Our next guest was a philosophy major and a magician before he ever considered trading in the stock market. In Part 1 of our talk, he describes how philosophy and psychology determine his firm’s decisions and the story of how he started trading in a small town in Pennsylvania.

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In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

On the 20th Anniversary of Scott’s firm, he looks back on how it all started.
Scott’s life as a magician and how the principals of magic influences his perspective on trading and the market.
How he became a philosophy major and how he applies philosophy to trading and everything his firm does.
How he started trading in the market, getting a group of his college friends to take out cash advances on their credit cards and investing it.
The Austrian perspective on economics that his college was well known for.
How he educated himself in futures trading and invested long before he ever met another trader.
Scott’s initial lessons learned from trading in the stock market; how he lost almost all of his capital in one day and had the first sleepless night of his life.
How he made the mistake of investing in coffee and cocoa in the late 1980s and what he learned from that experience.
How he started his first firm in 1989.
How Scott traded while living in rural Western Pennsylvania.
How a philosophy major with no connections to the financial world used his network to find a mentor.
The story of Scott becoming a principal at one of the biggest short-term CTAs in the world.
The story of Dominion Capital Management, which he started in 1994 by moving to Chicago.
Why he is based in Traverse City, Michigan.
How his firm is a bit different and why they don’t have any mathematicians or scientists on their team.

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Resources & Links Mentioned in this Episode:

Learn about the Square of Opposition that Scott explains in the episode.
In Scott’s first job at a firm, the company hired people belonging to Mensa.
Learn about how trading was conducted and firms operated before the use of personal computers and the Internet. Scott’s firm had a VAX computer.

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