ex Goldman Sachs Trader Tells Truth about Trading - Part 1

so yeah we're lucky enough to have Anton Creole here and he started his career with trading at about 16 with his own money and then got recruited into Goldman Sachs headhunted Lehman Brothers JP Morgan before retiring traveling the world then he you may know that he also did a PPC program million-dollar traders and proceeded to form his own company and next year he's trying he's going to travel to space hopefully so yeah it's pretty ridiculous career I think we're gonna learn a lot from this interview and so if we could just have a warm welcome and a round of applause for Anton and okay so let's make a start and how did you get into the world of trading and started trading pretty young as you mentioned in the in the introduction started when I was 16 basically so grew up in Liverpool and was watching documentaries on television about the markets said this was like 1994-95 and there was a lot of documentaries on TV about Thatcher's Britain and lots of guys in the in the city were making lots of money so I was watching these documentaries thinking I could do it because I'm clever in these guys so who heard so literally opened the trading account with a local stock broker in the north of England and back then it was all physical stock so you couldn't leverage or borrow money which rate so it was 1 for 1 cash trading in physical shares and really got into the IPO situations where you could buy stocks in the morning where you put in for the IPO allocation a few weeks earlier you get the IPO allocation and without even paying for it and then you can the IPO like at lunchtime if it goes up you know 50 a hundred percent with it because it was all t plus three settlement so you used to have to send the check to the stockbroker and then it'd be settled in three days so you you were able to flip IPOs are not actually pay for them so really got into it that way okay and you continued trading at university yeah so at university you know it was 97 to 2000 so I was pretty lucky I caught the tech bull market the tech boom so flipping IPOs and trading IPOs was actually really straightforward and university day used to be get up at 6:00 a.m. do an hour's research market with open at 8:00 put on my positions go to lectures lunchtime go in the computer room flip them but most of it was already done over most of it was done over the telephone so in my day wasn't so long ago this was the heaven this was before broadband so everything was dial-up and you know at home it used to cost like a pound a minute to plug your internet in so and you used to only get quotes online and when you pick up the telephone to trade the quotes upon the brokers would be totally different from what you see on the screen so it was pretty slow spreads were really wide so you had to trade very volatile situations and then go home in the evening do a bit of research and do the same again the next day was it that experience that got you into Goldman Sachs pretty much yeah the Goldman Sachs situation was you know typical situation where they come around on the milk rant and do presentations so obviously it first second year university you go to all of these and you get to know all the companies I'm sure here you have the same even today that the track record which is just all of your trades that you've ever done and your performance and your risk over return the track record would you know I basically told one of the traders on the desk at the press patience you know the amount of money that I made in university all the situations I was trading and they were really interested so I basically had a telephone interview the next day and emailed them my track record so the telephone interview was with the head of the desk and then I was invited down the next week to have interviews and then offered the job on the same day basically okay do you think that method still applies for getting students into the say that for us that want to follow in the same sort of path do you think that's the right way to go about getting a job getting a trading job now one of the big problems with with applying to investment banks hedge funds all financial institutions really is a lot of the industries of instructional decline at the moment so you see investment banks culling tens of thousands of people in the Western world hedge funds pulling back on hiring the insurance industry pretty much the same but the amount of applications has gone up exponentially in the last 10 15 years everyone seems to have an undergraduate degree now everyone has a masters so who you know differentiating yourself is really really hard in my day the way I differentiating myself was by doing as well and I think it's still really a place if you can show something on your resume and show something in your experience where you've actually applied real trading methodologies and use real money you stand out in a huge way you know everybody's got an undergrad with a 2:1 everyone's got a master's when I used to see CVS right now yeah used to hire a lot of people in the industry piles of CVS were dropping my desk from HR HR is really just a filtering process they don't know what makes a good trader but they know that people tick all the boxes so the Seavey's end up on the desk but there's thousands of them and it's literally sometimes just taking them and going to one masters couple of good place institutions that you went to nothing really interesting about this person bin I mean it