The Questions that Change Everything - Kris Longmore - 057

So, yeah, how does it inform what you take out solo and, you know, how much of it can you port out? That's a good question.

You know, if a lot, why a lot? If not much, why? So how do you port? What do you learn in there? And then what can you take from that into solo trading?

That's an excellent question.

And the answer is bits and pieces but not what people probably think.

Right.

So there's a few things that you would take.

You would take the culture and the research approach.

But if you took the actual, the trading approach, the trading implementation, there's no way that could work as a solo operator.

And I'll get into why.

Okay.

But when I say like the culture and the approach, I'm talking about things like, you know, we would have weekly research meetings where...

So I was basically a researcher at that firm.

I did touch most parts of the business because we were so small, but my primary function was research.

And so we'd have a weekly meeting where we'd each present whatever work we'd been doing and everyone else in the group would basically pull it to pieces, you know, and...

You know, when you first walk into an environment like that, you kind of have to check your ego a little bit and you have to realize that these people aren't having a go at you.

They're doing their best to get to the good ideas and the good research as quickly as possible.

And it's, yeah, it was a really healthy environment of skepticism, but also like building each other up at the same time.

Yeah, they really nailed the culture with that stuff, I think.

so yeah so when i bring that approach to what i do now right like i treat have an idea for an edge or if i hear about an edge or something like that the whole mindset is like paranoia that i'm wrong about this you know that's in contrast with that when i when i started my attitude when i started was oh let's try this and i'm going to hope that it's right i'm going to hope that i'm right about this and now it's the complete opposite i'm trying to kill every idea i have as quickly as possible and the good ones survive so yeah it's a really different mindset but I mean, and the other thing that I would take from my time at the firm would be like you have to have an underlying reason to get paid.

So what we were doing, we were doing like essentially low latency stat arb on global futures and means the edge behind stat arb is essentially you're providing liquidity to lumpy, noisy, price insensitive flow that comes in.

And the whole game is like really positioning yourself to be in the right place at the right time to take advantage of that.

And we just happened to do it in a competitive market that required speed and good infrastructure and some smarts about how you quote and how you cross and all of that stuff.

If you tried to do that as a solo trader, you would be dead in the water before you even started.

So the whole reason that could work was because we had the infrastructure.

We had a team of