YouSaid · the spoken record

Todd Simkin

lines on the record: 91
first: 2024-08-05
most recent: 2024-08-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Some degree, I think that the mystique might be beneficial. It is on the trading side. It seems like people who are interested college students who are interested in getting into trading don't know the details, but they do know enough to know that people who come to Susquehanna end up being successful, both in their career at Susquehanna and for those who choose to leave or for whom it's not the right fit. Those people still end up finding successful careers elsewhere. So I think that there the mistake has helped us candidly, I think on the technology side, it has hurt us. People know that if you go to Google, you're going to be working as a technologist and they think they know what that means. Whereas they say going into financial services, am I just writing some pricing code that somebody's going to implement and not fully understand where that goes? I think we've done a better job recently of really explaining the growth and the opportunity and our use of really cutting edge technology with our prospective technologists. I think to some degree they're also learning that”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We would just lose sight of the risk that we had and therefore would not be able to appropriately manage that risk. As we've grown, the ownership of the company has done a very good job of finding the appropriate infrastructure scaling as well to be able to support all the businesses that we have. The greatest pool of employees that we have is not traders, it's technologists because so much of what we do relies on good quality technology infrastructure and business infrastructure that our technologists are able to build out for us.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the really nice things is that the owners, the holders of the capital, have understood from the beginning the necessary interconnectedness in order to have scale. Structurally, things have to look different for a large organization than they do for a smaller organization. There's an analog in animal biology, which is that if you were to take an ant and blow it up to the size of an elephant, it would not be able to hold itself up. The cross-sectional area of the leg is not big enough to support the increased mass. In the same way, if we were to have the same structure for Susquehanna at 3,000 people that we had at 35 people or at however much money we were deploying in all the businesses that we have around the world now versus where we were when the company started, we would collapse under our own weight. Either we wouldn't be able to get anything done because things would get held up in processes or more likely.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love to ask how you think about scale in Susquehanna famously has never taken outside capital and now you can Google search and say even though it's a big mystery sort of how big Susquehanna is, it's very, very large.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The average price that it's worth. And if we're selling something that we're selling it above the fair value. So if I sell enough of it, even though sometimes I'm going to lose the amount of money I'm taking in on all of the wins ends up paying for it. The other piece that I think is embedded in this that I haven't quite said is that these risks are uncorrelated to the extent that we are thinking of all of our businesses as a portfolio in addition to all of our holdings being a portfolio, our businesses being uncorrelated means that over the long run, I expect my profits to increase by the expected value of each of these businesses, but my variance, my standard deviation only to go up by the square root of the number of businesses or exposures that we have. The more businesses we can get into profitably that do not have any relationship to our other businesses, the more money we make. So we actually end up being in a better position in terms of risk reduction by”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Insurance is a losing business because you've got this unlimited downside. Ultimately, what it comes down to is appropriate price. So you can go broke in venture capital by always overpaying. If you were always paying too much just because you've got this big upside, eventually you just run out of money and these companies don't turn into anything and you've spent it all. Likewise in the insurance world, there are certain risks where effectively we can have exposure to all of the outcomes at greater than 100% probability, then you can't lose, even though you are short, you actually have no downside. So even though there are these asymmetries, what we ultimately care about at the end of the day is the fair value and making sure that we are either buying something below its fair value so that we have reason to believe that over the long run with enough reps, we're going to realize its fair value and win from where we bought it up to.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like thinking about those products exactly as you talk about it when we talk about it internally. We talk about our insurance business very much as being a short put business, which means basically the most we can ever win on the business is the price at which we sell the risk, but sometimes we can lose a lot. So we've got this asymmetric risk exposure that is one where we can lose a lot, but only ever win a little. And I agree that the venture capital business is one where you can only ever lose what you put into the business, what you buy in for, but sometimes you buy into a company like ByteDance and you happen to get in when it was not worth very much. And now it's one of the biggest social media platforms in the world. And you happen to be there at the right time. So you have this other piece of asymmetry where you can have huge upside, but you've got limited downside. That is exactly how we talk about the risks when we talk about it internally. But that does not mean because of the asymmetries that venture capital is a winning business because you've got this unlimited upside or that”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be excellent at it. The other thing that's been really consistent is that in all the different products that we've gotten into, it looks different on its surface, but fundamentally we are talking about risk allocation or buying or selling risk at the appropriate price. Most recently in the last few years, we've moved into insurance, which is where I spend all of my time now is thinking about insurance products. And similarly, we've also recently did a partnership with Calci where we are providing liquidity in event markets. Those sound like two different things. Calci's this binary payout on an exchange and the events.