My Story in Prop Trading
- Thread starter peterkto
- Start date
The entire post is about a poor process and poor decision making in trade, despite an acceptable result. I’m glad you can recognize that. I almost never about good trades because they’re usually boring. Thank you for your advice.
As a side note I became a dad yesterday and it might be a little longer before the next post, which is about the Facebook IPO—the only day I can remember the entire desk trading one stock. Thanks for all kind words everyone and I hope I can finish quickly!
Congrats for your new born !
Whish her / him two lovely parents
As per your post it seems like the entire desk been shorting those tight consolidation in AAPL
Looking forward to read you !
Enjoy being a family.
Congrats for your newborn. And great read, brings back lots of memories. I ran into a few the guys you mentioned in your posts at a bar while I was placed as junior guy for a sell side firm in NYC at their lending desk (was part of the global training rotation program) for 2 months in 2002, soon after 9/11. GF of one of the other NYC based newgrads knew those guys. I was still naive back then and the big NYC talk really impressed me until I learned about their monthly pnl most of the time. Very few really made anything out of themselves. Probably a few years before you hopped onto the train. Another crazy memory was sneaking as newgrads onto the top floor boardroom of the building JPM abanondoned downtown in a rush post post 9/11. My firm took over the lease and we used our access cards that were checked by the only security guard downstairs at the entrance. We peeked into the abandoned trading floors and only saw millions of cables ripped out the walls and sticking out of every wall. Looked like a battlefield. I was told the carnage had nothing to do with 9/11 directly but more like the urge JPM put in to get out of downtown NYC that time. Anyway, we took a few chicks we met at a bar and booze upstairs and enjoyed one of the most spectacular sunsets with legs and shoes on the former JPM boardroom tables. Nothing much happened with the chicks up there in case anyone wonders. But that's the place I decided that I wanna be managing risk for the long haul, mostly driven by my fascination for markets. Good memories, thanks for bringing those back.
I don't remember when I found your blog but it was years ago before the CwT interview. I think I came across it when I also was reading the "phantom of the pits". You have a real skill in writing so if the trading ever didn't work out, you should consider writing. Good to see you finally joined ET.
Not sure if you mentioned it but are you still trading with a prop firm or solo now? What are you using for a broker/software? I got into following the steven dux's guys, shorting micros but it does seem the field is getting crowded with all the other traders like verma, madaz, etc.
Congrats on the newborn.
Damn, just read this.
What do you do when you dont like what you do anymore? - Churning and Burning
Definitely consider writing. Poker Nation is a book written by Andy Bellin who was an underground poker player with a degree in physics. He wrote about his adventures in the NYC underground game. You have a bunch of stories already done so you are like half way towards a completed book.
Poker Nation
Thanks for the congrats guys.
MW: Are you talking about the managing partners of my firm in 2002? I don't think they had started their own firm yet at that point.
Lwlee: Writing has actually helped spur some interest in trading again. Actually being curious about markets and having a creative process about it is what makes me tick. It had devolved into just going through the motions and button mashing in the last year or so. I'll check out Poker Nation. I'm with Avatar Securities at the moment although I also have my own retail account as Guardian Trading. I hate small cap trading and hope I can diversify away from it.
MW: Are you talking about the managing partners of my firm in 2002? I don't think they had started their own firm yet at that point.
Lwlee: Writing has actually helped spur some interest in trading again. Actually being curious about markets and having a creative process about it is what makes me tick. It had devolved into just going through the motions and button mashing in the last year or so. I'll check out Poker Nation. I'm with Avatar Securities at the moment although I also have my own retail account as Guardian Trading. I hate small cap trading and hope I can diversify away from it.
Nice I'm with Guardian Trading as well. You may want to consider Cobra Trading. Lately they've been pushing their incentives so they are competitive with Guardian now, and they seem to have as good or better short inventory.
I read your experience with HKD so I can empathize about small cap shorting. Long term daytrading shouldn't be about sheer moments of terror. Used to be a guy on here, lescor. His approach, daily basket of stocks mean reverting seemed to be a saner, less intensive approach. Don't know what happened to him but his posts are still available.
I followed 2 short guys (Theory Trading (@TheoryTrading) and daytradingzoo (@daytradingzoo)). They have a more systematic approach to shorting small cap using stats. More quality less quantity so they will wait weeks sometimes before executing a trade.
So I tried to "entertain" a systematic approach to it because a chatroom I was in (alldayholds) was headed that way. I didn't 100% commit to purely algorithmic entries and kept a lot of feel+discretion in it. I got tired of seeing the lead chat guy commit so many different backtesting flaws and over-tinker and pass up obvious short setups so I got disillusioned with it slowly. I just think 2020-2021 was a great flash in the pan and if you sat around waiting for your trading scans to be great with more forward data, boom, suddenly you missed it all.
But that was me trading in my prime. Now that I'm out of my prime, maybe I should swallow my pride and considering that steady approach again.
I used to have 4 brokers. Avatar, Guardian, Cobra, and Speedtrader. I've closed the latter two earlier in the year to reduce my total cash commitment and buy more long-term assets.
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Was curious @peterkto ...Could you reproduce now with retail trading software that which you used to do at your old firm(s), reading the tape and whatnot? It seems to me your knowledge could be an edge, although I don't know how much has changed electronically from the time of your experiences in the blog compared to now.