BOGDAN STOICHESCU ALEXANDER HAYWOOD

TRADERS
OF
OUR TIME

Navigating the Market’s Impossible Landscape

Traders of
Our Time
Navigating the Market’s
Impossible Landscape

Bogdan Stoichescu
& Alexander Haywood
First published in 2025 by
Axia Trading Biblioteca
an imprint of Axia Editions Limited.
4 Endsleigh Street
London
WC1H 0DS
(www.axiaeditions.com)

Copyright © Axia Futures Limited and Axia Markets Pro Limited, 2025

Jacketed hardback ISBN 9781068661501

Unjacketed hardback ISBN 9781068661549
eBook ISBN 9781068661518

Bogdan Stoichescu and Alexander Haywood assert the moral right to be

identified as the authors of this work.

The authors and publisher hereby express their sincere gratitude to Axia Futures
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their invaluable support and contributions to the production of this work.

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M.C. Escher’s Drawing Hands © 2024 The M.C. Escher Company –

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 CHAPTER ONE

THE TRADING DESKS

A mong several London townhouses, each with its own colouring

and design, sits a particularly peculiar floor at 4 Endsleigh Street.
Situated within is a cadre of successful traders whose behaviours,
activities, idiosyncrasies and energies are detailed within this book, a
study of their experiences. Boisterous, loud and completely alien to a
nine-to-five temperament, these market navigators confuse and shock
the polite society of normal office workers.
Yet, the office is a misnomer. Trading is too embodied, too
physical to be relegated to a mere office—a stadium fits better.
The open-plan floor is instead a staging ground, a holding pen,
for the gladiatorial battles that inhabit it. Consider The Hero’s poetic
conclusion (Chapter 11): “If you come in here and tell me that trading
is sitting in an elegant office wearing a nice suit, and you just click
and pull money out of the markets, well, that’s bollocks. It’s not how
it works.”
These traders embody the counter-intuitive, of ingenuity and stark
doggedness. Or perhaps they are simply mad, that is to say, a-useful-
genius-mad, not Emperor-Caligula’s-senatorial-horse-mad. Certainly,
the space is enigmatic.The trading floor itself and the physical positions

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 T R A D ER S O F O U R T I M E

of the traders on it are as important as the people who inhabit the

space. Before we study the traders, we must start with the floor, which
is as important as a ship is to pirates.
There is no walking onto the first floor. Rather, you do as the
Romans do, and barge in. The act confers a sense of urgency to the
God(s) watching above: punish me for my many sins—but not sloth! As
you barge in, then, you notice that tall townhouse ceiling, the windows
flanking your left and right and the white walls splashed with murals
depicting sportsmen and the much-loved Mario Draghi. A reminder of
the physicality, the sport of trading. Then, there are the desks.
Each year, these desks experience a thousand triumphs, defeats,
comedy and tragedy. Perhaps the essence of the professional trader is to
ensure their career story continues as comedy rather than the other
ancient Greek favourite, which is far more numerous in this industry.
The desks are wide and deep and are surprisingly accommodating, like
a bridge should be to an earthquake, as they endure a flurry of foot-
stomping, a hail of fist-slamming, cursing, yelling and sarcasm. Upon
these desks sit rows of eight and up to sixteen computer screens. At the
side of the monitors are two mice connected to two separate computers:
one for trade execution and the other for everything else. These
computers are connected to battery back-ups that take over in case of
power failure. Dedicated ethernet lines lead from the PCs to the
in-house server room and connect to the futures market exchanges
around the world.
Like truckers whose cabins reflect their temperaments and inter-
ests, so it is for the traders, who often sit at their desks as if in their
second homes, residing there for ten to twelve hours a day, sometimes
in for the long haul if the situation demands it. Some traders covet
oddities like a poker-chip-themed chair cushion. The family men
treasure reminders of home. Others stack books and harbour neatly
arranged trinkets. Some have nothing at all. There is something holy

