302 · Dylan Maltman - Go Where Orders Flow
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of going through how a quantitative strategy works will set you up for the rest of your trading career. Number one, both in hard skills and understanding what it takes to be consistently profitable over time. Because these strategies, even though they are robust and sophisticated, they may work today, they may not work tomorrow. And what do you do when you get to a point where you put so much time and energy into a strategy?

But you wake up on Friday morning or Monday morning and it no longer works. The answer is you need to figure it out. So getting into a position where you've had that experience to not only build a strategy, understand the variables and the testing measures that go into it and really creating alpha.

but also being able to create strategy logic. What is the strategy built for? How can I ensure that the logic is sound for each variable that I've put into this so that it makes sense and it's not just a black box of noise, really.

Once you've got that element down and you understand how the logic of different trading systems and strategies work, be it binary variables, again, be it the risk management side or trade management side, you'll then set up to create strategies, be it discretionary, systematic, or quantitative, for the rest of your life for the most part. Markets, speculation, and risk. This is the Chat with Traders podcast. ♪

You're tuning in to Chat with Traders, episode 302. And I'm Tessa. And before we introduce our next awesome guest, I just really want to welcome you and to let you know that

that it's really been an honor and great privilege to be the producer and your co-host on this podcast. And I think I can speak on behalf of my co-host, Ian Cox, as well, that we really appreciate you. And although we don't personally know most of you, but wish we could, we really hope you are doing well in every way. Now, I know I mentioned I am a producer and co-host, but I would call myself a trader first.

a trader who happens to co-host and produce the podcast on the side. In a way, this is like a public declaration for myself because when this wonderful podcasting opportunity was introduced into my life three years ago when Aaron, the original founder of the podcast, stepped down and I took over, for a while, my trading had to take a backseat. Although it has been truly fulfilling to run a podcast, and it still is, believe me,

But I had to face the question on what's priority? What do I really want? Because it was really a struggle to juggle. And I regained my clarity a year ago when I decided that trading needs to come first in terms of my career and what I want. So that clarity really helped me to bring things into order and focus and

And I'm sharing this because I know some of you might be going through something similar right now, struggling with what you really want to do and what your priority should be. And since we're at the half year mark of 2025, this might be a great reminder to reassess your goals and gain the clarity that you need. Well, our next guest, Dylan Maltman,

An intraday futures and forex trader and founder of Apex Capital Management must have had exceptional clarity starting at a young age.

Introduced to the markets in a high school presentation by a prop firm, Dylan caught the passion for the potential of the markets and persuaded his way into a position at the firm. Learning about backtesting, he became obsessed with dissecting every nuance of past data so as to create a system with high returns,

and with minimal drawdowns by understanding where edge can be found as evidence in the performance of his algorithmic strategies. Oh, and this episode also includes my one-on-one with Dylan at the end. Ladies and gentlemen, we are so pleased to present Dylan Maltman from South Africa. Dylan, I would like to welcome you to Chat with Traders. Yeah, absolutely fantastic to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Well, you sound like you have an accent. Tell us where you are and where did you grow up? Yeah, 100%. So the accent you're hearing is first and foremost South African. So I was brought up here in Cape Town. Growing up in South Africa, it's an amazing place. If you ever get the opportunity, definitely come through. You know, beautiful sunsets, warm weather, very much salt-of-the-earth type people, hard workers. Obviously, I finished my schooling here and then I studied in Italy, spent some time offshore.

My first introduction to financial markets was really, I think, from my mother. So she was, or is an actor, so very much risk-orientated mentality from day one. And we actually had a hedge fund manager come to my school when I was in grade 11 in the final year.

And at the time, you know, that whole world was just opening up to me. You know, you only really begin to understand these things once you get into high school and it just sounds extremely fascinating. So I had the opportunity to spend some time with them, you know, learn how

and more proff-style trading worked at the time. And that was my real first introduction to the space. This was in high school? So was this hedge fund presenting to the other students in the class? Yeah, exactly what it was. So typically what would happen in the high school assembly is maybe once a month or once a quarter, they'd have either one of the parents or one of the colleagues or the alumni of the school come through, and they would just give a presentation on what kind of career paths and options are.

are available, as would happen with a high school. That's a very normal thing I've found here. I don't know about the US, but that's a pretty common place here. So what kind of types of investment ideas did this hedge fund introduce to you and the other students? And was there a particular type of investment that initially attracted you? I think for all intents and purposes, they had a hedge fund on, but they were really more of a profit fund.

to be honest with you. So it was very much a writing stuff. And the way that they sold it was very much that financial markets are a place where billions, if not trillions of dollars are made and lost every day. And it attracts the best and brightest people to the field. And

Part of that is every day you arrive at the desk solving challenges. That's really the crux of the job, and you go up against the smartest people in the world. That was what really fascinated me. That was the original pull towards trading in general. Obviously, they traded a lot of crypto, and they spoke about crypto and what that was about at the time. It wasn't as well-known this year as it is now, but that was the majority of the conversation and the original pull.

What was the first asset class that attracted you? And when did you open up your first account? Yeah, yeah. So funnily enough, I traded for them. So after the assembly, I went up to the manager and said, look, I want to work for you. And then she said, listen, no, go get your degree first. And maybe once you've got your master's and you've spent a bit of time, and that's the bank we can shut down. And I think naturally being a bullish teenager, the first thing I said is, look, I don't think you understand. I really want to trade for you.

And she said, okay, fine. You know, if you arrive on Monday or it was a kind of school holiday that was following. And she said, if you arrive on Monday, fine. And you make a coffee and sweep the floors, maybe I'll let you in. And I think she was joking, to be honest. I arrived and obviously she came in much later. But she was kind of like, what are you doing here? I said, get here early. I got here early. I've been making everyone coffee. I thought that was the deal. So...

