All posts by Trading Technologies

On July 14, I gave an address to interns at the 2016 MarketsWiki World of Opportunity Summer Intern Education Series. What follows is an extended version of my remarks.

Trading Technologies has spent the last few years working on the next-generation TT® platform. Through the process, we’ve learned a lot about what makes a good team and how a product needs to challenge the status quo if to make a long-term impact.

It’s fair to say that any great accomplishment has as its first ingredient the people themselves. This is absolutely the case at TT, and growing our team over the last two years has been one of our major focuses. When I think about the type of people we’re looking to add, the most important question I have about any individual is: are they hungry?

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I have been an intern at Trading Technologies for a little over a month now, and not one person has asked me to get them a coffee. What gives?

I’ve been contributing in marketing team meetings, editing blog posts and marketing documents, and helping with event planning. I’ve participated on a lot of important projects and am learning a lot about working on a marketing team within a larger company.

When I talk to my supervisors, they give me feedback on what I’m doing, give me more non-coffee fetching assignments to complete and ask if I’m doing O.K.

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Here it is, summer 2016, and I am contemplating at least my fourth “once in a thousand year” event in my trading career: Brexit. The others include the dot-com bubble, LTCM and the 2008 financial crisis. Truly, though, these 1,000-year floods occur with alarming regularity, although not all are so global nor impact markets so widely, e.g., gold in 1999 or Enron in 2001. One of my colleagues thought enough of my opinion to reach out to me. It was at the end of a long night, so I’m not sure how helpful I was. Perhaps this may be of more use.

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This is not a political commentary. I’ll spare you my thoughts on the U.S. election content. Instead, I’d like to point out something that many already have: Trump has unexpectedly led the Republican field. In fact, it is not just Trump and Republicans. Bernie Sanders has been able to hang on far longer than expected in the Democratic primary despite going up against what can reasonably be described as a Clinton machine.

Is this about the glowing personality of Trump? The sound policies of Sanders? Vice versa? Probably not. Instead, I’d argue that the electorate has changed its priorities—in this case, very much trying to find an alternative to whatever it was that brought us to this moment in political time. Only now are many pundits acknowledging that or some other story as the reason for these surprise successes. It would have been far more helpful for predicting to know that before the event. And that is my point: the world has been surprised by these successes. Very surprised. Mostly the professional predictors.

Amongst the best of these predictors is Nate Silver and fivethirtyeight.com. I highly recommend Silver’s book, “The Signal and the Noise.” Yet that organization got it wrong—and not like a little wrong.

“Trump has a better chance of cameoing in another “Home Alone” movie with Macaulay Culkin—or playing in the NBA Finals—than winning the Republican nomination.” That’s not merely an incorrect prediction; that is saying an event is essentially an impossibility. Harry Enten revisited that quote in this article. Enten should be credited for acknowledging the mistake and for seeking how to address potential mistakes going forward. These are the good predictors—the people and organizations that we should be learning about predicting from. So what happened?

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