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 THE TR ADING DESKS

about the desk.You can do almost anything on a trading floor except

meddle with another trader’s desk space. That is sacrilege.
Then there is the smell, and its transformation is a keeper of
passing time as reliable as the tides. Cold air, caffeine and optimism
greet the morning as early as six o’clock. By midday, half of London’s
takeaways arrive through the door. But lunch is eaten at one’s desk, of
course; God(s) punish such indolent luxuries as going on a lunch
break. The air becomes a spice bazaar; the Greek loukaniko filters
through the air to meet the harissa chicken, the potatoes lined with
buttermilk and squash.The gorging of cheesy pizzas, in turn, overrides
the near-odourless poké bowls and sushi.The bins fill up, plates stacked
high, chicken bones atop. By afternoon, the locker-room smell sets in.
The stale air of food waste combines with the frequent emotional
turbulence, shouting, pleading and praying—bargaining!—matched by
the occasional solemnity of silence. This is love at first sniff, the waft
generated by red-blooded risk-takers, the smell of skin in the game.
And it is fresh, with a distinct lack of bullshit.
Then on a very special day, you barge in but feel ‘it’ in the air.Your
figure lights up, and your extremities tingle and become restless.There
is a current that passes through each trader, electrifying the room, the
culmination of a collective energy into which you just burst in to.This
is the anticipation before a big event, the feeling of witnessing history
in the making, as if standing before a great monument or a wonder of
nature. It is awe of the cosmic kind. It is intoxicating; you live for
it—they live for it! Yet, instead of feeling insignificantly finite in the
cosmos, it feels as if these events now revolve around you and the
traders, but as participants, not mere spectators. Ones ready to dive
into the volatile market whirlpool with only a jerry-rigged plan and
a knife wedged between their teeth. Mad.
But then—good God man, the sounds!—dings, pings and bleeping
alarms ricochet around the room as the flurry of news headlines

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 T R A D ER S O F O U R T I M E

hit, all coded to a specific auditory signal. And then the voices!
A disembodied robotic speech reads out important headlines while
various “squawk” services—humans—who hold watch over general
developments brave their microphones to announce the news to
hundreds of global traders. But… hopefully… do so calmly. Blurt
anything out, and the traders will dive back to their desks as if the
greatest calamity. “Why you shouting?” the traders yell at the voice
in the ceiling; nothing justifies the shouting, lest the market hears it.
And all of this cues a real crescendo effect—prices moving, headlines
dropping—dingding!—traders roar, the monotone baritone ceiling
voice recites the litany of surprise headlines—bleepbleep!—prices
explode off the screens—more stomping; more risk. Pingping! “ECB
sources…” The hours feel like seconds; then—silence. The final
reverberation of the stadium.
Then you realise that you are not among people who dress to
impress clients, to put on airs, because they have no clients; the only
real civilising force upon these traders are the markets themselves.
These are your spit-and-sawdust traders, one might say—and what
sawdust! Mountains of it produced after carving the nautical power of
this pirate ship. And this metaphor is apt as these traders burn with
fierce individualist streaks, many of whom dropped out of any strait-
laced corporate life or never entertained one at all. They are not
traders of grand financial institutions and pedigree, of massive pension
funds, hedge funds, and not your academically bound quant variety,
nor are they loaded with moral hazard—they eat what they kill, their
accounts have been grown from zero or negative; the trades are theirs,
and only theirs. A million dollars is a rounding error for an institution,
but these traders haul it in and keep nearly all of it, or as much as one
can after the taxman takes his cut.There are no mandates, committees
or assets under management; there is no hierarchy or separation

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 THE TR ADING DESKS

between an execution trader, analyst and manager. These traders

execute, analyse, think, react, risk and manage it all: individual free-
footed pirates on a common cause upon a very different kind of ship.
There are some fine institutional people in glass skyscrapers whose
smarts are, or perhaps were, propped up by the ‘Fed put’ and a decade
of quantitative easing, who have not likely heard of these good old
traders who form what we loosely term as proprietary trading firms.
If the institutions are the navy, then you are now among pirates.
Other institutions may look down on our traders with disdain,
those archaic, point-and-click traders—punters! So says he who bets on
horses, from aristocrats at the Royal Enclosure to the apparently igno-
rant plebian gambler at the muddy sidelines. The prop trader is the
everyman trader who is in the finance industry not through connec-
tions or hoop-jumping, and is not comforted by a salary and
bonus—there are none—but rather endures the snakes and ladders of
the brutally meritocratic financial markets—open to all, prejudiced
against all, yet survived only by a select few.
And few they are. It does not take long for the new entrants, the
new grads, the new traders sitting on your left and right to lose their
novice status very quickly, not through performance but through the
sheer act of survival.Those that came after are long gone, and that makes
this grad special already.Though tomorrow this grad may abruptly leave
this immaterial, impossible plane too. Feeling older yet? Thus it always has
been in our trading world, and always will be. If capitalism is “creative
destruction,” then welcome to the meat grinder. The veil between
normality and abject chaos is but an egg membrane. This is financial
ultra-violence, risk management as an exercise in pain management.
Consider, then, the gravitas cast by those who thrive in these little
prop firms. Because they are, pound for pound, the most complete,
direct, enduring and finest speculators you are ever likely to find. All

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 T R A D ER S O F O U R T I M E

the risk, all the reward; pure, unbridled, naked exposure to the market.
And in the nude, they are in want of nothing else.
Now, having learnt the ways of this trading floor, you still barge in,
and as you turn to your right, you spot the desks of The Godfather, The
Warrior, The Sphinx and Alex Haywood. You have cruised over to the
mostly Mediterranean side of the room—the global macro-news traders,
who specialise in fast-moving market narratives and possess the fiery
Greek blood as a temperament to match their quick fingers, faster thinking
and gregarious risk-taking. On the end of this assembly of desks resides
the runner—fresh-faced, eager—and sits right in the middle of the mael-
strom, tasked to deal with odd jobs in the worst of the volatility. But, as a
delight to the powers that be, all new runners arrive jinxed, yet we’ll leave
it to The Warrior to explain one day.The de-jinxing is a special process.
As you venture to the left side of the room, the climate changes
and the cooler Northern European part of the floor houses The
Engineer, The Hero and The Student. Their methods reflect their
temperament too.They are strategic, puzzle-piece-solving aficionados,
the relatively quieter and meditative traders who deal with the ‘market
profile’ and overt frameworks of operation.* They are the “technical”
traders—for the serious lack of a better word, and there is a dire need
for a new one. Nonetheless, the collective, yet occasional, roar and
cries of pain from The Hero and The Student pack a good punch if the
markets are especially capricious. And right in the middle of it all sits
The Collector, an amalgamation of these temperaments and approaches
that has created something wholly new!
A trading floor also reflects the specific edge and the approach of
the traders that inhabit it. The trading floor in Wrocław, Poland, is the
product of one man, The Razor, who painstakingly designed it over
four years, fusing his craftsman focus into the custom-made wooden

* Please note: “Market Profile ®” is a registered trademark of the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT),
as is “CBOT Market Profile ®”.

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 THE TR ADING DESKS

desks alongside the precision engineering involved within the sound-

proofed server room adjacent to the floor. This is perhaps the closest
to a pirate’s polite society; the building and office reflect it.
Here, the traders believe the Gods look the other way and that
going out for lunch is survivable. The smooth wooden desks sport
uniform eight to ten monitors and “silent-click” mice with exactly
replicated and neatly labelled computers. The wall art and peculiar
abstract paintings, the lights and the furniture are all handpicked by
The Razor. The smell: that of a luxury department store at all times.
But these traders do not burst through the glass doors! And they
forgo the long, trucker-like shifts pulled in the London office. That is
because their trading strategies are different. Some of the Londoners
wait upon news headlines, which have their own whims. For others,
to perform their methodical, market profile puzzle-piece assembly
requires long periods of observation. For the Wrocław floor, their
precise trades occur in specific market conditions. There is a time to
be vigilant and a time to stand down, enabling a relatively freer and
clearer routine. It does not make it easier, but the burdens are different,
shouldered better by some individuals—a topic we explore with The
Razor and many other traders in the book.
Finally, there is The Adventurer, who forgoes an office entirely, the
exception within this group, and who trades as frequently in hotel
rooms as he does at home. But not the beach—no one seriously trades
on the beach.
Whichever trader’s desk you whisk past in London, Wrocław or,
by the time of this book’s publication, Limassol, there is one particular
item that is visible on computer monitors and remains in clear view
of the traders, which speaks to its importance. It is what these traders
are all bound by, as much as they stare at it, for it is their mechanism
for operating in markets and sustaining their performance and careers.
It is a long and narrow grid-like column known as the “price ladder.”

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 T R A D ER S O F O U R T I M E

ORDER FLOW

The price ladder, or the “depth of market,” visualises the beating heart
of the futures market (see Figure 1.1). A row of consecutive numbers
sits vertically in ascending order, their values different per futures
market yet ascending in minimum price increments—a tick.
Side by side, this middle column features the bid and the offer, or
the ask, as it is to our American friends. The bids are another column
of numbers that descend towards the bottom of the screen. The offers

Market Price (Ask/Offers)

165.27 173
165.26 123
165.25 124
165.24 115
165.23 104
165.22 99
165.21 89
165.20 101
165.19 74
165.18 22
119 165.17
96 165.16
102 165.15
96 165.14
175 165.13
115 165.12
133 165.11
135 165.10
150 165.09
160 165.08
(Bids) Market Price

Figure 1.1: A price ladder of the Bund (FGBL) on the Eurex Exchange.

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 THE TR ADING DESKS

ascend towards the top as if hanging from the ceiling. The bid and
offer never cross paths at the same price; there is always a minimum
tick difference during regular trading.
The values of the bid and offer change per market depending on
various conditions. The New York Mercantile Exchange’s West Texas
Intermediate Crude Oil contract has bids and offers that are usually
in the low double or single digits. The Eurex Exchange’s two-year
German sovereign bond futures, the Schatz, featured thousands of bids
and offers sitting at each price during the Eurozone’s negative-inter-
est-rate era of the 2010s.
This is a visual shorthand for the immediate “liquidity” of the
market. The larger the numbers, the more liquid the market. Or so it
goes, since, as every participant eventually discovers, the depth, the
liquidity or the market’s “normal” behaviour is only there until you
really need it. Because when it really hits the fan, you will watch those
numbers evaporate to nothing, the bid and offer parting like the Red
Sea.Volatility and (il)liquidity have a fascinating, intricate, looped rela-
tionship. Which came first?
Yet this is only part of the story; the real action occurs by “hitting
the bid” or “lifting the offer,” and for a brief moment in time, this
activity consumes the liquidity at that specific price.
To lift is to buy; lift a single lot into a thousand lots sitting at the
offer, and the world shrugs in indifference. Buy a hundred lots into an
offer as thin as ten, then you move the market higher, trading the next
consecutive price, the next one and the next, eating all the liquidity
until you have your fill—ensuring a sharp and violent reaction. In
reality, that would be a disaster for the buyer, and they are usually
much smarter than this. Unless, of course, they are forced to do this…
but these special moments are for you to figure out.

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 T R A D ER S O F O U R T I M E

Nevertheless, watching the price ladder in real time reveals the

activity of thousands of participants jostling to trade in and out of the
market, all buying and selling for different purposes. Yet, eating this
liquidity is one half of executing in the market; the other is adding
to the liquidity to queue with your own bids or offers as you wait for
someone to fill you at a desired price.
Until the mid- to late 1990s, this activity was physical.The trading
pits like in London, Chicago and Singapore were full of traders
sporting bright-coloured jackets in tight spaces, executing orders
through hand signals, then relayed through others, shouted into the
phone and transmitted to the outside world.The pit traders generated
visible bouts of spontaneous action, frantic crescendos following
dreary periods. At other times, the market activity diffuses into slow
yet powerful one-way action or sharp run-you-off-the-road coun-
ter-reactions that all create flow—a tempo, a beat of the heart. The
personality, mood, fear and excitement is termed as order flow.
The electronisation of this process has created the price ladder;
panicked order flow is now a rupture of numbers sliding down the
screen rather than the frenzied cries of pit traders signalling to one
another. However, the cries are still there—only they are directed to
a computer screen instead of another brightly coloured jacket across
the pit. The order flow, the action on the price ladder, is still emotive
and demands an ability to read the story behind the numbers, a
powerful skill with a vast ceiling. And every trader in this book is a
master of understanding flow.
Watch a single price ladder, and you appreciate a story, but to
watch multiple ladders is to behold a saga. The convergence of
multiple asset classes and participants creates an interlinked market-
wide flow, each taking a cue from the other. Buying activity in equity
futures tugs on bond futures to trade lower, a seesaw of action termed

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 THE TR ADING DESKS

as “risk-on” flow. At other times, the opposite happens, and a savvy

order flow navigator must be a keen observer of keeping track of
market relationships over time as they change.
Sporadic lifting of Gold and Yen futures ripple into various bond
futures, allowing them to follow suit, unnerving the equity markets as
fast as they get hit: classic “risk-off ” flow. Other times, stubborn selling
activity in the two-year government bond futures outpaces the rela-
tively lagging thirty-year. This flow, known as ‘bear flattening’ of the
yield curve, is now a frequent occurrence in 2022 as the markets price
in central bank rate hikes—an attempt to grapple with inflation, which
has roared out of its generational slumber. All of this happens some of
the time, but not all of the time. Knowing when is another aspect of the
skill. Such are the waters navigated by the traders in this book.
Order flow experienced through the price ladders leaves a strong
residue of activity that indicates potential participant intent or reveals
those who are committed to their positions. They come in all shapes
and sizes: a cluster of lowly one-lot traders to the large institutional,
fund and commercial participants of different mandates and purposes.
In fact, the majority trades not for pure profit as we do, but to hedge,
that is, to insure against potential future events. The traders in this
book piece these clues together.
Larger participants who weave their oversized orders into the market
often create anomalies; they temporarily redirect the order flow like
water streaming around the feet of those crossing a river. Understanding
their tactics and adapting to them creates a game-theory-like
decision-making process. But then they adapt to you, to the market—
they have learnt your art of war; they have understood their Napoleon.
So, you must adapt too, and the cycle continues. The traders in this
book understand these opportunities. All of this is possible because of
the price ladder. It starts and ends with it.

