Chat With Traders – Details, episodes & analysis

There’s Contrarian Trading and then there’s Consistent Contrarian Trading. Can you really make money by consistently going against the crowd? Does it take a certain type of personality to be able to trade this way? Jason Shapiro was featured in “Unknown Market Wizards” by Jack Schwager and he returns to Chat With Traders for an update after two years since we last spoke with him.  We delve deeper into his countertrend trading philosophy, learning about how he identifies overcrowded trades, and how market positioning and sentiment, rather than price, guide his trades, and focusing on the underlying mechanics that drive market moves. About Jason Shapiro: Jason has over 30 years of trading experience, navigating various markets including the 90s rallies, the 2000s tech bubble, the 2008 crash, and recent volatility in the last few years. His contrarian approach has made him a successful hedge fund manager, and he was featured in one of Jack Schwager’s recent Market Wizards books. He has managed money ranging from a few million to several hundred million dollars, gaining extensive knowledge of futures markets. Jason currently runs a one-man hedge fund using the CMR process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greg Magadini began his career as a proprietary trader for DRW Trading and Chopper Trading in Chicago and traded with SMB Capital as well. He later took a bold step, venturing out to trade his own book, bootstrapping crypto volatility with options and turning $50,000 into a staggering $1.3 million in consistent profits over nine years. In addition to his trading success, Greg co-founded Genesis Volatility – a crypto options analytics company, which caught the attention of Amberdata and resulted in an acquisition. Today, Greg serves as the Director of Derivatives at Amberdata, continuing to leverage his expertise in the derivatives space. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a risk officer with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Will Gogolak was setting margin requirements and saw a wide variety of traders’ accounts and what separated the winning traders from the losing ones, before leaving to pursue his own trading and obtaining a PHD in finance and share his knowledge of quantitative analysis and market experience with students at Carnegie Mellon University. Combining his market experience with knowledge of statistics helps William create his custom buy the dip strategy with futures and leveraged ETFs, and focusing on probabilities and determining market direction for informed trading decisions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joining me on this episode is Sudhu Arumugam, the co-founder and Chief Risk Officer of cryptocurrency futures exchange CoinFLEX. Though prior to this, Sudhu spent near 20-years in various trading roles for banks and hedge funds—mostly transacting in options on indices and single stocks, exotic derivatives and fixed income. We start things off by talking about Sudhu’s early days and experience in London’s LIFFE trading pit, meeting and trading with DRW founder Don Wilson—who he identified as a “force to be reckoned with.” Sudhu also speaks about heading a small institutional trading team within Merrill Lynch and shares insight to its OTC dealings. Then in the later part, we speak more about crypto and the efforts of CoinFLEX to become a market leading exchange. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jaime Rogozinski, a serial entrepreneur who resides in Mexico, is the man responsible for bringing WallStreetBets to life—the infamous and wildly popular subreddit, which proudly boasts the tagline, “Like 4Chan found a Bloomberg terminal.” In other words, WSB is an online forum (on Reddit) where the majority of it’s 700k+ members aren’t looking to establish long-term, sustainable trading careers. Instead they’re buying lotto tickets on commission-free trading apps, taking almighty risks, and attempting to strike it rich fast. This is a community, of mainly unsophisticated investors, where losses of 10’s and 100’s of thousands of dollars are so common that it’s considered the norm. And although less common, there’s also the occasional member who’s handsomely rewarded for his or her audacious risk-taking. It’s kind of insane what goes on here, especially because it’s real-life (minus the odd trolling stunt). But make no mistake, I’m not throwing shade at WSB! The brazen culture is fascinating and you can’t help but appreciate the rawness of it all, not to mention the comments provide priceless entertainment value. And there just might be some insight to gleam, if you look hard enough (even if it’s do the opposite!) Sound and rationale financial advice has no place on WSB. Speaking with Jaime, he tells how the subreddit evolved and took on a life of its own, highlights from the timeline; featuring a member who exposed an ‘infinite money cheat code’ on Robinhood and the infamous ‘Pharma Bro’ Martin Shkrelli who was once a moderator, plus the largest gains and losses in WSB history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike Mangieri’s a co-founder and managing partner of Seven Points Capital—a proprietary trading firm in New York, and with several smaller offices in other U.S. cities as well as Toronto. Although Mike occasionally trades in volatility products, his days mostly revolve around operations of the firm and overseeing the traders. Therefore he has a slightly unique perspective on things, compared to the perspective of an individual trader… In our conversation we roll through subjects, such as; the birth of a trading firm, a day in the life of Mike, monitoring risk—both, on a firm and individual level, psychology and mindset, examples of general interactions that Mike has with the traders—and some of the difficult conversations he has from time to time, plus more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gregory Zuckerman is a writer at the Wall Street Journal and author of The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched The Quant Revolution. For anyone unfamiliar, Jim Simons is the brilliant-minded mathematician who founded hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. Using quantitative models and with billions in AUM, Renaissance has averaged annualized returns of net 39% since 1988. And these returns only become more spectacular, once you discover that Renaissance investors pay a management and performance fee of 5 and 44—therefore bringing the gross annualized returns to 66%. Due to the superior performance, today, Jim has an estimated net worth of $23-billion. Greg describes him as being, “The greatest money maker in modern financial history.” Although journalists have previously covered the rise of Renaissance, for the longest time, much of it was still shrouded with mystery. But by gaining remarkable access to Jim and also many of the people around him, Greg has been able to tell the full story, in print, with detail and accuracy. Pick up a copy of The Man Who Solved the Market, available on Amazon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nico, who goes by @InefficientMrkt on Twitter, is an intraday equities trader. His area of expertise lies in low float, micro cap stocks, near-exclusively playing the short side of overextended moves. Nico and I spoke almost exactly 3 years ago on episode 96—which was memorably titled, "An 8-year overnight success story." Now picking up where we left off, we discuss what's been happening as of late... The most notable development being; after many years trading retail, Nico has gone into proprietary trading with Seven Points Capital. Going one step further, he has also established and heads up the firms' San Diego office. During the second half of this episode (from 40:20), I ask Nico to share how he's evolved as a trader in recent years—or more specifically; what has changed, what remains the same and what's been fine tuned. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode features high-profile American businessman, Robert Greifeld, who from 2003-2017 served as the CEO at Nasdaq—one of the world's largest and widely known financial exchanges. Bob came into this role at a time when Nasdaq was on the verge of an internal crisis, he was tasked with turning it around and making transformational change. Throughout our conversation, he tells of the critical moments and drastic actions, insight to Nasdaq's many acquisitions and its business model, plus lessons in leadership and career advice. Having since stepped down from Nasdaq CEO, Bob's recently written a book that details his entire experience at the helm. The book is titled Market Mover, and you can get a copy here. Today, Bob is the managing partner of Cornerstone Investment Capital—a fin-tech investment firm, and the Chairman of Virtu Financial—a prominent trading and technology firm. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s no other way to say it; Larry Hite is the definition of a market veteran, he’s someone who first developed an interest for trading and markets during the 60’s… Besides a reputation for extreme risk management, Larry is perhaps best known as co-founding Mint Investments—a hedge fund formed in 1981. He’s also considered to be one of the forefathers of trading systems and a pioneer of trend following. By 1988, Mint achieved an average annual compounded return of over 30%—it’s best year being 60% (in 1987, the year of the stock market crash) and it’s worst year up 13%. By 1990, Mint was the world’s largest hedge fund at the time, with $1-billion of assets under management. It was also around this time, that Mint’s performance caught the attention of Jack Schwager, as Larry was profiled and interviewed in the first book of the best-selling Market Wizards series. Now almost 30-years on, Larry has written a book of his own titled The Rule. It reflects on life experiences, trading lessons, and pretty much, how the most unlikely kid in the classroom went on to generate a significant personal fortune. During this episode, Larry and I discuss trading, risk philosophy and probability, life and memorable moments, and Larry’s work as a philanthropist too. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices