The Derivative - The Game of Trading with SIG Alums Kris A, Tina L, & Steiner

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

We have a little saying over here on The Derivative, The More, The Merrier, and on this week's episode of The Derivative, we're not chatting with one guest, but THREE! Class may no longer be in session, but we are taking a trip down the SIG/Susquehanna memory lane and having our own class reunion with Kris Abdelmessih, Michael Steiner, and Tina Lindstrom. If you're interested in learning how big trading firms find and teach their traders, hold on to your seat because these three give you the answer key! Kris, Tina, and Michael are in session with Jeff and discussing competing with peers, finding an option’s fair value, making markets, and being in the game of trading, educating kids with board games, and of course Steiner’s new trading board game: Stock Slam! Discover how the game works and how you can join up with these three in NYC for a live session in this three-of-a-kind episode — SEND IT! Chapters: 00:00-2:06 = Intro 02:07-21:10 = Competing with peers & if you are teachable? 21:11-35:18 = Options, WhenTech, Fair value & Being in the game 35:19-46:09 = Are board games for fun or for learning? 46:10-57:38 = Stock Slam: Bridging to real-world concepts 57:39-01:16:24 = The components of the game & meet up in NYC 01:16:25-01:20:10 = Last thoughts From the episode: NYC meet-up application for StockSlam Sessions   Check out Moontower Weekly by Kris Abdelmessih Follow Kris on Twitter @KrisAbdelmessih and Tina on Twitter @moreproteinbars Don't forget to subscribe to The Derivative, follow us on Twitter at @rcmAlts and our host Jeff at @AttainCap2, or LinkedIn , and Facebook, and sign-up for our blog digest. Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, or tax advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of RCM Alternatives, their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations, nor reference past or potential profits. And listeners are reminded that managed futures, commodity trading, and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors. For more information, visit www.rcmalternatives.com/disclaimer

Welcome to The Derivative by RCM Alternatives, where we dive into what makes alternative investments go, analyze the strategies of unique hedge fund managers, and chat with interesting guests from across the investment world. Happy first day of fall, everyone. End of a nice three months we have here in Chicago. Oh, well, still rather nice out. And we can batten down the hatches with some good podcasts coming up. We've got Simon Ho, the creator of the Spikes Volatility Index, a sort of VIX competitor,

and possibly Mike Harris, formerly of Campbell & Company and now heading up Quest Partners. And maybe an episode talking through the US dollar's recent strength. On to this episode, which is a rather unique one, as we've got three guests, and where we're not talking about a hedge fund or macro view or where markets are going, but about a board game called Stock Slam, which these former market makers all love, and which they all think could be a great teaching tool

for aspiring traders and all sorts of professionals who would benefit from learning how to make a market in real time. Our trio are all former Susquehanna vets. We've got Chris Abdomasia, the writer of the Fantastic Party at the Moon Tower blog, Tina Lindstrom, a partner at First New York running an oil vol book, and Mike Steiner, a high school physics teacher who helped hire and teach both of those talents back in the day. Send it. This episode is brought to you by RCM's VIX and Volatility Specialists and its Managed

Futures Group. We've been helping investors access volatility traders for years and can help you make sense of this volatile space. See what I did there? Check out the newly updated VIX and Volatility white paper at rcmalts.com under the education menu, then white papers link. And now back to the show. Okay. We've got a little class reunion going on here. Welcome Mike. Welcome Chris and welcome Tina. Hello. Thanks. So let's start with how you three all know each other. Who met whom first?

Who wants to jump on that grenade? I'll start. Yeah. So Steiner was there first. I think I started before Chris at Susquehanna. I met Steiner. So Steiner was at Susquehanna first, and I guess I met Steiner first um but he he was my teacher so we would we would clerk during the day we would be an assistant for any number of a few senior traders during the day and then after work a few times a week we would go go to mock trading and or options theory training and Steiner would teach it. That was like mandatory or this was you wanted to learn and you would go

if you wanted to learn more? This was mandatory. And so what Susquehanna did was they hired the best and the brightest. Back, back then when I started, Susquehanna was about 300 people and they would hire maybe 20 to 30 people per, you know, every year, I'm guessing. And they would be in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, but you would have to compete. You compete with your peers and, New York, but you would, you'd have to compete. You compete with your peers

and, and, you know, whoever did the best would get selected for a class. And it usually took between, you know, the expected values a year, but some people would go in nine months. Some people would take one and a half years, but that, that was. Your job was to compete with your peers to get into class. If you didn't get into class, you were fired. So what was compete with your peers look like? Because you had real money you're trading and you're competing on a P&L basis or competing in other ways? You would have much.

Steiner, why don't you talk about that? How would you judge us? Once they got to me, they were basically hired to be assistant traders to become traders. So when they would come to my sessions after the trading day, we would do some option theory and mock trading. And the mock trading was just synthetic relationships and being able to make markets and adjust things and report their trades and respond to brokers. They would have to get to a level of proficiency in just finding arbitrage uh capitalizing on it maximizing expectations beating all of the other people in the class and then some with if we were if i was ready to send them to the next level which was class class as Tina calls it. The class was at the headquarters of the company in Philadelphia and, uh, they, they would, they would, yeah, basically I was a

gatekeeper to the talent New York sent to Philadelphia for fine tuning. And then you ended up at Susquehanna. That's right. That's right. Right after the army, um, a couple months after, uh, leaving, I, I just got a phone interview and then I just kept going through it and got the job. And how, how was that fortuitous or you pushed your way in there? Like I, I have this argument with a lot of people of like, like, Oh, you just, once you got the seat and then you have to learn and you have to do this. And I'm like, yeah, but getting the seat seems like the hard part, right? Oh, yeah. That was just, there's a kind of a gate you got to get through with Sesquihanna and ask and answer some math questions.

You have to answer some math questions. And this is how it was for as long as I was there. And that's kind of like once you get to an interview, answer some math questions, some personal questions, some deeper questions about, you know, statistics. And then just keep pushing you up into higher levels and making sure that after they know you know math, and they just want to make sure you're cool enough to hang out with the people on the floor. Right. What do you remember what the math questions were? Oh, Oh yeah. My, my, my, my favorite one that I asked my students, my stats students is well,

it can, I guess I can say three coins in a bag and one of them is unfair. So it's a two headed coin. And then the other two coins are fair coins. So they have a tails and heads. So there's a highest coin and then two good ones. So you reach into the bag. You don't really look at the coin very carefully. You flip it three times and you get heads each time. So you're now you have to think the chances that I pulled out that the two headed coin are, are pretty good. Exactly. How good are they? And it's a Bayesian, it's a Bayesian, Bayesian probability question. And I remember I, I, I said to the guy, that was the last question

he asked me. And I said, I don't, I know it's a Bayes question. I don't know asked me. And I said, I know it's a base question. I don't know the answer. And I'm kind of bummed. And he said, okay, well, maybe we'll be in contact. And I hung up the phone. And then I remembered if you draw a picture of it really quickly, you can get it. So I drew the picture of it. And as I was finishing the picture, I picked the phone up and I dialed the guy. And I said, it's 80%. And he said, when can you come

