Notes for Chat with Traders, Episode 117

Added on by C. Maoxian.

Episode 117 ... Larry Alintoff (72:00)

  • Lives in Florida
  • Sounds like a New Yorker
  • Trading for 30 years
  • University of Michigan grad
  • Sophomore year of college, watching FNN on day of 1987 crash -- hooked him on markets
  • Born in 1967
  • Started plotting prices on graph paper in his dorm room
  • Read as many books about trading as he could
  • Discovered "pressure points" 
  • Ascending triangle, or sideways action [he discovered coiling, power of ever narrowing range]
  • High frequency traders sniff out order flow and run ahead
  • Worked at RefCo, forex broker, odd hours from 2 PM to midnight
  • Worked for Paul Tudor Jones
  • Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (favorite book)
  • "Yuge"
  • "... if that makes sense." Ends a lot of sentences with this phrase
  • Paul Tudor Jones staked him and a group of people a bit of money
  • Traded from a little office at RefCo
  • "Yuman psychology"
  • No guidance from Jones or his people
  • Jones kept close tabs on positions of all the people he staked, created "sentiment indicator"
  • All people who trade for a long time evolve
  • Friend trading stock options on the American Stock Exchange, he joined him
  • Profits just handed to you there, no need to think or understand what you were doing
  • American Stock Exchange had no competition, everyone must see specialist on floor
  • Other exchanges started to make markets in options, spreads narrowed with competition
  • Pacific Coast, Boston, CBOE broke up American Stock Exchange monopoly
  • Went to New York Board of Trade, worked in frozen concentrated orange juice pit
  • Good traders can separate signal (good information) from noise
  • What should happen versus what did happen? Pay attention to that
  • People who grow oranges know the orange juice market better than guys on the floor
  • Have a point where you know you're wrong, and get out
  • He takes profits too quickly
  • Make sure no one trade really hurts you
  • When Trump won and the market should have gone down and didn't, that was valuable information
  • Turns over his portfolio every five days
  • Holds 80 - 100 longs and 80 - 100 shorts
  • Computing power today so great, he can filter thousands of stocks for his criteria in a minute
  • Larry has yellow pads, he's not a programmer, gives his ideas to the young programmers
  • Knew the floor was coming to an end, everything going electronic
  • Had to figure out how to do what he did on the floor once he was off the floor
  • Hated weekends, couldn't trade then, deeply depressed every Friday afternoon
  • Obsessed with markets for 30 years
  • He's not a quitter, not lazy ... a workaholic about the markets
  • "Yuman nature" will never change ... fear and greed still exactly the same, elation and despair
  • Keeps a low profile
  • Twitter: @AlintoffLarry