Notes for Chat with Traders, Episode 87

Added on by C. Maoxian.

Episode 87 ... Tom Sosnoff (60:58)

  • Aaron recommends Sosnoff’s Ted Talk

  • Caddying 18 holes is called a "loop"

  • Jimmy Rocko, his caddy master, grifted him out of all his earnings, cheap life lesson

  • Current generation way too risk averse

  • Current generation has too much student debt, makes them scared

  • Take risks when you're young ... it's common sense

  • Risks usually aren't efficiently priced

  • Graduated college in summer of 1979

  • Wanted to work for a lobbyist but couldn't find job

  • Worked for Drexel Burnham right out of college, fall of 1979

  • "Bullshitted his way" in

  • Pre-Milken, he was long gone before the collapse of Drexel

  • Gold and silver exploding then

  • Stepped on floor of CBOE and knew that's where he belonged

  • National Semiconductor (NSM) pit, first words to him: "f-ck you!"

  • Trading floors: all alpha males, strong egos, independent, grifters -- fit his personality

  • Spent 20 years on the floor of CBOE

  • 3-5% of the people they hired made it

  • He just got lucky and made it

  • Only instruction to trainees was "go make some money"

  • Couldn't outsmart anyone so tried to outwork them

  • Made enough money so he could build ThinkOrSwim

  • The only way to make money with options: trade small, manage profits, sell options naked

  • All about creating a statistical chance of success with options

  • No such thing as a quantitative model that can beat the markets

  • Market making models (and HFT) can beat the market, but that's it

  • The world prices everything perfectly -- no free money, no edge out there

  • Derivatives overprice for fear, take advantage of this opportunity

  • Sell high implied volatility

  • There are people who make money, but they're outliers

  • Can't steal money from your customers anymore, this is how people used to make money

  • Be product and strategy agnostic, all your focus is on liquidity

  • Manage your winners, forget about your losers

  • Learn all about implied volatility, learn how to sell premium

  • Price is not mean reverting, but implied volatility is

  • He's on pace to do 10,000 trades for the year (2016)

  • Start young and start small and learn

  • If you can order a pizza, you can trade. It's not rocket science

  • 100,000+ tastytraders [not sure what this means? active viewers?]

  • Markets 35 years ago were inefficient

  • Individual investors today at no disadvantage to professionals -- fees, technology the same, only know-how different

  • Trading psychology is 100% bullshit

  • We make people feel good about their lack of know-how

  • People aren't successful because they don't take the time and the commitment to be successful

  • Industry makes money by managing other people's money

  • There's no psychological element to blackjack or even poker (it's all mechanics, playing by the book)

  • He stood in the same two foot spot for twenty years in the pit

  • Saw the hurricane coming and wanted to be the first one out

  • Scott Sheridan his partner ... hired great technologists to build ThinkOrSwim

  • Hired smart people to execute their vision

  • He didn't see his family for ten years while building ThinkOrSwim

  • Built a great company and product

  • Didn't want to sell ThinkOrSwim, but it was a public company and TD bought them out

  • Sold ThinkOrSwim for $750MM

  • Went to CEO of TD Ameritrade and told him he wanted to leave

  • Built tastytrade, which is a media company, profitable since Day One

  • In order to trade for a living: you need capital and need to know what you're doing, stay small

  • His biggest revelation was that he was trading too large ... got smaller, got successful

  • Eight hours a day of live content on his website every day, tens of thousands of hours archived

  • Website: www.tastytrade.com