This podcast episode delves into the remarkable journey of Mete, who has navigated the intricate world of trading from his origins in Turkey to significant positions in esteemed companies across the United States and Europe. His narrative illuminates the myriad challenges faced in the trading industry, particularly the necessity of resilience and adaptability amidst a landscape that is increasingly influenced by automation and artificial intelligence. Mete articulates the importance of fostering a supportive and collaborative work environment, emphasizing the significant impact of culture on one’s professional trajectory. Furthermore, he shares insights on the critical attributes sought in team members, highlighting the values of character, empathy, and ambition as paramount to success in this competitive field. This episode serves as both an inspirational account and a cautionary tale for those contemplating a career in trading, urging listeners to reflect deeply on their motivations and aspirations within such a demanding industry.

Takeaways:

• The journey into trading necessitates resilience and adaptability due to constant challenges.
• Creating valuable connections during one's academic career is crucial for future opportunities.
• A collaborative and supportive environment is vital for traders to thrive and perform effectively.
• Meditation has proven to significantly enhance performance by reducing stress and increasing mental clarity.
• The competitive landscape of trading continues to evolve, requiring individuals to possess unique skills and attributes.
• The integration of AI into trading is likely to exacerbate existing competitive pressures within the industry.

Thanks so much, Matty, firstly for being on this.

But I know you've had a really, really interesting journey so far in your career and I think the audience would be, yeah, really grateful to hear about it.

So perhaps, perhaps we start there.

Perhaps you can tell us a bit about, you know, how you got into this industry and, and how you've got to where you've got to.

Hey, Augusta.

Well, first of all, thanks for inviting and yeah, that's great to be here.

Taking a break from the market and screens and.

Yeah, so yeah, I mean my journey started in Turkey.

I born and raised there and I went to Chicago for university and as an international student there, you know, one of the first things I thought about coming to college is what should I do next?

And you know, I should find a job and a new career in US and quickly I sort of decided that trading is the right path for me.

So yeah, during the university I, you know, did my preparations and it was challenging for an international student because of sponsorship, etc.

But I managed to get into one of the prominent trading companies and then, yeah, it's been a long journey.

I mean my journey is one of those with a lot of trials and errors and almost like not giving up and I was not one of those.

Find a job and you build a long career in the same company sort of a thing.

And I think it's also kind of standard and trading.

There's a lot of trial and error.

It's hard to find the right environment and right team on the first go.

And yeah, so I joined DRW Trading first.

I was there for a year, year and a half and then I maybe to get into a little bit more details, I was in a more traditional fixed income trading team and then I joined a high frequency, almost like a startup where I was exposed to more high frequency trading of the world and really got into speed related microstructure related trading and I did that for another three, four years in Chicago.

Then it was actually the time that I met you and I was trying to move to London or I was trying to move from US and continue my career in Europe and London was the most likely outcome.

I remember how you actually went out of your way to help me a lot to find a new job.

That was when you were in the.

In Shelby Jennings, I think.

Right.

And but yeah, although I didn't find the job through you at the end, but I found a job at Citadel London.

So that's when I started another adventure in a new city, but again in a relatively bigger Company unlike my startup experience I would say but more similar to my DIAA experience and unfortunately that didn't last that long, that was only one year I can talk more in detail about but short version of the story is like that was not the right fit and the right place for me as well.

And then I joined a mid sized company, trading company again, Alston Trading and this is the first time I'm all, I mean I felt a lot more confident that I knew I was getting into a better environment with the right team, with the people that I know from before and then pretty much I've been in the same team since then.

It's been almost seven years now.

Now the company got bought out by DV Trading so a lot of things have changed but our core business and what we're doing is still similar although you know in these markets you're always evolving, you're changing your changing a lot of things but it's still the same, same company I think team I would say yeah, that's basically the story.

What culture or what environment were you looking for?

What were you looking for that obviously you've now got but what were you looking for throughout your career in terms of culture or environment?

Yeah, I think that's a very, very important question that everyone needs to think almost in advance and you know, if you think about things when you're in college, when you're like sort of deciding on a career or once you choose your career, what type of environment I think that can help a lot.

