Mebane Faber is the founder and CIO at Cambria Investment Management, where he manages Cambria’s ETFs, separate accounts and private investment funds. He’s also authored numerous white papers and five books now, on various investing subjects. Meb’s a budding podcaster too, his podcast; The Meb Faber Show. The main reason why I asked Meb to join me for this episode, was to share some simple ways that active traders can capitalize on the opportunity and compounding effect that (somewhat passive) l...
Apr 13, 2017•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 120
Alex (@TAGRtrades) is a 27-year old day trader, from Texas. He’s been trading full-time for four years, and has really begun to hit his stride. Alex closed Q1 of 2017 with a $49,000 gain, after going into the year with an account balance of $32,000. He’s a small-cap momentum trader, but unlike most guests who I’ve had on previously that play in this space, Alex takes the majority of his trades on the long side. So naturally, we chat about his reasons for this… We also chat about; the leap into f...
Apr 06, 2017•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 119
High-speed trading veteran, Manoj Narang, originally worked on Wall St for the likes of Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs prior to founding Tradeworx, which became one of the larger trading firms in the U.S. (in terms of volume). He’s since parted ways with Tradeworx to start MANA Partners—an innovative quant fund which raised almost one billion dollars for it’s launch in January this year (2017). As a brief summary for some of the things we got to chat about; the value of technology which drives ...
Mar 30, 2017•1 hr•Ep. 118
Larry Alintoff was a prop trader for Paul Tudor Jones, before running the largest group of traders on the AMEX (at the time). When he later went over to the NYBOT, Larry became the largest trader in the Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice pit, and now days, he’s CIO of The Toro Fund. During this episode, we cover; the thing which helped Larry to become consistent, why there’s great opportunity in knowing when things that “should” happen, don’t happen, and how he’s been able to successfully apply a ...
Mar 23, 2017•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 117
Sean Hendelman is the co-founder and CEO of T3 Companies. T3 is one of the larger proprietary trading firms in the U.S. And incase you’re curious, the three T’s of T3 stand for; trading, training and technology. A few of the things Sean and I spoke about, include; how he got his start, how he lost all his money twice—and why it was a worthwhile experience (in hindsight), and some of the great lessons he’s learned from the business of trading. Even as CEO today, Sean is still very hands on with T...
Mar 16, 2017•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 116
Adam Grimes has been a trader for more than 20-years, he’s traded all major asset classes, across various timeframes. He’s traded independently, with a prop firm, and he’s run other trading businesses also. The main focus of this episode is to explore some of the things which discretionary traders can adapt from quantitative traders, and vice versa—meaning, what things can quants take from those who rely on discretion. Then in the later part of this episode, Adam lays out a solid framework which...
Mar 09, 2017•1 hr 48 min•Ep. 115
Brannigan Barrett is a futures day trader—who trades a total of eight markets, across; bonds, equity indices, currencies and commodities. He was previously a trader at prop firm, Futex, but is now part of Axia Futures. The subjects we cover during this conversation, include; how to progressively become a bigger (and better) trader, how a “dogfight” attitude has helped Brannigan’s trading career, how he prepares going into major news announcements, his daily process for journaling and being ready...
Mar 02, 2017•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 114
Benjamin Small is an electrical engineering PhD. He’s worked in quantitative research roles since 2006, at UBS, Citadel, Credit Suisse and the stock exchange, IEX. Today though, Ben is head of market structure at Gemini—the world’s first fully licensed and fully regulated Bitcoin exchange, which is based in New York. During this chat, we get into; payment for order flow and high frequency trading, why there’s an incentive to normalize Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency ecosystem, potential outcomes for...
Feb 23, 2017•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 113
Jorge Soltero began as a floor trader in Chicago, where he was an options market maker. A few years into his career, he landed a position at Hull Trading Company (the renowned firm of legendary trader, Blair Hull). After Hull Trading was bought by Goldman Sachs in 1999, Jorge became more of an institutional trader—not only working at Goldman, but later, UBS and Merrill Lynch too, where he specialized in options and ETFs. Listening to this episode you’re going to hear about; the culture of tradin...
Feb 16, 2017•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 112
Returning to Chat With Traders for a second time is David Bush—first on episode 23. David began as a discretionary trader, more than 20-years ago, but over time he’s developed into a quant trader. And he’s exceptionally good at what he does; David’s been the first place winner of two (real money) trading competitions in recent years. Last time David was on we spoke fairly extensively about his path as a trader and a high-level overview of his process. This time around we covered plenty of new gr...
