In this venturesome episode, Christopher Hnatko, Founder of Spartan Trading, shares how to master trading with institutional insights and avoid common pitfalls. If you struggle with financial leaks and poor risk decisions, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- How to define risk thresholds for scalable business choices

- Why institutional views reveal hidden market dynamics

- What real-time mentoring builds confident profitability

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 1 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Christopher Hnatko is the founder of Spartan Trading, an online trading education platform that empowers aspiring and experienced traders to master the stock and options markets. With decades of experience spanning hedge funds, financial institutions, and live trading floors, Chris has seen firsthand how traditional trading education falls short—and he built Spartan Trading to fill that gap. Chris’s approach is actionable, hands-on, and results-driven. He doesn’t just teach theory—he walks traders through real-time market opportunities, high-probability setups, and decision-making strategies that accelerate learning and build confidence.

Want to learn more about Christopher Hnatko's work at Spartan? Check out his website at https://spartantrading.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

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Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again

to the Start scale and succeed podcast. It's the only podcast

that grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As

a founder, I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and I see a lot of

folks who are trapped in jobs that just don't fulfill them. I

mean, it is the start of every founder's journey out there.

They're looking for a path to freedom, to financial

independence, and more and more, that doesn't look like having to

go into a traditional business or waiting decades for

retirement. There are industries like trading that offer much

faster routes to the freedom that they're looking for, if you

do it right. And that's the challenge, because here's what

happens. Folks get into the game and either trying to do it on

their own or wasting 1000s of dollars on many of the courses

and outdated strategies that are out there, they blow up their

accounts in seconds and find themselves feeling worse off

than they were in the first place. And here's the thing that

drives me absolutely crazy about this, and it's not just to the

trading space. It happens in other industries as well. But if

it doesn't work for you, it's almost like it's your fault,

like you're the problem, and maybe you did something wrong,

maybe you didn't. But the reality of it is you need to

find some source, some education, some training,

someone to walk with you, who can get you through that

difficult time, and it's especially true for trading. So

the real issue that we want to get here is, how do we get

beyond the cursory stuff, the eye candy, the ear candy, and

how do we get past the can strategies and stuff that just

doesn't really work and get down to the brass tacks of how to

actually do it, particularly in the world of trading and and if

that's something you're interested in, either as a side

hustle or even going full time, your My guest today is going to

be a huge treat for you, because he spent decades on actual

trading floors in hedge funds and at financial institutions.

Chris Hnatko, Hnatco, sorry, I probably still said that wrong.

He built Spartan trading specifically to fix what's

broken in trading education. And is the founder of Spartan

trading, an online education platform that empowers aspiring

and experienced traders to master the stock and options

markets with decades of experience spanning hedge funds,

financial institutions and live trading floors, Chris has seen

firsthand how traditional trading education falls short,

and he built Spartan trading to fill that gap. Chris' approach

is actionable. It's hands on, and it's results driven. He

doesn't just teach theory. He walks traders through real time

market opportunities, high probability setups and decision

making strategies that accelerate learning and build

confidence. He's here with us today. Chris, welcome to the

show. Glad to have you here. What's cool about your story is

like you've been there and done that. You've been on the actual

trading floors, you've you've traded with actual hedge funds.

So taking that, what's the secret here, like, Why does

trading education, or at least most trading education, actually

keep people stuck in their jobs instead of becoming profitable

traders?

Yeah, and just want to have just one, one

piece of clarity here guys, I've traded alongside hedge funds and

alongside guys on floors and helped advise, you know, some of

these types of individuals. From a consulting standpoint, I

wasn't actually on the floors with them, because I'm in front

of my screen and my setup in my office, so it's online, is where

I'm, you know, doing these activities. My partners, though,

that are part of Spartan trade, have Rand floors, ran hedge

funds, ran institutions. They've got a lot more tenure. They're

about 4050, years of tenure. But we've come together to make this

this group, but, you know, I certainly do have experience,

you know, dealing with those types of individuals.

Yeah, thank you. So using that, that's a lot

of experience, especially between the group of you. Where

did you see that experience not showing up in other programs?