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 T R A D ER S O F O U R T I M E

THE ENDURING

There is one very special room at the heart of 4 Endsleigh Street:

central operations.The Risk Room. And that is where Mario Kyriacou
is now sweating bullets. Hundred-thousand-dollar bullets. “C’mon!
What’s that!—What’s that!” Forgetting about all the others squashed
in that small room.
“When are these lows in the five-year going to break? Everyone is
piling in!” It is the night of the Federal Open Market Committee
(FOMC) press conference, and Kyriacou sits tortured in his chair. He
does not directly have a position on. He has everyone’s position on.
He stress-eats and pulls out some peanuts from a can.“You want some?”
Like the sports club manager who bounces up and down at the side of
the pitch, the man is possessed, because everything is exposed to the
market. And that is in the talent, the people, the traders, a special group
who are trusted with the fireworks but are proven to only singe
eyebrows at the worst of times, or perhaps lose just a finger or two.
Especially as tonight, Chairman Powell’s words schism the long-end
bonds from the short-end across the yield curve, sending interest rate
products and bond futures creaking lower. “But why won’t it break!?”
There is one aspect of the job, Kyriacou says, that his “risk
manager” title obscures, which is the repertories of roles it contains
and the moving and shaking it requires. Haywood and Kyriacou
both confer how even the proprietary firm risk manager had to
evolve from a faceless and placid spreadsheet back-office role as the
traders evolved too. Now the risk manager has to be a coach-men-
tor-fatherly-motherly-brotherly-Rolodex to dynamically manage a
trader at the right time, push them, pull them away—give them the
size if the time is right, and if the work has been done. And this is
one of the most potent and hidden ‘edge’ behind all the traders in

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this book. That is, for the firm as a whole to grow the trader at the
right time, it is not a formula but a deeply qualitative judgement call.
As certain military leaders have said—more or less!—strategy is for
amateurs, but logistics are for professionals. And Kyriacou knows
every nook and cranny of getting you that pallet of artillery shells
and all the way down to the cardboard boxes with your fresh socks
and pants.
But Kyriacou does not get out of his classic role! That is—In Case
of Emergency, Break Glass—the ceiling begins to rumble due to the
traders above, the market flow thrashes them around; you hear the
traders yelling, banging their feet as waves of buying upturn those
short in the U.S. Five-Year Treasury futures. “But why won’t it
break?!” And then you feel the mountain of computer screens making
the room smaller, the air of some impending doom, and Kyriacou is
telegraphing messages on a phone call or two, the ceiling still getting
pounded from above, as if the plaster is about to crumble. Tonight, he
is no less than Atlas holding up the very heavens of all the traders at
the firm. And now the traders send frantic messages from the gunports
above, but their screams say it all. “But why won’t it break?!” The
triage starts. “The Warrior… he’s down some, but that’s normal, he’s
accumulating… The Godfather played it smart and is buying the thir-
ty-year, but let’s see… Ok, The Hero recovered; his computer froze,
but we got him out…” Kyriacou’s finger slides down rows and rows
of traders, some green and others red: 12,403; 104,403; 234,130;
–30,501; –120,124; 76,540; –5,403… “eh, could be better”—even
from just reading the numbers, watching the markets and intimately
knowing the traders, he feels the situation out. “They nearly had us!”
But those damn Treasury futures finally released, and the traders all
worked their positions, some building on it, others scaling in—they
weathered the storm; their profits start to swell. The ceiling now

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 T R A D ER S O F O U R T I M E

ceases shaking; the risk room becomes a normal office again. But
these were just the first shots of the night, first blood. More is yet to
come… but that was… a relatively calm evening! The peanuts,
however, are all gone.