Well what I sort of figured out and you know, back in college I didn't have that much options.

I needed sponsorship and only a few companies were doing the sponsorship.

So it's not like I had to choose from you know, hundreds of different options in trading.

Now what I sort of had some offers from the banks back then in New York which I didn't want because I knew the banking environment was going to be too big, too political, too career oriented, too corporate.

That's why I chose the RW Trading.

Then within the world of trading I quickly realized that I even prefer a smaller environment.

An environment and DIW was a great company in many ways but for me what's important wasn't the actual career, wasn't the actual title, wasn't not like I was trying to move up the ladder of some hierarchy and try to manage more people.

For me it was really about what small team I'm working with and whether I can actually perform at higher level.

And obviously, I mean our industry is very money oriented so the ultimate call is to make money.

So a lot of this comes down to also like where you're going to make the most money.

So that's definitely a part of it, I cannot lie.

But also an environment that enables you to be a lot more independent.

An environment where you can really choose where to focus, where to leverage your strengths.

I think that's important.

And yeah, again going back to the small team like you really need to be, you don't need to be best friends with the people in your team but you really need to get along well I think is quite important.

And it's, you know, a bit more difficult in the bigger companies I would say.

Now that being said, companies like Citadel especially, you know, they offer for people who really prefer either status or long term career, they offer really good opportunities.

But I was definitely not one of those.

I really wanted to make impact quickly and really work on what I want to work on.

So that's, you know, last six, seven years, I'm, I'm really grateful that I'm in that kind of environment.

Yeah.

Did you have that when you went to the startup after drw?

Was that a, what was.

What was I guess less preferable about that environment?

So that was definitely a good experience.

It was a huge relief for me after the DRW environment.

And it was with a group that I, you know, had prior connections with, which is very, very important.

I mean that's the one thing that you know, I would advise most to or junior people or people in college now you need to make connections as fast as possible.

You know, obviously you're going to make connections in your first job but they, you know, connections don't need to be from the job environment.

You need to reach out.

You need to utilize every possible opportunity to make those connections.

And that's how I kind of got that job.

One of my colleagues in DRW's brother was starting that team or already started it back then and she recommended me and made the introduction.

But I also knew some of these people from my college times as well.

So those sort of connections are very important.

But the problem in trading world with startups or new initiatives is that especially now I would imagine the big companies or teams that have been around for a long time are so ahead.

They have such IPs and such things that they built in the last 20 years now that it is very, very difficult for new team startups, whatever the new initiatives, to compete.

And it was Even true even 10 years ago that the environment was amazing to work it's group of five, six and then we became 10 people working for the same goal.

All selective really well that everyone's, there's, it's a good union.

It's, you know, the founder or the CEO selected everyone very carefully so that there was no troublemaker in the team.

Everyone was on the same page, same goal.

So that was great.

But then it was very difficult to actually compete against the big companies or whoever is the best.

So we still survived, we still made money, but the challenges were pretty, pretty clear.

So that's why I didn't want to stay that long in that company and in Chicago.

I needed a change because I feel like there was a lot of element of reinventing the wheel basically in that kind of an environment which was fun and fine, but when, you know, some of the companies or teams are so out in the competition, you know, I felt like I was not close to the actual competition, which was not a good feeling.

And when we realized or when I realized we were hitting some sort of a plateau that didn't have a good feeling with me.

Now some people might be okay with it, some people might prefer the really nice environment over, you know, not reaching the level that you know, you really want to.

So that's where maybe I was a little bit different but you know, I really wanted to be in a higher, more competitive environment.

So that's where I made the change.

So it's, it's that trade off, you know, the resources of the big companies versus the, I would say better, more collaborative environment of the startups now.

I think Austin Trading and Divi Trading right now are almost sweet spots, at least for me, because they are.

I mean Divi is not a small company.

It's 400, 500 people.

But the feeling is really small and the owners, founder is like anyone in the company is extremely accessible.

There's no titles or other hierarchical stuff here.

So I think this is the sweet spot environment for me.

And yeah, that's how I would conclude.

Yeah, makes sense.

So it's blending, it's getting the balance then of environment slash infrastructure and support.

