Roman Vishnevsky biography. How much did the “stars” manage to earn on Forex and how did they do it?
founders, United Traders 04.06.2016 18:36
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If you enter the phrase “United Traders” into a search engine or on a YouTube channel, the algorithms will produce an unexpected result: serious video tutorials on active day trading in the US market or detailed analyzes of interesting transactions will be side by side with shocking rap-style clips, videos with Dzhigurda and someone dressed as a bearded mafioso “Trader Sea Buckthorn” throwing dollars from the window of a brand new BMW. Behind the creation of all this disparate content is the same group of traders.
Shocking behavior is in the blood of the guys from United Traders, which sometimes does not quite fit in with some of their more serious business areas (like their own profitable hedge fund). However, this does not prevent Roman Vishnevsky, Dmitry Belousov and Anatoly Radchenko, as well as their team, from building, perhaps, the most famous prop trading company in Russia. The founders of UT spoke to Financial One about how they manage to entertain the public while remaining professionals in their field. The interview was in the first issue of this year.
: Roma and I worked as traders in a Canadian company. Its representative office was in Moscow, and we traded American stocks. Meanwhile, Anatoly Radchenko, while in St. Petersburg, was doing the same thing, only in the representative office of an American office. Our company was called Swift Trade, the other company was called Dimension Trading Group.
It was subsequently bought by an American prop company. Now she is famous for making the Blackwood platform, which is now called Fusion. We worked there for literally a few months to understand that we are great (laughs).
: And it took me two years to understand that I was great.
Belousov: It took Roma seven months. I think it turned out faster thanks to perfectly streamlined business processes in terms of training new traders.
To set off on a further voyage together, you need to understand that the person can be trusted. Dmitry and Roman, how did you do it?
Belousov: We were just seeing each other off at 12 o’clock at night after work (laughs).
Have you discussed what other strategies can be used?
Belousov: No, we didn’t discuss anything. Roma simply treated me to different dishes: either swordfish or duck in grape sauce. So I realized that it is very beneficial to be friends with Roma. Roma knows restaurants.
How did Anatoly appear in this story?
Belousov: We looked for traders in any way. Having exhausted the resources of Moscow, as it seemed to us then, we gathered everyone we knew - about 15 people - who traded on the NYSE. Then we went to St. Petersburg to meet its best traders in order to recruit them. But then they were not interested in anything other than eating delicious food and having fun.
Anatoly, is there a difference between Moscow and St. Petersburg guys?
Radchenko: They arrived terribly pretentious, arrogant, Moscow. At that time I was not at all ready for such communication. In general, the first meeting was not very successful. Nobody understood anything.
Belousov: The result was negative. Anatoly and his comrades did not become our traders. We didn't start collaborating. But everyone remembered each other.
Radchenko: After a few months, the company through which we worked in America stopped providing us with good conditions for trading the so-called closing auction. Already at that time, this strategy worked worse than before, but still brought in good money. And I asked the guys if they had the opportunity to let us trade it.
: In general, we gave them money...
Radchenko: No. We gave you the money. And you gave us the opportunity.
Vishnevsky: We started collecting all traders of different stripes and strategies and began to learn how to work with them. That is, some needed closing auctions, others needed low commissions, others needed more buying power, and so on. This is how United Traders was born.
How many traders do you think in Russia now trade in America?
Radchenko: Do they trade or earn money? These are different things.
Belousov: It's not as obvious as it seems. People have been trading for years, they think they are making money, but they cannot be considered professionals.
Okay, how many first and second?
Vishnevsky: Those whom we consider traders are 200-300 people. This is probably even true if you count people in teams.
Radchenko: Traders don’t just appear. All traders came through Swifttrade, our company or Gerchik’s company. There were only three points. And they released a limited number of people. And those people who got in and managed to develop at the most favorable time - 2003-2005, and then in 2007-2011 held on and maintain their trade at a certain level, are no longer there.
They are added only as you study with us. When UT appeared, there were a huge number of companies that seemed to offer the same services: professional prop trading in America and professional training. Although, in principle, they were a class lower.
Vishnevsky: We outlasted all our competitors.
Belousov: You knock on the table! In general, we rarely pay attention to those who have achieved results in the Russian market. We have virtually no interest in those who trade Chicago futures. And they are the majority. One way or another, there are from 300 to 1000 “American” traders in total. We will be burned at the stake if we say that there are more than a thousand such traders in Russia.
When teamwork begins, when responsibility arises not only for oneself, but also for one’s business, new problems arise. What was the most difficult thing after you joined forces?
Radchenko: The most difficult thing was to study. We understood how to trade, how to work with traders, what they needed. It was necessary to hire people, build relationships. I think this was the most difficult thing, because we did not have such experience.
Vishnevsky: The hardest thing was not to screw it up.
What do you mean by this concept?
Vishnevsky: Working with traders involves big risks. Many companies fail because they do not know how to monitor risks. At some point, a trader may lose much more than risk managers think.
Who took care of the risks?
Vishnevsky: Historically, Dima cared about risks.
How was the history of the division of functions and powers built?
Vishnevsky: Tolya became our preacher. He opened America to people - no joke.
Radchenko: I am the first person to do a series of webinars where a professional trader spoke in professional language about the professional market. No one had done this before, so the audience quickly became interested. I remember that there was a limit of 300 people in the webinar room. People wrote to me asking me to open it earlier, since they couldn’t get in due to the limits.
I did my first webinars without video, and for some reason everyone thought I was 35–40 years old.
Which one of you is the oldest in the team?
Vishnevsky: The eldest is our first risk manager. He's no older than 40. He looks good.
What is UT's goal? Earn money?