Feb 09, 2017•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 111
On this episode, I’m joined by George—who goes by @RollyTrader on Twitter. George is an Australian equities trader, with a momentum/swing trading type of approach. In the past, George has held a few finance-related positions, but since late-2009 he’s mostly traded independently. During the interview, George and I got speaking about; lessons he learned early on, the effect that coaching and mentoring has had on his trading, specifics about the setups George trades, and also, his involvement with ...
Feb 02, 2017•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 110
I’m not sure how to best say this, but Edward Thorp, is kind of a big deal… Not only in the world of financial markets, but he’s also a household name amongst the gambling scene. He’s the man who beat the dealer, and later, beat the market. It was during the late-50’s and early-60’s, when Ed, a math genius and professor at MIT, took on the challenge of discovering a way to get an edge playing gambling games such as blackjack, roulette and baccarat. Long story short; Ed won—and he’s now considere...
Jan 26, 2017•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 109
Throughout this series, which has been a window into the workflow of professional quant trading firms, we’ve encouraged you to submit questions and requests for further clarification. So, in this episode, being the final installment, Delaney answers as many of these questions as possible (within 80-mins). -- Sponsored by DataCamp.com – Once you commit to learning how to program—specifically for data science and quant research, your next best step: Visit DataCamp to start any course, free! Learn ...
Jan 23, 2017•1 hr 16 min
John Netto, a former U.S. marine, describes himself as a high velocity, cross-asset class trader. He connects the ability to be versatile, adaptable, and interpret large amounts of information to be his greatest edge—for making lucrative returns. These are all things we cover during the interview, which includes discussion about; process, research, strategy, macro, and market regimes. We also talk about the benefits of stepping outside of your comfort zone, why there’s a need to embrace growing ...
Jan 19, 2017•56 min•Ep. 108
For the great, Anthony Saliba, his initial 13-years in the field were spent as a market maker on the CBOE floor, where he made approximately $9,000,000 before 30 years old (and that was during the 80’s). At which point, he was one of the traders featured in Jack Schwager’s first Market Wizards’ book. Since then, Anthony’s continued to scale up—making major moves, both, through trading and through various business ventures. We spoke for close to two hours; about his experience on the floor, a tra...
Jan 12, 2017•1 hr 51 min•Ep. 107
Turney Duff was a hedge fund trader on Wall Street who lead a truly excessive lifestyle. In 2013 he released a book about his experiences—titled, The Buy Side. And currently, Turney is a consultant on the Showtime TV series, Billions. On this episode we cover everything, from what it was like to trade more than one billion dollars at Galleon Group—which was the hedge fund run by Raj Rajaratnam, currently serving an 11-year prison sentence for partaking in one of the largest insider trading rings...
Jan 05, 2017•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 106
Brendan Poots is the founder of sports betting hedge fund, The Priomha Group, who mainly bet on football, cricket, golf and also horse racing and tennis. Priomha setup shop in Melbourne (Australia) in 2010, and more recently, have expanded with a second location in Gibraltar (Europe). From inception up to the release of this episode, Priomha’s Cloney fund has returned a little over 220%. From listening to our discussion, you’ll gain great insight to how Brendan runs his operation—from getting in...
Dec 29, 2016•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 105
Alex (@AT09_Trader) is a 22-year old, discretionary day trader, who’s seen great results in the few years he’s been grinding away at this. He trades small caps, and he trades aggressively—as you’ll soon hear, Alex is far from conservative. This conversation was recorded on the 16th of November (2016), right around the time when the madness in the shipping sector was unfolding. So we got talking about the ticker DRYS and how Alex racked up a $40k loss a day or two before our interview (although, ...
Dec 22, 2016•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 104
Machine learning is a hot topic right now, with a lot of people wondering how it could be used in finance and trading. Used naively, machine learning poses a great deal of risk. We’ll discuss why that’s the case and also some good ways to use it carefully. -- Sponsored by DataCamp.com – Learning to code can be challenging, but with A-grade courses at your fingertips, things are a whole lot easier. Visit DataCamp start today—sign up for free! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/a...
Dec 20, 2016•57 min
On this episode, I’m joined by a quant trader who works at a high frequency trading firm—though you might be surprised to hear, he started out on the same path that many retail traders do—his name is; Dave Bergstrom. The thing that makes Dave unique from most traders who’ve been on this podcast previously, is how he uses data-mining techniques to develop trading strategies. Though data-mining, in trading, often has a negative connotation attached to it, Dave believes this stems from bad practice...
