Inside Wall Street Benzinga Podcasts

"I use blue and white candles on my graphs instead of red and green because red triggers a different reaction in the brain which affects my trading."
"There is no consistency in your trading if there is no consistency in your brain."
"Markets take the elevator up and the stairs down."

Rodrigo Cerda speaks with Chris Capre a former broker on Wall Street, former hedge fund trader, and founder of 2ndSkies Trading, Lead Educator at Benzinga Options Trading School about trading the markets with a consistent profit.
Guest:
Chris Capre
CEO & Head Trader at 2nd Skies Trading
Lead Instructor at Benzinga Options Trading School
Host:
Rodrigo Cerda
Benzinga Pro Product Expert
Transcript:
All right. Welcome ladies and gentlemen, to another episode of inside wall street today with us chief educator at Benzinga option school. Chris Capri is going to be here with us today. How are you doing Chris? Very good news. I'm doing good, man. I'm doing good. There's so much here to cover a lot of interesting topics here and facts that you seem to be as someone that has an interesting background.

 Let's just start from the beginning here. I'd say Chris, how did you get into trading. ?
So 2000, 2001, I was a full-time yoga teacher. And so I wasn't on any necessarily particular career path. At that time, I had graduated at the university with a bachelor's in philosophy, and I was finishing up my undergrad in neuroscience while going for my masters in philosophy.

And I decided to take a break from a kind of like my dual degrees and a. Went to California to spend some time out there and just work on some personal things in my life that I felt like needed to go in a different direction. And so I started teaching yoga meditation after I got into it for about a year.

And  you realize very quickly that okay, unless I go down a very specific career path in yoga, this is not going to bring me the financial means. To really do the things that I want to do in life. And it's not that I want them like 10 Ferrari's or anything like that. It's more of I realize I have to build up a financial portfolio to really achieve and accomplish.

Do some of the things I want to do in my life at that time. So I started getting into just trading stocks and mutual funds at the very beginning. This is early 2000, 2001 before the.com bubble.  In the process I had started working with a client and he was a radiologist who had retired early.

He sold technology or radiology technology to Kodak.  Millions of dollars. Like he was a DECA millionaire several times over and as I was working with him one day, he comes up to me and he's Hey, I was reading this book and I've never had this before, but I had this strange intuition that you need to read this book.

I have a feeling that you need to read this book. This is something that you need to do, but in the book was about currency. At that time. And it was a story about an American who was an athlete and he doesn't know what to do after college very much like me. And he ended up getting a job, working for an outfit in Japan, trading currencies that led to some incredible stories and experiences in his life.

And I read the book and I felt oh yeah, I definitely want to try this out. And so keep in mind, this is like early two thousands, 2001, 2002, 2003. This is the early part of that decade. And so very little. Websites on the planet about trading FX or stocks or options or anything like that. And so I had to just teach myself.

So I got a demo account back then and I treated the moment I opened up the demo upon account and the platform I just instantly lit up. And I knew, I just felt like this made sense to me. There was just something about the platform like, Hey, I understand the language. I feel like I can read the charts.

I feel like whatever was in this platform made sense to me. It just clicked instantly. And a month later I went With a $3,000 account. And by six months later, that account was $83,0

" I had professors that were literally Nobel prize winners and I think Mario Gabelli is probably the smartest person I've ever met. "
"I've seen people get destroyed emotionally by trading. I've seen Steve Cohen make a $9 million profit In 5 minutes, both extremes, from the guy who gets actually crushed to the guy to become a billionaire and buy the New York Mets."
"I have traded through the .com bubble, 9/11, Commodities bubble the housing bubble and we've had the cannabis stock bubble a few years ago and then March 2020 Covid"
"What fascinates me about the markets is you see these historical things repeat themselves"
What does it take to trade with the likes of legendary Wall Street Traders Steve Cohen and Mario Gabelli?
Do you need to be a good chess player? Be great at poker? Have nerves of steel? Be smarter than Nobel Prize-Winning Professors?
In this episode, we take you inside famous hedge-funds like Steve Cohen's S.A.C Capital which the TV series Billions was based on, or Mario Gabelli's GAMCO Investors where 5 minutes can make you or break you.
Rodrigo Cerda speaks with Mark Putrino, former hedge-fund manager, Chief Market Technician, and Lead Educator at Benzinga Trading School about the rules of the game.
Guest:
Mark Putrino
Chief Market Technician, and Lead Educator at Benzinga Trading School
Host:
Rodrigo Cerda
Benzinga Pro Product Expert
Transcript:
R: Welcome to today's podcast Inside Wall Street, Mark. Putrino. How are you doing, man?
M:I'm doing great. Rodrigo. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
R: I know that you've had some experience trading in some really big funds with Steve Cohen and Mario Gabelli. Those are some legendary investors.
M: Mario Gabelli. He hired me. I met him when I was in business school. I was at the University of New York business school in the city. I'm in Greenwich village, but anyway, I met Mario make a long story short. He hired me when there was an opening on the trading desk and I went in there and at the time I don't this was a while ago. I don't remember how. Mario managed back then it was like maybe three to $5 billion. Now I think he manages an excess 50 billion, maybe like I had professors that were literally Nobel prize winners. Literally  and I think like Gabelli is probably like the smartest person I've ever met. But anyway, I was fortunate enough that I had a spot there. He had a broker dealer and I went in there and I was a market. Making markets and penny stocks and some of the stocks that we were trading after a few years there, I decided to move basically to make more money. And I went over and that's when I joined Steve Cohen at SAC, which whenever I tell people I worked at SAC, the question is always, oh, is Billions realistic or is Billions real ? I haven't seen Billions, but I am making a promise to people that I will watch. Now when I was there, that's when I got my first exposure to charting and people looking at charts and technicals Gabelli was more of a traditional value manager. He's not really looking at charts. He's more of the Graham and Dodd school of looking at price, earnings, ratios, that kind of things. But when I was at SAC, a lot of the people that I saw around. We're really into trading off the charts. And that's where I really got to start to learn, to teach myself about it.
R:What actually got you into trading the first time? How did you get into it? 
M: I grew up we weren't like poor or starving or anything like that, but I grew up pretty poor in a really wealthy town in Greenwich county. And when I was a kid I used to feel insecure about it. And I remember I used to ride my bike around or whatever, and I would look at all these big mansions and stuff. And I would think what do these people do that can make them live in these big mansions and these biggest states and everything. So that kind of brought me into wall street. Then once I got to wall street, it was very different than I thought it would be. But what