.

So that's the first thing. Like if I had done that, it would have avoided a lot of painful lessons. Rather than having to learn the hard way, you can learn from other people's experience. So that's an amazing um avenue to go down to grow quicker, to learn quicker and to make things less painful. I think the second thing is don't underestimate yourself. So like be ambitious. Do that thing which scares you. If you think you can't do it, like don't

I think a lot of people in life think like, what can I do? Or what am I qualified for? Or what do I know what do I know that I can do? Don't even ask that question. Forget about that. Ask yourself, what excites you? What's a challenge that you're not sure if if it's even possible? Aim for that because you're going to learn more, it's going to be more exciting, and you'll be surprised what you're capable of if you reach for it. That would be my two S.