Chat With Traders · Conversations With Talented Tradersin Stocks, Futures, Options, Forex And Crypto Markets.

There’s a very special guest on the podcast this week, who I’m excited to introduce… His name is Haim Bodek, although some refer to him as ‘The Algo Arms Dealer’ (and I totally understand why). Haim began his trading career at Hull Trading, a prestigious firm well known for driving forward innovation in the domain of automated trading. Following Hull, Haim then went into significant roles at Goldman Sachs, and UBS – which are all discussed during the interview. But to further set the scene, in 2007 Haim founded Trading Machines, a high frequency trading operation. At the peak, Trading Machines accounted for 0.5% of all options trading volume, with a team of 25 (one of who, was Bryan Wiener of EP 040). All was well for a couple years until the beginning of 2009, when Trading Machines ran into issues and began to bleed money, for unknown reasons. Until Haim later discovered, at the root of the problem were secretive order types being used by a select few firms, giving them an unfair advantage to front-run the o