DUSK

The end then, the evening, is merely half-time.The trading floor exists
in a strange temporal and removed space, as it is always half-time;
evenings are half-time, the weekend, the month and the year. Bloodied
and bruised—Well, old boy, it’s only half-time!—and so the evenings are
like a temporary slump on the boxing ring corner stool as you spit
blood into the bucket and your cuts are prodded with cotton swabs.
Tomorrow, we go again.
So too evenings are done differently on the first floor of Endsleigh
Street. Some have their feet up, tilted back on their chairs, yet with
an eye on the markets. A few digest the day’s events, sedated in a
food-like coma. Some type up their journals to debrief the day or
message a person sitting four metres away. Because, of course, God(s)
hear idle chat—but the instant message is silent. You think to leave,
yet know that no one barges out of the first floor—only in. An abrupt
exit in a state of sorry, tears or fury is permissible, but to barge out…
relatively calmly… without compulsion… guarantees it happens.The
big trade that happens as you leave the room. Sod’s law! And slipping
out is your only hope. Others never say their goodbyes. To slip out
also ensures no one can ask you about your day. Endure a bad one,
and you would not want to talk about it. Tolerate a good one, and
you would not want to jinx it, another hedge of sorts—least those
above punish some degree of optimism. Our own Pascal’s wager, if

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 THE TR ADING DESKS

you please. Yet today, you take one for the team and leave first.
Remind them later to throw you a bone as you conjure the trade of
the year by your exit.
Speaking of teams, the trading floors are designed by “thinking
in teams”; its organisation, its training and design factors are all
organised around this principle.The floor is an amalgamation, pockets
of traders who are often the few survivors of their generation, of their
peer groups or graduate programmes, and they have often grown,
learnt and endured together. They bring a lineage of culture and
knowledge that has been transmuted over decades, like the physicality
of pit trading. The evolution of the market and the economic
environment drives the generational nature of how the trader
perceives markets as a product of the times. The slow, methodical
technical traders found their start within the doldrums of market
volatility in the mid-2010s. The news-trader origins are frequently
found in the days of the European sovereign debt crisis, as it
began in 2009, or the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–2009 that
preceded it. Spread traders, those who trade the relative value or
difference across the yield curve, likely grew up as traders at the turn
of the millennium, when there had been functional and dynamic
curve movement. Or they just traded any spread, really, anything
between two or more prices.
Over time, these small surviving tribes have amalgamated onto the
AXIA floor, whereby it has come into its own, fortifying it with a
unique identity. Such is the case of all trading floors as they eventually
add to it with a cadre of home-grown traders infused with this lineage,
only to later pass it down themselves. From tribe to kingdom, this
becomes the true measure of the value of a trading floor or commu-
nity—the relationship, efficiency and communication that goes on
between the individual parts, in effect, is a network.

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And it can also be assessed by real-time communication! Eyes in

the right place at the right time can make all the difference for the
team. The quick-fire communication between The Warrior, The
Godfather, The Sphinx and The Collector is as diagnostic for the health
of the team as it is to spread the burden of attention. Like the sailors
standing in an old galleon’s crow’s nest, the quiet of the Wrocław
trading floor is interspersed by a trader drawing attention to distinct
order flow anomalies that blipped onto the price ladders. So, too, the
very presence of other traders confers distinct advantages. In particular,
the feelings on a trading floor, its mood and atmosphere provide
important information to colour the story behind the price ladder
and the markets.
Moreover, the realisation of what is possible when the trader on
your left is trading a hundred or a thousand lots has been career-
changing for many who would not have believed it otherwise possible.
Ideas and practices, both good and bad, follow with its people; the
contact that occurs with new traders and the floor allows for bad
practices to melt away and create better ones. The durable ideas and
practices are re-adapted, each trader doing so in their own way. The
act of creation, then—the rejoining of the parts in novel ways—and
the efficiency and rate at which this occurs is ultimately the peak
utility of a trading floor or community and should be assessed as such.
That is, how well a trading floor stays ahead of the market’s evolving
meta-game is strongly linked to its fortunes. Or, in some cases, even
creating a new meta-game.
But it does not stop there! A floor’s fortunes are also strongly
linked to its future talent—not only its current—no matter how great
they are. Time will catch up, and if you realise you are in a demo-
graphic crisis then it is likely already too late. Hence—the training
room. Descend the flights of stairs in the Endsleigh Street office, and

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that is where you find a certain Richard Bailey, training those both
in-house and remote, supplemented by those like Eric Jousse, who
fulfil key mentorship roles. Here, all that is learnt from the trading
floors above goes straight into training the next generation of traders.
And this is a unique edge for this flagship career programme. It is
inexorably linked to a performing, dynamic trading floor, because the
training must always evolve too—it has to!—as it too is based off the
freshest, yet ever changing meta-game.
Bailey himself was already a senior and burgeoning trader at Firm
Y before The Warrior, The Engineer and The Hero ever set foot on its
floors. He navigated both the macro-dominated heydays of the Great
Financial Crisis, and later adopted the market profile and put it to
good use in the following years. Therefore, his wide repertoire is
perfectly positioned to train new talent, placing him within one of
Axia Futures’ most important roles.