Yeah, yeah, I mean it is, it's, it's challenging.

So you know, it's easier to make an impact in a company like DV trading than the bigger companies.

It's, I mean nowadays it's quite difficult to make impact in trading regardless.

Like a lot of things are at the very, very high, most competitive levels and saturated.

But at least, you know, when you make an impact in a smaller place, it's recognized a lot faster and you can claim I guess this is the more important part where you could claim a lot more ownership on a place like DB Trading than any other bigger company.

Because in a bigger company you are utilizing a lot of the already existing resources and you can make bigger dollar impacts and that's what the whole bed of behind that companies are.

But then it's hard to, harder to claim, claim that that's coming from you.

Whereas in a smaller environment maybe it's actually more difficult to make that same dollar impact or any impact.

But when you do, you can actually like claim that it's yours or you know, this is, can claim a higher payout.

But also what I mean is, you know, you get better satisfaction because you know you accomplished something that's more difficult and you know, it was more you than anything else makes sense.

And you're obviously you place quite a large importance on culture and environment.

So when you hire for your team, what do you look for?

What characteristics do you look for in people or what values do you look for in people?

When you're hiring, you're bringing people into your actual team to maintain what you've built.

I mean, I think the most important is the character.

The persons and the one within the character needs to be a decent person.

The person shouldn't cause trouble within the team.

That's why I really prefer hiring from, you know, through references because then you actually hear a lot more about the person.

Person's character is past.

So yeah, being a decent human being and I think is the most important thing someone.

Yeah, I mean I can count a lot of things like for specifically what we do, we have a very, very high bar mathematically and game theoretically.

And the person needs to be.

Because we don't really require that much programming and technical experience, which is pretty rare nowadays.

But the bar on the mathematical side of things is very, very high.

So we take people through this sort of mathematical examinations and if they're, you know, they need to be above a certain bar to get in.

That's the like there is no, you know, we cannot hire unfortunately anyone who's below that because we know it's not going to succeed even with that success rate is not 100% by any means.

But the personal characteristics we're looking for are definitely.

Being ambitious is very, very important with what we do because again, it's not a technical role that much.

We're not writing codes for.

I'm talking about traders right now specifically the person really needs to be a hardworking, ambitious person.

Like it's, it's a very Mentally difficult job.

So we, we are looking for resilient people.

And you know, it's.

It's a stressful, difficult job.

So yes, the person really needs to be handling stress well.

And it is very difficult to know how they will, you know, react to those stress environments because, you know, they're, you know, we usually try to hire junior people, so that's another challenging thing.

It's hard.

Some of these things are hard to test.

So we actually try to test a little bit like for stress during the interviews and watch people's reactions on certain, like stressors during the interviews.

But yeah, I think.

And all these things combined or not really reduces the pool a lot because, you know, when we add that high mathematical bar with handling stress elements, it's really a big challenge for us to build a team.

And on top of that, we are obviously looking for team players, as I said at the very beginning, because even if you have one person who's causing trouble within the team, it affects everyone very negatively.

So we cannot afford that.

So, yeah, people with high empathy.

It is a stressful environment.

We also need people with high empathy because if somebody in the team is going through a stress, we expect other people in the team to be helpful and understanding and.

But we also want people to raise their points and criticize when it's the right time to do so.

And adjusting that balance is also tricky.

Yeah, these are sort of the dynamics we're looking for.

Then you talk about how it's been a, you know, it's been a long journey to get to where you've got to now.

I can.

Obviously you've moved firms a few times.

How do you think you've stayed, you know, motivated to stay in this industry, which is a challenging industry.

And how do you think you stayed, like in, you know, in the game long enough to see the successes.

What do you think's gonna kept you.

Kept you in it and what do you think?

You know, how do you think you stayed?

I am a ambitious person and I don't like to give up easily.

But to be honest, like, if Austin trading my fourth job did.

Didn't work out the way I want it to be, that could have been the last one.

Who knows?

Hard to tell.

But I was not ready to give up at that point.

Although I was at a very, very low point in my life and career, like after Citadel, like, I questioned a lot of things for sure.

But yeah, I don't like to give up easily, I guess, and I wanted to give it another shot for sure.