Belousov: It is comfortable to develop any business within the framework of the existing structure. This business is now in finance, but sooner or later it will begin to revolve around anything. Now Roma and I were discussing the magnetic levitation train Moscow - St. Petersburg. An hour and a half before Moscow... Or landing traders on Mars.
Radchenko: One way or another, of course, the goal is to earn money. For a trader, the most important motivator is money. Recently Dima wrote me a letter, where the first sentence was: “The main thing is that we want to make money.”
Belousov: This is taken out of context. In general, we discussed the 2015 conference of NP RTS “Russian Financial Market: A Look into the Future.” There was no phrase that someone wanted to make money. All participants seem to be embarrassed or have forgotten the priorities of the companies they work for. As part of our investment objectives, we want to earn money without deceiving anyone and by doing large-scale projects that, perhaps, will remain in history.
In a situation where you quickly achieve results at the beginning of your career, you get the feeling that you are your own authority and there are no people from whom you can learn. Who motivates you, who can you consider your teachers?
Vishnevsky: I just like people who have built global businesses. It is difficult to single out a specific person. If we take the Russian ones, then I am very impressed by Galitsky, because despite everything that exists, he built an excellent business. He is the only oligarch from the top 20 who made money in the most white and clean way possible.
Radchenko: There is very little relevant information about how a person achieved something. All the people who could become an example are people from the 90s in Russia, who, one way or another, by chance, selling patches or computers, are now at the helm of the largest banks or state-owned companies. For example, you can say that I am motivated by Tinkov, or Gref, or someone else. But there is no exact biography or data on how they got there.
In general, any success stories motivate. I don't like to take American stories, since the reality in Russia is very different from what they have there. You could say that Richard Branson motivates me, but he motivates me in the same way that a new issue of your favorite magazine or a new video on YouTube of the channel you subscribe to motivates.
Therefore, I can say that they are strongly motivated by their successes and the successes of the company. In general, trading is such a philosophical thing, when you constantly analyze yourself, you learn more about yourself. When you understand where you are wrong and where you are doing well.
Who can you call your teacher?
Radchenko: I had a good teacher in elementary school.
Vishnevsky: I taught physics masterfully.
Belousov: I have a hockey coach.
Vishnevsky: But we learned from our mistakes.
And by communicating with people who are on the market, we come to the conclusion that we will have to do it ourselves. Because the person who knows how is either in great demand or does something of his own.
I watched your channel on YouTube, you have quite provocative videos. Why did you decide to promote your brand this way?
Belousov: These are not well-thought-out steps. This is just a video we made for fun. We think this will attract the attention of those who think like us. But we didn’t think through that it would attract so many people. These were chaotic marketing campaigns.
Successful?
Belousov: Unfortunately, we do not know how successful they were in terms of the final result. But they are definitely successful in terms of recognition.
They write different things about you on the Internet. How do you feel about different opinions and statements about yourself?
So you think that people just make things up?
Vishnevsky: They started making up stories about us when I was still in college. That we have a secret investor who sponsors us.
Belousov: That Roma’s parents are from United Russia and they are promoting their son. We are engaged in training, and this is not typical for companies that make money from trading. Therefore, this breaks the mold of ordinary people and professionals who do not know us... We simply strive to develop not only as traders, but also as entrepreneurs.
Radchenko: There is a demand for training. And from the very beginning, people began to ask us to train them. It would be strange to send them somewhere else, considering that we already trained prop traders. If we even take private traders-teachers, private managers, then due to the low regulation of the market there is a lot of fraud, deception, and people were deceived so often that it is easier to keep in mind the idea that in general everyone is a deceiver.
Prop Traders United Traders
Do you have any desire to somehow separate yourself from those who offer obvious fraudulent schemes?
Radchenko: Again, people can associate us with scammers only due to low literacy in terms of trade. That is, if he traded on Forex once and was deceived there, for him both the CME exchange is Forex and the NYSE is Forex. He doesn't know how to check whether he hits the market or doesn't hit the market. If a person uneducated in finance trades on the real market or forex, the broker will still be at fault.
Radchenko: I’ll tell you about my course. We've had it for two months. Lectures are given during the first month. Then comes practice, familiarization with the terminal. After this, as part of the training, we offer an account from the company, which future traders begin to manage, and if they succeed, then after that they need to go through certain steps, and we increase this account and risk limits. This is the know-how of a prop trading company. Ultimately, students have a chance to grow into our fund managers (Bloomberg: KVABLCK: KY)
If they fail, we give them the opportunity to prove in UTChallenge that they understood everything and are developing further. That is, the support does not end if a person needs a year - he will study for a year. The biggest problem for beginners who come into the market with a small amount of money is that they want to make millions with only $3-5 thousand. They cannot build a systematic development in order to ultimately arrive at this amount. They feel like they have to earn this money in one day.
Most likely, by increasing the risks for this, they will most likely lose their money. As part of the training, a person understands how much one can earn in the market, where profitability comes from, what supply and demand are. Such basic things are not some kind of surrealism like the Fibonacci line.
How much do you need to trade per day to make progress?
Radchenko: It’s like everywhere else. Professional trading is like professional sport, it’s like becoming a good lawyer. Preferably, of course, all day long. There is a “10 thousand hours” rule, which, in general, can explain everything. If you do something for a very long time, you will achieve average competence. Everyone wants to come and in a few months become that person who sits on the beach with a laptop, presses buttons and earns unlimited money. It’s just that for some reason marketing in this industry has developed in such a way that many people come for the sake of easy money. Sometimes you are lucky, there are good deals, but if you want to stay here longer, you will have to work very hard.
Do you have a hobby? What do you do in your free time?
Belousov: Lately the lights haven’t been going out in our office.