But that's what ended up happening. I think she just saw a bit of herself in me and she said, look, let's give this kid a shot. If he becomes something, great. And that's where I first started trading. So it was picking crypto names for kind of macro swing positions, which went quite well. And I learned some more of the quantity stuff through the quant desk as well. Yeah, so that was really where my first, quote unquote, brokerage account came from.

describe to us kind of your early time there at the prop firm? This was going from 2018 to 2019. So really when that volatility spike in crypto really started to come back and volume started to move into that space, I learned very much a response style of trading, which is really where the experience comes in. So I think contextually, if you put yourself in that headspace where you're starting to see volume pick up, you're starting to see these names start to move again, or at least substantially, contextually speaking,

it was the perfect storm, really. Because they had the data and the quantitative side to say, look, this is when you want to start buying. This is when you want to start looking for volume, standard deviation breaks and ATR breaks and all that kind of thing. But at the time, that was my introduction to trading, which was inherently aggressive just because the timeline of when I learned was just an aggressive market cycle, if that makes any sense.

So I learned a lot of the basics, market structure, volume, volume profiles at the time, where they were relevant, learning about narrative, things like that. That was really the fundamentals of where I started there. And then how long were you in training, so to speak, or in this initial learning phase before you were able to click the first button to buy or short? Yeah.

By myself, full transparency, I don't think at the time by myself I was able to make any important decisions. It was very much a team effort, which I think was a really important start to my trading career. I really started picking the actual button with the team from day two, day three, learning alongside the traders next to me and the quantitative and fundamental guys, and

But like I said, it was very much a team effort. I wasn't making any of those decisions myself. As I think is appropriate. You trade for a prop fund, you've got to go through your school fees, so to speak. So it sounds like you hit the market right at the right time with the volume and activity really picking up. How did this time period go for you and the hedge fund as far as profitability? Did your strategies work out, at least initially?

They did. Again, I think it's important to remember that this was really the start of where everything started to go up. So it was really the bottom, so to speak, in a lot of ways, especially for your alternatives like your altcoin and, you know, not going to say the word, but the small coins at the time. It was really where the bottom was starting to kick in.

No, we did very well. We did very well. I think for that period, I worked on a more aggressive style fund where we were able to take on a bit more risk. I think we 3x'd the portfolio within the six to eight month period. So we did well. We did well. Wow. And now are you trading your own personal account at the same time or just dedicated to the prop firm? Just the prop firm. I think at the time I was fully cognizant that

There were much more advanced, more sophisticated members on the trading team that were trading their own accounts, obviously linked to the prop firm. That's commonplace. I knew well enough that if I had to start on my own accounts, I wouldn't go anywhere very quickly. I think I was setting myself back, creating bad habits and whatnot. Primarily props, no?

So this is going well, and you guys are making bank. How long did you stay there at the prop firm? The firm did well. Obviously, I was just an intern, like the rest of the Jets. But I made a little bit of money there. The thinking was, look, he's done okay. Let's give him a bit of profitability, and we'll send him on to Williams ready. And that's what happened.

And so that was that. And then following that, I obviously went to go study in Italy during COVID. There was a small gap between when I started and when I finished. And as soon as I got to Italy, obviously COVID happened. And that was a spanner that was throwing the work. So I moved over to Italy

I'm in Bologna, they had a phenomenal economics and finance degree. And then 10 days in, I got a call from one of the government representatives and he said, yeah, I can see on our system that you're here and you're studying and it's phenomenal. And I said, yeah, I'm having a great time. Why are you calling me? And they said, well, there's one flight out of Bologna and you need to be on it. It's in four hours. So I had to burst your bubble. But if you want to go back home throughout this COVID thing, you need to leave. So that was a major, major span in the works for my family and my family.

So then I had to come back after 10 days. And then obviously finished my studies remotely. But I mean, it's stories about times of people going through that experience. Yeah, just for our listeners, what is the difference between a regular prop firm and what they call the funding get when you quote get funded? Are they the same thing?

Such a good point Ian. No, they are explicitly not. There's two primary distinctions that you're going to make here. The first one is instrumentation. A brick and mortar proprietary trading firm is defined by a group of individuals that are trading their own capital or a firm's capital, so there's no clients whatsoever, and it is solely for the profit of those individuals and the firm. Very simple.

There has been a rise in what's called CFD and futures profits. So CFD is contract for difference. Anywhere outside of the US, you can practically trade them. And that is...

a model where a brokerage is signing a contract with you with every position that says whatever the difference in the position is from when you enter to exit, I'll settle with you. I'll assume that exposure on my book. The other alternative is futures and we'll get into that shortly, but for all intents and purposes, a prop firm in the sense of getting funded is a company that agrees if you can

trade by hours, and you go through a kind of evaluation process to ensure that you do that for a fee, I might add, we will then give you a quote-unquote trading account, which is 99% of the time not live. It is a demo account, and we'll give you a split of whatever you would hypothetically make on that account.

There are exceptions. I know that there are firms that take the same routes and they do fund some of their traders live. I'm sure that that is, I wouldn't say commonplace, but it happens. The majority of these funded firms

accounts are not live. It is a business model like a casino. You pay your fee, 90% of people can't pass this challenge. As a result, the business makes money and whatever the difference is between what they're making from these evaluation fees and what their profits that is that the profitable traders get, they then just pay that out. There is a substantial difference and I think it's important to make that distinction.

Great. So you go back to South Africa during COVID. And during that time, you're still trading with the firm remotely? Or you were trading just by yourself or what? At the time, I actually wasn't. I was still following markets substantially. It was my passion and that was what I was focusing on. But I think just given the amount of turbulence that was going on in the world, it wasn't something that I wanted to commit to at the time.

And that was obviously the time during COVID where Bitcoin really started to take off. I mean, that's when we were breaking all-time highs and we were absolutely flying. So I didn't fall apart in that way. Okay. So then during this time, what are you trading? What are you looking at? And anything stand out for you? Yeah. At the time, I was doing a lot of demo trading. I think the important part for me when I arrived back was going, I'm not in a position where I should be trading live cap rings.

I think obviously financially, it hit a lot of people hard. I mean, when I went to Italy, that was my kind of life play at the time. And, you know, having to come back and, you know, having to start over was a big challenge for me. So the immediate discussion was, I know what good looks like, contextually speaking. I'm nowhere near that, but I need to get there as quickly as I can.