And then Things started changing for the positive direction exponentially so.

But it is difficult, especially at the younger ages.

The whole industry and now you hear these big numbers that some of these big companies like Chainstrees and they're producing.

It sounds really amazing and sexy in some sense like these jobs.

But it is very challenging and it is very difficult.

Although the industry is making more money than ever, I think for a junior person it's a lot, lot more difficult now than 10 years ago versus the 20 years ago.

It's, it's, it's becoming a lot, lot more difficult now.

I should say probably the environment itself and the work life, balance, et cetera, probably slightly better now or maybe better now than when I first started.

But to be successful I think is a lot more difficult now than before.

So I think anyone who's considering training, trading as a career at the very early stages or you're at college, I think they should think twice or three times.

I mean this is the honest advice I would give.

And you know, I think if you're a very technically capable person, I think there's other, you know, brainer fields nowadays where you could make probably even bigger impact with AI and all these things going on.

And if you're not technically that adapt, then trading is going to be very, very, very difficult.

So you really need unique reasons, unique opportunities to actually justify, to even get into trading.

I would say yes, having that resilient mind and being ambitious is, I think it's important to have.

But at the same time, as they say, you know, competition is for losers, you know, that has a little bit of truth as well.

So you, you should really look at your skill set and then maybe there's other fields that are where you can make bigger impact in today's world.

So one should really, really think about it.

In my experience, yes, I guess I wouldn't want to know what I would have done if it wasn't trading.

But it was challenging because I also didn't have the very technical skills.

I mean I was not a computer science major.

I started coding.

Early stages of my career picked up well.

But I cannot be competitive in this in the current, today's world.

So, you know, I sort of found my niche, find the right team at the end after, you know, seven, eight years of trial and error, struggle.

But yeah, like people really don't need to choose that path because it's not going to be easier now.

But again, I think the most important thing is anyone considering trading or looking for jobs, should there do due diligence, they should talk to a lot of people.

There is a lot of non, technical, non trading, even roles in the trading companies because again, as I said, trading companies are doing better than ever before.

There's a lot of money.

There's a lot of opportunity.

It doesn't have to be technical.

It doesn't have to be even trading.

So there's a lot of other roles and operational roles, like people's role.

People need people also in this field as well.

But yeah, but if they really want to be a trader, then yeah, it will take a very resilient mind, for sure.

Yeah.

Okay.

How do you manage your stress with trading every day in a very stressful environment?

How do you manage that?

Yeah, I guess that's a really important question and one of my milestones in my career.

I was never that great at.

I mean, I've been an emotional person.

Emotional in the sense that, like, wasn't that great controlling the negative emotions, but I was.

I always made up for it through really hard work and.

But yeah, I was able to work with a lot of hours and still function despite not feeling great.

But then after my Citadel experience, I was at a very, very low point and I was actually losing a lot of the, I guess, inner strength.

That's when I'm.

That's when I guess started meditating.

And that's been the biggest.

I guess that meditation itself was the, you know, single biggest thing that made the biggest impact in my career.

And I was actually.

It's the first time I heard about meditation a lot before, but then when Ray Dalio said it, I was like, okay, like, if this guy is actually spending 20, 40 minutes a day, his time's valuable and it cannot be just bullshit.

And then I started, you know, I started, I tried a few different meditation and then finally ended up learning transcendental meditation.

And I've been doing that without probably skipping a day in the last eight, eight years now, maybe nine years.

And that really, I think, took my ability to perform to next level.

It was definitely really, really important fighting against stress or handling stress rather.

But also, you know, when you minimize, I mean, I cannot say eliminate, but when you minimize stress in your life, then you also get this mental clarity and that's when you become almost smarter.

And you know, obviously there's other factors who are being in the right environment and right opportunity.

But I don't think I would have performed nearly as much.

I mean like I think I performed 4, 5x in the last or 7, 8 years since I've been meditating because of that.

It took me a little bit while to actually learn but then I, you know, for a strict, it's not even strict, you know, but like it's, you know, I meditate basically every morning and then take a break every single day during, you know, around lunchtime and meditate at least twice, usually three times to be fair, for like 15, 20, 25 minutes.