Vishnevsky: We have a new trend. In the world the trend is for a four-day working week, in our country the trend is for a seven-day one. If you come to our office on Saturday or Sunday, then with a 90% probability there will be someone working for us. And we are here seven days a week too.
No time left?
Belousov: I play hockey, but for the last few months I haven’t had any time for it.
Radchenko: Our company plays football on Fridays - a kind of team building. I have verified from my own experience that all psychological problems, if you do not play sports, cripple you more. The simplest thing is to come home after a hard day and run 5–10 kilometers. Such traditional good prevention, so as not to go crazy.
Are you scared of going crazy?
Radchenko: No, it’s not scary. I have been trading for 10 years, and during the development stage there were ups and downs, and these swings of joy and disappointment, they are, of course, very difficult. Not every person can handle this. Therefore, it is possible to go crazy in the market. Everyone associates the stock market with people who jump out of skyscrapers.
Vishnevsky: Recently a man worked at a startup, found out that it was all fake, and shot himself. And he worked for six years and believed that this was all real.
What books do you read? Perhaps you study from books or just love fiction?
Vishnevsky: I’ve been reading articles on a variety of topics lately. About social trends, about financial development, about business.
Belousov: We have a whole library on our shelves - this is what I read. There is both business literature and a little bit of fiction. The library is thinning out very quickly as staff clear out.
Radchenko: And I read the news. The news flow is increasing every year. There is more and more “noise”, it is more and more difficult to find any relevant news that can be used in trading.
Belousov: Books on psychology have recently helped me a lot from a marketing point of view. All marketing is based on psychology. Business books only cover the consequences; they never get to the physical causes, which start from chemical processes in the head and end with the purchase of a specific product.
What can you recommend?
Belousov: Probably the most powerful impression this year was “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. This book talks about the structure of any human habits. Starting with alcohol, ending with regular evening reading of a book. Describes how retailers predict future customer purchases. By the way, these methods came to retail from Wall Street. Every entrepreneur needs this book to understand how their customers develop the habit of constantly interacting with their business.
I really like taking business ideas from other industries. It’s interesting to take something from online games and repeat it in finance. At the NP RTS conference, the possibility of purchasing financial products through an application with one button was just discussed. Although all this has already been done in other businesses - for example, in the game Angry Birds. Everyone is trying to make Angry Birds on the stock market. Studying other industries will allow you to make a breakthrough in yours.
Vishnevsky: We are telling this because, in addition to trading, we have five more main areas: traders, a service for servicing traders, a training service, a hedge fund and another very promising project - a competition for selecting traders. This is an automated system that allows us to screen out a very large number of applicants for the position of trader in our company. This project is called UTChallenge, which has already been mentioned.
What percentage of people get to you?
Belousov: One out of 20 passes the first stage of trading on a real account. And then you have to go through five more steps.
Vishnevsky: That is, the system is structured like this: the applicant selects the market in which he wants to develop, pays for participation in the selection, and then trades on the account for 20 days. The system monitors how he trades, and if he complies with the parameters that we set, and sufficient profit is made on this account, then the next day he receives a contract with a login and password from the real account. This is how you can start trading and make a profit.
How do you apply advice from psychological books in life?
Belousov: Robert Cialdini’s book “The Psychology of Influence” describes research that is applicable to both business and private situations. This includes the availability of certain items on the menu. For example, the fact that people are scared by the choice: in a high-level restaurant the menu fits on one sheet of paper, in a restaurant in a residential area you see a huge book.
Vishnevsky: Or simply: if there is no “spend all the money” item on the menu, then you will never get a client who is ready to spend all the money and thus increase the average bill.
Radchenko: In any restaurant there is a bottle of champagne for 50 thousand rubles. It may not even be on sale. But there is a theoretical opportunity to buy it.
You read books and study on your own. Do you have any desire to go and get a traditional education, such as an MBA?
Belousov: We and the people we work with are moving towards applied goals. We don’t have a goal to get a crust and then somehow monetize it. We first think about what result we want to achieve.
Radchenko: In my opinion, the greatest value of an MBA is case learning. You analyze a specific case, work in a team. But the theory is in books and on the Internet. Every day we have a huge number of cases at work that need to be solved somehow. And what worked there may not work here. All the same, you will have to solve your case yourself.
Belousov: Actually, we are learning. The same book by Duhigg was recommended to me at a seminar on product metrics. If any problems or knowledge gaps arise, we first try to fill these gaps with the help of publicly available information on the Internet. Then we look among our friends and colleagues. For example, we found a person who is strong in game design. You are well aware of how terrible trading platforms look. That is, if you make the design the same as Angry Birds, then people will come.
If we talk about trading, then in 2012-2013 we had the task of making friends between manual traders and algorithmic traders. Then we collaborated with Arsen Yakovlev. His guys (NES teachers) gave us a short course on financial mathematics. It became clear that this was not enough.
We hired a teacher from the university and studied for several months. It is impossible to teach a trader mathematics in a few months, just like programming. But we have achieved that traders, mathematicians and programmers now speak the same language. This investment of time and money has already yielded results.
Vishnevsky: I took courses on legal aspects, running a business in the IT field, protecting personal data, and storing it. These topics are now being introduced and developed, but no one yet knows how to handle it. Of course, you can hire all these people, but it will be very expensive.
Belousov: In general, we come to the conclusion that it is impossible to effectively manage people without at least superficial knowledge of what they do. Maybe we are bad managers, or maybe there is no other way. We have been developing software for UTChallenge for five years now. And we come to the conclusion that the more we understand what the team does, the more effectively we manage it.
How do you divide your responsibilities?
Vishnevsky: We sit down and come to an agreement.
Can you argue about related responsibilities? When did someone leave something unfinished?