down for the next, for the next? Yeah. So you showed some grit there too, right? I'm like, Hey, I picked up the phone and called back probably. Yeah. I just, I think I just needed to hear the click of the phone and just, and then like, just not be on, not be on, on pressure, on the pressure. But I, I just love, yeah, all of those questions were great. And some of them get really deep. Like one of them is a one mile racetrack and you go 30 miles an hour for one mile. And then how fast do you have to do the second lap

in order to get your average speed over the entire two miles up to 60 miles an hour? So it turns out that the question is, um, the question is, uh, easy to understand, but hard to answer. And I'm not going to give the answer away if, unless you want me to tell you the answer. Yeah, sure. Oh, it just turns out it's impossible because you need two seconds. It knows most people will just yell out the answer 90 because 90 is average is 60 and speeds don't average that way. And so, so you ask that question in an interview, you make sure that the person understands it. And sometimes I've had, we've had interviewers,

one particular one stands out where he said, he said, the answer is 90. And I said, no, I was like, and then he just snapped and he just said, oh, the answer is 90. And I said, No, it's like, and then he just snapped. And he just said, Oh, the answer is 150. And I said, Well, we just hold on a second, like, can, like, maybe just work it out, work the math out. And then he said, I said, Well, he said, there must be there must be some answer. And I said, Well, it turns out it's impossible. And he said, he said, No, it has to be possible. And I said, why do you like? I asked the question. You seem awfully confident, right? So then I wound up asking him, I said, I'll bet you that it's impossible. Like, I'll bet you a dollar.

And he said, all right, fine. And I said, okay, how about I'll put another dollar down if you put $10 down. I'm sorry, I'll put $10 down more. If you just put down one more dollar, like you get better odds now. Right. And he said, he said, oh, that's great. And I said, okay, if you put one more dollar down and I yelled to a friend of mine, I said, Hey, Bill, would you like to make a dollar? And if you give me 5,000, I can make you a dollar. I know he always carried a big stash with him. i and i and he said okay fine so i took the 5 000 and put it down and and and i said to the kid i said how do you like your first bet

now that i'm i'm just like this is how sure i know that you're right on 5 000 yeah and he's like he's like well i like my bet now and i'm just thinking there's no way you're gonna work for this for this company so i only took the i only took I only gave Bill his $1 payoff. The other rest of it, I gave back to the, and it's part of that, just how they react under that sort of pressure, which doesn't sound like he did very well. Yeah. Yeah. Overconfidence is something that we, Susquehanna really doesn't, um, really wants to weed out.

Like if you're, if you're smart, but you're, you're, you're, you think you're smarter than you actually are, then you're not going to be able to, you're not going to be able to come up with some, some, some deeper ideas that are really important. Like you have to be able to know, you have to be able to think how wrong can I really be here in order to understand maybe risk or a piece of the puzzle you're not you're not seeing in pricing something so Chris you came through that program so you impressed Steiner somehow yeah I'll I'll back up for a second yeah just to because I I joined so I joined in 2000 I was part of Tina mentioned this there was about 300 people when when she joined.

When I joined, there was already the firm had probably doubled from that point. Just two years later, Tina, I think you're two years ahead of me. And so when I was when I was coming through, I was the largest cohort SIG ever hired. There was about 80 assistant traders that were hired my year because we were coming, the dot-com bubble was going on. I was hired right in 2000. So they just needed bodies on that floor. And so I always kind of joke, but I kind of slipped through that selective process because They were hiring lots of people, but I think that that was an, that was an interesting, there's an interesting story in there because I got hired. So there was an on-campus recruiting session and the guy that was at the

career fair at, I was, I went to Cornell, was up at Cornell and I was walking around the career fair and there's like tons of peers that are wearing their suits and they're all hobnobbing with the bankers because everybody wanted to be a banker back then. And this guy, he had some dice and a deck of cards on the table and there was really nobody around him. The SAG Recruiter did? Totally, yeah. Yeah, nice. So I'm walking through, and I kind of pause in front of the booth.

So he's like, okay, like a good salesman. He comes right in on me here. It's like he's paused. I got him here. And he starts just talking about some kind of a game idea. And as we started talking, I said, oh, this doesn't sound like work at all. This sounds like fun. And so he invited me for an interview on campus there.

So he asked me a bunch of math questions. And I don't do very good at this. But I asked the question at the end of the interview that I think was really important. I said, I don't know the answers to these questions, but I like this. How, what can I do to learn more about this? And he recommended to me getting the best of it by David Sklansky. And he specifically said, read the first chapter. And so I did that. And I went home and I read the first chapter. And then the phone interview was taken straight out of the first chapter. So this guy gave me the answer key, which told me, you know, partly he must have liked me for some reason, even though I couldn't, I wasn't competent enough to get the questions right. And the other thing was he probably cared a lot that I was teachable and ask the question.

So I think, and I think that's an important story because it, it tells you a little bit, gives a little more context to how SIG hired. It wasn't just best and brightest. It was also, are you teachable? You could be super bright, but if you were not teachable, they weren't interested in you. So I probably was more teachable than best and brightest, but that's how I got in there. And somewhere along then, what changed from Susquehanna to SIG? That happened while I was, I remember the release about that. Yeah, I remember that. First, it was Susquehanna Investment Group.

Then it was Susquehanna International Group. Then they would just call it SIG. And the joke was there is no I in SIG because we were very team oriented. But that would be the joke. There is no I in SIG. So talk a little bit. Like you said, they go for the best and brightest and we're generally speaking, this is how most big firms work, right? Like whatever other DRW or Citadel, those are my Chicago ones, but you've got your New York ones there as well. But to me, it's always

like you're searching for the LeBrons and you just plug them in are you saying like no there's there's a massive amount of training to get them up to speed is it like the the theory of it versus the application or what's different between the coming in as a blue-eyed is it blue-eyed as a young-eyed uh someone who wants to do this versus actually doing it i'm not sure if I asked a question even, sorry, but. Yeah. Well, what Chris said about finding people that were teachable, one of the things that as an interviewer for just after the resumes were scanned and we would maybe take people in, just testing for overconfidence. So if, if you were a kid who just could understand what a 90% confidence interval is, and he could state back to me what

a 90% confidence interval was. And, and then, um, uh, then I gave him a bunch of things to, to, uh, I gave him a test of his abilities to make 90% confidenceidables in 10 different facts. If he was overconfident, he would get very few of them correct because he would tighten up his markets or tighten up his ranges and wind up getting lots of them wrong. And so just that kind of test for overconfidence is someone that we would not want to proceed with or we would just make a note that the person was overconfident or seemed to be overconfident. And there was, there's other,

there's plenty of other ways to ask questions of someone to see if they're going to be disagreeable to, uh, to, um, Susquehanna's way of thinking, whether it's, uh, Susquehanna's way of thinking, whether it's Susquehanna doesn't, we don't read charts, historical data to predict the future. And so when, when we show, if I were to show a bunch of truly random walks and some stock graphs and ask them to make predictions based on the patterns and then ask him like, well, one of these is actually, is actually not a stock. It's actually a random walk generated by a computer. Can you figure it out?