It was very much coming back, learning about an algorithmic style of trading binary variables, how to create strategies that work in the real world and not just on backtest, and then eventually putting that together into my own strategy. That was a six-year period of learning how to do that. Then when I got back while I was finishing my studies, I actually worked for a CFD firm, a sell-side derivatives firm.

And that's about the majority of the time. So you're learning how to, what, create these quant models, doing a bunch of backtesting on, like, give us an example of some markets that you're doing backtesting on and what you found. Yeah, absolutely. So my immediate exposure was FX. I knew that FX was, for all intents and purposes, the most widely available instruments that one can trade as a retail individual.

And likewise, a lot of the platforms or the most popular platform to CFDs at the time had a somewhat quantitative trading platform where you could optimize strategies and backtest on historical data and things like that. That was my real introduction.

My initial success in that space was very much in your exotic FX pairs. So things like dollar-rand, your crosses like Euro GDP that worked very well for substantial amounts of time. And then also a couple of the majors, Euro USD, obviously something that you want to look at if you're trading FX. That was when it really got started.

What attracted you to these more obscure trades? Is it because there's less competition or is there a particular advantage due to presumably less liquidity, right?

Yeah, definitely less liquidity. When you're trading derivatives, liquidity isn't as much of a challenge because you've got a market maker or a liquidity provider on the other side. The real element retrospectively that drove me towards that side was because of the volatility associated with these pairs, they tended to be more directionally.

And you were able to catch directional edge a lot easier with the quantitative model, especially on such a surface level, that that was just where the alpha was at the time. Like if you look at something that's going to be a bit more range bound, especially at the time like Euro USD, the level of variables and understanding of how these models work is a lot more sophisticated to create genuine alpha.

Whereas on your exact ex when liquidity wasn't an issue because you've got those market makers and liquidity providers, it was not easier to just go, "Look, we've been long for three months, and we're probably going to be long for another three months." Your directional bias is going to be long and not easy to create an entry model risk management plan and trade management plan and you're good to go. That's just where the strategy broke into. It was very much a circumstance of I'm going to let the alpha decide

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I did have experience with discretionary trading, again, with the team. They had some guys with very good discretionary trading, but that said, they were experienced. I think one of the first big lessons I learned was that discretion you learn to do either with a mentor or you're going to pay your school fees in the market. Hence why I went the more systematic and quantitative routes because you're dealing with binary variables and those aren't subject to change, at least in the beginning phases.

So how do you go about doing backtesting? Because I've heard people say, oh, you should only backtest for the last five years or you shouldn't include exogenous events like 2008 and the COVID crisis because then it distorts everything. So kind of what's the process that you implement in this?

It's a great question. And I think the most simple answer and indirect one is it depends, right? There's more than one thing that works in the market. But we have our own internal IP of how exactly that works, right? So firstly, let's start with time frame and let's start with the amount of data that one needs to consume. So obviously, depending on the time frame that you choose, if you're trading the one minute to check chart versus say 15 minutes, you're going to have a very different

level of data and timeframe. I think the important part, firstly, is to acknowledge it's about data points and not necessarily a certain amount of data points. Because again, we could say five years, but five years on a one minute versus five years on a daily or weekly chart are very different sets of data. So you want to ensure that you've got a substantial amount of data points to deal with. For us, that typically is anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 data points. But again, currently, we trade a lot of tick in one minute and

second related charts. So for us, it's really important to consume the metadata. The other challenge when it comes to backtesting is the curse of over-optimization or code fitting, right? So for those who don't know what that means, it basically means if we had a bag of Skittles, you've got Skittles where you're in the US, obviously, you must have. So if I've got a bag of Skittles and let's say that I call

one red Skittle out of the bag. And then I go in and I happen to pull up another red Skittle. It's fairly logical to make the assumption at this point that if you haven't seen the rest of the bag and you don't know what Skittles are, the color of those sweets are just red, right? So if I then say, okay, I'm going to start taking bets with people who

who don't know what's in this bag, and I still don't know what's in this bag, but I can make an assumption that every stickle is red, you're very quickly going to understand that you're going to lose money that way. That's called co-fitting, creating a strategy that is very and extremely optimized for a subset of sample data, but not necessarily all of the outcomes in the data that's within the market, so to speak. That

That's how that happens. So how do you avoid this as a trader? Well, the first thing that you do is you need to test for what's called robustness. There's a few ways to do this. The way that we do it is we do something called non-consecutive sample testing, walk-forward optimization, and out-of-sample testing.

For all the quantum systematic guys in the audience, it's going to make a lot of sense. This isn't brand new information, but it's really about going, let's test and create a strategy on, say, 10 data points.

We're happy with how this is working. We're happy with how the strategy is performing. What we now need to do is take that strategy and test it on a separate set of data points, call it the next 20 or 30 data points. Based upon those results, you're going to get a very quick understanding that creating strategies is difficult because the majority of the time that's not going to work.

When you find something that does work, so test it on your first 10 and then you test it on your second and third set of 10, and it still works, you've then got something that has legs. Then what you want to do is do a round of optimization. You want to make sure that if we

say test this data on another 50 data points that not only is it sound, but we can optimize each of those variables in the trading strategy to that set of data and it's still going to. We really want to get into the weeds of how we can refine these things. If we're able to clear that robustness test, the last step for us is called non-consecutive sample testing. By this stage, we've maybe tested

just based off this conversation, we're looking at 60 or 70 dead points. We now want to look at the last 30 to 200. 30 to 200 total dead points, so 30 to 130. If the strategy still performs over that period,

That's how you create a strategy that's going to work in the long term. Because not only have you tested over a specific sample, you've tested it with out of sample data, and you've done something called walk-forward optimization. You optimize the strategy for periodic sets of data and check if it still works and it does. That's how we create a strategy.

Okay, so given that quant trading has been around a long time and you have a lot of different groups doing all these kind of backtesting, and I've even seen some programs for sale, people have created these algorithms and stuff. I imagine what you're doing is probably pretty time-consuming. Wouldn't it make more sense for your typical trader just simply buy an off-the-shelf program since other people have done it before and save ourself a bunch of time?

