Trader Roman Vishnevsky made his first million dollars during the US financial crisis.
Roman studied in a physics and mathematics class, then at a school with an in-depth study of economics. The dream of becoming an entrepreneur led him to the Higher School of Economics. In the third year, I took the first steps of a trader and in a short period increased the initial capital by 30%.
Feeling success, he increased his investments and ... lost everything. Thinking about 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 US stocks.
After the crisis, having accumulated capital, he opened a trading company United Traders with partners. More than 200 experienced and 1,000 start-up entrepreneurs use the services of this project. He has the author's "layering" trading strategy, which is used by experts all over the world.
The biography of Roman Vishnevsky is filled with ups and downs, he had a tremendous success and lost everything at once. Only the ability to constantly maintain composure and control one's own emotions has led to the fact that Forbes magazine is now writing about him. Roman is constantly progressing, is engaged in brokerage business and trading, successfully invests.
Roman Vishnevsky conducts consulting trainings and seminars, prepared several training programs on trading, which are a great success with the audience.
Roman's knowledge is brought to life by novice businessmen and increases the profitability of projects. By studying his trading methods, everyone can find something new for themselves, learn the secrets of big business and become a true professional.
founders, United Traders 04.06.2016 18:36
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If you enter the phrase “United Traders” into a search engine or YouTube channel, the algorithms will give you an unexpected result: serious video tutorials on active day trading in the US market or detailed analyzes of interesting deals will be side by side with shocking rap clips, videos with Dzhigurda and dressed as a bearded mafia "Sea Buckthorn Trader" throwing dollars out the window of a brand new BMW. Behind the creation of all this motley content is the same group of traders.
Outrageousness is in the blood of the guys from United Traders, which sometimes does not quite fit in with some of their more serious business lines (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 told Financial One about how they manage to amuse the audience, 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 representation of the American office. Our company was called Swift Trade, another company was called Dimension Trading Group.
She was subsequently bought by an American prop firm. Now she is known for making the Blackwood platform, now called Fusion. We worked there for just a few months to understand that we are great (laughs).
: And it took me two years to understand that I'm done.
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 go on a further voyage together, you need to understand that a person can be trusted. Dmitry and Roman, how did you do it?
Belousov: We just saw each other off at 12 o'clock at night after work (laughs).
Discussed what other strategies can be applied?
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 profitable to be friends with Roma. Roma knows restaurants.
How did Anatoly appear in this story?
Belousov: We were looking for traders by any means. 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 get acquainted with his best traders in order to recruit them. But then they were not interested in anything but how to eat delicious food and have fun.
Anatoly, is there a difference between Moscow and St. Petersburg guys?
Radchenko: They are pretentious, they arrived terribly, arrogant, Moscow. At the time, I was not at all ready for such a conversation. In general, the first meeting was not very successful. Nobody understood.
Belousov: The result was negative. Anatoly and his comrades did not become our traders. We have not begun to cooperate. But everyone remembers each other.
Radchenko: A few months later, the company through which we worked in America stopped providing us good conditions in order to trade the so-called closing auction. Already at that time, this strategy worked worse than before, but still brought good money. And I asked the guys if they have the opportunity to let us trade it.
: So we gave them money...
Radchenko: Not. We gave you money. And you gave us the opportunity.
Vishnevsky: We began to collect all traders of different suits and strategies and began to learn how to work with them. That is, some needed closing auctions, others needed low commissions, others needed big buying power, and so on. This is how United Traders was born.
What do you think, how many traders in Russia are now trading in America?
Radchenko: Trade or earn? These are different things.
Belousov: It's not as obvious as it seems. People have been trading for years, it seems to them that they are earning, but they cannot be considered professionals.
Okay, how many firsts and seconds?
Vishnevsky: Those whom we consider traders are 200-300 people. This is even, probably, if you count the people in the teams.
Radchenko: Traders don't just show up. All traders came through Swifttrade, our company or Gerchik's company. There were only three dots. And they released a limited number of people. And those people who got there 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 more.
