Kris Abdelmessih - Life Through a Volatility Lens (S7E10)
Corey Hoffstein is joined by Kris Abdelmessih to explore Kris's transition from electronic to relative value trading. They discuss differences between market making and relative value trading, and the influence of mentorship on Kris's approach. The episode delves into discretionary versus systematic trading, particularly within the context of 2020's oil market dynamics, and the role of AI in trading. Kris introduces MoonTower AI, highlighting its purpose and audience, while discussing the evolution of trading strategies in commodities markets. The conversation touches on retail volatility trading, integrating stock opinions with options strategies, and Kris's passion for board games and their parallels to trading.
Key Points
- Learning on the trading floor is highly accelerated due to the unique environment where traders can directly observe and reverse engineer competitors' strategies, a dynamic that is lost in purely electronic trading.
- Transitioning from market making to relative value trading involves shifting from short-term flipping for small edges to holding positions based on value judgments, requiring a different risk management approach.
- MoonTower AI is designed to help traders make better options trades by providing a structured, opinionated progression that reflects the vol trader's lens, enabling users to efficiently express their directional views through options.
My guest in this episode is Kris Abdelmessih, co-founder of moontower.ai.
Kris began his career at SIG, where he worked as a market maker in several different option pits, before moving to Parallax where he ran a relative value commodities volatility book. For the last five years, Kris has been writing on his blog Party at the Moontower, which is one of my favorite reads for all things probability, payoff space, trading, optionality, and seeing the world through a volatility lens.
Kris is a passionate educator, so it should come as no surprise that learning is a key thread throughout this entire episode. Kris discusses how learning is accelerated in the pits and how we can think about replicating it in electronic space. Kris discusses what he had to unlearn and relearn in his move from market making to relative value trading. He also shares his thoughts about how firm lineage influences how you learn to trade markets.
Finally, we discuss Kris’s newest venture, moontower.ai, which seeks to provide a “volatility lens” to opinionated traders to help them better express their bets in option space.
There is a lot of experience to unpack in this one.
I hope you enjoy my conversation with Kris Abdelmessih.
Chapters
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| 35:26 | |
| 38:13 | |
| 43:18 | |
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| 55:06 | |
| 1:05:31 | |
| 1:09:17 | |
| 1:12:52 | |
| 1:13:10 | |
| 1:14:05 |
Transcript
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