Vishnevsky: We don’t swear, but we express constructive complaints.
Belousov: This is a trading trick. People quarrel because of inconsistencies in expectations, and when a conflict arises, they cannot yield to each other. A trader trains the skill of yielding from the very first day. When the market acts against a trader, he must give in to the market. Either he is no longer a trader, he is bankrupt. And this is really trained and transferred to real life. People who go bankrupt at the age of 40 and jump out of windows are not traders, they are those who spent their whole lives wonderfully going to the top, but at some point they were cut off. And a trader is someone who is used to losing a thousand, earning a thousand, then 100, 200, a million. He is already prepared that at the age of 50, 90% of what he has achieved may evaporate.
Don't you want stability?
Belousov: We started doing a service business, rather than just trading ourselves, precisely because of the desire to achieve stability. Business at that time seemed to us something more stable than trading. In fact, we realized that everything is the same. You assume a risk, take a certain number of actions, achieve either a positive or negative result, or something in between.
Radchenko: Trading taught us that you can ensure stability for yourself by earning a lot in one month, and earning nothing in others - that’s your average income.
What if the month doesn’t come when you earn a lot again?
Vishnevsky: So it won’t come...
Belousov: In general, the fact is that we do not strive to earn a lot at the moment, either in business or in trading. We strive to be prepared for profits to come before expected. For example, we earned 10% in the fund last August. This is an abnormal return and we know it. It's too much. This means that there will be a period when we will not earn anything. Right now we don’t expect to earn 100% per annum next year. We know that we have earned our 10%, and we are ready for the fact that there will be 0 for three months.
Despite the fairly successful activity of your fund, investors are in no hurry to invest in it. What is the reason?
Belousov: For us, attracting investors is a relatively new activity, and we have not yet received an answer to this question. Hedge fund industry insiders say that once a fund has three years of audited accounts, institutional investors start investing in it. We will have reports for three years at the end of summer. So we'll see. In principle, there are already preliminary agreements.
For example, the most absurd thing for us is that investors want their money to be managed in their brokerage account. The argument is that this way they will see transactions and will be able to influence the situation if, in their opinion (!), it does not go according to plan.
Some people want to hear the details of the strategies we use. Moreover, they are not even able to understand their standard descriptions.
The most unpleasant problem with investors from the Russian Federation is currency control of banks. The launch of our fund coincided with two events at once: the introduction of anti-Russian sanctions and the revocation of licenses from banks. The foreign exchange control of banks is very afraid to allow clients to make transfers to purchase shares of our fund.
Some banks ask for additional documents or simply refuse, because they believe that it is better to play it safe than to figure out where the client is sending the money. Now we have already found banks in which all documents have been verified, and we can work normally, but at the initial stage we lost several investors.
There are also funny clients who do not want to enter the fund because they need to exchange their rubles for dollars. The fund is dollar. And they say: “Now the dollar will fall a little, I will change money and enter.” But this is heard before the first noticeable upward movement of the dollar.
Tell us in more detail about the work of the fund. How many people are directly involved in maintaining existing algorithms, and how many are involved in developing new ones? Which direction in developing trading strategies, in your opinion, is the most promising? How important is the speed of order execution for you?
Belousov: The main feature of our fund, which distinguishes us from other funds at this stage of development, is the presence of a large number of strategies independent of each other. They are implemented by different people with different approaches. This allows you to achieve a unique level of diversification, which funds with assets up to $100 million are not able to provide. The strategies have one thing in common: they are all algorithmic. We do not have a division of roles between developers of new strategies and those who support old ones. Except perhaps for those who must monitor the work of the algorithms in the fund right now. We have three of these people. Three more connect periodically. There are 15 people in total who are involved in developing fund strategies.
The question about strategy is generally the most difficult. Firstly, these are algorithmic strategies. Secondly, we trade US stocks. In general, we trade everything that moves. Literally. It is promising to be where money changes owners - these are the most liquid and volatile markets. Speed is important to us when we are talking about milliseconds, which is not God knows what quantities. We do not use HFT strategies in our fund. And it makes sense to talk about execution speed in isolation from the speed of everything else only in the case of classical arbitration; it is also called low latency arbitration. We don’t do such things in the American market, where our competencies do not provide any advantages. You already have to go there “with a soldering iron and a shovel.”
We use high frequency algorithms in other markets where speed is of course important. But that is another story…
Interviewed by Liliya Zakirova and Anna NekrasovaIlya Shershnev
30 years
Gallway Capital
Assets under management: $100 million
Having worked at Penny Lane Realty as a student at the Higher School of Economics, Shershnev founded Swiss Realty Group in 2001, an intermediary company in the commercial real estate rental market. In the mid-2000s, its turnover exceeded $10 million a year, but after the crisis and stagnation of 2008-2009, Shershnev closed Swiss Realty and is now involved in managing the funds of shareholders of three private equity funds (the value of assets grew to $100 million in two years) and appraisal activities . He did not change his specialization - commercial real estate. Main interests include distressed assets and short-term transactions.
Dmitry Salikhov
28 years
Revenue: 280 million rubles.
Novosibirsk resident Dmitry Salikhov changed seven jobs, was both a manager and a taxi driver. Having been laid off in the spring of 2009, he conceived the idea of his own business - transfer transportation. He hired several motorists who met passengers at the airport, and then, having accumulated the required amount, rented an office and began collaborating with professional drivers and taxi services. The company now has corporate clients. i"way opened offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The company now accepts orders in more than 200 cities in 65 countries and is creating its own fleet of vehicles. “I couldn’t even imagine that we would reach this level. I just saw opportunities for development,” - says Salikhov.