They are added only as we learn. When UT appeared, there were a huge number of companies that seemed to offer the same services: professional prop trading in America and professional education. Although, in principle, they were a class below.
Vishnevsky: We have outlived all competitors.
Belousov: You knock on the table! In general, we rarely pay attention to those who have achieved results on Russian market. We have little or no interest in those who trade Chicago futures. And most of them. One way or another, there are between 300 and 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 team work begins, when responsibility arises not only for oneself, but also for one's business, new problems appear. 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. It seems to me that this was the most difficult, because we had no such experience.
Vishnevsky A: The hardest part was not screwing up.
What do you mean by this concept?
Vishnevsky: Working with traders is a big risk. Many companies fail because they do not know how to monitor risks. At some point, a trader can lose much more than risk managers think.
Who cares about the risks?
Vishnevsky: Historically, Dima cared about risks.
And how was the history of the division of functions and powers built?
Vishnevsky: Tolya became a preacher with us. He opened America to people - no joke.
Radchenko: I am the first person who made a series of webinars where a professional trader spoke about the professional market in professional language. Nobody had done this before, so the audience quickly became interested. I remember that the webinar room had a limit of 300 people. People wrote to me to open it early, because they could not get in because of the limits.
I did my first webinars without video, and for some reason everyone thought that I was 35–40 years old.
Which one of you is the oldest in the team?
Vishnevsky: The oldest is our first risk manager. He's not over 40. He looks good.
What is the purpose of UT? Earn money?
Belousov: It is comfortable to develop any business within the existing structure. This business is now in finance, but sooner or later it will start to revolve around anything. Now Roma and I were discussing the Moscow-Peter maglev train. An hour and a half before Moscow... Or land traders on Mars.
Radchenko: One way or another, of course, the goal is to make money. For a trader, the most important motivator is money. Just 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 “ Financial market Russia: a look into the future. There was no phrase that someone wants to make money. All participants seem to be shy or have forgotten the priorities of the companies they work for. Within their investment tasks we want to make money without cheating anyone and doing large-scale projects that will probably 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 Russians, then I am very impressed by Galitsky, because, contrary to everything that exists, he built an excellent business. He is the only one of the top 20 oligarchs who made money in the most white and clean way.
Radchenko: There is very little up-to-date information about how a person has achieved something. All the people who could be an example are people from the 90s in Russia, who, one way or another by chance, selling plasters or computers, are now at the helm of the largest banks or state-owned companies. For example, you can say that Tinkov, or Gref, or someone else motivates me. But how they got there, there is no exact biography and data.
In general, any success stories motivate. I don't like to take American stories, because the reality in Russia is very different from what they have there. You could say that Richard Branson motivates me, but he motivates in the same way that a new issue of your favorite magazine or a new YouTube video of the channel you subscribe to motivates.
Therefore, I can say that they strongly motivate their success and the success of the company. In general, trading is such a philosophical thing, when you constantly analyze yourself, you get to know yourself more. 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: My physics was a masterpiece.
Belousov: I have a hockey coach.
Vishnevsky: But we learned from our mistakes.
And communicating with people who are on the market, we come to what we have to do ourselves. Because the person who knows how is either in great demand or does something of his own.
I watched your YouTube channel, you have quite provocative videos. Why did you decide to promote your brand this way?
Belousov: These are not well-thought-out steps. It's just a video that we made for fun. It seems to us that this will attract the attention of those who think the same way as we do. But we didn't think it would attract so many people. These were chaotic marketing actions.
Successful?
Belousov: We, unfortunately, do not know how successful they were in terms of the final result. But they are definitely successful in terms of recognition.
Different things are written about you on the Internet. How do you feel about different opinions and statements about yourself?
So you think people just make things up?
Vishnevsky: They started making up stories about us when I was still at the institute. That we have a secret investor who sponsors us.
Belousov: That Roma has parents 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, it breaks the pattern of ordinary people and professionals who do not know us… We just 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, given that we already trained prop traders. If we take even private traders-teachers, private managers, then due to the low regulation of the market, there is a large amount of fraud, deceit, and people were deceived so often that it is easier to keep in mind the idea that in general all are deceivers.
