Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 95% certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Simkin: Susquehanna's founders tested decision principles in Vegas poker before trading

Todd Simkin · #119 Todd Simkin: Making Better Decisions · Sep 7, 2021 · at 39:04

Todd Simkin, trader and educator at Susquehanna International Group (SIG), recounts how the firm's founders used poker to develop and test their probabilistic decision-making framework.

0:00 / 0:28exact quote · 29.0s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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. And they said, you know, we shouldn't just be, you know, shifting our own money between ourselves. Let's go to Vegas and let's see if we can apply these decision principles at the poker table in Vegas. So they went out to Vegas one summer and did very well.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Todd Simkin

Insight
Simkin: Call-out culture incentivizes finger-pointing regardless of expertise
“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 …”
Todd Simkin Sep 7, 2021 ▶ 17:55 #119 Todd Simkin: Making Better Decisions
Insight
Simkin: Probabilistic forecasts cannot be judged wrong unless 0% or 100%
“It's really hard to say anybody's wrong about a single probability prediction, unless they said that something was zero percent or a hundred percent.”
Todd Simkin Sep 7, 2021 ▶ 35:00 #119 Todd Simkin: Making Better Decisions
Insight
Simkin: Constructive communication beats probabilistic thinking for truth-finding
“Talk more is number one. That beats probabilistic thinking that, you know, that, that beats sort of anything else in truth finding is, is being able to bring in other people in the decision process in a constructive way.”
Todd Simkin Sep 7, 2021 ▶ 41:53 #119 Todd Simkin: Making Better Decisions
Insight
Simkin: Traders should not back limited opinions against informed counterparties
“Our approach is to recognize that we are often on the bad end of informational asymmetry that other people who are looking to trade in the markets frequently know more than we do. And as a result, we don't want to back our own limited opinion against a more in…”
Todd Simkin Sep 7, 2021 ▶ 3:16 #119 Todd Simkin: Making Better Decisions
Insight
Simkin: Decision-makers must update opinions in a Bayesian way
“The most important thing from our perspective is to be willing to update that opinion in a Bayesian way, to use approaches that are going to be inclusive of all the information available to us, and only when we get to mutually exclusive information or mutually…”
Todd Simkin Sep 7, 2021 ▶ 4:20 #119 Todd Simkin: Making Better Decisions
Insight
Simkin: Use related instruments to find disconfirming evidence before taking trades
“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 …”
Todd Simkin Sep 7, 2021 ▶ 8:10 #119 Todd Simkin: Making Better Decisions
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.