Well, you know, you don't tend to have

that much tenure, just between, you know, three people, we have

over 100 years of tenure between us, us, and you know, that's a

lot. And I find that most of the you know, the groups out there,

educational side of things, they lack the expert, the expertise,

the experience. Most of them have never done anything from an

institutional standpoint, mostly it's on the retail side. If you

really want to understand the game, you need to understand it

from an institutional standpoint, because

realistically, that's kind of who's going to have the most

impact on the market. You need to understand the nuances of how

the back end of that works in terms of, you know, you want to

understand, you know, order, flow. You want to understand

liquidity, volume, these types of things, structure, of, you

know, different names that you're looking at. You know,

when news is put out, how it's disseminated, and, you know,

essentially, how institutional individuals react to it, how

they control risk, etc. Because, you know, they have the most

impact within the market. Retail doesn't necessarily have that

much impact. We're kind of just riding the waves, so to speak.

But they're the guys that are, you know, making. Waves. So I

found that there was a large gap in that. So we use our expertise

there, you know, to go through every single type of nuance

within the market. You know, whether it's from, you know,

risk control to the technical side of things, to, you know,

how money actually flows, interpreting news, I think

there's a lot of you know, I would say 95% of the retail

market doesn't know how to look at, you know, an SEC filing and

actually understand what's going on. So there's a lot of

confusion when news comes out, especially in the small cap side

of things. So, you know, we take our expertise and we've, you

know, been able to help guide people, you know, within our

chat room, from an educational standpoint, you know, day to

day, giving our opinion on, you know, when things are moving,

what's actually going on, what we think is, you know, happening

within the market. I got some really nice kind of examples

from, you know, today, for instance, you know, it's a

Friday, and you know, the market, you know, is coming off

the lows. We're able to, you know, before the market opened

up, I can see, you know, from a technical standpoint, it's

fairly extended, you know, going to get long a lot of these

higher quality names. There's been a lot of volatility lately

in the market. And, you know, we got into, you know, things like

a matt Tesla, etc, some of these derivatives. And we had some

pretty large moves on some of them, you know, a matt, for

instance, we had these 220 calls today. They went up to 100% in,

you know, intraday. Now, these are same day expiration

contracts. But what I'm trying to get, kind of get to is, you

know, we have the expertise to see those types of opportunities

and then have the conviction to actually go after them and hold

those types of, you know, trades for a longer period of time. And

we help, yeah, people, you know, find those types of ideas, I

guess.

Yeah, there's this saying that has some truth

to it, but can get us in a lot of trouble, and it's that those

who can't do teach and and oftentimes in industries, you'll

see folks who who find out that they can make more money talking

about what it is that they do than actually doing it

themselves. And how do you separate, particularly in the

world of training, how trading? How do you separate those who

really can do from those who are just talking about doing?

Yeah, well, I think one of the things is,

you know, everything that we do, we timestamp every single idea,

and then you can see the outcome of them. We're very transparent.

I post that online every single day, and I don't see any any

other group that does that. You know, we've been around for

eight years. I've seen a lot of groups come and go. We've been

in the industry for, obviously, longer, but, you know, I don't

see any other type of individual that likes to have that type of

transparency, because no one likes to be held accountable in

this environment. And I think that's kind of what we've made a

name for ourselves, is, you know, when people see the

performance consistency and we show them exactly what we're

doing in and out, and we can be held accountable to it. It does,

you know, put the proof in the pudding, right? So, and I, you

know, the other thing is, too a lot of these different

educational platforms don't stick around for very long. You

know, some of the guys this, they kind of fade away because,

you know, the markets hop for a little bit. It's very easy, but

when the market gets a little bit tough, there's a little bit

of volatility and range. You know, people, their their their

groups, kind of get smoked by that. I think the other, the

other, you know, kind of thing that really speaks to the

quality of what we do is, you know, I have individuals that I,

you know, teach in a mentorship in, you know, environments. And,

you know, we talk, we go through their statistics, you know, week

to week, we make adjustments to, you know, what we're what

they're doing, in our opinion. And, you know, we teach them our

system. And I have some of these individuals that you know have

been able to, you know, quit their jobs. You know, some of

them, you know, top student Atlanta, for instance, she's

made about $5 million this year, which I think that's

outperforming most people that actually, you know, run those

other educational rooms, right? So if our students are, you

know, able to outperform those types of people, that, I think

it also just shows you how much more power there is and what we

do over others. But of course, you know, that's that's up to

everyone else to see the you know, the value for them to

decide.

The thing that's really cool about what

you guys do is, is that it's those stories where it's one

thing to be successful in a domain, right? It's one thing to

be a great hitter in the major leagues, but being a great

hitter in the major leagues doesn't mean that you've got

what it takes to make great hitters in the major leagues.