Prop Traders United Traders
Do you have any desire to somehow separate yourself from those who offer obvious fraudulent schemes?
Radchenko: Again, people can only associate us with scammers because of low literacy in terms of trade. That is, if he traded 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 if he hits the market or not. For a person who is not educated in the field of finance, trading in the real market or forex will still be the fault of the broker.
Radchenko: I will tell you about my course. We have it for two months. Lectures are given during the first month. Then comes the practice, familiarity with the terminal. After that, 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 it is necessary to go through certain steps, and we increase this account and risk limits. This is the know-how of a prop trading company. After all, students have a chance to grow into our fund managers (Bloomberg: KVABLCK: KY)
If they fail, we give them the opportunity to prove in the UTChallenge that they have understood everything and are developing further. That is, support does not end, if a person needs a year, he will study for a year. The most a big problem for beginners who come to the market with a small amount, it is that they want to earn millions with only $3-5 thousand. They cannot build a systematic development in order to eventually reach this amount. It seems to them that they should earn this money in one day.
With the greatest probability, they, increasing the risks for this, most likely, will lose their money. As part of the training, a person understands how much one can earn in the market, where the 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 sports, it's like becoming a good lawyer. Preferably, of course, the whole working day. There is such a rule "10 thousand hours", which, in general, can explain everything. If you do something for a very long time, then 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 money in unlimited quantities. Just for some reason, marketing in this industry has developed so that many people come for easy money. Sometimes you are lucky, there are good deals, but if you want to stay here longer, then you will have to work very hard.
Do you have a hobby? What do you do in your free time?
Belousov: Recently, the lights have not gone out in our office.
Vishnevsky: We have a new trend. In the world there is a trend for a four-day work week, we have a trend for a seven-day one. If you come to our office on Saturday or Sunday, then with a probability of 90% someone will work for us. And we're here, too, seven days a week.
Is there no time at all?
Belousov: I play hockey, but for the last few months I have not had time for it at all.
Radchenko: We play football in the company on Fridays - a kind of team building. I have verified from my own experience that all psychological problems, if you do not go in for sports, cripple you more. The simplest thing is to come home after a hard day and run 5-10 kilometers. Such a traditional good prevention, so as not to go crazy.
Scared to go crazy?
Radchenko: No, it's not scary. I have been trading for 10 years, and at the stage of development there were ups and downs, and these swings of joy and disappointment, they are, of course, very difficult. Not every person can handle it. Therefore, you can go crazy in the market. Everyone associates the stock market with people jumping out of skyscrapers.
Vishnevsky: Recently, a man worked in a startup, found out that it was all fake, and shot himself. And he worked for six years and believed that it was all real.
What books do you read? Perhaps you study from books or just love fiction?
Vishnevsky: Lately I have been reading articles on a variety of topics. About social trends, oh financial development, about business.
Belousov: Here we have a whole library on the shelves - this is what I read. There is business literature, and a little bit of fiction. The library is thinning out very quickly as the staff sort it out.
Radchenko: And I read the news. The news flow is increasing every year. More and more "noise", more and more difficult to find some relevant news that can be used in trading.
Belousov: Recently, books on psychology have helped me a lot in terms of marketing. All marketing is based on psychology. In business books, only the consequences are washed away, they never reach the physical causes, which start from the chemical processes in the head and end with the purchase of a specific product.
What can you advise?
Belousov: Probably the strongest impression this year is “The Force of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. This book tells about the structure of any human habits. Starting with alcohol, ending with regular evening reading of a book. Talks about 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 form the habit of constantly interacting with their business.
I really like to take business ideas from other industries. It is interesting to take something from online games and repeat it in finance. At the NP RTS conference, the possibility of buying financial products through an application with a single button was discussed. Although all this has already been done in other businesses - for example, in the game Angry Birds. Everyone wants to make Angry Birds on the stock exchange. Studying other industries will allow you to make a breakthrough in your own.
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. it automated system, which allows you to screen out a very large number of applicants for the position of a trader in our company. This project is called UTChallenge, which has already been mentioned.