that's sometimes that can be the process okay so you're already trading once you're at goldman sachs how did how did they develop durability and well you know publicly you know these companies that these companies are public companies so they're always gonna say that they have official training programs it's something you know public companies have to show their shareholders that they're being responsible in in training they're the people that they hire so you do have an official training program that you go on in New York which is pretty much sitting in a lecture theatre like we're here now for a couple of months but also you're given a seat on on the trading floor on Wall Street to be honest what you learn in those in that situation is really about applied finance more that you would learn in a masters but also the culture of the firm and you get to meet everybody and all the right people in the US office so you don't really learn how to trade or learn about your profession in practice that's when you come back on the desk and really that's where you works what you learn okay so you spend about four years at Goldman's and what were your highlights highlights well walking onto the desk in the first week where it's all hands to the pump because it was the tech boom so this would have been a June 2000 and it was crazy so they just give you a pot of money with me it was ten million dollars to start they say learn how to trade this guy next to you is going to teach you what to do press this button to buy press this button to sell and because it was the tech boom it was you know every day walking in with pretty much very little experience saying right we're gonna we're going to give you some responsibilities today you know after a couple of weeks you'll go to IPO this company and I'm like okay so I'm on the other side of the IPO now that I'm used to ahem and then next day doing a rights issue raising capital for companies next day selling stake sink these four large shareholders and pension funds so yeah I mean the first couple of months of real baptism of fire you know I thought I knew stuff I didn't know anything until I walked onto that floor I guess big trading situations I mean there's so many but ones that you know really stand out probably during the tech boom doing all the IPOs 2001 September the 11th a huge situation in the market the recession we periods of 2002 and then the take off of the market in oh three oh four okay and we'll have a little pause now and get some audience questions any so far yeah I really think so I mean you've you've really got to do it in practice with real money if you get the experience doing that even if you lose a little bit of money you've got to see it as paying for the education of trading with real money so even if you lose money and say to an investment bank or a hedge fund this is my track record I lost a couple of thousand pounds last year trading they will look at that favorably so you've got no downside in doing it so as long as you show that you've done it and you've traded for a year and they say well what lessons have you learned well I've learned not to do this I've learned not to do this the market last year was really tough the fact that you're actually doing it means you're going to learn faster so you because what you know there's a great saying you're not trading until you've got a position okay or you don't know anything about a stock until you've got a position you know so once you have a position in something you're forced to learn and monitor your risk so I think it's it's it's really really important to do it and you know then going into the investment banking site it is very very different so the approach to trade is very different in investment banks and hedge funds the way professionals did it compared to the retail trader or the man on the street so you'll learn how to do that but from the ground up just having a position will teach you a lot I would say okay in terms of volatility you know volatility creates opportunities for traders over any given time horizon and that's what traders live and die on they need volatility otherwise you can't make money so the forex market you know implied volatility over the last couple of years has been absolutely crushed we've actually seen it tick up a little bit recently especially in dollar yen you know huge moves forex is is good to learn in but don't expect to make loads of money if you're day trading because actually the important of ala Atilla T of forex at the moment of the major g10 currency pairs globally is very very low so it's very difficult to make money over short periods of time in equities generally historically volatility is higher than in forex

Channel: InstituteofTrading

Views: 3,878,310

Rating: 4.7858753 out of 5

Keywords: Interview, School, Interviews, Exclusive, trading, goldman sachs, cass, business, school, graduates, morgan stanley, banks, hedge funds, forex, stocks, commodities, institute, institute of trading, portfolio management, lex van dam, greg secker, university, city, wall street, million dollar traders, space expedition corporation, sxc, michiel mol, finance

Id: 9h3lByx59ns

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Fletch71011]

He really makes it sound like his early trading was pure luck - buying IPOs during the tech bubble and not getting demolished by the crash was fairly lucky.

[u/Macsnight]

just watched the full interview (6 parts) - was really interesting stuff...highly recommended.