And that was the single biggest thing that made the biggest impact in my performance.

You know, I did other things as well, but I cannot, I don't even need to mention the other ones.

And I think it's important.

I mean mine is maybe like a little bit too much but I think to be successful especially with what we do, right, because we're not, we are discretionary trading.

We have a lot of human actions and interactions during the day.

And when you're trading as a human in this world and it's always been that way, there's always emotion, there's always extra stress.

I mean I've worked at, as I said, like high frequency trading and, and sit down the bubbles, hypercons are trading.

You know, when the computer is doing the trading for you, you're not feeling that stress can still be a stressful job for other reasons but you're not feeling the actual trading stress.

Like even if the machine loses money, it doesn't hurt you in the same way.

As a discretionary trader, when you lose as a human manual discretionary trader, it affects you really, really negatively.

And you know, and then that stress is also accumulates, accumulates, you know, in the day, it accumulates during the weeks, months.

And that's why a lot of the people that I know, you know, had lot shorter careers because there comes a point that accumulation of stress is just so much that they just cannot handle it so they give up.

I think my meditation definitely helped me on that.

It's been a relatively long career or sub career doing the same thing and I feel like I can still do it.

So yeah, I think everyone needs to find their niche when it comes to stress handling and I highly recommend it to you.

Can you, can you talk us through maybe just briefly in very basic terms then how you, how you meditate, how this form of meditation, what you, what you do, if it's easy to explain.

I mean, it is trans and it is very, very.

I mean, I started with.

Started with a Transcendental meditation.

Transcendental meditation is, you know, you basically hire someone who knows it and they teach you.

I mean, I can teach as well, and I try to teach, you know, at least 20 people so far, but I don't know.

Whenever I teach people, they don't seem to, you know, continue doing requires at least a month of practicing.

At least a month.

So you need to practice for a month after learning about it, obviously, and then sometime between, like two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, like, it clicks.

You kind of understand, okay, like, I'm doing this and this helps.

And then once it clicks, then it.

You can almost not stop doing it.

And then as you do it, it always goes to the new dimension.

Almost.

And yeah, I mean, basically you are.

What you do is you're in a room and, you know, ideally without a lot of distractions, at least in the first phases.

And then you close your eyes and, you know, the way they teach it is like you repeat a mantra, but realistically, you don't even need the mantra.

You just need to put your brain into a certain state that.

Yeah, you basically don't think about anything.

It's hard to explain.

It's, It's.

It's definitely different than other sort of meditations, like mindfulness meditations or other focused meditations by, like, this one is effortless.

Once you learn it, it's an effortless thing, which is the, which is the beauty and which is.

It's very pragmatic.

So you don't need to prepare or like, you will always have a good meditation if you do the right thing because it's effortless.

You don't need to put any effort on it.

You just close your eyes.

I mean, yeah, I think if anybody wants to learn, they can find a chance.

I'm not a meditation teacher, but then, you know, teacher teaches certain things and then everyone, I think, takes it to a certain way that works.

So everyone's meditation or chance.

And no meditation could be different.

You need to find what works with you.

But, yeah, it is quite effective.

Yeah, it definitely cannot say eliminate, but removes a lot of the cortisols or whatever causes that stress.

And once the stress is gone, you start thinking differently, start having that clarity of mind.

You can focus a lot better.

And then, at least in my case, the effects go down in the next, like four, five, six hours.

Then you can either do it again or.

Yeah, that's what I just did to be honest.

Wow.

Amazing.

What attracted you to get into trading in the first place?

I know you said that that's what you wanted to do when you were at college, but why?

I guess it's a combination of being a competitive environment and an environment where you can actually make a lot of money.

To be honest, it wasn't just the money for sure.

It was a lot of the competitive people around me, especially people in the one year, two years above they were choosing it and I think I thought, which was true, that I would find also a lot of like minded people in the this industry.

People who like math, people who like betting, people.

Yeah.

Who have a mathematical view of the world.

Pragmatic people and competitive people.

Yeah, I mean I, a lot of, yeah, I would say a lot of the like minded people chose this.