It's a good question and I understand the logic. Personally, I was single and again, there's going to be exceptions to that, but here's why. Typically, when you create a strategy that makes alpha and does so in a sustainable and consistent way, there's more capital to be made from trading that strategy either through a hedge fund, prop firm, etc., or selling it to an institution if that's the route you want to take and selling it to the public.

I have yet to see a consistently profitable strategy that's sold to the public, especially when you look at a price point of a couple of hundred dollars to maybe a couple of thousand dollars. These strategies typically have extremely high valuation when they are sophisticated. And generally with those return risk return profiles and return consistency, they are generally very sophisticated. It's not an offshore product you want to buy, but what I would recommend, uh,

and again, just because I've gone down this route personally, is I would recommend putting the work in, even if you are a manual discretionary or systematic trader, and I'll tell you why. The learning curve of going through how a quantitative strategy works will set you up for the rest of your trading career. Number one, both in hard skills and understanding what it takes to be consistently profitable over time. Because these strategies, even though they are robust and sophisticated,

They may work today. They may not work tomorrow. And what do you do when you get to a point where you put so much time and energy into a strategy, but you wake up on Friday morning or Monday morning and it no longer works? The answer is you need to figure it out. So getting into a position where you've had that experience to not only build a strategy, understand the variables and the testing measures that go into it and really creating alpha,

but also being able to create strategy logic. What is the strategy built for? How can I ensure that the logic is sound for each variable that I've put into this so that it makes sense and it's not just a black box of noise really.

I think that's really important. Once you've got that element down and you understand how the logic of different trading systems and strategies work, be it binary variables, again, be it the risk management side or trade management side, you're then set up to create strategies, be it discretionary, systematic, or quantitative for the rest of your life for the most part. Alternatively, you're going to go to someone who's maybe made a strategy

You don't really know how it works because you didn't put the work in. They'll release an update, but ultimately, because you purchased the strategy and it's your own capital, they aren't lying if anything goes wrong. There's also an accountability shift that happens there. So succinctly put, do the work early, get it out the way. It will do you good in the long run.

And how do we define what doesn't work? Because there's a certain time period, right, that everyone expects a drawdown. And during the drawdown period, I'm sure many traders say, oh, well, you know, I just need to wait a little bit longer. My system will work. It's worked in the past. It'll come back. At what point or how long should one wait before you throw in the towel and realize, oh, my strategy really doesn't work?

And this is the black box thing, right? And this is why logic is so important. If you understand when and why a strategy works, you'll know when it's not working because you'll be able to point towards the variable that is supposed to dictate that you're working. I'll give you an example. Let's look at like an intraday breakout strategy.

Okay. So let's say we're trading NASDAQ. We've just gotten to the New York session. It's the first 15 minutes of the open, the most volatile time. But we can see that the average daily volume, so the past 100-day period, for example, how much volume have we done to that point relative to the past 100 days of average volume? If you've only done, say, 14%,

of volume by the close of the first 15-minute candle of the US session. Logically speaking, you understand how markets move. Breakout strategies are not typically going to work in that environment because for breakout strategies to break and run, you need consistent buying volume.

Now, again, that seems very simple, but what is consistent buying volume? How do you measure that? Then you learn about delta. This is positive and negative delta, and then you learn about footprint charts, and then you go into that one. Once you understand that one, and you understand, "I'm trading a breakout strength. For this to work, I need to see this amount of volume happen within the first 15 minutes and within the first 12 hours of the day."

You then are able to pinpoint, look, it's between June and August. The majority of the intraday traders and the big banks are going on holiday. There just isn't that much volume surging through the market right now. And again, I see that we've only done, say, 14% of the average daily volume in this 15-minute period. The lightness of this working is not high because the core variable we need is volume. If the volume is not there, the breakout is not probably going to work. So maybe we look at something else, mean reversion, arbitrage, things like that.

And so that's why it's important to really understand why do these things work? Not does it work? That's a very good question. But why? And when you understand why, you then know when it doesn't work and when it breaks. Does that make sense?

Yes. So you mentioned the breakout volume. Are you only looking at the individual security and their volume, or are you also looking at the market volume to see how sustainable that might be? You can look at both. You can absolutely look at both. This is where there's lots of things that work. There's many racist cats in markets. You can look at both. And again, this is also about logic.

If you're going to build a strategy that maybe looks at the index as opposed to the individual stock, or let's refine that with a good example. If you're going to look at the futures versus, say, the underlying index, those are two separate strategies with different financial engineering and different options. And you need to cater for one of those, right? You can't necessarily pick one and it's going to work in both. So this is why getting into that logic is so important.

So do you focus just on FX or are you looking at, do you also trade other markets? Maybe I need to touch up from where we were to kind of top firms or other stuff. So after about two years of working for CFD and derivative firms, I had some exposure to a few hedge funds in South Africa.

And there was a consistent point where I realized that there's a substantial difference between the asymmetry of a proprietary trading firm. You can lose a lot less and make a lot more versus most hedge funds. Most hedge funds don't have a very good risk return profile. I mean, if you look at the shafts of

you're very big boys like your Citadel's for example, and they have a different set of variables trading that kind of size. I think it's unfair to expect super high shock ratios and asymmetry, but you get the point. Most hedge funds just don't have that amount of asymmetry. When I saw that, it baffled me a bit because I thought to myself, I thought trading

is supposed to be asymmetric. Why do I have to risk one to make one or risk one to make 0.7? That doesn't make any sense. Why would anyone do that? That's when I began to realize, well, there's this special thing called prop trading that most people don't actually get access to. There's demand for this product. If you had to go to a lot of other multi-strat or family offices and say, look, I've got this product that outperforms your traditional long short equity or macro hedge fund,

Here's the data, let me show you how it works. That's a product that would be in high demand. So as a result of that, I ended up saying two years later, you know, I'm in my 20s.