Andrey Guzairov
27 years
Federal Finance Group
Capitalization: $20 million
He started online business in 2010, using money accumulated over three years to create the company CreditCardsOnline (selection and sale of credit cards from Russian banks). I spotted the idea in an American company where I had previously worked: “I understood how it worked, but then they fired me, and three weeks later I opened my own business.” In 2011, Finam Global fund bought a 25% stake in CreditCardsOnline. The following year, Guzairov launched the microfinance business Platiza.ru and Russia’s first online identification service ff.ru. This service, for example, is used by Philip Morris Corporation, which needs to know exactly the age of site visitors.
Vsevolod Fear
25 years
"Sotmarket"
Revenue: 4.15 billion rubles.
“I always believed that this would turn into a global story,” says Vsevolod Strakh about his business. In 2005, as an 11th grade student, he used his saved money to buy a thousand USB cables and began selling them through his own website. Later, accessories for mobile phones appeared in the Sotmarket online store, and then the phones themselves, electronics and small household appliances. In 2012, the venture fund IQ One Holdings bought a 51% stake in Sotmarket. After the deal, the company was valued at $100 million. Now Sotmarket accepts more than 5,000 orders a day, and Vsevolod still personally monitors customer feedback.
Roman Vishnevsky
26 years
United Traders
Revenue: 200 million rubles.
Vishnevsky created United Traders in 2009 together with Dmitry Belousov and Anatoly Radchenko. Initial investment - $80,000. While working at Swift Trade, Vishnevsky developed his own trading strategy, which was called layering in the market. Currently, the services of United Traders (prop trading - algorithmic trading) are used by about 200 professional and more than 1000 beginner traders. Vishnevsky and his partners also make money by training traders, and this year they launched the Kvadrat Black hedge fund with an estimated volume of funds under management of $100 million.
Dmitry Kibkalo
32 years
"Mosigra"
Revenue: 450 million rubles.
In 2008, the director of the production center, Dmitry Kibkalo, decided to give his father a board game about pirates, “Jackal,” invented by Moscow State University students in the 1970s. As it turned out, he took the first step towards his own business: the minimum batch that the manufacturers took on was 100 copies. To sell the extra ones, Dmitry opened an online store, purchasing other board games for the assortment. Within a month he repaid all the costs, quit his job in 2009 and opened the first Mosigra. The chain now includes 17 own and 71 franchise stores in Russia and Ukraine. The Kibkalo company also develops and publishes its own games. “Jackal” is still among its sales leaders.
Gevork Sargsyan
30 years
Revenue: 1.5 billion rubles.
An economist by training, Sargsyan worked in the Ministry of Taxes and Duties and the Ministry of Finance. In 2006, when he and a team of like-minded people founded Innova, adaptation of foreign online games was mainly carried out by “pirates”. In order to agree on the first licensed publication of the game with its developer, it was necessary, according to Gevork, to “exaggerate our capabilities.” But now the company has more than 10 game projects (including Lineage II, Planet Side II, Aion) and also the online cinema “Aiyo”. Games are free for users, but in-game items are paid for - this is Innova's main source of income.
Andrey Medvedev
33 years
"Industrial power machines"
Revenue: 1.6 billion rubles.
Andrei Medvedev and his partner Alexander Salnikov are former marketers at the Yaroslavl Motor Plant (Avtodiesel). They went free in 2005, having discovered that many consumers needed non-standard diesel generators. The partners rented premises, purchased components, hired workers and completed several orders for the modernization of Avtodiesel installations. Business has started. Medvedev set up the assembly of his own models of generators, power and pumping units based on Russian and imported engines. He employs about 300 people at the company. Clients include subsidiaries of Gazprom, Transneft and Lukoil.
Trader Roman Vishnevsky earned his first million dollars during the US financial crisis.
Roman studied in a physics and mathematics class, then at a school with in-depth study of economics. The dream of becoming an entrepreneur led him to the Higher School of Economics. In my third year I took my first steps as a trader and in a short period increased my initial capital by 30%.
Feeling success, I increased my investments and... lost everything. Reflecting on his actions, Roman decided to continue his studies and reach a professional level. He got a job at the Moscow office of the Canadian Trading Company and quickly made progress in trading American stocks.
Roman Vishnevsky: a trader's success story
After the crisis, having accumulated capital, he and his partners opened a trading company, United Traders. More than 200 experienced and 1 thousand beginning entrepreneurs use the services of this project. He has a proprietary trading strategy called “layering”, which is used by experts all over the world.
The biography of Roman Vishnevsky is filled with ups and downs; he had enormous success and lost everything at once. Only the ability to constantly maintain composure and control his own emotions led to the fact that Forbes magazine is now writing about him. Roman is constantly progressing, is engaged in brokerage business and trading, and successfully invests.
Roman Vishnevsky conducts consulting trainings and seminars, and has prepared several training programs on trading, which are a great success among students.
Roman's knowledge is implemented by budding businessmen and increases the profitability of projects. By studying his trading methods, everyone will be able to find something new for themselves, learn the secrets of big business and become a true professional.
“Are you making money? “I’m making money.” The first conversation between the three future founders of United Traders, Roman Vishnevsky, Dmitry Belousov and Anatoly Radchenko, in the St. Petersburg Terrace restaurant overlooking St. Isaac's Cathedral was short. In the trading environment, it is not customary to discuss strategies in detail. A mutual acquaintance introduced them to each other as “the best traders,” which surprised all three: each of them considered himself the best in the profession. Vishnevsky and Belousov, going to St. Petersburg in May 2008 for this meeting, rented a Mercedes S-Class. The pathos turned out to be inappropriate: a colleague from St. Petersburg met them in a tracksuit.