Although in Northwestern where I studied it was not one of the popular fields and you know, most of the, most of my friends didn't choose it but I guess more like like minded people that I know of chose it.

So yeah, I wanted to give it a shot.

I mean I was, I wasn't even sure if I wanted to stay in US for a very long time and in fact I thought I wouldn't.

I thought I was going to come back so I afford that.

But then I said if I'm going to give it a shot to something, it should be competitive and it should have a high potential because I knew I was never going to be able to build another long career in US where I go to a company, stay there for 10 years, move up from analyst, associate this, that, try to become a partner.

I taught.

I mean there was no chance I was going to do it myself anyway.

If that was the case I would have gone back to Turkey.

So trading was one of those, you know, some sense like a shortcut where you know, if you're smart, if you have what it takes, you can actually move up pretty fast.

Now it didn't turn out to be that fast for me for sure.

It turned out to be a lot more, a lot bigger of a struggle.

A painful journey in many ways but, but still worth it.

But yeah, I guess that was the only career I taught or any potential that I thought I could do after university, especially in the U.S. yeah.

And you, you spoke a little bit about how trading is and how this industry has become more and more competitive over, you know, the last 10, 20 years.

How much of an impact do you think AI is going to have on this Industry again, is it going to fast forward things making it even more competitive, even more difficult to make money or what do you think?

I mean, yeah, it's hard to visualize how the market will look like from five years today to be honest.

It is going to become more automated for sure, but it's already very automated.

But I mean what we specifically do is probably be out of business in 10 years although we're evolving and adapting so you never know.

But it's going to be, yeah, it's going to be very difficult for new teams and startups to emerge.

I don't think we're going to see a new wave of trading companies.

The big companies already have all the resources and they to all the investing in AI and related things.

So I think they will continue dominating.

And when the companies dominate, a few companies dominate the field.

It also becomes more difficult for individuals to become successful as well.

Now they will have a lot of people will have great careers and you know, in these big companies, but it's going to be very difficult to claim individual success and have some of the opportunities that people had.

Like basically my years, I mean I was talking to one of the partners in one of these trading firms recently top trading firms and you know about like 10 years ago it was very common for you know, these companies to hire out of undergrad and pay, I don't know, like, and I'm talking about selective big talent and paying maybe 200, $250,000 out of college.

And then these people would come in and then just observe what's going on and then build trading strategies teams, you know, desk and even new trading companies within like a year or two exposure to trading and then make millions and millions of dollars every year.

But then nowadays, I mean he said that in the last six, seven years that story did not happen at all.

Nowadays what happens is some of these companies are actually paying almost up to a million dollars out of undergrad I hear.

But then they join these teams that already make, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars or billions even.

And their goal is to only make these improvements of 1% improvement, 2% improvement.

They don't even see the big picture, they don't even see what's being traded.

They're just working on one of the sub problems of that big billion dollar machines.

And then if they make that 1% impact and it's a huge success, but then they're not rewarded as the way they were rewarded in the past, like their impact is, I don't know, let's say 2% on a billion dollar, which is $20 million, but they're not getting paid 25% of that thing.

Maybe they're getting a 10, 20% race.

Whereas in the past, if you're that smart, like that person, then you would be able to see this trading strategies and come up with things that make 10, 20, 30 million dollars and you would get paid 20, 30% on that.

Now that doesn't happen anymore because, you know, it's so evolved that it's those type of opportunities.

It's rare.

I mean, I shouldn't say it's not anywhere.

I mean, we, you know, have similar opportunities, but it's a lot more difficult and very, very rare.

And yeah, I mean, going back to the original question with AI, I mean, trading has been using.

It wasn't AI.

It's called machine learning here.

It's been there for the 20 years, always.

It's one of the industries that started this transition a lot early and almost was a pioneer in the automatization of things.

But then it's coming to, I think, even a new level where.

Yeah, it will be the.

Yeah, there'll be 100% machines doing the thing as opposed to 98% right now.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Super interesting.

Perfect.

I think that's been.

Yeah, amazing.

Thank you so much for your time and I really appreciate it.

I think it's been a really interesting conversation.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you so much, Augusta.

Thank you for the opportunity and best of luck with this new endeavor.