Chris Camillo Talks Trading Strategies, Advice And More Ahead Of Trading Summit

Ahead of the Benzinga Trading Summit on June 20, Benzinga sat down with Chris Camillo, one of the prolific educators headlining the inaugural event.

BZ: What would you have changed about your early trading strategies, knowing what you know now?

CC: My trading strategy hasn’t changed much over the years. What has changed is my patience with the strategy. If I could go back in time I would spend less time on low conviction trades and instead focus all my efforts on high conviction social arb trade opportunities where I am able to identify a large information imbalance in the market.

BZ: What advice would you recommend to a new trader just starting out?

CC: Do not trade aggressively or with conviction until you are able to identify a trading strategy that consistently delivers alpha. Until that happens, be content experimenting with small dollars while the bulk of your portfolio tracks market returns in a cost-efficient ETF.

See Also: Why Every Trader Should Attend The Benzinga Trading Summit

BZ: Will the prevalent advancements in technology continue to bolster your trading research/style?

CC: Yes. Each new alternative data point that becomes available adds to the diversity of the data mosaic I rely on for gauging trade conviction. The more diverse and agreeable the data points, the larger and more levered my trades become.

BZ: What type of research goes into determining the social data that is implemented in your strategy?

CC: I initiate investments upon discovering a meaningfully relevant social information imbalance and exit investments at the point of information parity.

Social information arbitrage is unlike financial social sentiment analysis. Financial social sentiment analysis attempts to derive trading signals from a relatively small universe of influential financial chatter and related social sentiment. Social information arbitrage involves mining, cleansing, validating, correlating, and analyzing terabytes of unstructured non-financial social data to derive actionable trading signals from interrelated non- financial information determined to be meaningfully relevant to a specific underlying security.

BZ: How has the industry/landscape changed since you’ve started trading?

CC: As time passes, Institutional traders are becoming savvier to the social data points that sit at the center of my trading research strategy. My arbitrage window is still large but becoming slightly smaller every day so I must step up my game in stair step with the competition to retain a trading edge.

BZ: What are you most looking forward to at the Benzinga Trading Summit?

CC: Having spent most of the past five years engaging with and consulting institutional traders who are often handcuffed by their firms and slow to adopt new ideas, I look forward to talking shop with nimble and open-minded retail traders the Benzinga Trading Summit.

Want to hear more from Camillo and others like Peter Schiff, Whitney Tilson and Joe Saluzzi? Get your tickets here.