 Okay, hi Matt absolutely great to have you on I know we haven't spoken in sometimes but I do remember you very fondly from many years ago I think I had to look at 2017 that you the program. But yeah, I saw you came to mind because I saw it pop up on LinkedIn that you've you've just secured a new role. And I know you've had a few since when you would graduated from the University of Birmingham so I thought you could just tell us a little bit about what you're doing now and where are you I can see it's it looks a little bit warmer where you are than where I am at the moment so So what's going on. So yeah so I'm currently living in Monaco, working at hedge fund here. So I'm an execution trader. So, as you rightly said, when we first met I was at the University of Birmingham. I did my undergrad in economics, and then I did the amplify someone program at the end of my first or second year actually sits my mind which I think second year. And then following kind of going back uni and completing my degree. I then started on the grad scheme at Credit Suisse, where I was on the electronic trading desk, and then I spent three years there. I spent half in cash equities and a year and a half in listed derivatives. And then I moved to Barenburg, while I was on the high touch cash sale trading desk. I spent just over a year there. And now I'm a trader hedge fund monitor. Wow. There's a couple of terminology points there. You said high touch and you said electronic trading. So you're staying in the order of reverse chronological orders electronic trading at Credit Suisse what what is that. So yeah, so I'm not trading or low touch trading, especially trading through algorithms. The reason why it's called low touches. That's what it says on the tin. The idea is that the client and also the bank that broker want to get involved with the order as little as possible. It's supposed to be straight through process seamless. And you can kind of give an order to the bank to one of these algos and it will intelligently work it in the best way to, well, in a way to get the best execution. So, you know, it will have tried to have as little impact as possible and not alert market. That's kind of very generalized as many different algos that you can use and types of low touch trading, but it's effectively kind of giving the keys more to the buy side trader. And they can kind of have more economy and control of their order. Whereas high touch trading again, that's what it says on the tin. Very much kind of more personal and you'll have a sales trader who you will need to and you will physically give him or her the order. And again, it can work in any different ways, but the general high level principles that high touch trading, you'll have a lot more interaction with your counterpart on the south side. And low touch, it kind of gives you more control and you have less interaction with your broker. So in a low touch environment, where it's more algorithmic led, is there to work in that area. Is this where it's all people who come from a mathematical background programming background or is there a blend of different people within these teams. And so, for example, you know, ideas, economics university, which obviously is geared towards mathematics to some degree, but certainly not a STEM subject. And within the many different electronic and that's what I've seen across the city. You do have that mix and it really can vary massively the way that electronic and that's generally split out is that you'll have kind of a sales slash sales trader function. You'll have a quant and development side of the business as well and obviously they all work seamlessly hopefully together. But the quant and the development side of the team and naturally extremely kind of more technical and our engineers and computer scientists and they bill the product they build the algorithms, they back test the algorithms and look at data. All the time to see, you know, how they can improve the functionality of the algorithms, whereas the sales slash self data functions. Obviously you need to be able to understand kind of these technical principles, but you certainly don't need to have an in depth STEM background. I know people who studies history and the arts who will work on that kind of. Going back to when you were graduating. So, when you were first doing applications and things like that, did you have it in mind that it was trading you wanted to go into and then how did like the amplify experience fit within that process. I mean that fight that fight experience was definitely instrumental. I, I did have in my mind that I wanted to go into trading. But obviously, when you apply for internships and grad screens is often branded all as one global markets internship. So within that, it's not necessarily going to be trading. It could be sales, it could be structuring. It could be research done product. So, I knew that I wanted to do some more gear towards trading, but there wasn't really an option directly applied to, you know, get experience on a trading desk. And then at the time, my housemate had done the amplify seminar when you guys came to Birmingham mentioned to me is that you should should definitely check out this summer program. So I did and I thought, wow, that looks great. So came to do that. And then, kind of from there, it was, it was definitely the building block which I was able to then apply to grad schemes and further jobs from. And I think what so instrumental about what you guys do on that program is real world experience and you, you go away from that program able to continue your growth and journey on your own. And that's what I did. I actually remembered you telling me, well telling the class, how, you know, you recommend, even if you're just paper trading, keep kind of just a blog and a diary of exactly what you do, what your reason are to answer a trade what you'll stop. Like what your profit level is going to be what you're looking at what the peers doing etc etc etc. So that was something