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that I think we've been very good at is making sure that if we get into a business, we understand where we're going to stand in that business and we only pursue it if we think we can be excellent at it. We don't want to raise our hands and just be another participant in something that other people are doing. So we've had the good fortune of success. A lot of that, I think, from good practices and good policies internally, and certainly a lot of that from luck as well. And as we have been successful, that means that we've had more resources available to us that we can deploy in other venues. So we've moved into venture capital and private equity. We've moved into creating a sports trading unit that is trading on sports books in Europe. And that group is in Ireland. All of the growth has been in places where we have said we have a reason to think that we have internal resources that can support this in a productive way and we're willing to put the capital behind it.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Them to be able to point them in the right direction to learn more. And then when they learn more, they actually have more questions, not fewer. Those are the people that have a big impact not only on their own trading, but we get to leverage those questions and really improve best practices across the firm.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I pulled up the formula that we used to plug into the machines that are trading our automated strategies. And it has this additional factor in it. What does that factor mean? And the person who's digging in deep enough to pull up the mechanics in the machine to see how it's treating and to see how that differs from what we're teaching them in an open outcry environment, that person is not doing it because they're getting paid an extra X dollars to do it. They're doing it because they just really want to beat the rest of the people in the room at their trade. They want to understand it well enough to know this also might matter. So there's a drive and an intrinsic curiosity, an extrinsic one. And then the other part that I've already alluded to is that they then talk about it. So when they are curious, they don't have enough information to learn it on their own. But once they start talking about what they're curious about and where their questions are that they are finding the appropriate resources internally and we have plenty of.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it actually goes back to the first thing we were talking about with my desire to learn sign language. It was something that I did not have mastery of and I wanted to know it better. And it was entirely self-serving. It was just for me. Nobody else cared whether or not I learned sign language. Nobody was grading me on it. Everybody that we're bringing in as quantitative traders, they're all smart. They're all capable. They are all straight A students in finance or physics or computer science or whatever it might be, what differentiates the ones who end up being great from those who end up being fine are the ones who just really, really want to dig in and get it and understand it and win the game. And you'll see people that will come up after a mock trading session and say, okay, I understand the basic options model. I understand these adjustments that we at Susquehanna make to the basic options model.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10% here, your pricing is going to change by 75%. This is something where you really need to make sure either you have better information than the market does and not better information from the insider trading type view, but better information you've done your research. You've done the work, you've read the perspectives of the offering, and you know exactly what risk you have here. And the other thing is in a Bayesian way to update my assumptions when somebody is willing to trade against me by looking at those points that are most sensitive. So understanding not only the outputs of the model, here's the price at which we think you should trade, or this is how much size you should be willing to trade, but also understanding the inputs well enough that I know where I can go wrong, that I think is applying the art to the science.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lever to change the sensitivity or the responsiveness of my trading programs. In the mid part of my career, I was looking at some very quantitatively driven products. There were very esoteric products that traded in Europe that did not have a lot of liquidity, which meant that if I was trading, I was probably trading against other professionals who were doing a good job of figuring out the appropriate fair value and the expected return on the different trades that we're making. So I was facing a lot of selection bias. If somebody wanted to trade against me, it was probably something I should be worried about. And because of that, I worked very closely with our quantitative researchers not only to build out the model, but really to also understand the sensitivities of the model of the product I was trading to things that I might get wrong. There were some things that I could get wrong, and it was like, yeah, if you're off by 10% here, it doesn't really matter. It's not going to have a big impact on pricing. And there were other things where it's like, if you're off by”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like to make this distinction between art and science, and I think that if you've used any of the AI image creators, it feels like there's a lot more blending of that now. And I think that's probably true in trading as well, that the art side is figuring out how do I appropriately respond to real people who are going to make their own decisions on the back of what I've done. And then the science side is the fundamental underlying principles, the arbitrage relationships or statistical arbitrage relationships between different products or different types of information. And a lot of what we want to do is incorporate the art that we can develop. So the ability to figure out here's how I probably want to respond most of the time in this type of situation into the science to say, so can I build that intelligence into my trading systems so that they will respond that way and let me know that they've responded that way. And I can decide whether or not it's appropriate and if I need to tweak a dial or pull.