If there's ever a time to go risk on and build a business and a good one, it's now. It's not going to be when I'm 50, right? This is the leap of faith. So what I ended up doing is I built a team. We created a company called Apex Capital. We raised some equity capital for that. And we have some phenomenal investors who've been very helpful throughout this period. And we incorporated our own proprietary training.

Again, all guys in our 20s, we've got a phenomenal team of some substantially experienced traders, far better than I am, very lucky. We trade futures intraday. We created a strategy that was first and foremost meant to be liquid. This is something that you can withdraw from and play with in terms of liquidity. Secondly, extremely asymmetric. Again, we're not risking one to make one, we're risking one to make five, six, seven and above, for example.

and we need to have a defined logic and a defined edge. We need to know our niche of what we're good at in six months, not drift too much from side to side. That took the shape of a core team, trading team of four. It was spread across most CME liquid futures sectors, so things like NASDAQ, S&P, natural gas, gold, crude oil, and then we have got some FX exposure as well, and it moves, and it's got the volume.

So, okay. So it looks like you look at a wide variety of markets then. Do your algos, do they look at, once you got it down for one market, does it apply to all the markets or do you have to go back and test it for every single market again and again? Yeah.

So the logic works. The logic of how does it break out versus mean reversion strategy or arbitrage strategy, that works pretty much consistently across all centralized futures markets. Again, this isn't something that will necessarily work on crypto, which has its own advantages in different spaces.

the logic books. Obviously, when you trade these instruments, particularly on an intraday basis, you begin to realize very quickly that you're dealing with different participants who are all optimizing for different outcomes. They've all got "their own personality."

if that makes sense. Now, that behaves differently to natural gas and crude oil. It is important to have, say, a set of foundational philosophies that are important, but on top of that, you need to cater for each individual personality. It's like inviting your friends to a party at your house, drinks at your place. You're going to invite everyone through, but not everyone likes to drink champagne. Some guys are going to want water, some guys are going to want beer, but they're all at the party. They're all at the same place.

Does that make sense? Yes. Yeah. You mentioned earlier about using order flow to confirm directional volatility in your strategy. Can you break that down a little bit more? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to give an overarching view here. So we base all of our three core principles. So the first one is order flow. Order flow, in essence, is a skill where you are dissecting the volume

of a particular asset over a given period to get a better sense of what the underlying participants are doing. It's basically how you're able to read the heartbeat of the markets just before it's about to snap. That's what order flow does for you. Admittedly, it does have a bias towards shorter timeframes in our experience. But again, if you have got that shorter timeframe bias just naturally as a trader, you want to have a look at order flow in your centralized markets. So that's the first one.

The second thing is asymmetry. It's important for us to, again, find our niche. And our niche is we're good at high expected value strategies, particularly ones that you can risk one to make three, five, seven, et cetera. You can get high expected value strategies risking one to one, for example, but that is a completely different set of skills, in our opinion. The final element that we focus on is risk planning.

Risk management in itself is also an edge, and I think there aren't enough traders that pay enough attention to it. Again, understanding maybe the biases of your strategy from a risk perspective and catering a model that can trade on top of that risk management strategy, whilst not necessarily optimizing for return only, but also optimizing for a smooth equity curve. It's like chart ratios. Let's get back to the question, Waterflow specifically.

Order flow tells you who's buying, how aggressively they're buying, who's selling, how aggressively they're selling, and who's winning. And again, because we're trading markets that are developing on an ongoing basis, the guys who are buying and selling 30 seconds ago are not the same guys that are buying and selling now in the present, and it won't be the same if the guy's buying in the next 5, 10, 15, 30 seconds. Like I said, it tends to have a bias for the short term.

But if you're able to use that as a confirmation signal, perhaps for an entry, even if it's on a swing position, there's a lot of edge to be having. Here's Waterflow. I mean, it's phenomenal.

Isn't it common though, for both buyers and sellers to break up their orders into a whole bunch of small lots, a hundred share lots or whatever, and disguise this? And how does one detect this kind of hidden way of accumulation or distribution? Yeah. You're getting into the real health questions now. That's a great question. All right. So

Let's use that example specifically. Let me ask you, Ian, who are going to be the entities that are going to be doing that, breaking up all this? The market maker, I would assume, right? Yeah. They'd be acting as an agent for somebody else. There's a fund. Let's call it Ian's Fund Capital. Ian, you call up your investment bank and you say, buy

I don't know, 200,000 shares of the stock. The guy on the other side of the phone says, "Yes, Ian, sounds great. I'll have that done for you at VWAP today." What that individual is incentivized to do is to execute your order without increasing the cost of the order or the slippage of the order. Because if you just buy and market it one single time, 200,000 shares, depending on the liquidity of the asset, you're going to eat up that order book, you're going to get slipped, you're going to get a terrible price.

The investment banker or the sell-side trader, he's going to break that order up into smaller pieces. I know this sounds-- this is very simple, but you'll understand why we're walking through it step by step. He gets on this trading platform, he's starting to execute your orders. If you were an investment banker and you're incentivized to get the best price possible, what kind of order type are you going to use ideally?

Presumably limit orders, right? A whole bunch of limit orders. Yeah. You are spot on. Absolutely right. So now we've just brought up this thing of passive versus buying. It's like passive versus active participation. Again, in terms, your passive participation is a limit order who's adding liquidity stock to the market. And you've got active who is removing liquidity or stock from the market. So yeah, let's look at this example.

Now that we have this information in mind, let's look at a break off then.