which I, well, so I cut forward a bit there but after I finished the program. I was like, okay, this is definitely what I want to do for a career. And all the real world experience. And when I say real world experience, I mean actual trading experience in live markets. All that experience then allowed me to take that base layer away and just continually build on it when I was back at uni. Obviously jumping straight into learning to trade is extremely difficult because it's such an alien world and there's. Can you hear that in the background? Good. Yeah, so jumping into trading is extremely hard because such an alien world is kind of quite tricky terminology and also just the various ventures extremely high. So it's hard to just jump in and get an understanding of course there are sources of information out there but also on the other side. And some of them are actually reliable so you don't really know where to start and amplify really does provide that succinct package of expert knowledge which allows you to understand what is going on in the market. So like I said after I left amplified I was like, okay, it's definitely what I want to do. So then I just continue to kind of trade my own book. And, you know, when you say that to people, people can say, yeah, but like we're students, we don't have money to waste or potentially lose what I'm not potentially you are going to lose money at the start. But but you don't need to have a live account, you know, you can have a paper account for, you know, I would recommend having live accounts as it makes it more real. But also, you don't have to have a large account at all. Start with like 50 quid or something and you know, I don't want to stand, you know, out of touch with anybody at all but most people as students can can find 50 quid somewhere. So if you if you really want to kind of start and get going and you know, that's what you have to do. And to cut it long story short, that really was kind of the springboard to my career. That's why that amplifier gave me the initial knowledge to kind of go and trade myself. That meant that I just had a constant understanding of what was going on in the markets because I was trading every day while I was at uni. So then when I went to interviews, I had an appreciation for what was going on. And that's extremely important when you apply because as I said a minute ago, it doesn't matter if you make all these money. What kind of the cruisers want to see is that you actually have an interest and you have a sustainable interest. And I personally think the only way to really stand out amongst thousands of applicants these days, if you're applying for a bulge bracket bank role, is to show that you're kind of a self starter and you've done something to really show that you're passionate and you want to succeed. It's very easy to even if you have a stellar spring week or internship experience at a bulge bracket bank, that doesn't actually show that you're necessarily going above and beyond. Yeah, it's great to get onto that, but were you just a seat warmer in that situation? Were you really engaged? And the only way to really show that on your TV and to see potential employers is to show what you've done off your own back. So like I said, after I left you guys, I kind of was training my own book and then keeping just a completely personal blog. It was almost just a blog, not even a blog. And then from that I actually started to build it out to more of a blog. So if I was thinking about a trade or I put on a trade for a specific reason or in a specific sector, then I would just kind of write a bit of a blurb about what I thought was the reason, motivation for that trade. And then I just literally started sharing that on Facebook to my friends, to which none of them even cared slightly. And which is what I expected, but it was kind of just, I was like, okay, well, it's just a good exercise for me. And after doing that, I then actually started writing for this kind of online financial media startup called Market Mogul. But I was doing that. So then kind of it was just anything in life, an incremental building block process. So I went from really just keeping a trade blotter to then kind of writing a bit of a blog. So then kind of running these articles for this online financial media company. Because obviously, you know, I just got more proficient and more involved and understood the market more had more to say. So then, even just those kind of three things I've just described, then when I went to interviews, I just had all of this kind of experience to talk about. And it wasn't conventional experience. It was experience which you don't need to have any connections or putting the door money to do like you can just do that yourself. Yeah. Yeah. What's your background then? I mean, where is your hometown? Where are you from? There's a slight regional accent there. I'm sensing. It's a tricky accent because I'm originally from South Wales, but right on the border with Bristol. So it's that beautiful combination of as well and West country accent with many people as far as it is. How many South Wales border Bristol people are there in Monaco? So having worked to see, you know, you graduated now four or five years ago now looking back in retrospect to, you know, the people who will be listening to this a lot of them are still in that undergrad phase. There's a lot of uncertainty. Obviously, we're going into an economic downturn or recession, and there's job cuts and, you know, this seems to be never a good time to enter the workforce. But looking back now that you've now taken a couple of steps down the path, you've worked at a few different places. What kind of like words of advice could you pass on to those people other than like kind of practical stuff that you've shared just from a kind of motivational or the cultural aspects of the different places where you've worked or locations? Yeah. Super important question. And obviously, aside from what I've already said, I think, you