What percentage of people come to you?
Belousov: One out of 20 passes the first stage for trading already on a real account. And then you have to go through five more steps.
Vishnevsky: That is, the system is arranged as follows: the applicant chooses the market in which he wants to develop, pays for participation in the selection, then trades on the account for 20 days. The system monitors how he trades, and if he complies with the parameters that we have set and sufficient profit has been received on this account, then the next day he receives a contract with a login and password from a 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. Including there understands the presence of certain items in the menu. For example, the fact that people are afraid of choice: in a restaurant high level the menu fits on one sheet, in a restaurant in a residential area you see a huge book.
Vishnevsky: Or elementary: if there is no “spend all the money” item in the menu, then you will never get a client who is ready to spend all the money and thus raise the average check.
Radchenko: Any restaurant has a bottle of champagne for 50,000 rubles. It may not even be for sale. But there is a theoretical possibility to buy it.
You read books, study on your own. Do you have a desire to go and get a traditional education like an MBA?
Belousov: We and the people we work with are moving from applied goals. We do not 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 study. You analyze a specific case, work in a team. And the theory is in books, on the Internet. Every day at work we have a huge number of cases that need to be solved somehow. And what worked there may not work here. Anyway, you will have to solve your case yourself.
Belousov: In fact, we are learning. The same book by Duhigg was recommended to me at a seminar on product metrics. If there are any challenges or gaps in the field of knowledge, we first try to fill these gaps with the help of publicly available information on the Internet. Then we look in the circle of acquaintances, colleagues. For example, we found a person who is strong in game design. You perfectly understand how terrible trading platforms look. That is, if you make sure that the design is the same as that of Angry Birds, then people will come.
If we talk about trading, then in 2012-2013 we had a task to make 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.
They took 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 paid off.
Vishnevsky: I took courses on legal aspects, doing business in the IT field, on the protection of personal data, their storage. These themes are now being introduced and developed, but no one knows yet how to deal with it. Of course, you can hire all these people, but it will be very expensive.
Belousov: We generally come to the conclusion that it is impossible to manage people effectively without at least a superficial knowledge of what they are doing. Maybe we are bad managers, or maybe there is no other way. We have been developing software for UTChallenge for five years already. And we come to the conclusion that the more we understand what the team is doing, the more effectively we manage it.
How do you share your responsibilities?
Vishnevsky: We sit down and agree.
Can you quarrel about related duties? When did someone do something wrong?
Vishnevsky: We do not swear, but we express constructive claims.
Belousov: This is a trading trick. People swear because of a mismatch of expectations, and when a conflict arises, they cannot give in to each other. A trader trains the skill of yielding from the very first day. When the market is acting against the trader, he must yield to the market. Either he is no longer a trader, he is bankrupt. And it really trains and on real life shifted. People who go bankrupt at the age of 40 and jump out of windows are not traders, they are those who have been admirably going to the top all their lives, but at some point it was 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 ready that at 50 years old, 90% of what he has achieved can evaporate.
Do you want stability?
Belousov: We started doing a service business, and not 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 one and the same. You take a risk, take a certain number of actions, achieve either a positive or a negative result, or something in between.
Radchenko: Trading has taught us that you can ensure stability by earning a lot in one month and not earning anything in others - that's your average income.
And if that month does not 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 that profits will come before expectations. For example, in the fund we earned 10% 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. Now we do not expect that next year we will earn 100% per annum. 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 rather 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 experts say that once a fund has three years of audited accounts, institutional investors start investing in it. We will have three-year financial statements at the end of summer. Here we'll see. In principle, preliminary agreements already exist.
For example, the most absurd thing for us is that investors want money to be managed in their brokerage account. They argue that this is how they will see transactions and will be able to influence the situation if, in their opinion (!), It does not go according to plan.
Some want to hear the details of the strategies we use. However, they are not even able to understand their standard descriptions.
The most unpleasant problem with investors from the Russian Federation is the 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. Currency control banks are very afraid to allow clients to make transfers to buy shares in our fund.