We've got to break our trades. We have price breaching our level, let's say, on the one minute. And we can see in order flow that there is an influx of buying. An influx of buying is demonstrated by what people call positive delta. Delta is just a fancy term for what is the difference in buying or selling from active participation. So the volume. If you took the volume bar and you split that between buyers and sellers, are there more buyers in that candle or are there more sellers in that candle?

in terms of market markets. Now, if we had a circumstance where we have price breaking out of a certain level to the upside, tons of positive delta, tons, abnormal positive delta, but price moved up above that level, we're looking at a long example, and then declined again below the level,

Something intuitively doesn't make sense that you've got all of these buyers pushing price beyond this point, but for some reason, we can't close the candle beyond that point. How does that make any sense? The answer is limitless. There are resting limit orders.

that are absorbing all of that buying pressure to the point where there is now an unfair fight between the guys who are buying and the guys who are selling. It takes so much more buying power to breach that resting sell order than it is for maybe aggressive sellers to go,

look, this is very normal selling pressure that we can put into the market. Your buyers can't raise price and you go, let's just keep selling and it's likely going to tank the market. There's a level of asymmetry there. That is the kind of information you can obtain via order flow. Yes, you may have your institutions that are

are breaking up orders into multiple orders in Iceberg Order, and that's completely common. But these are still things you can see and read either via the tape, via a footprint chart, via a cumulative volume delta chart, things like that. And this is why order flow is so asymmetric, right? It lets you see behind price and see what the actual participants are doing and what that level of participation looks like.

So are you looking for a setup where the limit orders on the top end, the potential sellers, have exhausted their stock? And then at that point, then you say, oh, look, the sellers have exhausted their stock. Now's the time to go in because it looks like this breakout is going to be more sustainable. Yeah, that absolutely is something that we look for, right? And that's a common break, actually.

There isn't enough liquidity to hold buyers back. Buyers are thinking of all of that liquidity and we can break through that level and keep breaking up. Absolutely. We also look at the previous example, which we call absorption. Why not we? That's what the second one is, absorption, where there is so much stock available that there isn't enough buying to get through that massive order. Now, there's asymmetry between buyers and sellers. Sellers are going to take this down.

That's also a setup that we look at. There's tons of these things. There's a whole world we can get into in terms of what's possible in one order flow and all of these setups and confirmations. Absolutely. For you and for your fund, are you just a super short-term scalper where you take positions for longer periods? We can take positions for longer periods theoretically. There is edge there.

For us, because we wanted to turn this into a hedge fund product, for all intents and purposes now, we are not a hedge fund. We have a waiting list of clients who want to purchase into this hedge fund. And I think once we get to a critical mass point, we'll get there. But for right now, we're just a proprietary trading firm. We're trading our own capital, shareholder capital.

Because the end goal has always been this hedge fund product, we are putting all of our emphasis and resources into refining what the intraday systems look like. Again, only trading within that US session, like you say, scalping. I mean, our average trade time is about six minutes, although we do have the longest trades we've taken off, let's say, mid-London sessions with the close of the US, but all within that one-day timeframe.

But again, I think with Waterflow and all of these tools, there's edge over some of the time frames. Obviously, they're just in the bias for that kind of fixer-teller. And then, so over the years, as you've learned and implemented, developed out your strategies, how have your kind of returns, drawdowns, different metrics, Sharpe ratios evolved over time? Also a phenomenal question.

Look, naturally, when you start trading, you're going to be shocking. There's just no way around that. I think right in the beginning, when I started trading by myself, naturally, the returns were negative. They weren't good at all. It was a major learning curve and a humbling experience. Since then, we've primarily thought of this model and through the Waterflow elements of those three philosophies that we have.

We were able to optimize for better investment metrics, things like your Sharpe ratio, your Sortino ratio, Calmar, et cetera. Currently, our Sharpe ratio is doing very well. It's in excess of, I know it's in excess of three. Last time I checked it, I think it's in excess of 60. Wow.

Yeah, it's doing phenomenally well. Our sortino is in excess of nine as well. To date, we've returned just over 30% of the fund. Well, the simulated hedge fund, the prop side, we traded a higher risk model just because obviously it's more appropriate to trade our own capital with a higher risk model for the hedge fund, which we report to be returned 30%. And our match for them as of today, this year is,

negative 0.2% negative 0 sorry 0.72% so I'll count my ratios yeah it's going very well the guys are doing a phenomenal job

Wow, great. What if some traders came to you and say, hey, look, I don't have enough money to invest in your hedge fund or whatever, but I've been a discretionary trader for the last two years, and I'm doing quite well. Why would I want to get involved in any of this quant stuff? My discretionary trading seems to work just fine.

I would say that's phenomenal. That's great news. I think it depends on what your goals are, ultimately. Like I said, there's so many ways to make money in markets. There really are. There's so many things. If you are the kind of trader that says, look, I want to get not only returns, but I want to do that in the most asymmetric form possible.

I would then say look at order flow and look into the quantity risk management stuff because that's where that ultimately lies. If you're optimizing for that, you can capitalize on both sides of the expected value formula and all four sides technically speaking. Whereas if you're just trading things like price action and regular backtesting, those metrics, you can get return without a doubt, but it's not going to get you to that ultimate form of asymmetry that you're looking for.

So what do you think are some of the biggest risks to discretionary traders, especially ones who have some early success and say, I've got this down. I'm doing well, and I'll just keep repeating what I'm doing. And what are some of the hidden traps that discretionary traders frequently don't look at?

Before I answer, there's discretionary and discretionary, right? I mean, there are firms out there. I know a couple of guys at S&P Capital, Trillium and Kirchner. There's some phenomenal firms out there that just got a ton of IP towards discretionary trading and they do so in such a way where they can trade discretionary in a very consistent way. I'd even argue that it's not discretionary once you get to that level of sophistication. It is systematic. You're just using your heuristics a lot more.

which is phenomenal, right? Hats off to those guys, I think they're great. But, and again, just coming back to the original points, if we define a discretionary as just not having a set of binary variables that you're ticking off before every trade. So if that's what we're talking about. I would say that the most face value elements is obviously just tilt, right? What happens when your calls just aren't there today

You're trying to maybe force your own views on the markets and you just keep adding risk on the table into something that's not working. That's the first risk. The other elements of discretionary trading that I feel has elements of risk that maybe your quantity and systematic style guys don't have is the risk management side. There is so much more to risk management than just risk per trade and that's brought on capability.

I'd go so far as to say the one thing that has made us immediately profitable is having a sound understanding of risk management and really diving into what that means. There are hundreds and hundreds of different ways that you can look at risk that really open your eyes.