DAWN

These traders certainly are survivors! Shipwrecked, as many of the

traders in this book passed through the gates of an older but now-de-
funct trading firm, referred to as Firm Y in their stories. Defunct as it
had transpired that management mismanaged—to put it lightly, pilfered!—
all of their trading accounts. Overnight, they were left with nothing;
some lost entire seven-figure trading accounts. But all traders now lost
the means to ever trade again. Nothing except skills, spit and No Plan B.
But then entered Kyriacou and Roger Carlsson. The saviour ship
on the horizon, passing by our stranded survivors, came in the form
of FCT Europe, a company with its heritage rooted in the 1980s
trading pits around the world—well-capitalised, serious, iron-clad

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credibility. These traders will not be burnt again! As it happened,

Kyriacou was winding down proprietary trading operations; Carlsson
wanted to move on. “Now you’re getting me back in again?” Just when
I thought I was out…
Yet immense loss tugs even greater opportunity behind it—as true
for trading as it was for the frantic blur that was to become summer
2016, a display of pure synchronicity and of immense trust between
strangers. The Warrior and Haywood only just met Kyriacou—perhaps
they could do something together, start something new? But within
a month, a promising but tentative, nebulous idea became the only
plan as Firm Y melted down.There was an immense chain of trust and
responsibilities; the traders rendered their faith onto The Warrior and
Haywood, themselves onto Kyriacou, himself onto Carlsson! And
standing before a new and tiny team of traders was the June Brexit
Referendum result. Mere weeks away! Crunch time to re-set up a
new office, paperwork, approvals, KYCs, phone calls, rent some office
space, fund the traders: Go! Go! Go!
It all coalesced into the week leading up to that Brexit night, with
the traders still fighting around in the markets, treading water and
fiddling with their monitors and desks. Did we make the right decision?
But it is now the eve of the Referendum! The traders are all
crammed inside a cupboard trading floor. Messy; cables, screens,
keyboards everywhere.
Bookmakers are offering odds on roughly a ninety-per-cent
chance on Vote: Remain. And financial markets have traded and then
closed in a way to imply calm expectations of the same. Such has been
the conclusion of its participants, and so they are all positioned this way.
It is now 10 p.m. in London and the voting polls shut. Preliminary
indications place Remain ahead; even Leave campaigners start to
concede. But the results keep coming in—

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 THE TR ADING DESKS

Surprise! Vote: Leave.

Cable! It’s going and going!—
1.45–1.40–1.35–1.30!
Reality suddenly and totally comes calling. GBPUSD, the collo-
quially named Cable—ruptures. It depreciates ten per cent in a matter
of hours. Still open, American equity futures are sharply sold off and
their bond futures aggressively bid higher in kind as “risk-off ” flow
hits the markets.
Yet European markets are closed. They need to catch up, to
re-price, and they will be screaming. Such will be the scene of the
Eurex Exchange 7 a.m. open.
Now this is our kind of trading. Seizing such an overwhelming,
opportune moment in time where risking it all is just too safe. The
rest is mere detail.
Because this is a moment where the markets have got it wrong—
very wrong.The market reaction is going to be general risk-off—selling
equities and buying bonds—as the calm certainty of last night has just
met an uncertain, Brexit-confirmed future. Your models and derived
rules ain’t going to save you now. Because we are trading an instance
that just broke all your rules.
So this is the play: simply the “open trade.” The markets, a variety
of them, are going to “gap” against the many who positioned for
Remain on the 7 a.m. open.They need to get out, or rush to hedge—
forced to act.There will be many market orders and few to fulfil them,
with desperation to trade before everyone else. This illiquidity within
a narrow window of time in which to act is grounds for financial
violence of the highest order.
A gap forms due to the pre-market auction, or “netting”—partic-
ipants place their bids and offers, and their aggregate subsequently
determines the opening price of that market. Often this can be far