And just to see how they kind of reacted to that. Are you coming up with this stuff on the fly or you would spend hours and days of coming up with these tests and questions? No, on the floor, there's a lot of downtime because you need customers to come in to do transactions. So during the downtime, we would rehearse in our heads what we would do if some broker came in with some particular order at that time. And then there's still more downtime. So we would come up with just ideas in general. And then when we got done with that, it was, it was more hilarity and

just goofball antics. So to Steiner's point here, the first time I met Steiner was, and he says here, he might kind of remember this, but the first time I met Steiner, it was after I had, I had already received an offer from SIG. And I was visiting the trading floor because after, well, that's where I was going to work. So this was before I started working. I was probably still in college, but they wanted me to go walk around the trading floor. And I ran into Steiner on the Amex. And I don't know if Steiner knew that I was already hired or not, but he decided he wanted to kick the tires on me, which is a bit telling of SIG's culture in general. It is, you know, coming up with questions and sort of interrogating people and all that was very much part of their part of that culture, like a very puzzle kind of culture. I remember he asked me the question he asked me, I still remember, uh, was, uh, if player a had a higher batting average than player B for the first half of the season, and then

player a had a higher batting average than player B in the second half of the season. Is it possible that player B has a higher batting average for the entire season? And I did happen to get the question, right? So somewhere along the line, I improved at my arithmetic or whatever. And then much, many, many, many years later, probably 15 years later, I learned that that's called Simpson's paradox, which I didn't know it at the time. But yeah, Steiner thought it was only right to kick the tires on somebody that was just standing there like a lamb on the floor. Right give us the answer what's the answer what's the math behind it oh yeah you can player

b can because it has to it just has to do with that to get much larger yeah because it's just like a weighted average thing yeah if you're if you're uh you know the player a hits 400 and player b hits 300 but it's on a small sample size, then player B can have a higher average over a much, or kind of a slightly lower average at a higher number over a much larger sample size. And that would, the weighting would make player B have a higher average for the whole season. And so Steiner, you taught senior traders, not just at SIG, right? But all sorts of different places?

So no, it was primarily New York and it was all assistant traders to become traders. So these were the fresh people right out of college before they would go to the headquarters for the, for the final, but it was, and it wasn't just at a college. I mean, these, some of these, again, like how Susquehanna thinks about things, some of these, uh, uh, fellows were, um, and girls were just like gamblers. Like they, they were just really good poker players or, uh, lawyers. And they just and they just really could understand things just at a granular level that we could really appreciate. Tina, in one of your tweets, you said that you helped, Steiner helped develop Wintec, IOA, pricing model for commodities

that got bought by ice what's that all about caught my eye i at the time i was on the nai i was in charge of high cap indices um options on indices so i ran they had a sort of a weird LMM program. I was the specialist for the Russell 1000, Russell 3000, sorry for my birds, and the options on them. So while I was there, you know, we were the only financial pit with a dollar pit next to us. There was sugar, coffee, cotton cocoa, orange juice, and then the Comex was on the same floor. So I started backtesting sugar calendar spread options, and we started putting a little position on. Our chief global risk manager at SIG, they always wanted to go into new products. So

they let me put a little position on in sugar and ended up making about a million dollars on a small position. So they said, why don't you start a commodity ball trading operation for Susquehanna? And at the time there was no, we did not trade commodity ball. We only traded index ball and equity ball. So they gave me four or five guys and we started, we started an operation. So the pricing model that we had before micro hedge didn't really um you couldn't you couldn't price things properly you couldn't price the skew properly you couldn't price the basis properly it just what they weren't good models when i first tried to start trading and i was writing things down i was managing the position on on if you could believe, on paper.

The deltas were wrong. So one day Steiner comes over and he comes to my booth and he's like, look at this, look at this. And he shows me this tablet, looks like an Excel spreadsheet. Like, look, you can click on here, click on here, and look for commodities. And he had this friend, Dave Wender. And Dave would come over and show me this piece of software. So then later, Dave Wender incorporated this software and made it a little prettier. And they called it Wentech. Then later, so I was the first person at Cisco Hanna to use Wentech. And then a friend of mine, Jason Rockland, they wanted him to start because

my operation was successful trading agricultural commodity options. They wanted to start an oil operation. So Jason went to college with me. We went to the Ross Business School together. And he said, oh, T, what should I do? What kind of pricing model? Who should I talk to? What brokers? I said, okay, we got to use this thing called Wentech. So then we bought a bunch of licenses for Wentech. And the funny thing is is so now the ice bought them and every i would say more than half of all commodity options traders use one tech still but it's called ioa now ice options analytics but to the old people it's always one tech one tech and what's the difference because of the different expirations and whatnot in the commodities?

So you have to plug in basically the curve? It's different models and different basis. You know, with financial products, it's, you know, interest minus dividend is, you know, the forward. But here there's all kinds of different futures. It just didn't interact very well. Plus the different models, the futures models versus the equity models. So this way was much better. And it had a lot more you can like to me i'm always thinking like it's the whole at a prop firm like this is the whole game we've got the prop firms model and then you're just waiting for prices to get out of line with the model and either buy or sell to get back in line with the model that's not uh not really um good because i well well you would so you would have

you would have a we did this notion of fair value. Okay. So what, what is, what is fair value? It is, it's not something that comes out of a model. It's a consensus. It's a wisdom of crowds consensus. So if we back up just for one second, if you are a SIG trader, whatever the stock price is, that's fair value. Like midpoint, let's call it midpoint. And let's pretend that there's no spoofing or funny business going on on the bid ask. The midpoint is sort of, you can think of that as kind of a fair value. In options, we have the same concept and you would kind of fit your models to some notion of fair value. But the way we figured out what fair value was, was by reading the order flow. So for example, if the market is, I'll use modern firms today, but if it's like Goldman Sachs on the bid and Jane street on the offer and the market's a penny wide, well, guess what? You found fair value. So if you can take that number and then set your sheets to that number and then say, given this, what opportunities exist in the world?

You can find relative value trades between different instruments across asset classes. The way I think of trading is a big normalization game. It's a big measurement game. We weren't necessarily looking at history and saying, this is what the pattern was in the past. It was a lot more like real-time poker. Everybody's saying that the market for this is X. Well, given that X is worth this, what is less liquid that stands out? What's Y worth? What's Z worth? What's PQ? Right. Got it. Right. So we had a lot of tremendous amount of respect for liquid transparent markets. So if a market was liquid and transparent, we were pretty much like, hey, that's fair. I'm who am I to disagree with that? The world is voted with infinitely more dollars than even Susquehanna has. Um, so it really starts with humility and then trying to find what was, what, what was, uh, off the line in other markets.

