From Market Making to Relative Value Trading

My guest in this episode is Kris Abdelmessih, co-founder of moontower.ai.

Kris began his career at SIG, where he worked as a market maker in several different option pits, before moving to Parallax where he ran a relative value commodities volatility book. For the last five years, Kris has been writing on his blog Party at the Moontower, which is one of my favorite reads for all things probability, payoff space, trading, optionality, and seeing the world through a volatility lens.

Kris is a passionate educator, so it should come as no surprise that learning is a key thread throughout this entire episode. Kris discusses how learning is accelerated in the pits and how we can think about replicating it in electronic space. Kris discusses what he had to unlearn and relearn in his move from market making to relative value trading. He also shares his thoughts about how firm lineage influences how you learn to trade markets.

Finally, we discuss Kris’s newest venture, moontower.ai, which seeks to provide a “volatility lens” to opinionated traders to help them better express their bets in option space.

There is a lot of experience to unpack in this one.

I hope you enjoy my conversation with Kris Abdelmessih.