know, obviously at risk of just sounding like this is a generic answer and I will delve deeper into it to kind of justify it. The reason why networking is obviously just so important. And the reason why networking is so important is not necessarily, you know, like, I've been super involved with the graduate recruitment process. I've done lots of credits for these, and I've done lots of various kind of like to the point of literally meet and greet and bring potential spring week interns all the way through to actually training intern and graduate who have actually secured the job. You know, what I kind of always tell them is that, and what I always say is when you go to one of these events, you'll just get hundreds of LinkedIn requests afterwards. And that's it. And people think, oh, great. Yeah, I networked. Cool. But that's not really what it's about. It's the whole point of networking is to get a sponsor, right. And that's what everybody needs, like everybody, every young person needs a sponsor. And people are more mature in their career needs a sponsor. And without the sponsors that I have had, I would have had with no way of going to where I am now, like without the shadow of a doubt. And the way you kind of meet a sponsor obviously initially to network and etc. But it's just interacting on a human level. Anybody who is going to sponsor you wants you want really to know that, you know, what your true character is. So just really getting to know people on a human level, whether that's, you know, going for drinks or somebody or going for coffee or literally just having a standard chit chat with them at the water cooler. Like, that's really what you have to do. And that's really important. Your career is ultimately at the end of the day, if you're working 12 hours in the immediate vicinity of somebody, then you need to be able to get on with them. And, yeah, and the more you get on with them, the more successful you're going to be. And like I said, the sponsors that I've had in my career have 100% allowed me to move on to the next step every single time when I left Credit Suisse to go to Barenburg. I wanted to go to work on a high tech desk and my boss at the time who I'm still extremely close with, she gave me that platform and kind of gave me an understanding of all the options that I had. And it allowed me to do that. And then the same thing when I left Barenburg, people kind of knew that I was destined to work on the buy side instead of the sell side and I was supported to do that. And, you know, if you don't have the sponsors to do that and it just makes it extremely difficult. So that's definitely a sailing bit of advice, which I would just say is so, so key. And the other thing, which again I would always kind of tell undergrads is that you just have to really be sure that this is exactly what you want to do. It's absolutely fine to not be sure and do a spring week or do an internship and say, okay fine, it's not for me but I've seen plenty of people who do a spring week and do an internship and then get a graduate job offer and then they take it and you can tell it's not for them. And they kind of know it's not for them, but they stick at it they persist, and it just doesn't work because ultimately, this is an industry, but if you don't actually enjoy what you're doing then it's almost impossible to do this job because it's extremely intense the hours are extremely long, like the hours are extremely long, you know, that's just in trading. If you're working on the restaurant side then it's all this, all your life is, like, at the start at least anyway. So you definitely have to be sure this is what you want to do and this comes back to my first point of kind of being a South starter while you're at uni and getting as much experience as you can just through whether that be something as rudimentary as reading EFT or kind of reading Bloomberg's news articles or like, well look at Twitter these days, right, things with actually just such a huge source of news now which the professional community uses much as the retail community. Obviously that's partly driven by the fact that the retail community is now so inherently linked to the professional community, but everything is on Twitter. So like research reports are going to be on Twitter, kind of outlook pieces are going to be on Twitter from Big Bang, everything is on Twitter. So, you know, you can just get stuck in there for an absolute degree and then that will tell you whether you're interested in the industry or not by just actually having a look. No, it's great. It's great to hear because I think, yeah, testament to you for having that kind of curiosity to just persevere without having that kind of, I think people often have this false pretense that you have to come through this very traditional path to have success to land the role and then have success to grow within those roles but it's not always the case right you can hustle to a certain degree. And I mean, it's a very good point and kind of when I first, I kind of think of my career in London in two parts because that's what it was in two parts. But I think it's like this for everybody. When you work in May war versus working in the city, it's extremely different environment. And I say this, but it's probably not a completely apples to apples comparison because obviously I was on the grad scheme and I was in Canary Wharf and the early stages of my career then a bit later on when I moved to the city. But when you join a big bank grad scheme, a lot of people have come through that traditional part and you know, Bolshevik banks, I think there's eight or something right so like they're very small part of the universe. But naturally they have the biggest markets and budgets they have the biggest campus campus recruitment budget so that's what everybody's kind of drawn for. So on the grand scheme there, the paths are quite linear. And they are almost carbon copies of everybody else's part. Even though to be fair, the banks are definitely trying to