I'd say that those are the two primary challenges I think most discretionary guys make. Again, there are exceptions. I'm not talking about the super sophisticated, you know, wonder kids out there. Yeah. What about the issue of, say, position sizing? Have you found an optimum level of position sizing in your back testing? Yeah. And this is just, you ask good questions again. This is, I'm having a great time. Yes. So,

It all depends on tolerance. My level of risk tolerance is not going to suit yours or someone else, for example. I think first and foremost, you need to have an understanding of what your personal risk tolerance is and have a target value of risk or match drawdown that you can incur in the worst possible scenario. That's step one. Let's say that that's 10% preventable. Let's use 10 as an easy number.

What's then really important to do is understand what does the drawdown capability of a strategy look like based on its inherent variables and expected value. And there's ways to test for this, right? So you can, what we do personally, just to maybe get some game out, is we use...

Monte Carlo simulation. This is not new. But what we also do is we add a realism factor because ultimately they're just simulations. They won't necessarily show you the absolute worst case scenario. You then multiply that by say an additional 20 to 30%. So you're exaggerating the match drawdown you can incur.

What you then want to do is match that to be based on the expected value, the maximum amount of trades you can or negative trades you can go with in a straight line. How many consecutive losses can I make? Let's say that I want to target a negative 10% drawdown, that's what my exaggeration multiple gives me.

target drawdown. I then see that based on my exaggeration multiple that I can incur a maximum of, let's just keep it under easy 10 trades in a row of losses. What I'm then going to do is match those two together to get a risk per trade, at least as a basis. Again, 10 divided by 10 is 1. I'm going to be risking 1% per trade, for example.

What's then really important too, when it comes to understanding risk for trade is not all trades are made equal. There are going to be some A+ trades where if you look at blackjack, when the true count becomes extremely positive, you want to start doubling, tripling, or quadrupling your bet size. If you're playing blackjack, you don't want to be doing those multiples per second, you're trading for a fund. There are going to be times where your strategy is more potent, and there's going to be times where your strategy is more dilutive.

In those environments, you want to have the flexibility to either increase size above your baseline or decrease size substantially below your baseline. And again, another piece of game here, maybe that would be valuable, is one of the elements that really worked for us in the beginning phases, before we even got into order flow,

was anticipating based on the variables that make our strategy successful when we're going to see a reduction in performance or performance dilution, as we call it, and substantially decreasing our risk. Substantially, I'm talking a third of the exposure to a tenth or even less.

And why does this work, right? You know, why is that so important to do? Well, ultimately, trading is what you make versus or minus what you lose is what you keep. So if you can make as much as possible during the times that your strategy is most potent and then, you know, retain as much of that when your strategy is more diluted, you're going to be making more in the long term.

So number one, when it comes to where the edge lies, get a sound understanding of what's possible in terms of drawdown with your strategy. That's the first one. Have a firm understanding of where your personal drawdown limit is. That is extremely important, especially if you're trading on a discretionary basis. Your head is very important. Your headspace and psychology. Matching those two together on an exaggerated basis. So give that a bit of leeway in case things go wrong. Things go wrong in the real world. That's just the way that things are.

Then get some nuance with your strategy in terms of variables that you can go, okay, if the volume is greater than X percent by a certain time period in the day, or our volume is two or three or five times its normal range if you're trading stocks.

That is when my strategy logically and from a backtesting perspective is most potent. When that happens, I'm going to add some. Conversely, the volume is really not there today. It's a UK and US banking holiday. The volume is maybe 10% of what a new year is. I'm not going to trade at all if I'm going to. I'm going to do that at a third or a tenth of the size so that if I lose, I'm not losing much, but when I win in my most asymmetric parts of the day,

and making the most amount of health possible.

Excuse the last interruption here. This is Tessa. We hope you're enjoying this episode so far. If you love the podcast, please give Chat with Traders the best review you can on whatever platform you're listening from. This will help us to keep the episodes coming. Also, if you haven't subscribed to our email list, please hop on to chatwithtraders.com and click on subscribe so we can keep you posted of information that may be of importance. Thank you. Now back to the chat with our guest.

So for our listeners who obviously hear the enormous amount of work you've put into this over the years, is there a way for traders to either plug in to your system or to your group and or to invest passively?

Not yet. So put it this way. This is a brand new venture for us. And we've got investors that are our priority. We've got a fund on the way that we're looking to get up and running. And neither of those two things are small tasks, I think, especially for a young team like us. I think what we do have on our side, obviously, like I said, is an amazing group of investors that have taught us a lot and have been patient with us. But also, we have the work ethic and we have the ability to forecast where maybe what we call

It's not brilliance, but we call it brilliance. That's kind of what the youth call it, right? Like you're young and hungry and you want to make it work, but that only takes you so far. There is an element of experience that you maybe haven't gotten to that's going to limit you inherently.

So right now, no, we don't have any form of plugin or any form of passive investing that clients can get into directly. But that's right now, it's publicly speaking, I can't say it's publicly. But there will come a time where we will have that hedge fund open. Like I said, we're raising on a waitlist at the moment. So if there is interest, there's that.

But we're in no rush, put it that way. We want to ensure that by the time that that fund is ready, we have got all our checks and balances complete, crossed our eyes, dotted our T's, and we're ready to rock without any hesitation. Well, not hesitation, but we're ready to rock without any box left unchecked, if that makes any sense. So looking forward, tell us, what are you looking forward to? Getting everything, all the boxes checked? Yeah, absolutely. I think

Something that we're focusing on heavily right now from a business perspective is institutionalizing. A large part of trading client capital when the time is right is trust. There's nothing that says trust like secure and robust processes.

things like having the right kind of documentation involved so that when you have an institutional client knocking at your door asking difficult questions, you can already show them the documentation that anticipates and answers those questions. So that's the first thing. Institutionalizing is the big one for us. We've also created a substantial amount of new IP over the past three months.