Some banks ask for additional documents or simply refuse, as they believe that it is better to play it safe than to figure out where the client is sending money. Now we have already found banks in which all documents have been verified and 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 change their rubles into dollars. The fund is in dollars. And they say: "Now the dollar will fall a little, I will change money and go in." But this is heard before the first noticeable movement of the dollar up.
Tell us more about the work of the fund. How many people are directly involved in the maintenance of existing algorithms, how many - in the development of new ones? What direction in development trading strategies, in your opinion, the most promising? How important is the speed of order execution to you?
Belousov: The main feature of our fund, which distinguishes us from other funds at this stage of development, is the presence a large number independent strategies. 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. Strategies have one thing in common: they are all algorithmic. We do not have a division of roles into developers of new strategies and those who support old ones. Except perhaps for those who have to monitor the work of algorithms in the fund right now. We have three people. Three more are periodically connected. There are 15 people in total who are involved in the development of fund strategies.
The question of strategy is generally the most difficult. First, these are algorithmic strategies. Second, 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 for us when it comes to milliseconds, which is not God knows what values. We do not use HFT strategies in our fund. Yes, and talking about the speed of execution in isolation from the speed of everything else is reasonable only in the case of classical arbitrage, it is also called low latency arbitrage. We don't do such things on the American market, our competencies don't give any advantages there. You already have to climb there “with a soldering iron and a shovel”.
We use high frequency algorithms in other markets where speed is of course important. But that's another story…
Interviewed by Lilia Zakirova and Anna NekrasovaIlya Shershnev
30 years
Gallway Capital
Assets under management: $100 million
After working as a student at the Higher School of Economics at Penny Lane Realty, Shershnev founded the 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 managing the funds of the shareholders of three private equity funds (the value of assets rose to $100 million in two years) and valuation activities . He didn't change his specialization. commercial real estate. Among the main interests are distressed assets and short-term transactions.
Dmitry Salikhov
28 years
Revenue: 280 million rubles
Novosibirsk Dmitry Salikhov changed seven jobs, was both a manager and a taxi driver. Having fallen under staff reduction in the spring of 2009, he conceived his own business - transfer transportation. He hired several motorists who met passengers at the airport, and then, after accumulating the required amount, he rented an office and began to cooperate with professional drivers and taxi services. The firm has got corporate clients. i "way opened offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Now the company accepts orders in more than 200 cities in 65 countries of the world and creates its own fleet. "I could not even imagine that we would reach such a level. I just saw opportunities for development," Salikhov says.
Andrey Guzairov
27 years
Federal Finance Group
Capitalization: $20 million
He took up the Internet business in 2010, having created the company CreditCardsOnline with the money accumulated over three years (selection and sale credit cards Russian banks). I spotted the idea in an American company where I had previously worked: “I understood how it works, but then they fired me, and three weeks later I opened my own business.” In 2011, Finam Global 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 the exact age of site visitors.
Vsevolod Fear
25 years
Sotmarket
Revenue: RUB 4.15 billion
“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 bought a thousand USB cables with the money he saved and started selling them through his own website. Later, accessories for mobile phones, and then the phones themselves, electronics and small household appliances. In 2012 venture fund IQ One Holdings bought a 51% stake in Sotmarket. After the deal, the company was valued at $100 million. Now Sotmarket takes more than 5,000 orders a day, and Vsevolod still personally monitors customer feedback.
Roman Vishnevsky
26 years
United Traders
Revenue: 200 million rubles.
United Traders Vishnevsky created in 2009 together with Dmitry Belousov and Anatoly Radchenko. The initial investment is $80,000. While working at Swift Trade, Vishnevsky developed his own trading strategy, which was called layering on the market. Now the services of United Traders (prop-trading - algorithmic trading) are used by about 200 professional and more than 1000 novice traders. Vishnevsky and his partners also make money by training traders, and this year launched the Kvadrat Black hedge fund with an estimated $100 million under management.
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 students of Moscow State University in the 1970s. As it turned out, he took the first step towards his own business: the minimum lot that manufacturers took on was 100 copies. To sell the excess, Dmitry opened an online store, purchasing other board games for the assortment. In a month, he paid back all the costs, in 2009 he quit and opened the first Mosigra. Now the network unites 17 own and 71 franchise stores in Russia and Ukraine. Kibkalo also develops and publishes its own games. "Jackal" is still among the leaders of its sales.
Gevorg Sargsyan
30 years
Revenue: RUB 1.5 billion
An economist by education, Sargsyan worked at the Ministry of Taxes and Duties and the Ministry of Finance. In 2006, when he founded Innova with a team of like-minded people, "pirates" were mainly engaged in adapting foreign online games. In order to agree on the first licensed publication of the game with its developer, according to Gevork, I had to "exaggerate my capabilities." But now the company has more than 10 gaming projects (including Lineage II, Planet Side II, Aion) and an online cinema "Aiyo". Games are free for users, but game items in them are received for money - this is the main source of income for Innova.
Andrey Medvedev
33 years
"Industrial Power Machines"
Revenue: RUB 1.6 billion
Andrei Medvedev and his partner Alexander Salnikov are former marketers at the Yaroslavl Motor Plant (Avtodiesel). AT free swimming they left in 2005 after finding that many customers needed custom diesel generators. The partners rented premises, purchased components, hired workers and completed several orders for the modernization of Avtodizel's installations. Business has gone. Medvedev set up the assembly of his own models of generators, power and pumping units based on Russian and imported engines. The company employs about 300 people. Among the clients are subsidiaries of Gazprom, Transneft and Lukoil.
On November 16, a competition among novice traders will begin at the Higher School of Economics. Within a month, participants are given the opportunity to trade on the stock exchange using the starting capital. Each of them will strive not only to save their money, but also to increase it. In order to find out the details of the upcoming competition, as well as discuss what it is like to be a young trader, we met with Roman Vishnevsky, founder of United Traders, and Sergey Volodin, senior lecturer in the Department of Finance.
Competition for young traders
10.11.2015 21:00
On November 16, a competition among novice traders will begin at the Higher School of Economics. Within a month, participants are given the opportunity to trade on the stock exchange using the starting capital. Each of them will strive not only to save their money, but also to increase it. In order to find out the details of the upcoming competition, as well as discuss what it is like to be a young trader, we met with Roman Vishnevsky, founder of United Traders, and Sergey Volodin, senior lecturer in the Department of Finance.
Good afternoon, Roman. Tell us why, as a young graduate of the HSE Faculty of Economics, you decided to leave well-known trading companies and found your own?
Roman Vishnevsky: Good afternoon. At first I worked in a trading firm, but they did not provide opportunities for growth and development, as in other similar organizations. Therefore, I left it, and we, together with other traders, decided to create our own company, without this drawback. We have an ideology: “Better Place for financial traders”, that is, we give traders all the conditions so that they are satisfied, earn the maximum and can develop with us if they have such a desire.
That is, the competition that will be held at HSE is a kind of demo version of working in your company?
Roman Vishnevsky: Yes, in a way, exactly. You trade using a virtual account, you have 100 thousand rubles and a month to show the best results. Then those who will be at the top of the rating according to these results will receive real money under management. And then, if we understand that a person is motivated enough for further development in this profession, he can become a full-fledged trader of the company and work with us on an ongoing basis. For us, the competition is an opportunity to select capable traders for our company. In America, for comparison, such competitions are already held from schools, and, on average, 5-6 thousand educational institutions participate in them annually.
Are there other reasons to enter the competition? Not everyone will be able to show high results and then work as a trader.
Sergey Volodin: The fact is that at HSE, even in financial disciplines, the emphasis is often on theory. For free work in this direction, practical exercises are needed, which are given in a small volume. If a student participates in the competition, he will definitely know how the exchange works, how market assets are traded, and how to practically apply the knowledge gained in lectures.
What else, besides experience, will the contestants be able to get?
Roman Vishnevsky: The most important thing is that the participants will see how the market works in practice: they will learn what trading terminal how it should look and how to use it; understand when trading sessions open and close, what clearing is and much more that any trader needs.