improve this now and, you know, reaching out to non-target unions and doing more on that side to get a more diverse pool of graduates in. My point is, is that when I left Canary Wharf and I started working in the city, you realise how many opportunities have come about through the exact millions that you've just said. You just hustling and working hard and, you know, finding someone who might be a sponsor for you. And I actually know many people who literally got trading jobs because they reached out to somebody on LinkedIn and said, can I just have a chat. And then, you know, people assume that it's so hard to break into this industry, but a lot of the time we'll be looking for juniors. And it's hard to find them sometimes. So it's never going to hurt you to just reach out to somebody and say, can we have a chat? Because even if that chat leads to nothing in six months time, they might suddenly need a junior and they're naturally going to think, oh, I met that person. Yeah, they seem pretty bright, pretty keen. Yeah, it's like creating your own luck in a way. And it's like, there's a saying that I'm definitely not going to quote it correctly now, but it's something along the lines of creating your own luck is really just, you know, working, working, working, working, working. And then you end up being in the right place at the right time and all that work you've done prior suddenly pays off. But you just need to wait. And there's no such thing as just straight luck. You always influence the luck that you're going to get. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Final questions just to wrap up is that I know, maybe a few people watching this might think so doing the role that you do and as you've explained, what would be the skill set that you have. So if they were to simulate a similar path, what do they need to focus on? Yeah. So I would actually say that my number one kind of most necessary skill is just being able to read. And I know from other traders. And one of the traders I don't even mean execution traders, I mean, alpha generating traders, like many people quote that. Because ultimately, this game is just a game of knowledge, right? You don't have to know more than somebody else to know more than the other person is on the other side of your trade effectively if you want to win in that trade. And the only way you kind of assimilate that knowledge is through reading. And that can be, you know, immediate news like red headline on Bloomberg and Askall or a research report from a bank or anything on Twitter, or a short seller report or anything. But that's the key point. There's values to be found in so many different sources of news these days that you need to quickly be able to run through something and run a comprehension on it and digest that and have an opinion on that. And it's just so important and the more you read and more news sources and you can see them more likely to you're more likely you are to be successful. So, you know, like I just said a minute ago, it's not even just the immediacy of reading something and acting on it, it's about just understanding the whole network of the market and some contextual nuances of the market. And again, you only learn that from reading, reading about them, whether you know it's obviously people comparing the situation in the market today and the inflation scenario to what happened in the 70 and there's great value to just looking back at financial and economic history and seeing how that played out and seeing how the Fed reacted and seeing, you know, how the Fed might have done this better or done this wrong. And when they did this wrong, this happened. And history doesn't repeat but it often does rhyme. And you've seen myriad graphs in the last kind of year people comparing the market today to 2001 and 2002. So there are big similarities to be seen. So, it's just having that constant awareness of what's going on, what's going on, what's happened before, what's going on now, then hopefully in turn come out what's going to happen in the future. So reading is definitely kind of my number one tip. So number two is kind of more of a soft scale, but, and I sort of Ray Dahlia actually said this, but to be a good trader you have to be resilient because you're going to get hurt, you're going to get pretty bad a lot before it starts getting better. You know, as many things in the market, people always end up selling at the bottom. So, you know, when you're in the darkest hour and you think, oh, this just isn't for me, I cannot get this right. You just have to do that and have that resilience. Is that resilience. Did you have that resilience already because I know you used to play a lot of sport when you were younger. So is that from that or can you learn resilience. But again, I personally have the opinion that you can learn anything. If you kind of have just the right dedication and on the work ethic. And this brings me back to my point of what I said earlier, you have to actually want to do is you have to actually enjoy this because if you go, then it's super hard to be resilient because you're like, I don't even really enjoy that this much. What's the point? Whereas if you know for certain that this is what you want to do and you're absolutely sure of that, then it's almost like you don't have another choice. Like it doesn't matter how bad it gets, how much money you might lose or how stupid you feel because of the decision you've made. You're like, well, there are no other options. This is exactly what I want to do with my life. So I just have to get up and go again. Cool. Well, look, we'll wrap it up there. It's been a pleasure to catch up with you. It's amazing to see the success you continue to have. And I know there's many more turns in the road, I'm sure to come, but thank you very much for taking the time out to speak to people who were exactly like you were a few years back. So it's so valuable, I think for them to see, you know, success in different ways. So thank you, Matt. Thank you.