What have you all learned at Spartan about the difference

between being successful traders and helping build successful

traders.

Well, being a successful trader, you know,

one of the things is this, it's really dependent upon your

style, how you operate. From an individual standpoint, the way

that I operate may not make sense for other individuals. You

know, trading is something that there's a couple things that

need to be consistent, and there's a couple things that you

need to adjust your style to with what you're doing. And what

I mean by that is, you know, it's like playing a sport. You

know, there's going to be guys who are good at certain things

within, you know, playing on a team or, you know, individually,

everyone's going to have a. Things that they are good at,

and it's your job to figure out what you are good at, and the

only way to do that is by tracking statistics and

probabilities what you're actually doing. So that's

something that we do with everybody. We overlay, you know,

some criteria on top of what they're doing. We track what

they're doing every single week, and then we can see very clearly

where the, you know, there's gaps in their performance and

what they actually should focus on to actually grow. So, you

know, I know for myself what I'm good at. I know, you know, from

a risk control standpoint, where I'm strong and what

opportunities to go after, and everyone's different from that

regard. So, you know, one of the things that we do is when we

talk to individuals and we get them involved in, you know,

let's say the mentorship program. We do a basically

reporting of every single behavior that could possibly do

with our system overlaid on top. And then very quickly, we can

see where they're strong, where they're weak. We eliminate where

they're weak, we focus on where they're strong, because that's

going to be most scalable. So I guess, to answer your question,

you know, everyone's an individual, and everyone's going

to be individually different. It's, you know, the one person,

or it's that individual's job to pull the trigger and then to

manage their positions and manage what they're doing within

the market. I can't do that for them, but if they are able to

understand where they're strong and understand where they can

actually scale and push themselves, they should operate

better, and they should, you know, perform better in the end

as well.

Yeah. So in in the trading world in particular,

it's pretty easy to set up. I don't even know the technical

name for this, but fake accounts, basically. But that

trade unreal money in live environments, to some extent. To

give you an idea of what trading a paper trading account, yes.

Thank you. And and one of the I've seen several friends who

have done that and then got into the real world and found that

it's, it's a very different ballgame. What is it that

separates? I think my son, he's playing around with one right

now. He's up like 12 100% or something like that. But why?

Why do those returns seem to vary so much with what happens

once, once the rubber meets the road?

Well, I think there's a couple different

reasons. If you're in a, you know, let's say you're paper

trading, and you're in an environment that you're trading

something that has very low or small liquidity, that your buys

and sells are not going to have an impact on what's actually

going on. So there could be, like, a, you know, two or three

cent spread on, on something, you know, in the in on the paper

trading side. But in the real world, it could be larger just

because, you know, you're actually looking at, you know, a

market being made there. And when there's a sell that occurs,

it doesn't actually affect the spread, or you're getting filled

on the Ask on the paper trading side. So the actual gains aren't

actually realistic. I find that, you know, especially, you know,

from a paper trading standpoint, a lot of the times, you know,

you have these accounts that are very, you know, large that

people are kind of screwed around with. But when you when

the rubber meets the road, the amount of motion that will come

out from actually executing, and having real money on the line

will change the way that you behave, you know, from a you

know, paper trading standpoint, you kind of think of things a

little bit more logically, because there's no emotion

involved. And then when you actually start to trade, you

start to think illogically. And that's the issue. That's the

hard thing about trading, you know, I think the you know, the

you know, the learning curve is quite large in terms of

understanding the technicals and these types of things, but the

learning curve is even larger because, or with yourself,

because you're the one that's in charge of your emotions. And I

find that that's where the main gap is. You know, people might

find they're incredibly good on paper trading, but when they

flip to real money, they don't know how to operate, because

it's almost like a deer in the headlights sort of situation.

Maybe they're, you know, too scared to take losses, and

that's part of the game, and you need to control risk and take

losses and move on. But, you know, maybe they have, they

don't have the ability to do that in real life, because they

don't want to, you know, cause themselves any pain from taking

that loss and losing, you know, money, short term, right? Right

trade, real life. So that's typically where it is. It's from

the emotional standpoint, I think. And then if you want to

get kind of more on the technical side, usually it's

unrealistic, because of the fills are going to be

unrealistic because there's, you know, on anything that's low

liquidity, you can get in and out with, you know, 100 million

shares. But it doesn't affect the actual, you know, right

market, which isn't realistic.

