This past week I was partially out of pocket as the day job needed the majority of my attention. While I try my best to keep up with activity in the markets while I am travelling, two days away from the screens tends to leave me feeling out of sync with the flow of things. I didn’t put on any new positions last week preferring to wait until after the 4th of July holiday.
For those who may be wondering what my “day job” entails, I will try and summarize that for you here. Our company (Data Transmission Network, DTN) specializes in being an unbiased provider of software, market data, and analytical tools to assist traders, investors, hedgers, etc in making informed trading and risk management decisions. Unbiased means that our sole interest is helping your trading desk make the most money possible, thereby being a long term customer of ours. We do this for different segments of the global markets including Energy, Agriculture, Weather, Refined Fuels, and Active Trading (my group). You may have heard of or be familiar with some of our products like:
In short, my role as Business Development Manager (Active Trader) includes working with software developers bringing new trading applications to market, and trying to help them become as successful as possible. Oftentimes, my clients are trying to build an application to use only personally, while others have the goal of developing and selling a commercially available application. Perhaps they are quants, looking for years worth of historical tick data for system testing and design. Others may be chartists or technicians trying to understand the differences in data sources and how those differences affect their volume profile, cumulative delta, and order flow indicators.
While there will always be aspects of a job you aren’t thrilled with, mine affords me the opportunity of getting to meet some pretty incredible people. This past week I had the opportunity to catch up with Eric Scott Hunsader, a colleague of ours who understands more about markets than anyone I have ever met.
You’ll do yourself a favor by following him on Twitter and getting notifications when he tweets like I have for the past 5 years. @nanexllc
If you are interested, he did an interview this past year with Chat With Traders and you can have a listen here:
I have been called a smart guy my whole life, but there is smart and then there is Eric. He is frighteningly brilliant and one of those people who has probably forgotten more about markets than most ever knew. Being able to work with and bounce ideas off him is one of the most invigorating experiences I get to have. I’ve always sought out people I feel are great at what they do, have an interesting story to tell, or are just plain smarter than me. Eric falls into all three of those categories.
Every so often I will write up a quick blog on different people in the financial services, money management or fintech industry whom I feel you should be paying attention to.