Dec 15, 2016•59 min•Ep. 103
When one has a price model that they think will work well for forecasting returns, the next step is to actually trade it. This isn’t that simple for a variety of reasons. For one thing, you need to define how much risk you’re okay with taking on in a portfolio, and then try to maximize your returns while staying within those boundaries. This is the foundation of modern portfolio theory—we’ll discuss some real life issues with this. -- Sponsored by DataCamp.com – Wanna learn how to code? Then you...
Dec 12, 2016•1 hr 12 min
Eugene Soltes is an author and finance professor at Harvard Business School. Over the past eight years, give or take, he’s spent a lot of time with many big-time executives and professionals who have been convicted of major financial crimes, such as; cooking the books, fraud, Ponzi schemes, and insider trading. What initially began as nothing other than self-interest has materialized into a 464-page hardcover book, which was released in October this year (2016). The book is titled, Why They Do I...
Dec 07, 2016•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 102
In practice, no one trading model will ever be that good on its own. Luckily statistics has come up with a lot of theory about how you can combine weaker models to create better overall predictions. We’ll discuss how to combine many different trading signals into overall models and some of the practical considerations in doing so. -- Sponsored by DataCamp.com – For new and intermediate programmers, DataCamp have an evergrowing library of interactive courses that’ll help you to become a data scie...
Dec 05, 2016•51 min
My guest for episode 1-0-1 is Siam Kidd, from Norwich in the UK. He’s a former-air force pilot, turned retail trader. He’s also a serial entrepreneur, and on a quest to dramatically improve the schooling system. We got to chat about his shaky beginnings as a trader, his rock bottom moment, and how he trades currency pairs—using a technical-driven approach, with the goal of catching major trends when they happen. During the later half, I ask Siam about why he got into business, how he’s found the...
Dec 01, 2016•1 hr 57 min•Ep. 101
Factors are at the core of a modern quant equity workflow. This episode introduces the notion of alpha and risk factors at a high level, and delves into some of the use cases which include: understanding how the market is moving, understanding how a portfolio is exposed to sources of risk, and turning ideas for price forecasting into encapsulated alpha factors. -- Sponsored by DataCamp.com – DataCamp is the ultimate go-to for learning data science and stats, using programming languages Python an...
Nov 28, 2016•1 hr 8 min
My guest for this special milestone (being episode 100!) is someone who I’ve been attempting to bring on since before episode one was even released… Folks, I’d like to introduce you to Bao—or better known as @Modern_Rock on Twitter. Bao is an independent day trader, and a former-Silicon Valley software engineer, who made the large majority of his fortune trading stocks on the OTC bulletin board market. His story emphasizes; anyone with the will to succeed, even amongst adversity, can become unst...
Nov 24, 2016•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 100
The worst case in finance is when you think you’re right, but you’re actually wrong. This can be especially dangerous when you’ve used some methodology or statistics to justify a decision, but are unaware of all the subtle biases that can cause false results. In this episode we’ll cover many of the ways that you can be wrong without knowing it in trading and finance. -- Sponsored by DataCamp.com – For learning how to program, DataCamp is easily one of the top resources available—their online cou...
Nov 21, 2016•1 hr 21 min
My guest for this episode is Brynne Kelly; an electricity, natural gas, and crude oil trader who’s spent the majority of her career on merchant trading desks, for the likes of BP amongst others. She has also been a prop trader and has experience as a hedge fund portfolio manager. A few of the key topics we hit on include: Brynne’s responsibilities as head of trading desks, how she taught, trained and managed newer traders, and an overview for how Brynne trades relationships using fundamentals an...
Nov 17, 2016•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 99
Before day trading equities, Peter To played a lot of online poker and did fairly well for himself. He then dabbled in markets as an investor, but was soon attracted to OTC stocks after discovering a strange inefficiency… In this episode we spend quite a bit of time talking about Peter’s prop trading experience, both the good and the bad. Trading nihilism and doing everything you supposedly shouldn’t do, why Peter accepts he’s not a “cold blooded assassin” and does trade with the influence of em...
Nov 10, 2016•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 98
On this episode, I have our very first guest from China; Derek Wong—he is the Director of Systematic Trading and Options at a private fund in Shanghai. Initially though, Derek got his start in the agricultural pits at the CBOT, then following on from this, he’s worked at various quant shops in Chicago, South Korea, and now days, mainland China. After discussing Derek’s backstory, we talk; emerging markets, cultural differences of Chinese investors, convergent and divergent strategies, diversific...
Nov 03, 2016•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 97
