TTU27: Magician-turned Trader: Reality Doesnt Matter ft. Scott Foster of Dominion Capital Management 1of2

Published: Sept. 1, 2014, 3:09 a.m.

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Our next guest was a philosophy major and a magician before he ever considered trading in the stock market. In Part 1 of our talk, he describes how philosophy and psychology determine his firm\\u2019s decisions and the story of how he started trading in a small town in Pennsylvania.

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In This Episode, You\\u2019ll Learn:

  • On the 20th Anniversary of Scott\\u2019s firm, he looks back on how it all started.
  • Scott\\u2019s life as a magician and how the principals of magic influences his perspective on trading and the market.
  • How he became a philosophy major and how he applies philosophy to trading and everything his firm does.
  • How he started trading in the market, getting a group of his college friends to take out cash advances on their credit cards and investing it.
  • The Austrian perspective on economics that his college was well known for.
  • How he educated himself in futures trading and invested long before he ever met another trader.
  • Scott\\u2019s initial lessons learned from trading in the stock market; how he lost almost all of his capital in one day and had the first sleepless night of his life.
  • How he made the mistake of investing in coffee and cocoa in the late 1980s and what he learned from that experience.
  • How he started his first firm in 1989.
  • How Scott traded while living in rural Western Pennsylvania.
  • How a philosophy major with no connections to the financial world used his network to find a mentor.
  • The story of Scott becoming a principal at one of the biggest short-term CTAs in the world.
  • The story of Dominion Capital Management, which he started in 1994 by moving to Chicago.
  • Why he is based in Traverse City, Michigan.
  • How his firm is a bit different and why they don\\u2019t have any mathematicians or scientists on their team.

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Resources & Links Mentioned in this Episode:

  • Learn about the Square of Opposition that Scott explains in the episode.
  • In Scott\\u2019s first job at a firm, the company hired people belonging to Mensa.
  • Learn about how trading was conducted and firms operated before the use of personal computers and the Internet. Scott\\u2019s firm had a VAX computer.

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