Sergey Volodin: Students will study various aspects of trading in more depth and will be able to make smarter investments in the future. For example, do not invest in mutual funds, losing on management fees, but independently create a similar portfolio of shares. And if a person really has experience and understands that it is easy to open an account and buy - sell shares, then there will be no insurmountable obstacles for him.
What are the restrictions for participants, who are you waiting for first?
Roman Vishnevsky: First of all, these are young people or girls over 18 who have a desire to make money on the stock exchange. That is, there are practically no restrictions. The main thing is the desire to develop in this direction.
And what qualities should a person have to become a successful trader?
Roman Vishnevsky: Not much is needed for this: firstly, a tendency to analyze, the ability to interpret the information received; secondly, the attitude to risk: on the one hand, it should be a person who is ready to take risks and make a deal, on the other hand, he should not risk everything, as in a casino.
Are you expecting students from specific faculties or not?
Roman Vishnevsky: No. As I said, the main thing is the desire to understand how the financial world works, to get real experience trade, but this still cannot be attributed to any particular faculty. It is clear that most of the guys will be from economic and mathematical faculties, but there may be students of any humanitarian specialties.
Sergey Volodin: We are trying to focus the project on students from all faculties, since among non-economic areas there may be those guys who become successful traders, since they may have the necessary qualities, without even knowing about them, since they have never tried themselves in this sphere. The competition is also a good chance for a student, including those from a non-economic faculty, to decide whether the financial world suits him in terms of his future career, whether he is interested in it and whether he has any abilities here to understand in which area it should be further developed.
Is there any special knowledge required from those who decide to take part in the competition?
Roman Vishnevsky: No, you don't need any additional, special knowledge. The training information provided to the competitors will suffice. To do this, a lot of special video clips have been made that will help you understand the course of things and get a general idea of \u200b\u200btrading. There are both short and long training videos on the following topics: what is an exchange, how to buy shares, how to trade, what is a trading platform, what is technical analysis, and so on. In addition, we will do a preparatory lesson, maybe even more than one.
Why did you choose HSE to host the competition?
Roman Vishnevsky: Because Sergei called me and said that there is an opportunity to hold a competition. And I have long wanted to organize something similar among students. We have already held similar competitions, so we already had the whole system ready. Now I hope that by teaming up with the HSE team, it will be possible to hold a truly large-scale competition.
Sergey Volodin: And from the side of the HSE, it turns out that the idea is that students acquire practical knowledge of trading on stock markets. They will learn the practice and then, when they graduate from the university, they will already know how it all works and will be able to work in this area. Otherwise now, when a student comes to get a job, for example, in brokerage company, he has to be taught everything again, sometimes starting with the basics.
You have a lot of newly graduated students and those who are still studying in your company. What are the advantages for students who are just planning their path to stock trading compared to experienced economists?
Roman Vishnevsky: A student does not have wrong patterns in his head. An experienced person with economic education there is a formed, and in his opinion, correct picture of the world, his own understanding of how markets work, how macroeconomics works, how financial institutions interact, and so on. And he projects this vision onto his deals. The student does not yet have anything like that in his head, and he just looks at what is happening and draws conclusions from it. He has a more flexible mindset that makes it easier to navigate the real market.
And how to combine competition with study? After all, it is difficult to follow the trading session, sitting on a pair of macroeconomics.
Roman Vishnevsky: Now, thank God, from 10 to midnight there is time to compete. That is, the Moscow Exchange opens at 10 am, and until midnight a student can trade: during the day, shares of Gazprom, Lukoil and others, as well as futures, in the evening only futures: for the dollar, euro, gold, RTS index. Therefore, nothing prevents a student from actively participating in the competition: a bachelor will be able to take part in trading sessions in the evening, after classes, and masters, on the contrary, in the afternoon.
How will the competition take place? All you need is Internet access and the ability to work with a terminal in your free time?
Roman Vishnevsky: Yes, the strategy will be something like this: students will be able to come to the presentation (it will take place on November 11), then there will be an introductory lesson, and then the whole process will take place remotely. Trading on the exchange will begin on November 16.
More information can be found in the competition group.