And then, uh, and if you had a fair value, part of that fair value was how you trade it around. A lot of the techniques were how you trade it around that. You know, if what are people's tendencies? This broker is coming in and he's quoting this calendar spread. Well, have I seen this broker before? If the broker buys the calendar spread and the next couple of, you have to have a good memory. So, you know, you'd have a trade memory and say, hey, you know, the last two times this person did this X happened. I don't I'm going to shift my my like Bayesian updating. Right. It's like I'm going to shift my probabilities of what can happen because this person seems to be informed order flow.

And what's this person's tendency? Like maybe they bought calls in the stock rallies. How do they behave after the stock rallies? Do they roll their calls up or do they close them? Do they diagonal them into another month? And if I know your habits, I can now make markets in say another month anticipating your flow that's coming in. And a lot of that's automated now, right?

Like they'll create identities that they don't know who the flow is, but you could create an identity and say this, basically have an automated memory of what that flow usually does. So I couldn't speak to that directly because I haven't been at SIG in a long time. And my expectation is that them and their competitors have advanced well beyond where we were when we were there. So I would imagine that they've really leveraged technology to answer a lot of these questions. But the underlying blueprint of what's going on there, that's always the same. Yeah.

Because the implementation is varied. I know from our Algo group and their anti-gaming logic that there's gaming logic, right? And so if you come in with a 10 lot every day and it ends up being a thousand lot that was iceberged in, they build a little profile. And I'm not saying SIG, but generally these big firms and they'll build a profile on that order type and call it trader X one four or something. Right. And then they know every time that 10

comes in, there's 900 behind it or a hundred come in and there's 900 behind. Yeah. I think it's probably the same thing as poker bots, right? You turn on a poker bot and it says, Hey, this person, this person raises pre they raise raises preflop with a hand threshold that is X or higher. You're just building profiles on competitors. But the basics are still there. It's all find a positive expectancy trade and explore it. Slam it for as long as you can, for as big as you can. Yeah.

And if it starts going a different way you just keep evaluating and trying to see figure out where you're wrong yeah constantly ask questions and just dig into that a little more so you've talked like there was that way of thinking and i think is common to most all prop firms and traders right of like okay i have to think in probabilities i have to think in risk. So you told me you sponged that all up. So tell me a little bit about that and how kind of they view the world versus the rest of the world. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And then a lot of people do this, I'm sure. But, but we just felt, it just felt great. They just caught it. We just had this language that we all

shared. And if you kind of like, if you wanted to explore something, we have this great way to be able to explain it to the trader right next to us and what was happening and what we were thinking. And, and that was kind of the, and that was kind of a smell test. If you had an idea to do something, you just kept talking to people and yeah, it was just easy. It's easy when you're all, when you all agree what the goal is to maximize expectancy and minimize risk. And then think about all the different ways you can be wrong and explore those. And then how you can test it, right? Would you be fair to categorize that as thinking in terms of options versus thinking in terms of linearity, right? In terms of kind of thinking 3D instead of linearly?

Oh, yes. No, absolutely. butterfly prices and options and trying to think about like what that really means about the distribution of prices and then, and, and then derivatives on those prices, other derivatives. So. So curiously, as fun as this game is, Tina, you're the only one still in the game. What's that all about? I'm the only dumb one still in the game. I don't know about that. Maybe the only, the, the, the greed one still in the game. I don't know about that. Maybe the only,

the, the, the greediest one in the game. Maybe, maybe I can't stop. I'll be bored. Maybe I'm afraid of hang out, of hanging out with all the housewives around here.

I think it's, I think it's option C for sure. It probably is I probably would want to kill myself and I hope nobody none of my friends will definitely

they won't hear this podcast so that's great this podcast is huge in Long Island we're huge in Long Island amongst the housewives but Steiner what was it like for you

to get out of the game refreshing you miss it um no I don't think I miss it um I get my I get my fill in other ways now and I um yeah I loved it though I mean I loved every minute of it it's fat absolutely fascinating and yeah it's not like I got it's like I got sick I loved every minute of it. It's fat, absolutely fascinating. And yeah, it's not like I got, it's not like I got sick of it. I was just like timing out and life, life was just changing. Not in bad ways, but no, I mean maybe I felt a little weird for a few months as I was trying to work on some stuff and think about things, but it faded. And I just got,

I just got more excited about some other projects and teach, always, always teaching, thinking about finance. Absolutely. But not, not, not being in the game. It's funny in Chicago here, a lot of the, uh, old floor traders and stuff, and there was, you know, what are they going to do? But a lot of them made a lot of money by their seats and the IPOs of the cbt and see me merging and all that so they've done quite well and really never had to figure out what to do they just kind of sailed off in the sunset bought some real estate did some different things chris you had a good post on your moon tower if anyone doesn't subscribe to moon tower go do it immediately it's awesome

um and caught my eye i love playing games with my kids katan ticket to ride clue backgammon and just kind of teach them right like hey think in terms of game theory think in terms of strategy which seems like it's a good life lesson so how do you how do you think about games in general and how it applies to to life in general right uh so growing up we i played a lot of board games with my sister and in my family that was just a normal thing to do there was nothing it was just totally normal you would play life or you'd play monopoly or you know you play some cards or whatever. And, but we, we played a lot of games. I was always a big fan of it. And then I guess around, and then at SIG, I learned how to play poker properly. I didn't, I didn't know how to play poker when I went into SIG. We spoke only a little bit about

games going into, I remember talking about Monopoly actually going into SIG because, you know, if you don't know like in monopoly the most valuable properties are the ones on the corner right after free parking the red the orange ones like illinois avenue and stuff like that and that's because they're the ones you're most likely to land on and because they're also the ones that you're probably going to land on coming out of jail for example and uh so you know games are always fascinating things because there's it's you know, it requires some combination of strategy and computational thinking and reading other people and possibly teamwork, possibly, you know, forming alliances and then maybe backstabbing somebody or how to even think about how you might do that and uh the game culture was big in sig and that kind of kept that alive for me i learned how to play backgammon not especially good or anything like that but i learned how to play backgammon

when i was at sig and um and then around 2008 2007 2008 somebody gifted me a copy of Settlers of Catan. I realize they call it Catan now, but back then it was Settlers of Catan. Which I think I see on your bookshelf there. It says Settlers. It is, and that's the same copy. I mean, that's an ancient copy right there, 15 years ago or whatever. And so I remember I was on the beach reading the rulebook to this. And I said, oh, this feels kind of complicated.