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You picked one course of action out of all of the courses of action that were available to you. What went into that decision? And can we break down the decision biases that you may have had that could have weighed in here? You might remember that this trade, you've seen every month for the last 18 months, and every time it comes in, this happens next. And you've incorporated that into your decision process. But if you don't say it out loud, your decision process sounds odd to me. But then you say, here's the pattern that I've noticed, and here's what I'm pricing in. You say, okay, well, then that makes sense. And I get where you're coming from, but you have to be able to explain the conditions that lead to the decision.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is something that comes a bit organically through our mock trading. We get to ask the questions in mock trading. It looks like you faded your offer when I showed that I had bigger size. Why did you do it that way? What were you afraid of? What might you have gotten wrong? All the prompting questions that we would ask in that mock trading session then.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right ordering for the way you use adjectives, and you just know that. You know that because you're a native English speaker, you've been using the language long enough that something sound right and something sound wrong. In the same way, when junior traders talk about trades, they might point out something that just feels like it doesn't matter compared to something bigger that does. And I don't know which question to ask them a priori. I don't want to say we need to focus on is the size of the order before the price or do you really need to focus on where the order is coming from before you look at the underlying risk there's not a simple answer to it other than to say it definitely sounds wrong when a junior trader gets it wrong and a senior trader knows it and feels it because they know the grammar they know what goes into making appropriate decisions for risk allocation under conditions of uncertainty”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I had a script for it, it'd be easy because then I would just give people a script to use as a checklist like a pilot does when they're starting up their plane or like a surgeon does when they're starting a surgery. I don't have a script and I wish I did because then I could hand it off to somebody. Instead, it's more like a grammar. There are things that you know how to do grammatically that you could not describe. If I were to say to you that I have eight large red French soccer balls, you would know what I mean. It makes sense. And if I were to change the order of the adjectives, it would sound crazy to you. If I moved one adjective and I said, I have eight red French soccer large balls, I would sound certainly not like a native speaker. And you would have a hard time explaining what the right order is for adjectives. A lot of people have gone through and tried to describe the rules here, and it comes down to number, opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose, I think, is.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who have seen more and experienced more, the other thing that we are encouraging and teaching all the way through is encouraging communication and teaching how to communicate both the information that's available to you and what is going on for you and your decision process. Because as I'm sure you've experienced that, you know people who have talked about something that they've decided to do and you're thinking, what an idiot. I can't believe you don't realize that you're falling into this trap. How could you not know that that was a scam marketer that reached out to you in your text message? Whatever it is, it's easy for you to see it and hard for the person in the moment to see it. In the same way in trading, people are going to make mistakes all the time. Other people can give better feedback than you can give yourself. So teaching the communication and encouraging the communication is another big part of that process for us.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have not yet built the internal capacity to ask themselves. Once they go through the trading class, in that class, we spend a lot of time mock trading. So putting them in trading situations that we can control and that we can pause at any time and we can talk about the different branches of outcomes that they might have experienced instead of just having them experience just one path of outcomes. We could say, okay, what would have happened if instead of them announcing a takeover, they had declared a dividend. How would that have changed what your option prices look like both your near term and far term at the money, out of the money? And we get to talk about the impact of all these different things that they might experience in their trading life, how they would impact their decision making in the confines of this mock trading. But then the other thing that happens is that we're still in an artificial situation. So eventually we have to let them wild out in the world. And there, it's important for us to have, again, senior mentors.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some things that you cannot teach in a classroom. We know that we're good at teaching the things in a classroom that we need to teach in a classroom. And then there are other parts of the decision process that we model in other ways, like by playing games with our trainees as they're learning. So we play things like poker and board games and chess and other games that model different parts of the decision process. But at the end of the day, there's no substitute for learning how to trade by trading. And there are a couple of ways that happens. One is before ever going through our trading class, our quantitative traders are working directly on trading desks, talking to the traders who are making decisions about the decisions that they're making. And they gain responsibility over time. So they'll be responsible for trading a small book before we ever put them through the trading class where the trader can oversee what they're doing and help model appropriate decision making or ask them the appropriate questions that”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as you're teaching people how to be traitors, there's a bunch of things you could imagine reading on behavioral stuff and basic finance. Once you have all of the fundamental underpinnings of what you need, where do people start to really learn what it takes to being a successful trader?”