This IP has been amazing for the team to digest, but obviously when you find new avenues, there's going to be new avenues for you to digest from it, right? Like sub avenues. So the team and I are not only working on the existing strategies, but strategies that could become valuable in time to come once we have additional resources. And other than that, I think just being in a position where we can disseminate additional value to other traders. It wasn't very long ago when we were struggling

And we were trying to figure out how trading works in general. It's a challenging field to be in, especially when you do it alone. So being in a position where I wouldn't say we've got the secret sauce, but we're doing well and we can just provide some kind of direction at the very least to other traders who may be in our shoes, call it six years ago. That's something that's been phenomenal for us to do. And we feel very blessed to do that. Fantastic, Dylan. Thanks for coming on chat with Traders.

Thank you for having me. It's been amazing. Looking forward to chatting soon. Yeah, great. And how can our listeners get in touch with you? I think the best place would be through our website. So that's www.apexcptl.com. We've got forms for traders, investors, and interested parties to come up there. That'd be the best place. Fantastic. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks again.

There were a lot of golden nuggets, and I admit I'm not a very good listener and I would have to listen to this interview over maybe at least two more times to to really, you know, not miss anything. But I remember you mentioned something about, you know, make your strategy systematic earlier as soon as you can. Is that is that what you meant? And.

So what stuck out to me is like, if I'm not a programmer, if not, you know, I don't know how to program or anything. And if I hire somebody or if anyone's interested in hiring someone to do the programming to make it more systematic, I mean, wouldn't we worry about that? Say that programmer who might steal our strategy or something like that. That's one of the things that I just always had in my mind. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. Yeah.

So there's two answers to this, two avenues that I want to take. So the first one is that you don't actually have to code. I can't code for what it's worth, right? There are platforms out there that are no-code platforms that allow you to basically put in a preset of common variables that are very sophisticated. You know, if it's market structure, value, or even indicators, right? You can just plot in when RSI does this,

And MapD does this, for example, do this at this size for this amount of time. You can put all that stuff in, copy the code, paste it into platform and it'll test it for you without even having to code anything. So that's the first avenue. There are ways to do it without having to create that kind of trust. Um, not to mention manual backtesting. I think manual backtesting literally just with a piece of paper and checklist is incredibly underrated. I would recommend if you can do that, do that. If you're going down that avenue, um,

In terms of the trust element between you and the developer, something that you've begun to realize, especially when we talk about our IP, because originally we didn't want to say anything about what our three philosophies were, how we do what we do and things like that. But one of our investors told us, no one's going to steal your idea unless you're driving several barons. If you think about people stealing your idea,

There's so much sophistication that goes into creating a strategy that someone would objectively want to steal and incur that risk, that the likeness of that happening during that period is so slim, I don't even worry about it. And if you are at a place where that is so sophisticated, you would have likely built a team back at that stage, or at least the contact that you can trust. That would be my kind of two avenues to think about it. Yeah.

That's helpful. Okay, another question I have, you mentioned a lot about risk management, and we know all that is super important. But what comes first, risk management or edge? Oh, that's a good question. Risk management or edge. I would say edge comes first. And I'll tell you why. Risk management is pointless if you don't have something that works. Risk management is the thing that just...

It takes you from good to great on something that is already working, if that makes sense, right? Yeah. Like picture a strategy that's for all intents and purposes, just excuse my French, crappy, right? It doesn't work. And you add superior risk management to it. It just means you're going to lose this. That's what it means. Yeah.

Whereas if you've got something that's sound and you add the risk management elements on top of it, your returns make good with the right risk management, you've gone from good to great. Does that make sense? Yes, absolutely. I just wanted to hear you confirm that. Okay, one last question. You're so young. Remind us how old you are. I'm 25. So young. And you accomplished so much already, but I'm still going to ask this question. If you had to start over, would you do anything different?

if I had to start over would I do anything different? Yes I would. This is kind of a question where it's also like if you had to give yourself advice now looking back. Yes definitely for the guys that are just getting new, just getting into trading and it is a passion of yours and

Maybe even to a degree, if you've got something to prove, it's going to be a self-valuable thing. A lot of traders attach their value to what they do. I think to a large degree, all of them. If you're getting started, it's not going to work immediately, end of discussion, especially if you don't have a mentor and particularly if you're doing it alone. There is no need to hinder in a really difficult process.

by beating yourself up for not being the successful trader immediately. And I'll tell you why. That negative buildup that you created in your head while you're trying to put the work in to just get ahead,

is going to hinder you. It's not going to benefit your work process or your workload. It's not going to get you to a point where you can operate more effectively or more efficiently. It's going to dial back your progress. It's going to dial back your enjoyment and dial back your efficiency. I think the most important thing is having faith in the fact that A, it takes time. It takes people years to just get profitable.

I've seen guys do it in far less time and you can definitely do it. The one thing that will get you there the fastest, aside from the work ethic, aside from the hard skills, is making sure that you don't beat yourself up for not being where you want to be. Focus as intensely as you can on enjoying the process, learning every day and being thankful that you just need to take that extra step towards profitability.

Does that make sense? Yeah, that's so important. We don't hear that. You know, we don't hear that enough, actually, you know, giving guidance to not beat yourself up because we do it all the time.

Yeah. And it's such a tricky balance, isn't it, Tesco? Because on the one hand, to be excellent, which we all want to be, we all want to be the top grader dog, like we want to be the big boy, or big girl, or whatever. We all want to be that person. And we all think like, look, I need to be hard on myself. I need to be hard on my performance. And yes, you do, right? But you don't need to disrespect your headspace. That's going to take you nowhere. It really is going to set you back. You can be hard on yourself.

right? Be hard on results, but don't do it to the point where it hinders you. It needs to be an enjoyable process because that's where your genuine inspiration and that work ethic and efficiency comes from. If you can keep that in a good space and just muscle yourself through that period and enjoy it, you're going to be unstoppable. Without it, it's just the way it is. Yes. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much. That is so good. We're going to, we're absolutely going to include that in the bonus section.

Thank you again, Dylan, and have a wonderful weekend. You too. Tessa, again, thanks so much, guys. Really enjoyed the conversation. Take care. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye, guys. Bye.

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