I've never really seen a game like this. And then that was a gateway into what we all now know is the Euro games and Euro board gaming. And I went to go watch or went to go to the World Board Gaming Championships in 2008, which was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And you just got the chance to play all these super nerdy games with these crazy themes. And, you know, it's a bit of a weird culture, kind of probably like going to a Civil War reenactment or something like that. My wife was one of the only females there. And that was interesting, but the, the, the whole, I, but we really enjoyed it. We really enjoyed kind of being in that setting and, and, and seeing all the creativity around games. And then as I got, uh, and then, so we were playing a ton of games. I was playing a ton of

games in, in, at that time, buying tons of games and playing them. We had a group and then fast forward, I have kids, the games kind of go to the wayside. Uh, you know, there's no, I don't longer have those times, that time where I can just spend four hours playing with like three friends. So, uh, the games kind of go out of my life for a few years. And then my older guy, he turns four or five years old, right? Six years old. I was able to teach him Catan and we just start playing games at home a lot. And it just reemerged in the last few years. And it's so fertile. It's such a fertile ground for teaching concepts because you get to do the same thing you do in mock trading, which is, why did you make that? It's a lot of debriefing. Like, why'd you make that decision? Why didn't,

you know, why didn't, why'd you make that trade? Or do you realize that like, you're, you're stopped out at like in Catan, you have a, if you get a two to one Harbor trading situation, like I'm stopped out at two to one on this thing why would you trade two of that thing to somebody else because if you make that trade with somebody else instead of trading it with the harbor and settlers of katan you're making them both of you better off but if you trade with just a harbor you just get to be better off so so you you increase your lead over everybody else if you do that so concepts like value over replacement things that you like that's a fantasy football concept but that exists everywhere so like what is the proper games teach you the proper baseline for comparison and uh and then they of course they teach you like the basic stuff like odds how you know dice

dice odds those kinds of things but you can give all that to children without ever having to get into a classroom and teach that you just play a game with them and they're going to pick it up i might you know it's amazing to me to watch my older guy like because we've been playing so much like he's he's very quick on this stuff now and it's i think it's um because he developed some patience and focus and tolerance for being able to sit through these sessions because they were fun while he was learning uh tina are you a gamer? You got any favorite board games? I like to play Risk. Chris bought me a crude game, which I haven't played yet. Power Grid. Power, Power.

Oh, well, you bought me Power Grid. I bought myself a crude board game, but I haven't played because I'm kind of wiped after work every day because it's sort of like i'm playing right the whole sesbihanna thing you're playing poker all day with your opponents right i kind of do that all day so i'm kind of tired that night so yeah give me like a hungry hippo or something where i don't have to strategize yeah give me a drink give me a drink give me some karate and let me go to sleep so i can do do the same thing the next day the uh and then steiner bring it back to you tell us what how you view games yeah i love games and i i like the idea of like in a classroom my classroom having a

leaderboard of like who's you know and and maybe anonymous or just like with not with their not with their names, but they know where they are, especially because like the kids at the top are going to want to stay at the top and the kids at the bottom are going to say, Oh wait, you know, like I got to get up here. I got to make, you know, like, so I like, I just like the idea of competition in general and, um, um, teaching with, with competition in mind for, um, but I, but I, uh, but in terms of, of games, um, yeah, like any, anytime, anytime someone has a puzzle to figure out and, uh, and it's presented that way as a, as a game is, um, is much more fun. And, uh, yeah, you start to um you start to invent things like invent ideas and try them out right so um

and maybe invent and invent new language to describe like what's happening so the but that's interesting to me so you're thinking of in terms more of like the game the power of the game is the competition side of it versus to me the power of it is the strategic thinking side of it but maybe one in the same oh and figuring stuff out and especially if there's like a chance element like what like what role of the dice are going to get you this and what are you you know like as you're playing monopoly even though you can't control the dice like you kind of know what's what you know you're expected to get about you're expected to get a seven right yeah um and so like thinking thinking um with with whenever they're games with with dice like thinking strategically how you're gonna how you're gonna

win and make the best choices the thing that's great about teaching with games versus regular teaching where you you know give a lecture or and test or the even even if you give someone you know the hands-on experience of of taking apart a motor and putting it back. The one thing that games give that, that, that it gives you that doesn't, that doesn't, that it's not provided in any other context, I think, is this, this choice and this, when students get to make their decisions and they get the feedback, no, no kid, no student of mine right now gets to decide in my physics classes, what the velocity is and what the time is to find the distance, right? I'm going to give them the velocity. I'm going to give them the time. And I

say, find the distance. There's not a lot of, there's not a lot of choices in that, right? So, so to teach and to test in the standard way, and just to teach in general, there's not a lot of choices that the learner gets to make. But with games, you know, you get to, the person gets to decide on what they want to do. Not chutes and ladders and hungry hippos, but in other games, right? You get to decide whether you're going to buy that piece of property in Monopoly, whether you're going to build houses. And the other thing, and I kind of lifted this from Sal Khan, who has something, he's got, he does something similar to Stock Slam, the game that I started. But one thing that my game does with, when I do it with middle schoolers,

and he, Sal Khan mentions this also, is that the participants will develop their own language for describing different parts of the game. You don't have to, you don't have to tell them what a bid and offer are before they, they play my game. They're going to come up with them. They're going to come up with the language. Sal Khan and his version even goes so far as to say that when he was playing it he noticed that some his game his game that people the the the participants figured out what it meant to short something they they actually figured out how to turn to the guy next to them and say hey

can I borrow that I'll give it back to you later I'll buy it back. I'm going to sell it now. So that's the thing that games do better than regular teaching, like I said. It's got to be the right kind of game. But that's what backgammon is interesting, right? Because people got so fed up with the strategy. They're like, we need to reintroduce an element of chance. I think that's where people eventually go back to backgammon because they're like, I want the element of chance to kind of juice up the odds a little bit, which comes back to the market of there's always as much as you know, you never know. Right. So let's move on to your game, Stock Slam. So let's start in the beginning.

Tell us what you came up with. So I knew I always wanted to make something like Stock Slam when I was teaching at Susquehanna because there was something that King Yao did with us. He was a senior trader to us. And when I was a junior trader, the education wasn't as direct as when I took over. So what would happen is a senior trader would be there and say, okay, whatever, I'll run mock trading until the poker game starts. So one day King Yao walked in and he had a plan. He showed us a video of a basketball game that none of us had ever seen before.

And we made markets on the total number of points throughout the game. So it was this basically a random walk. We didn't know where it was going to end. And we had to make a market around it. And it was amazing. So in the back of my mind, I always knew that there was a key to, one of the keys was to figure out how to make a series of random walks

that you could make bets on. And that's something that I wound up figuring out with Stocksland. So I wanted to develop something that would teach the fundamentals of trading in a way that was more repeatable outside of our mock trading sessions that we would run. Because I think Chris would say also that when I would, Chris and Tina would agree that after they saw Stocksland, that my job is to teach them. If I had Stocksland back when I was teaching them, if I had that, I probably could have got them to the next level in half the time.

That's what my game does. It prepares people to become essentially pit traders, but you could take those skills and move them somewhere else upstairs. But it was to teach the pit trading skills as quickly and strongly as possible to these new... Chris, this is your chance to hold up the box. Yeah. I do have a copy of the game right here, and you can... I'll put it up to the screen there. Chris or Tina, whoever wants to jump in, tell us what you thought. You looked at it.