Less than a year later, all three of them quit their companies one by one to start their own. The partners were barely 20, and they quickly found a common language. All three were not satisfied with hired work for a small commission of 20% of the profit and the lack of opportunity to use more promising, from their point of view, strategies. So in March 2009, the United Traders company appeared, its main activity is prop trading (from English proprietary trading - own trading). Prop traders trade with company funds and on its behalf. Typically, a trader makes a security deposit into an account with a company, which increases it several times. Thus, he gets the opportunity to trade with a leverage of, for example, 1:50, which is impossible when working through a regular broker. A prop trader's losses are limited: as soon as a negative result exceeds the deposited amount, the account is blocked. If successful, the trader is paid from 10% (the rate for beginners) to 90% of the profit he earned.
Vishnevsky and Belousov had experience working in such a company - before creating United Traders, they worked in the Canadian Swift Trade and were part of a global network of 4,500 traders built by Hungarian-born businessman Peter Back. An extensive network allowed Beck to bring the company to the top ten largest brokers in terms of turnover on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Young students were hired as traders with low salaries in Russia, Romania, Nicaragua, China and other countries. After a short introductory course, they received a trading account with leverage using the company’s funds.
Over a couple of years, in 2007-2008, Vishnevsky and Belousov earned approximately $2 million each for Swift Trade, of which they received a fifth. Their main strategy is scalping, making hundreds of speculative transactions within a trading day, each of which can bring a small profit. They made the biggest money at the height of the crisis: they shorted securities of the financial sector and made money on volatility.
At that time, Radchenko worked at the St. Petersburg company Title Trading; he was closer to the intraday trading strategy, which involved concluding fewer transactions than with scalping.
The partners invested $80,000 in their own company, then reinvested most of the profits into development for three years. United Traders rents a dealing room with 100 workplaces and an area of 500 sq. m. m in the business center near the Aviamotornaya metro station. The company acts as a service provider for approximately 200 professional traders and more than 1,000 beginners. There are 70 people on staff, half of them are key traders for the company, their income can reach 80% of the profit received.
United Traders has access to $200 million in intraday funds from overseas partners. To trade them, the prop company’s own funds must be at least $5 million.
Partners of United Traders name Swift Trade and Hold Brothers among their direct competitors. Both companies are known for using the layering strategy. It is based on placing a large number of buy or sell orders, creating the impression of a large supply or demand. As a result, ordinary investors make transactions at prices at which they would not otherwise enter into them, and manipulators make money on the difference in prices and volatility. For this, Swift Trade and other Peter Back companies paid with fines imposed by British, American and Canadian regulators.
The American Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fined these companies $500,000, the Canadian regulator OSC - $400,000. The OSC also banned Beck from holding management positions for two years. The largest American self-regulatory organization FINRA banned Beck from having relations with all its members. But the largest fine - a record for manipulation - of £8 million was imposed on Swift Trade by the British regulator FSA. As a result, the company officially ceased operations two years ago. Hold Brothers received similar claims for $4 million for manipulation in 2009-2010 last year from the SEC.
What does this have to do with United Traders? Vishnevsky says that when he collaborated with Swift Trade, he developed his own trading strategy, which became widespread throughout the world, but it was modified by Chinese traders, after which it became known as layering. “All United Traders trading strategies are legal and profitable,” says Wisniewski.
At the beginning of the year, the company launched the Kvadrat Black hedge fund: the estimated volume of funds under management is $100 million, the target return is from 30% per annum and the risk of losses is up to 10%. Stock indices are growing at a more modest pace. But for traders who, like Vishnevsky and his partners, make money on arbitrage strategies, such profitability does not look exorbitant. Before entering the retail market, United Traders won the Best Private Investor award twice. The company's trading robot showed the best results in terms of profitability both in 2011 (7833% in 2.5 months) and in 2012 (5288%). Profitability of this level can be shown on a small volume; the starting amounts of the competitors were 50,000-150,000 rubles. The higher the volumes, the lower the profitability: testing strategies for the Kvadrat fund over the past year on an unaudited account with $5 million shows 40% per annum.
Investors with a minimum amount of $300,000 and an investment horizon of one year can join the Kvadrat Black fund. The Foundation is registered in the Cayman Islands under English law. There are three main trading strategies: statistical arbitrage of Russian futures, “volatility smile” arbitrage of options on American stocks, and trend algorithmic trading of American stocks. Strategies allow you to profit from differences in prices for related financial instruments. And the rise or fall of securities. The fund employs eight traders and programmers.
“You can invest in algorithmic funds provided that the investor understands the manager’s strategy well and feels comfortable with the level of risk inherent in the algorithm,” says Anatoly Tsoir, managing partner of the Granat Equity Fund algorithmic fund. Perhaps for some, understanding the financial “black square” will be more productive than the work of the same name by the world-famous Suprematist.
Hi all. My name is Alexander Norkin. In today's article we will talk about the best and greatest traders in the world.
The best traders in Russia
I don’t know whether the traders listed here can be classified as great traders, but the fact that these guys are the best traders in Russia is a fact. I tried to find our contemporaries without getting into the weeds, what happened, see below.
Alexander Mikhailovich Gerchik
In trading:
since 1998
Trades on exchanges:
NYSE/NASDAQ, RTS, CME
Achievements of Alexander Gerchik
Having lost his money for the first time while working as a broker at Worldco, Alexander began self-education in trading and reached a high level. Since 1999, it has closed exclusively positive monthly newsletters. In 2003, Gerchik became a managing partner in one of the largest brokerage companies in America.
2006 was one of the brightest years for Gerchik; he was called to participate in the prestigious project of the CNBC television company, in which he was presented as the safest trader out of 2000 traders, as a trader with practically no unprofitable days in the Daily Traiding section.