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comes in with a really rational approach instead of the image of the Lone Wolf trader who just has a feel for what matters.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Financial crisis. As my career developed, I then handed that off to another trader who was well situated to manage that risk. And I really wanted to teach other people how to trade. So then I moved into our education program, which like I said before, part of the philosophy is that traders are made and not born. So in order to make them, you have to teach them. So we built out a lot of capabilities where we could teach the basics of derivative valuation and option pricing and risk and risk management and all the finance background necessary to be successful as a trader, but also the game theory and behavioral economics and decision science that goes into recognizing biases that we have or that other people have or errors that we might make in our approach to trading and making sure that we're well calibrated to correct each other and to support each other to make better decisions as we get better information and update our information space as new information.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we went over there with something like 10 people and hired two people locally. And today we have, I want to say it's around 400 or 500 people in that office. So we've really grown a lot from there in a way that has mirrored the growth of the larger firm. I traded in Europe for a little over a year, came back to the US, and worked with a mutual friend of ours who was at the time the chief operating officer of the firm, Eric Brooks. And I worked closer with him in really building out a lot of our strategic development, so new areas of exploration. We moved into private equity and venture capital while I was in that role. We moved into institutional brokerage to feed the trading engine that we had built. And I served in that capacity for almost a decade until the financial crisis of the late aughts. And at that time, I moved back into trading, a large and exposed fixed income books. So I ran our fixed income portfolio for a couple years through.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Group that really was providing liquidity in ETFs at the very start of BTFs. So all of these areas of trading were growing at the same time. And then I was asked to help open up a new trading operation in Europe. So early 2000s, we started to really expand internationally. We actually changed our name from Susquehanna Investment Group to a new parent company, which was Susquehanna International Group because we were now international. We had trading operations in Dublin for trading all of Western Europe, another operation that we started at about the same time in Sydney, Australia for trading Australian markets and Southeast Asia. So I got to really see the growth of a business.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I started, like I said, on the floor of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange in 1997. The firm was formed in 87. So by that point, we had grown to, I don't know, 350 or 400 people, I think worldwide in the firm. And I was learning from experienced traders, working as an assistant trader. I quickly moved to a point where I was no longer assisting. I went through a trading class and I was able to put Susquehanna's capital at risk. Pretty soon after that got a tap to move to an upstairs trading desk and moved up to trade American depository receipts, ADRs, which are shares of foreign companies listed in US dollars on US exchanges. There was an arbitrage relationship between where the price was trading in Germany, where it was trading in the US, and the currency exchange rate. We were also trading a bunch of fixed income products like municipal bonds, convertible bonds. We were very big in trading index products, so we were among the first.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chicago wanted to list options on Dell. And then once they said, well, yeah, there should be no protection against another exchange listing options. Everybody listed everything. And then soon after that was the emergence of electronic options trading. So I was there in the age of dinosaurs when everything was shouted out loud. We had to circle months on a ticket and staple a ticket back with the buyer the sell on the other side. Fast forward to today when everything's done electronically. And in fact, just about everything happens at faster than human time.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The core part of our business then is still the core part now, which is derivatives trading. We had a physical presence on the floors of all of the options exchanges in the US, so that was Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, Chicago Board Options Exchange, and then the PCOS, the Pacific Coast in San Francisco. And we had traders on all of those floors. Part of this is a history lesson in options trading in general. Any particular option only traded in one of those locations. So if you want to trade options on Motorola, you had to do that in San Francisco. If you want to trade options on Dell Computer, you had to do that. There was no other place to do it. So the market makers on the floors had a time and place advantage of seeing every order that came into their pit. And then a couple years after I started, the multiple listing boom started. So there was a case, Dell Computer was the first one that”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have a desire to learn this stuff, we can teach it to them and we can get them to a point where they're making good decisions, allocating capital in uncertain markets and getting a positive return for it.