You think it's fun? You think it's a teaching tool, a little bit of both. Where do you see it going? I thought, I thought it was very cool. So when we, when Steiner was teaching us, first of all, he has, Steiner has a good personality for teaching. That's first of all, um, you know, he did a few things to, to me and other kids out of college, I'd say, you know, first thing he, he broke down any kind of ego. Um, you know, my first, the first day I met Steiner, my first day of work, the guy I was clerking for went to the bathroom or something and Steiner, my first day of work, the guy I was clerking for went to the bathroom or something

and Steiner walked over and I talked like a valley girl. I was saying like every three seconds. And he looked at me and he said, are you fast track? There were two kinds of assistants at Susquehanna, people who were assistants for life and there was assistants who were fast-tracked to the treating role. And first I was shocked. I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe he asked me that. And I was like, okay, okay.

So I think that's number one, break down the ego, right? Everybody was a hotshot at high school and high school and college, right? They're all the hotshots, right? So now you have to come over here and you have to start from scratch um know that you don't know anything okay so so so in that sense steiner that's the first thing he did for me the second thing when we did mock trading was we so back then there were no random number generators until until ballot kinwood you know we would move the stock around and he would teach you synthetic relationships. And we had sheets, there was no computers. You have to learn, you know, put call parity, you have to do math in your head. Okay, the puts here, the stock is here, the strike is here. Okay, and the reverse conversion is here. What's the other option valued? Okay, here's the call spread. What's the put spread worth? Some broker comes in, ask for what's a box, whatever. Right. So that's, that was sort of complicated, but his game,

you can, you can figure out how to, how to trade and figure out expected value and a lot of different options things. So in this sense, there's a big market, I think, for people who want to learn sort of the way to think about trading, the fast paced nature of thinking. And I think this game simulates it very well. So I thought it was I thought it was a great thing when he when he showed it to me. And Chris, what were your thoughts? Yeah. So first of all, I'll just add because I agree with everything Tina just said there. But what I will add to it is when I saw it, the whole reason I went to the internet in

the first place is because I don't know thing one about investing. I didn't know thing one. It's just a really weird thing to say, but I the first place is because I don't know thing one about investing. I didn't know thing one. It's just a really weird thing to say, but I was a trader, but I didn't know anything about investing. And you got to remember, if you step into the pit at SIG, the first thing they teach you is like, everything's fair. Like, there's no edge here at all. Like, your opinions are completely worthless. The stock is this price. That's what the stock's worth. That's it's a very, hey, markets are really efficient.

Given that they are super efficient, what can we do in that context? So, you know, ultimately, I mean, they didn't use this language, but that concept that markets are efficiently inefficient is sort of what they were saying without using those words. So when I was came to the internet, it was, I came to Twitter because I realized I didn't learn, I didn't know about investing and I want to learn about it. So I started consuming blogs and I started reading Twitter and trying to figure out like, does this person know what they're talking about and all that stuff. And when I started writing, it was because it was that gradual process of bridging with the people on the investing side we're talking about

and the people that had come from this SIG or trading floor, not just SIG, but trader trading floor people in general it was sort of bridging book smarts and street smarts yeah and not i mean you know there's book smart and smart and street sort of people on both sides of that on investing and the floor but it was more of uh this this this concept of not having an opinion, like floor traders, not just at SIG, any floor trader at any firm, for the most part, is not getting married to a position. They are fluid. They hold their opinions very loosely. They update very quickly. If I buy this and then you reload to sell like a whole bunch more i'm very quickly like okay i'm wrong you you know like i'm i've been had so uh this combination of

two different ways versus say like maybe a investor who dollar cost averages a trader doesn't really dollar cost average like are you are you right? Or, you know, if you're wrong, then you should cut and get, you should, you should get out unless you have a good reason to think that you should add. These kinds of mentalities are very different. And so what I also saw in this game was a bridge to taking some of the things that live inside this game and bridge them to real world concepts. And so in addition to learning sort of the meta of how to trade, there's also, hey, this is, you've seen this in the wild and this lives in the game and you might not have noticed that this is in the game, but let's, let's highlight that. So that was kind of the other piece that I saw it as a cool way to maybe talk about some of the things that I've written

about that I've noticed on discovery of trying to reconcile these two points of view. And just quickly on those points of view, like both can exist at the same time, right? I can be like, oh, this energy crisis is stupid. There's going to be tons of uranium demand in the future. And I want to own as much uranium stocks as possible. I can have that view in a five-year time frame and be totally at odds with the trader who has a minute-by-minute time view and is getting sold into and says, I got to get out of this position, right? Which is what makes a market, right? That's absolutely right. I mean, a lot of it is what is your strategy and what are the inputs that would go?

I always have a thing I like to say that your dashboard should match your strategy. Warren Buffett doesn't care what the chart looks like. Yeah. And likewise, if you are an options market maker, you don't give a crap what that company's cogs are. Right. Yeah. So your dashboard should match what it's widgets. You mean like it's right. You don't even care what it does.

Yeah. When I first I mean, it's a little embarrassing to say, but for the most part, when I started trading equity options, I really didn't know. All I really knew is what sector they were in. I really didn't care what the hell they did, because to me, I was in a heads up poker game with the brokers that came into the pit. I don't care what the company does. I don't care what your opinion is. I just, you know, I didn't I didn't know. That's not you could have gotten away with that, I think, 20 years ago because the markets were wide enough today that you need to have a little bit more of a hybrid approach. It is much more common today that a market making group is going to have a fundamental research desk, if anything, just to make sure that their options traders have a solid calendar to go off of, which is super important, making sure you know when the events are, you know when the dividends are, you know when there's a

conference, you know when a peer has a conference, you need to know all that stuff. This was not as well fleshed out 20 years ago as it is today. Yeah. Which is another whole interesting topic of this, that whole thing, damp and realize all, if everyone knows all that stuff, it's like the surprises get removed from the market. So it doesn't get realized as much. But we'll save that for another day. So Chris or Tina, do you want to explain the game as you think of it, how it works and what the components are? Sure. So I think Steiner's used this example before. I think it's exactly right. You can think of it as a race that goes off that you can. You have your you have your ticket of what bet you made.