"Are you making money? - I'm making money. The first conversation of the three future founders of United Traders Roman Vishnevsky, Dmitry Belousov and Anatoly Radchenko at the Terrace restaurant in St. Petersburg overlooking St. Isaac's Cathedral was short. In the trading environment, it is not customary to discuss strategies in detail. A mutual friend introduced them to each other as “the best traders”, which surprised all three of them a lot: each of them considered himself the best in the profession. Vishnevsky and Belousov, going to St. Petersburg in May 2008 for this meeting, rented an S-class Mercedes. The pathos turned out to be inappropriate: a St. Petersburg colleague met them in a tracksuit.
Less than a year later, all three quit their companies one by one to start their own. The partners were barely over 20, and they quickly found a common language. All three were not satisfied with hired work for a small commission of 20% of the profits and the inability 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 the English proprietary trading - own trading). Prop traders trade with the funds of the company and on its behalf. Typically, a trader makes a security deposit to an account with a company, which increases it several times. Thus, he gets the opportunity to trade with leverage, for example, 1:50, which is impossible when working through a regular broker. The losses of the prop trader are limited: as soon as the negative result exceeds the amount deposited, the account is blocked. In case of success, the trader is paid from 10% (beginner rate) to 90% of the profit he has earned.
Vishnevsky and Belousov had experience in such a company - before the creation of 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 Beck. An extensive network allowed Back to bring the company to the top ten largest brokers in terms of turnover by stock exchange Nasdaq. Young students were hired as low-wage traders in Russia, Romania, Nicaragua, China and other countries. After a short introductory course, they received a trading account with a leverage on the company's funds.
For a couple of years, in 2007-2008, Vishnevsky and Belousov earned about $2 million for Swift Trade, of which they received a fifth. Their main strategy is scalping, making hundreds of speculative trades within a trading day, each of which can bring a small profit. They made the biggest money in the midst of the crisis: they shorted the securities of the financial sector and made money on volatility.
Radchenko at that time worked in the St. Petersburg company Title Trading, he was closer to the intraday trading strategy, which implies the conclusion of a smaller number of transactions than with scalping.
The partners invested $80,000 in their own company, then over the course of three years they reinvested most of the profits into development. United Traders rents a dealing room for 100 workplaces with an area of 500 sq. 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 1000 beginners. There are 70 people in the staff, half of them are key traders for the company, their income can reach 80% of the profits.
United Traders has access to $200M intraday Money from foreign 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 their use of the layering strategy. It is based on placing a large number of orders to buy or sell, giving the impression of a large supply or demand. As a result, ordinary investors make deals at prices they would not otherwise enter into, and manipulators make money on price differences and volatility. For this, Swift Trade and other companies of Peter Beck paid the price with fines imposed by British, American and Canadian regulators.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fined these companies $500,000, the Canadian OSC regulator fined $400,000. The OSC also banned Back from holding leadership positions for two years. The largest American self-regulatory organization FINRA forbade Beck to have relations with all its members. But the biggest fine - a record for manipulation - was imposed on Swift Trade by the British regulator FSA for £8 million. As a result, the company officially ceased operations two years ago. Hold Brothers received similar claims for $4 million for manipulations 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 all over 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 launches the Kvadrat Black hedge fund: the estimated amount of funds under management is $100 million, the yield target 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, earn on arbitrage strategies, such profitability does not look exorbitant. Before entering the retail market, United Traders won the "Best Private Investor" award twice. The trading robot of the company showed the best result in terms of profitability both in 2011 (7833% for 2.5 months) and in 2012 (5288%). Profitability of this level can be shown on a small volume, the starting amounts of the contestants were 50,000-150,000 rubles. The higher the volume, the lower the yield: 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 fund is registered in the Cayman Islands under English law. There are three main trading strategies: statistical arbitrage in Russian futures, volatility smile arbitrage in US stock options, and trend algorithmic trading in US stocks. Strategies allow you to profit from the difference in prices for related financial instruments. And rise or fall valuable papers. Eight traders and programmers are involved in the work of the fund.
“Investing in algorithmic funds is possible 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.