Having returned to Russia and having worked until 2015 as the managing director of the FINAM holding, he began hosting an hour-long, original radio program on Finam FM. In 2015, he opened his own Forex broker company “Gerchik & Co”.
Also, Gerchik was noted for writing the books “The Active Trader Course”, “Exchange Secrets”, where short-term trading strategies are well described. Constantly conducts videos and online seminars.
Alexander constantly recalls the words of his Japanese mentor:
The most important thing in trading is to learn not to lose money, and only then learn to earn money.
Alexander Rezvyakov
In trading:
since 2004
Trades on exchanges:
Achievements of Alexander Rezvyakov
Alexander Rezvyakov began his trading activities in 2003 by investing in mutual funds. Having tasted what they say it tastes like, he decides to engage in trading on his own and already in 2004, makes his first transactions on the stock exchange.
Until 2006, Alexander was looking for his own trading tool and strategy. And already in 2007, having finally settled on FORTS and choosing futures on the RTS index for trading, I began to receive stable profits.
His personal record in public transactions is 1,367,666.05 rubles for one trading day during a seminar in St. Petersburg in 2011 and 3,232,026.51 rubles for 4 trading days during a seminar in Kiev in 2012.
Without interruption from trading, he is engaged in teaching activities, records video seminars, and constantly modifies his strategy using a transaction journal developed by himself.
Alexander Elder
1951 in Leningrad
In trading:
since 1970
Trades on exchanges:
Achievements of Alexander Elder
He began his career by entering and graduating from medical university with honors, after which he got a job as a doctor on a merchant ship. In 1974, he applied for political asylum in the United States, where he continued his career as a medical worker. There he began to conduct private practice as a psychiatrist. At the beginning of 1971, he became interested in stock exchange activities.
Founded Financial Trading Seminars, Inc. (New York), which trains traders and became its director. Elder conducts consultations, trainings and seminars in the field of trading in the USA, Asia, Australia, Europe and Russia. Developed the well-known trading strategy “Three Screens”.
He has written a number of books in English and Russian. List of some of them:
- How to take profits, limit losses and benefit from falling prices: Selling and shorting.
- Trading with Dr. Elder. Encyclopedia of stock trading.
- Trading. First steps.
- How to play and win on the stock exchange.
- The strongest signal in technical analysis: Divergences and trend reversals.
- Basics of stock trading. A training manual for trading participants on world exchanges.
- Basics of stock trading.
Psychiatric practice helps Elder in lectures that allowed thousands of bankrupt traders to get back on their feet. After the lectures, traders were able not only to realize the mistakes, but also to work on them.
Roman Vishnevsky
In trading:
since 2007
Trades on exchanges:
NYSE, NASDAQ, CME, MOEX, OTC
Achievements of Roman Vishnevsky
During my student years, in 2007, I got a job at the Canadian prop trading company, which had a Moscow office. Achieved incredible success in scalping American stocks.
His trading career began in 2007, and already in 2009, during the US financial crisis, he earned his first million dollars. After which, together with partners, he founded the United Traders company.
The main achievement is the daily profitability of $198,713. In addition to the fantastic profitability, Roman Vishnevsky boasts a record break-even streak of 33 months.
The best traders in the world
With the best traders in the world, the situation is much more complicated. The list of traders is so large that it is not possible to list them all in one article. My list includes only the very best traders who have actually achieved fantastic success.
Larry Williams
1944 in Billing, Oregon
In trading:
since 1966
Trades on exchanges:
NYSE, NASDAQ, CME
Achievements of Larry Williams
It is currently difficult to find a more famous trader who can deservedly be considered great than Larry Williams. In 1987, he set a super world record for investing. His most famous achievement was winning the Robbins World Cup of Championship of Futures Trading. Then he managed to earn $1,147,000 in a year, with an initial capital of $10,000.
Larry Williams has written a ton of books about trading. Here's a small list:
- Long-term secrets of short-term trading.
- Secrets of trading in the futures market. Take action with insiders.
Linda Bradford Raschke
Born:
1956 in Pasadena
In trading:
since 1981
Trades on exchanges:
NYSE, NASDAQ, CME
Achievements of Linda Bradford Raschke
Linda Bradford Raschke is one of the few famous, successful female traders. Her trading career did not develop in the most successful way. After graduating from college, she tried to work as a broker, but the companies she sent resumes to did not hire her.
After getting a job as an analyst at Crown-Zellerbach, a paper manufacturing company, Linda begins trading options. As it turned out, Linda had an amazing ability to grasp everything on the fly. The teacher really liked this and he decided to give her a deposit of $25,000 (the minimum deposit amount at that time) for trading.
At first everything was very good and within 3 months, the amount was doubled, but then Linda lost $80,000. And these were not her last losses.
In 1986, being a horse lover, Linda was horseback riding and fell from her horse, breaking several ribs and dislocating her shoulder. Due to an injury, Linda had to trade from her home office, where again a series of positive transactions began.
Linda Raschke, an amazingly courageous woman who fell so many times, losing money, but still found strength and rose again. She went from being a speculator on the stock exchange floor to managing her own investment fund, LBRGroup, Inc.
Main quote from Linda Raschke:
The main goal of every trade is to minimize risk rather than maximize profit.
Michael Marcus
in 1940 in Brooklyn, New York, USA
In trading:
since 1972
Trades on exchanges:
stock exchange
Achievements Michael Marcus
Michael Merkus showed high professionalism from the very first days of trading. In 1972, he buys securities and makes a $700 profit. In just 6 months, $700 turns into $12,000. After 1 year, the profit was $64,000.
Such a leap did not go unnoticed. They begin to invite him to one brokerage company, then to another. What is called in great demand. He eventually ends up at Commodities Corporation, where he grew his account by more than 2,500 times within 10 years.