And everybody in the beginning starts with a portfolio. Everybody starts with the same amount, the same portfolio and same amount of money. And yeah, so the, the horses, if you just imagine a horse race goes off and some, some, you know, some, some of them go ahead and some of them are lagging and, you know, the ones that are lagging, their odds are dropping. Let's say everybody starts off equal and then some of them are lagging, their odds are dropping. Let's say everybody starts off equal and then some of them are lagging and their odds drop and some of them are going up and are taking the lead,

their odds increase. So the question becomes, how much do you want to pay for any particular ticket? So people can offer to make trades. I'll buy your ticket. Let's say, for example, when the game starts out, every horse is worth, has an equal chance of winning. And the amount, the maximum amount you can win is the winning horse is worth a hundred bucks. So if there's eight horses, every horse is worth 12 and a half bucks at the start. I just pulled it up on the screen here while we're talking about. Right, right there. So here you can see that, okay, so in this case, the red horse

has a, well, let's take the yellow horse and the gray horse are tied for the lead right now. And we know that they are going to move 28 steps or 30 steps, depending on which horse we're talking about here. They're going to move either one of those or they're going to be unchanged. So the question is, is how much are you willing to pay for the ticket for one of these winning horses? So these two guys are in the lead. And if at the very beginning, every horse starts at 12 and a half bucks in terms of expectancy, what are you willing to bid for the yellow or the gray horse right now? What's the right market for the yellow or the gray horse after we see them leave? And here you just ran it again. The gray horse has jumped out to a commanding lead of 151.

Yellow is now dropped to 93 and purple has jumped up to 125 to be in second place. So how much do you update Gray's odds of winning the entire thing? And at the same time, the number of periods is declining at the same time. So it's very similar. It's exactly similar to betting on NCAA tournament or who's going to win the Superbowl. Everybody, if we assume that every team is equal at the beginning, which we know that's not true, but if they were, everybody would start as one and let's say NCAA, everybody starts off worth one 64th of a dollar.

If we settle the contract at $64. So as people move, as teams move through the tournament, how do their odds change? And this is not just theoretical. This was betting on NCAA odds like this, trading NCAA teams. This was super popular on Wall Street, still super popular on Wall Street, not just on the trading floor, but the brokers on the trading floor would talk to the guys on the bank desk or the gals on the bank desk and say, hey, I got a guy on the floor that's willing to pay 14 for Kansas. Where are you on Kansas? I'm sure a lot of our listeners have done a Calcutta or anything where you bid on the teams. Right. So it's similar. There's a few famous Chicago.

I think the FBI came in and shut down the Merck one at some point because it got too big. Right. So I think that this is it's not that this is familiar to this will be familiar to traders, but it's put together in this very tidy package. It's got this great online scoreboard. It can support a lot of people, can play it at the same time. And then you have Steiner, who is an amazing facilitator. And this is something I really want to emphasize if you just saw this game on a shelf it might be you you need sort of a you might want a guide at the beginning to kind of get you started and steiner is sort of the perfect guide to start focusing your maybe start pushing you in the direction of what kinds of things you need to be thinking about when you

play a game like this and facilitating transactions, facilitating. Just like in mock trading, you would have everybody standing around as if they were trading options in a pit. And the senior traders who are running mock, they would come in and they would just throw out an order. They would say, hey, eight trainees who are standing in the pit here. What's the market in the November 2530 call spread? I needed a 500 up market. And the traders are going to make a competition. Who's going to be the fastest to make a market? Who's going to be able to price that thing the best? And the broker is going to trade with the best offer. Where can you price that thing so that you have edge and you still

have margin, but the broker will trade with you? If you are constantly conservative in the markets that you make, you'll get no market share. Nobody will ever trade with you. If you are too aggressive, you will get all the market share and you're going to be wearing them. So finding that balance. Which is similar to poker there of like if you play a lot of hands you gotta right you're gonna have a lot more volatility that's right and if you don't play enough hands the ante is gonna gonna gonna kill you i just popped in my head as i was looking at yellow here turning into like peloton or something did you ever think of it'd be an interesting case study right with your students

or something or in this new york weekend to run it with the colors and then run it with random stock names right and if you'd get a bias in there of like oh i want to own that i do have i do have an option if you explored up a right corner there with a little paw print. We can, you can make markets instead of the colors. You see the little paw print up there? Yeah. Nope. Next one. So you can, we could, we can make markets on ladybug,

dobbins, octopus. Yeah. It's sometimes it's more fun to yell out. How's the frog? Right. I'm 10 bit on the frog. Yeah. I'm going to fail the SIG math test, but why wouldn't I always just,

so this wager piece is like the volatility of it basically, right? How much it can move in the next round. Right. And I think I told you, I may have told Chris, Tina, at least, the only bias that's built into this is that the wager amount, as the person gets into like the higher your, your place, the lower the average wager is. So if you hit, if you hit advanced right now, you'll see the red who's in first place. He only wagered 23. Right. And then the people in the, in the farther, the farther back places they wagered on average,

they wagered a little bit more. So I've built in some. So they can come back essentially. Uh, yeah. And, and, and you can go, um, I've actually, it also built in like a little bit of a dead cat bounce, not completely dead. Um, obviously the yellow rubber ducky there went bust, but, um, I, I built it in so that you could bet more than you have. So that actually provides for a slight upward bias when the person is really, really low. So there's a little bit of personality built into it and a little bit of bias, but not to the point where anybody would have a substantial amount of edge. And then after watching a few simulations, it's almost negligible. And then confuse me the first time, this is just the random number generator, essentially what

we're looking at here. The game itself is the cards and the concept of trading back and forth on what the result of this random generator is. Exactly, exactly right. This is the race that you're betting on in the live setting by swapping the cards, which are the bets and swapping cash. And so who's the target audience? Anyone? Everyone? Or is it kind of for a bit of financial literacy? I'm not sure yet. I mean, as a teacher, right? I do like the game just to play it and to teach from it. But I kind of think it might be more for, I mean, what I'm really thinking is building a course around the game because it goes really deep. and understanding risk and measuring stuff like expected value and understanding market making, shorting.

I'm going to add options to the game also where you can trade options. Adding all of that, since it's getting, in my mind, so big, it's not going to be just a game. It's going to be building of like building entire course around it. And on that vein, do you think financial literacy, like how you see these high school kids, is that a problem out there? Do you think? Oh, yeah.

It's hard for me. Again, it's like I don't have a solution because it's hard for me. I, again, it's like, I don't have a solution because, so it's hard for me to be critical. Although, you know, there's, there's no, there's no, there's no stakes in it for, for a kid when they're doing a financial literacy course. Right. Like there, like there's some kids who are going to come in and get a lot of deep insight and understanding why credit card interest rates are so high, but most kids are just, they just want to know if it's going to be on the test and they just want to get through it. It's not, it's not applicable to their lives. I mean, sex education is more applicable to a teenager's life than financial

literacy. Yeah. But only by a few years, probably. Right. Yeah. No. So, so the, the, the testing of it, I don't have a good solution to it you know a lot of a lot of schools offer you can oh you can get through this course by taking it in the summer a financial literacy course in the summer you can take it online and that's gonna that's gonna satisfy the requirement for us teaching you financial literacy and the students look at it exactly like you'd expect them to look at something that's mandatory it's like right it's like you know what score do i need to get yeah and what yeah they have to go to driver's ed class in order to be able to go and take the test they have to attend the class but when they are attending that class they're not particularly interested in they just want to know what the

test is going to be and yeah and what the answers So the idea of teaching financial literacy, I think with my game, I can teach deep insights into understanding trading and Bayesian inference and financial decisions under uncertainty, things like that. But teaching a budget, household budget, oh my gosh, that's a snore fest for any teenager. Right. Like that's the, why do I need to learn this? What is this going to do for me? Yeah. Or teaching the value of compound interest. I mean, their thoughts aren't past the next like two months, maybe two years. And it's understandable, right? They're changing so much. They're going to be a different person in two years. So it's hard to capture that kind of, the importance of those things. And I don't have the right answer to do it. Right. And you could argue like, well, that was the game of life or even Monopoly or something like teach you not to spend all them, but they don't get it. And what are your

thoughts on the gamification, which has become a bad word in terms of Robinhood and some of these platforms where if you do an option trade and confetti goes on the screen and you did it. Right. It's just like, if you think market goes up by calls, if you think market down by puts. So yeah. What are your thoughts in general? Like, is that's the bad sort of gamification? Oh yeah. I mean, yeah, for sure. If I were to make a value judgment, I would say that that's, that's probably not the best, not the best use of gamification.

