Day in the life of a hybrid quantitative qualitative trader. A thread

1/ Wake up 7:00 EST. Chug cold brew coffee, then water. Have a script that highlights top 10 largest standard deviation moves in Europe and Asia. Go through them for 30 minutes. Make "shock response basket"

2/ Shock response is a quant strategy that responds to large events from the last session. It can have nasty drawdowns - so mixes well with human judgment. Example - I might buy Thailand ETF if European travel space surged. But also will check Thai / vaccine news to confirm

3/ By 8:15 AM, I'll have a basket of 4-5 megacap stocks and 2-3 ETF pair trades I'll tentatively put on during the open or bid pre market. 8:15-9 I try to read transcripts or company events -- if it's earnings season I'll have skipped shock response and only read transcripts

4/ I aim to have an additional 2-3 'human' trades based on the transcripts / company updates / Press releases. by 9 AM. Around 9 AM my systems run pre-market analysis to put on a basket of 70-80 stock trades in addition to my qualitative trades, bidding pre market if possible

5/ I make sure everything is working then binge read macro news. I also have a macro portfolio and depending on how things open I will adjust usually around 11 AM EST. At 9:30 EST my open orders get filled and depending on how limit fills came out will automatically hedge w ETFs

6/ By 9:35 I should be fully done at which point I have my overnight PNL print. At this point I categorize which strategies made money overnight, which lost, on what securities and what my realized slippage was. I write a note in my trading journal around significant things

7/ After I do overnight PNL, I review my macro book which is sensitive to bond instruments (rates, credit). I have a google sheet where I rate my human view of macro trends on a 1-10. So if gold miner bonds are tanking I might look why and downgrade my view of Gold.

8/ It's probably worth noting here I have a google sheet of my human ratings of stocks, and macro instruments. They combine with quantitative ratings into a single score. Over time I track whether my judgment is adding or subtracting from quantitative strategies.

9/ By 11 EST I am done with human trading. From 11 - 1 I both eat lunch and also work on intraday trading strategies, focused on reducing my transaction costs. I have a "Lab Book" of hypotheses about intraday strategies that I test.

10/ From 1-2:30 PM I work on testing production code which requires the market being open. If I don't have anything that needs to be tested (rare) I continue to work on intraday trading strats.

11/ From 2:30 - 3:30 PM I review large intraday moves, read related news, talk with a few traders about their views. I come up with 7-8 human overnight "gap trades" - whether meme stocks, short squeezes, earnings releases, events, or "risk reduction" trades.

12/ Overnight risk reduction trades are pairs that align with "things that could go wrong overnight". Some examples - owning Cyber security and shorting e-com for cyber attacks, owning Lockheed vs Japan if there's a war, long bitcoin vs MSTR for crypto regulation

13/ By 3:45 PM orders start firing off - limit orders usually which get filled and then hedged with market urgency as they execute. This also coincides with most of my trades being exited from the day time session. I monitor this actively from 3:45-4 PM, stress and Tweet randomly

14/ 4-4:30 PM I run my day time PNL, reflecting on what worked and what didn't - then come up with my evening sprint plan. At this point I turn into a normal data-scientist/ software developer, task tracking in Gitlab, and working against a "Product Document"

15/ My dev projects are new strategies, data sources, or performance software (lately, Dank Options). I do a quick workout, eat, and code until 8-9:30 PM. Then read transcripts/sell side research until 11. 30 minutes of CBT journaling (therapy), pass out and repeat

16/ Spelling out this process explicitly a couple years ago (I have a checklist with boxes) helped me silo/quantify what are effectively 2 jobs - being a qualitative trader and being a data-scientist/software developer. Perhaps helpful if you're starting on a similar path