John Arnold
in 1974 in the USA
In trading:
since 1998
Trades on exchanges:
NYSE, NASDAQ, CME
Achievements John Arnold
John Arnold, a man about whom we can confidently say: he made himself.
John's first job was as a trader for the US energy giant Enron. In 2001, he managed to earn a huge income, approximately $1 billion. This achievement inspired management and it was decided to award John a bonus of $8 million.
In 2008, Enron filed for bankruptcy, and John Arnold decided to open his own company called Centaurus, which subsequently reached a capital level of $3 billion.
In 2007, Forbes magazine ranked John Arnold 317th among the 400 richest Americans. According to unofficial data, his fortune exceeded $1 billion. Thus, Arnold became the youngest American billionaire.
John Arnold was recognized as the best trader in the Forex market.
Quotes from Great Traders
Gunn
Time is more important than price; when the time comes, the price reverses.
Martin Zweig
It's okay if you're wrong, but it's not forgivable if you stay that way.
Doug Kass
Small losses are part of the game. Big losses can knock you out of the game.
Clement Stone
Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Have the courage to do what is right because it is right.
Bertrand Russell
The biggest problem in the world is that fools are always confident in themselves, while smart people are always tormented by doubts.
Thomas Sovel
People need to understand that often the truth is simple. It is much more difficult to see the truth.
William O'Neill
The most serious mistake of most Forex investors is to let losses take their course.
Diversification is an insurance against ignorance.
Bruce Kovner
Michael Marcus, one of the top traders, taught me one simple and important thing: you should be willing to make mistakes regularly, because there is nothing wrong or shameful in doing so. Michael taught me that you need to make your best decisions and judgments, be wrong, make another great decision, be wrong, find your third best judgment, and make the decision that will double your wealth.
Rondi McKay
When I feel defeated in the market, I immediately leave. And it doesn’t matter what market you trade in. I'm just leaving because I believe that if you lose one day in the market, all subsequent decisions will be much less objective than they were in the best situation... If you stay when the market is radically opposed to you, then sooner or later late he will leave you with nothing.
Tony Saliba
I always identify my risks so I don't have to worry about them.
Victor Sperandeo
The key to trading success is emotional discipline. If intelligence was the key, then many traders would be making money from trading... It will sound like a cliché, but the only reason people make money in the financial markets is because they don't cut their losses.
Paul Tudor Jones
If I had positions that would go against me, I would get rid of them. If the positions were in my favor, I would have held them. Risk management is the most important nuance in trading. If you have a losing position that brings you discomfort, get rid of it so that you always have the opportunity to return.
I always think about losses, not profits. Don't focus on making money - focus on protecting the capital you already have.
I believe the biggest money is made on market turns. Everyone says that you fail by trying to pick tops and bottoms, and you make all your money by playing the trend in the middle. Okay, for twelve years I missed out on profits in the middle, but I made a lot of money on the tops and bottoms.
Marty Schwartz
Over the past few years in the markets, I have learned that it is very important to take a few days off. The natural tendency is to play until you get the maximum winnings, but experience has taught that rest and a fresh perspective can always expand the possibilities.
Randy McKay
I will reduce the size of my trading positions as long as I lose... My money management techniques are very conservative. I never take risks that would significantly affect the funds in my account - leave my account alone.
George Soros
Markets are constantly in a state of uncertainty and fluctuation, and money is made by calculating the obvious and betting on the unexpected.
Larry Williams
No matter how hard we try to educate the trader by telling him the most important information, he will inevitably become disappointed, forget everything, or simply lack the will to put it into practice effectively.
Linda Raschke
If the market offers you an unexpectedly large profit on a trade, you should take it.
Alexander Elder
You can only succeed in trading the stock market if you treat it as a serious intellectual endeavor. Emotional play is deadly.
Tom Berowick
Develop a trading style that is compatible with your psychology. Your trading style should exactly match your personality.
Walter Bressert
The market is all about emotions. He pulls all your levers of fear and greed, sniffs out all your weaknesses. I have to control the emotional part. I became convinced that my temperament did not allow me to be a trading star. I found a way to overcome this using mechanical input and output patterns.
Tom DeMark
In fact, good discipline, knowing your limits and good money management are much more important than a system or an indicator.
George Fontanills
I learned how to use options and how to become delta neutral so that I could hedge myself in both directions and still sleep well at night. That's when I dramatically increased my profitability.
Lee Gettiss
The only thing a trader can control is risk. I know how much risk I am willing to take, but I have no idea how much the market will allow me to return the money.
Cynthia Case
The three most important things in trading: firstly, you can’t listen to other people’s advice all the time, secondly, there is no easy way, and finally, thirdly, it should be fun.
Gary Wagner
Invest in education. A novice trader jumps into a pool full of sharks. To survive, they need good protection and very large teeth.
Richard Dennis
Reflect on whether you are acting correctly, and not on the outcomes of individual transactions, which are essentially random.
Jason Zweig
When there is greed or fear in the market, people start to think alike. Therefore, very often many people buy at the top of the market and sell at the bottom.
Michael Steinhardt
A good trader is, first of all, a person who knows how to curb the desire to follow his theories to the end, and has enough flexibility of mind to understand where and when he can make a mistake.
Julian Robertson
The goal is to find the 200 best companies in the world and invest in them, then find the 200 worst companies in the world and go short on them. If the top 200 don't outperform the bottom 200, then you'd better try another business.
Of course, not all the great and certainly the best traders in the world were included in the list, but I considered this list to be of high quality. Write your opinion about which of them is superfluous or, on the contrary, maybe you think that someone should definitely be added. All wishes will be taken into account.
That's all I have for today. Until new articles, I look forward to your comments on the article. Happy trading.