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from the previous day’s closing price, and so a gap is formed. This is
not ‘regular’ trading as no orders are executed inside that gap. And
pressure on various participants will double again as a market can gap
beyond their ‘stop.’ These are automated orders that trigger an exit at
any ‘best’ price. Or rather, any price they can get.
So all their stops will trigger the first moment the markets open.
Shorts cover; longs liquidate. In many cases, their actual exit will be
well beyond what price they would have liked to exit. And in this fast
scramble, a split-second dash to chase best possible prices creates
opportunity. This is jet fuel for a one-way trip—isolation of an
instance where the markets can only do one thing before anything else.
And this opportune instance is what our little team of traders are
going for. But the “open trade” demands perfect execution, because
once the stops are cleared, the market can turn in but a flash: career-
ending. Yet they will still bet a career-defining moment where
perfection is but a minimum; it is their fervent duty to maximise such
opportunity that these wily markets have delivered unto them. But it
is also lost on no one what failure is likely to mean here. Because it
will be the proving grounds for the traders, Haywood’s thesis and
defence of the human, and Kyriacou’s entrepreneurial spirit, the risk
to start up again. It is the only time The Warrior, a dauntless risk-taker,
would describe anything as a “scary, scary moment.”
It is 7 a.m.; the netting begins.
And Kyriacou is shocked.
“They all have max size on,” he messages Haywood.
“—Yes.”
Kyriacou has cleared many traders over the years, but not like this.
These strange and salvaged traders are now risking many multiples more
on a generational moment on a comparatively esoteric pre-open trade
where God knows what’s going to happen after the netting completes.

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But do not be mistaken! These traders did not get here by betting
on any odds, but only on the best odds stacked even better through
their skills. And these odds are now obscenely opportune in their
favour. They have seen it before, done it before, believe in it—grounds
ripe for maximum conviction—so they risk the same in kind.
The netting continues. The traders have already placed their own
orders within it.
Upon market open they will have maximum, full-size long posi-
tions in the Bund futures, the German ten-year sovereign bond. And
full-size short positions in the Eurostoxx 50 Futures, a European
equity index.
But—
Bund keeps going! 200—250—300 ticks higher on the netting! The
traders keep dragging their orders higher and higher.
“Bund has gone nuts; stupidly high—do we bail? Do—”
“No. Stops have to be taken out on the open—one hundred per
cent—the shorts still have to cover.”
The bigger the gap, the bigger the stops.
Many other participants are in this netting too, all dragging orders
higher and higher in response to others doing the same, creating a
self-reinforcing vortex.
It’s nearly time.
The traders fall silent. They know that by the end of this morning
they will either come back as traders or they will not come back at all.
The netting ceases—
Market open!—
The Bund gap is now over 450 ticks wide! Gigantic. It blips higher
but then melts, collapses—then it white-boxes! A volatility halt! This
trading suspension kicks in when it all gets too out-of-hand; to cool
off—allow some ‘orderly’ trading to come back. The Bund effectively

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 T R A D ER S O F O U R T I M E

just collapsed straight into another netting phase, and no orders can
be executed until this phase finishes.
So you can’t get in, and you can’t get out. You are stuck with
whatever position you have on just before the halt. The white-box
will let you out when it wants to, your losses be damned.
The Bund keeps netting lower and lower; goes and goes and goes;
it is absolutely manic as it liquifies an entire point lower, a hundred
ticks. And this happens in mere seconds.
Christ! The entire team is long! They’re trapped! Who—
But there they are, sitting beside the charnel house. Singed,
battered, frayed, but alive. They grabbed what they could as the Bund
pinged over fifty ticks higher and got out before it reversed.
This was a raid. Such had always been the plan of the “open
trade”—get filled on the opening price and exit at a higher price
nearly simultaneously as the market jumps higher.
And their efforts were mirrored in the Eurostoxx. It gapped lower
following its own netting, and instantly sliced lower again as it took
out other people’s stops like a stack of dominos. The Stoxx trade
proved the more lucrative out of the two.
If the little trading team blinked and took little risk, the reward
might have been too small to resuscitate their careers. But, too stub-
born, if they overstayed their welcome and asked for too much, their
entire accounts would have been caught and obliterated in that
white-box. It all happened to be just right—from that morning’s trade
execution, all the way back to the improbable timing of The Warrior
and Kyriacou first meeting for a beer or two on a terrace in Cyprus.
Their old world had fallen; burnt, sacked… gone… but its few
survivors now made landfall. They started anew. And this little team
became Axia Futures, one all-in bet on a single morning. The day
demanded nothing less, and they answered in kind.

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So, eight years later, in a new city of their own, all of those in this
book are seven-to-eight-figure traders.Throughout the writing of this
book, they all climbed the leagues and added to their achievements.
Eight-figure trading years, multi-seven-figure trading days, the survival
of account destruction to account resurrection. All of them sharp in
their consistency—a few with no down-days for long stretches of
time, most traders with few down-months a year, and down-years
nearly non-existent. Their career equity curves snake upwards across
peaks and troughs as if gliding along the silhouette of ever-growing
mountains.
But they have only just started climbing, as they are emerging…
becoming.
And these are their stories,
their journeys of our time.

57
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