Right, right. So having done this a time or

two with others as well, what have you found? Really makes a

great trader. So is there some type of personality

characteristic? Is there our portfolio requirement for folks

who've come through the program and had success, what has

separated them from the rest?

Well, I think, you know, one of the

things that separates them from the rest is, you know, we go

through this process of understanding and figuring out,

first and foremost, how much risk you should be taking for

trade, and we start at a small threshold where it doesn't have

a massive effect on your mentality. And. Or, you know,

from you from a emotional standpoint. And when you take

that approach, you don't have any emotion while you're

trading. And what I mean by that is you're able to make decisions

that are going to be more logical, rather than emotional.

So you need to start at a lower level and understand exactly

what your risk, you know, profile should be before

actually taking a trade. A lot of the times, people start out

they don't actually plan this, and that's what causes a lot of

issues, because, most likely, they're trading with too big of

size, and that's causing them to lose, you know, a lot of money

from them making emotional decisions, whether it's, you

know, buying aggressively or selling aggressively and

freaking out, etc. That's not a scalable behavior. What is

scalable is figuring out exactly you know how much you want to

take, what your risk actually should be per position, and then

actually planning out your exit strategy before you even get

into a position as well. Right? That's as important as you know,

as as anything as you know, understanding the technicals

behind something that you're doing, understanding, you know,

the news or whatever. If you don't understand how much you're

risking per trade, you probably are going to, you know, you've

already lost. You're going to make mistakes over the course of

time. You might get lucky a time or two, but most likely, you're

going to make some form of a mistake that's going to have a

large impact on your bottom line. That's, that's the main

thing I find. So the risk reward side, we get that dialed in, we

get these statistics and probabilities figured out, aka

what you're actually good at, what's going to be scalable from

a behavioral standpoint, and then from there, we can kind of

move on and go through the process without those nuances

figured out. Most People Fail. The risk reward is not

necessarily talked about as much as it is, and that's the biggest

impact to anyone's trading on the bottom line.

Yeah, yeah. So Chris, before I let you go, I do

have a question that I want to ask. It's one that ask all my

guests. I'm interested to see what you'd have to say. But the

question is this, what is the biggest secret that you wish

wasn't a secret at all. What's that? One thing you wish every

founder watching or listening today knew?

I think risk reward of what we just kind of

talked about, is actually spending the time to figure it

out what makes sense for you. And that's from a business

standpoint. That's from a trading standpoint. A lot of the

things that you learn in trading and the behaviors you learn in

trading can be carried over into your real life or your business.

You know anything that you do in business, because if you don't

understand the threshold of risk that you should be taking, you

know when you start a new venture, or whatever things try

to things tend to get out of hand fairly quickly. So

understanding that risk threshold and where you should

be in every single situation you put yourself within, I think is

massively key, because it allows you the ability to operate, from

a logic standpoint, look at every single you know, piece of

data and actually make a decision that makes sense. Also,

you're not going to be over leveraged. You're not going to

be stressed out. Things will be planned. From that standpoint,

it's extremely important in trading. And I think you know,

when you approach it that way, your ability to scale over the

course of time increases, and your ability to succeed

increases as well, because you're not taking such large

failures that you know, make you or you know, let's you know.

I'll give you an example from a mathematical standpoint. Let's

say you know you risk, you know half, half of your, you know

bank account, or your, of your, you know, trading account, etc,

on some sort of a decision or trade, and it doesn't work out

well, the next thing that you do, you have to make 100% to get

back to square one. So understanding that you can't

take on too much risk at any single, single given point in

time or any opportunity, makes a lot of sense, because it's not

going to be scalable. Otherwise, that's that's probably the

biggest thing. I would say.

Yeah, Chris. I know there's folks listening

today that love to get into trading, either on the side or

even full time. How can they learn more about the work that

you all do at Spartan trading? And where can they find out

more?

Sure, you can go to spartantrading.com

There's plenty of information there. You can follow us on

YouTube. We have a pretty large account. There a lot of free

information for you guys to use. And of course, you can follow us

on x as well, which we're very busy posting, you know, during

market hours and all day long. So those are the three areas I'd

probably look at.

Fantastic, fantastic. Well, Chris, thanks

for being on the show. Thanks for what you all do at Spartan

appreciate your time. Really was a privilege and honor having you

here. And for those of you watching and listening, you know

your time and attention mean the world to us. Hope. You got as

much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait

to see you next time. Take care you.