Right. But it seems like this, something like this could be like, Hey, here's how you can write a little tutorial game to teach yourself how to trade options or even how to trade Bitcoin or stocks or whatever the case might be. Yeah. Although there's not binary in that case, right? You might get out with some, and the other one is first, second and third. Oh yeah. That's another outcome for tickets for how the payoff is. Yeah. I don't know about, I don't know gamifying and hooking people into the, they're not learning anything. They're just getting the feedback and then, and then, um, getting hooked on the confetti and that, and the, and the, uh, roulette roulette wheel kind of thing, watching it spin.

And so we touched on a little bit, you're currently teach high school physics and some calculus and stats tutoring on the side. yeah it'll help anyone with any math or or physics so how are we looking for america's youth are we in good hands or are we are we dead are the chinese and everyone else gonna kick our butts um because you see all these test results and everything that we just keep lagging further and further behind but you're there on the front lines do you see that or no um i don't i don't i don't i don't see it honestly and my world is so small um compared to everything else i'm in a suburban

school with um uh with uh mixed a very mixed very very diverse group of people. And I can honestly say like the most, the thing that I feel more than anything coming from the students is just a profound kindness. And they're kind to each other and they're kind to themselves. And that gives me enough hope for anything else. But yeah, I can-

Are we all done? Like, where do they lose their way then, right? Like how do we become so divisive in the country if they're good at that level, right? Well, the academics took a hit from the COVID and the remote instruction and all that. That's making a comeback. Like the standard, you know you know coming back it's going

to take a few more years but that but that like i say that's the one thing that gives me the i think we're going to be fine because these kids all they're taking care of each other and they're taking care of themselves so um and like just like helping each other with just you watch them help each other with like math problems and you're like man this is this is awesome yeah they're they're you know they might not be i think ap scores i don't know if ap scores have really decreased as much for the pandemic which is a good i think that's might be a really good gauge to see how our education system is still holding up good i like it a hopeful message usually we have everyone on here talking global macro and the US is going to fail and the dollar's junk. Oh no. We have some awesome entrepreneurs and people who

think just like nobody else and just people who are not going to give up. I mean, that's what an American is. I mean, the typical American isn't lazy and dumb. The typical American isn't lazy and, and, and, and, and dumb. Like the typical American is someone who looks at a problem and says like, yeah, I can patch that and I can fix it. Maybe I can come up with something better and make some money from it. So you launched the game. Now you guys are doing a little meetup in New York city at the beginning of October. So tell us what's going on there. Who's running that Steiner? Yeah. So it's

going to be October 4th, 5th and 7th in New York city. It's going to be in Midtown. We'll reveal the location a little bit later to the people that are getting in. As far as, and when I say getting in, it's, there's nothing meant to be exclusive about it. It's just, there's limited amount of space. So it's not, um, it's completely free. Uh, there's a limited amount of space. However, um, we, me, Tina and Steiner, we will all be there. There will be a mix of, uh, veterans that we know from the business 20 years ago down to learners that are, you know, 18 years old that are on the internet and are just super interested in learning about this kind of stuff. And I want to just emphasize that it's a totally no ego, super welcoming environment. And we just, we want to,

we want people to have a good time. And we, from our point of view, we are trying to learn how other people can learn better. So this is the first time we're doing this. And we're really interested in if we try to approach a topic in such and such a way, is that landing? Is it not landing? We're going to get feedback from everybody. We would love to go out with attendees afterwards know go to a happy hour or whatever and just speak informally about it the experience and um you know to kind of be part networking part meeting people part playing the game part learning

um and it's just an experiment that we're going to see how it goes sounds like fun i might have to go um definitely it's gonna be in tina's backyard i think that's why that's why the numbers are sort of not literally uh and so and help me understand because i saw the video you had steiner of the the kids playing it and they were like 30 or some in there so if i have more than eight people it's just you can everyone gets more and several people can own each horse so to speak so so everyone starts with the same portfolio and as and so as many portfolios as you can print that's how many people can play any round of this game so i i'm really looking forward to some point playing this game in maybe a conference setting with 100 or more people. Yeah.

And like just one open outcry. I mean, you advance the game there pretty fast. But if 15 teenagers in the bottom floor of a library are going to be loud and jump around and get the game right away. It's with a hundred plus people. It's going to be the funnest, the funnest way to, um, I want to start using it on due diligence meetings of like, okay, we're going to get, uh, these five people, you got to play the game against them. And if you don't win, I'm not sure about an allocation. i'm not sure about your skill level

all right steiner last thoughts from you give us your pitch come out to new york oh yeah it's gonna be it's gonna be a party i'm so looking forward to uh reconnecting to these people in my life that are that were in my life um at that time and they were it was just so fun to to be with them so that's good that's going to be the number one thing and then just to have just to be able to play this game and yeah it's a rocking good time tell us about the hat mom of boys oh it's just um my my son had a party and somebody it wasn't a big party and it somebody left the hat on the counter and i saw it and and and i liked it so i i insisted i told my son before i take this you have two days to find the owner. Otherwise I'm going to take it. And I knew, I knew

he wasn't going to try to find the owner. So I took it and I wore it. And, um, uh, the, my, my girlfriend saw it and she laughed and I was like, this is perfect. This is exactly, this is exactly for me. Mom of boys. And then it begs the question though, did your son have a party with moms there they have like 30 moms at at his party i have no idea it doesn't it's my hat now and and uh but yeah if he had some moms over at her i don't know so be it uh chris last thoughts oh yeah so for me this is this is super fun to be doing this super fun to be reconnecting with this team. And, you know, my favorite thing in the world is watching people like get switched

on, feel unlocked. Steiner is a master of giving people that feeling. And it's a total privilege for me to be able to be a witness to that and to help facilitate it and help in any way that I possibly can and to meet all these people that are interested in bettering themselves and learning more. So I'm just super psyched to watch people get excited. Love it. We'll leave it there. Thank you, guys. And we'll see you in New York hopefully thanks Jeff appreciate it thank you you've been listening to The Derivative

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