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the poker table to the options world. And a lot of people, when they hear games think of fun thing to do with your family on the weekend as opposed to thinking of it as a structured rule set in which you can make decisions and then your decisions are impacted by the decisions of others and in turn other people get to see your actions and adjust their behavior as well. So from the start they were applying these game theory concepts to what we're doing in trading and the other part of the philosophy of Susquehanna from the very beginning that continues to this day before Carol Twick wrote about it was very much a growth mindset that they had the firm belief that traders are made and not born. So it's not the case that you'd have to find somebody who is inherently a traitor and then you just put them in the right spot and they go. Instead, they said if you bring us any smart person, if you bring us people that are willing to learn”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the sound like playing a game is probably something that happened on day one. The 35 or so people that were around on May 1st of 1987 were there because there were progenitor companies. Jeff Yaz started his own options trading company on the floor of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange in 1981. Some of the other partners of Susquehanna in the early days had their own companies that they merged together to come together as Susquehanna in 1987. The background that the founders had was in gaming. They were poker players. They played poker together in college. They went out to Vegas and played together in Vegas. They were gamblers. They would bet on horse races and figured out some risk arbitrage type bets that they could place on horses. So they were thinking in a very gaming context from the start. And in fact, the reason they moved into options was because they thought they could apply the same game theory that they were using.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you roll forward to coming out of college in the years from Susquehanna's founding until you joined, what was the history of the firm and how it evolved to get to this point where it sounded like you were playing a game?”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A totally different language and language structure and language modality that just happens to coexist in our backyard that most people just don't have access to. So I studied it on my own. I learned from books. I would get videotapes from the library and learned a bit that way. And it wasn't until I was later in high school that I first ran into a deaf person organically. It was at a doctor's office. There was a young deaf man that was trying to leave, and he was having trouble figuring out how to get out. And I got to sign to him to explain where the door was or that you pull instead of push or whatever it was that I said to him. And the feeling of accomplishment from that just kept me going. I stayed curious about it and continued studying from there.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is one of the stories where I'm glad that my kids are old enough now that they'll forgive me for my transgressions in my youth. But in sixth grade, my good friend Brandon wasn't prepared for the science tests. So he wanted to cheat on our sixth grade science test. He taught me the manual alphabet. He taught me how to fingerspell from A through E, which is as far as we had to go for the science test. And then from across the room, he would hold up a number of fingers for the question he was stuck on. And I would hold up letter D for the right answer. And that lasted for all of one test where we figured out that Brandon's eyesight wasn't good enough to see across the room to even see what I was holding up. But it got me curious. And I wanted to learn more. It didn't make sense to me that deaf people would fingerspell to each other every time they had something to say. So I started looking into how deaf people actually communicate, which is far more robust. It's actually beautiful thing to see.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The reason I ended up in trading wasn't because trading was a passion of mine, but because I really liked competing. I really liked the idea of being part of a winning team. And that's what I got to do working at Susquehanna.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Brokerage was not the right role. Sales wasn't a good fit for me personality wise or constitutionally. It just wasn't where I belonged. But while I was there, I got introduced to Of the stock specialists for Susquehanna, and when I was talking to him, his story sounded a lot different than everybody else that I spoke to. And he talked about Decision making with imperfect information and figuring out the game and he compared it to playing sports, which was always part of what I enjoyed in my childhood. And it just so happened that the sport that you got to play was one where the skill set was in your mind as opposed to the physical skill set. But everything else about it sounded appealing. So it sounded like I got to. Figure out each day whether or not I won or lost and then game plan for the next day and revisit all the decisions.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am not the kid that was reading the Wall Street Journal at eight years old and asking my dad about stock prices. I took a very different path through college. I ended up studying deaf culture and language, so focused on American sign language and the deaf community. I thought for a while that I was going to end up being a math teacher in a school for the deaf and then realized that that was probably not going to be a great fit for me and started looking for jobs. My father suggested that I talk to a friend of his who was a broker on the New York Stock Exchange. And then I got up there and saw what the job entailed and I realized it was definitely not appealing to me.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Relationships with investors and building a brand through workshops and peer discussions. You can learn more and sign up to join us at capitalallocators.com slash university. Thanks so much for spreading the word about our newest capital allocators university course for investor relations and business development professionals. Enjoy my conversation with Todd Simpkin. Todd, great to see you”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guessed on today's show is Todd Simpkin, an associate director at Susquehanna International Group, a global quantitative trading firm comprised solely of internal capital that's known for its rigorous analytical approach to decision making. Todd is also the CEO of Susquehanna Re. His latest role in a 27-year tenure at SIG that spanned trading, strategic initiatives, and trader education. Our conversation covers the history of SIG alongside Todd's roles, trader development, the art and science of trading, risk management, recruiting talent, competitive advantages, luck, and strategic initiatives in venture capital, prediction markets, sports gambling, and reinsurance.”
2024-08-05 · Capital Allocators · Todd Simkin - Game of Trading at Susquehanna (EP.399) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source