Todd Simkin

“One is before ever going through our trading class, our quantitative traders are working directly on trading desks, talking to the traders who are making decisions about the decisions that they're making, and they gain responsibility over time. So they will be…”

“If I had a script for it, it'd be easy, because then I would just give people a script to use as a checklist like a pilot does when they're starting up their plane, or like a surgeon does when they're starting a surgery. I don't have a script, and I wish I did…”

“Most recently, in the last few years, we've moved into insurance, which is where I spend all of my time now, is thinking about insurance products. And similarly, we've also recently did a partnership with Kalshi, where we are providing liquidity in event marke…”

“This is again that marriage of art and science. So some of it is being a good handicapper, being able to look at Jared Goff and decide how strong is he as a quarterback with this certain receiver core. That's part of it. And that is what we would refer to as t…”

“From your perspective, it costs you the exact same amount of money, except that now you're not hoping to go from a 100,000 to a 120,000 dollars a month. You're hoping to go from a 100,000 to 500,000 dollars a month because anybody, whoever was in the market fo…”

“At the time, Jeff Yoss, one of the founders of Susquehanna, walked into my office and said, look, nobody cares if you know anything about American history, but if you mess up the betting, don't bother coming back on Monday.”

“And again, in isolation, it's really hard for me just to say this person's wrong. But if I have a similar looking option, similar because it's the same expiration, or because it's the same strike and a different expiration, or that there's something about the …”

“It's so much easier if you have a rule than if you try to have a principle, right? That I don't eat dessert is so much easier than each time that you have the opportunity to have dessert to say, well, I don't eat a lot of dessert. Is this one of the times that…”

“The big problem with call out culture is that we're rewarding people just for the call out. That it doesn't matter what their other behavior it is. It doesn't matter what other positions they have, what knowledge they have, what expertise they have. They just …”

“I joined Susquehanna in 1997 straight out of college. I went to University of Virginia undergrad. Unlike sort of the stereotypical finance background, I studied a combination of anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and education. And I, it was combined into …”

“If the only thing that you predict are very hard to predict outcomes and you predict them very rarely, you're not going to be able to calibrate very well at all. On the other hand, if you predict many different things that particularly if they're uncorrelated,…”

“Weather forecasters are really good. I mean, just stupid good. And if you were to plot how often it rains when they say there's a 30% chance of rain, it's like 30% of the time. It's not 25 or 35.”

“The worst forecasts are often from people who are experts who make extreme forecasts. You know, when they're right, they're going to look really right because they said something extreme. And that means that they're going to get on the news program.”

“On the trading side, sort of this principle of charity is really giving somebody credit for knowing what they're doing when they're trading against you. This is what sort of protects you from being run over by somebody who has better information than you do.”

“Every single negotiation is a cooperation and a collaboration. But there's not a single time where I'm almost never, and really, you know, probably never, where the other person has to negotiate with you. They have some alternative. They can walk away, which m…”

“The best outcome for me for an interview is if the candidate walks away and wishes they could have part of the interview back.”