The Psychology of Money - Managing Billions - Inside Wall Street with Mark Putrino
" 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
