Todd Simkin
Associate Director, Susquehanna International Group. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveinvestoroperatorsig.com ↗
Todd Simkin is an Associate Director at Susquehanna International Group and the CEO of Susquehanna Re. He oversees strategic initiatives, private equity investments, and the firm's trader education program.
2shows
2appearances
49statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Todd Simkin said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Simkin: Strict binary rules reduce cognitive load better than flexible principles
“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…”
Todd Simkin: SIG operates on the belief that traders are made, not born
“Susquehanna has always had a very growth mindset perspective on, on teaching trading, you know, before Carol Dweck had even shared her views on growth mindset. That is, that has always been the company's position is that traders are made, not born.”
Simkin: Effective mentorship models the decision process rather than prescribing actions
“And a big part of how information is passed from the mentor to the mentee is by modeling the decision process. It is not enough to say you should have raised vol by two points when this trade came in. Instead, it's so much more important to say, okay, when thi…”
Simkin: Trading is running continuous experiments where failure drives success
“In the world that I live in, you know, for better or worse, we know that we're going to make mistakes all the time, that we are effectively just running experiments and getting feedback and then updating our approach and running a new experiment again the next…”
Simkin: The worst probabilistic forecasts come from media-incentivized experts
“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.”
Simkin: Asking for feedback without acting on it is actively harmful
“If you get feedback and then don't do anything with it, people are going to stop giving you the feedback. It's not just not helpful to ask for feedback and not change it. It's actually hurtful.”
Simkin: Assuming counterparties know what they are doing protects traders
“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.”
Simkin: Negotiations are collaborative because counterparties can always walk away
“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…”
Simkin: The best job interviews leave candidates wishing for a do-over
“The best outcome for me for an interview is if the candidate walks away and wishes they could have part of the interview back.”
Simkin: Susquehanna trainees manage small books before trading class
“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…”
Simkin: Susquehanna operates a sports trading unit in Ireland
“We've moved into creating a sports trading unit that is trading on sports books in Europe, and that group is in Ireland.”
Simkin: Uncorrelated businesses scale profit linearly and variance sublinearly
“Our businesses being uncorrelated means that over the long run, I expect my profits to increase by the expected value of each of these businesses, but my variance, my standard deviation only to go up by the square root of the number of Businesses or exposures …”
Simkin: Susquehanna employs more technologists than traders
“The greatest pool of employees that we have is not traders, it's technologists, because so much of what we do relies on good quality technology infrastructure and business infrastructure that our technologists are able to build out for us.”
Simkin: Susquehanna operates a weather trading desk with an in-house meteorologist
“We have some weather derivative risk that we take. Well, we've got a weather derivatives trading desk, and we have a meteorologist on staff.”
Simkin: Jeff Yass threatened my job over Jeopardy wagering strategy
“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.”
Simkin: Susquehanna requires traders to continuously vocalize their decisions to peers
“A big part of our approach to education is to teach people to talk through their decisions and to talk about why they're doing what they're doing with their peers, the other people on their team.”
Simkin: Susquehanna shields feedback providers from knowing a trade's financial outcome
“When people talk about trading decisions that they've made to more experienced traders or to peers who can give them feedback on it, we do everything we can to shield The person giving feedback from knowing the results.”
Simkin: Calibrating forecasts requires frequent, uncorrelated repetitions and feedback
“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,…”
Simkin: Weather forecasters are exceptionally well-calibrated in probability assessments
“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.”
Simkin: Susquehanna's founders tested decision principles in Vegas poker before trading
“The founders of Susquehanna were in college together. And they studied an array of subjects, but what really brought them together was that they played poker together and were able to talk about the decision process in their poker game in, in a really nice way…”
Simkin: Jeff Yass threatened to fire him over bad Jeopardy wagers
“Jeff Yoss, the founder of, you know, one of the founders of Susquehanna, the chief risk manager at Susquehanna came into my office. Before I went and he said, Todd, nobody cares if you know anything about American history, but if you screw up the betting on, o…”
Simkin: Jeff Yass merged trading firms to form Susquehanna in 1987
“Jeff Yaz started his own options trading company on the Florida Philadelphia Stock Exchange in 1981. Some of the other partners of Susquehanna in the early days had their own companies that they merged together to come together as Susquehanna in 1987.”
Simkin: Derivatives trading remains Susquehanna's core business
“The core part of our business then is still the core part now, which is derivatives trading.”
The other half of the tape: Todd Simkin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 1
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tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 1
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Todd's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Associate Director, Susquehanna International Group | 1 | 27 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
 KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Associate Director, Susquehanna International Group | 1 | 22 | 100% 2/2 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |