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This Is Your Best Trading Edge

ByOddmund Groette Trading, Trading Plan

Your best trading edge may not be a setup, indicator, or platform. It may be the traders you meet.

If you connect with smart, adaptable traders, that is worth a ton more than anything else. The people you surround yourself with will either pull your future closer – or quietly keep it out of reach. Hakan and I (Oddmund) have been blessed (and lucky) to meet, but also lucky to meet other good traders.

Take my own experience:

When i started trading prop in 2001 I’m pretty sure I would not have made it without the help of Steinar L. He was already successful and willing to help me. Steinar gave me a solid foundation for succeeding in pairs trading.

In 2003, I went to Phoenix, Arizona, for three months, where Håkan was the office manager. At this time, I was a decent trader (in hindsight), but way too conservative and risk-averse. Håkan “forced” me to step up the size, and finally, I had some good months where I could put aside some money.

However, my strategy (yes, I only had one) hit the wall early in 2005 when a regulation change made short sales more difficult.

It was back to the drawing board. Just before that, I connected to Ole Richard, a fellow Norwegian. We exchanged some ideas, and by chance, luck, and systematic thinking, we found some huge inefficiencies in the opening cross on Nasdaq stocks (this was the infancy of the opening cross).

For example, big stocks like Comcast (CMCSA) could open at 29.3 and just a second later trade at 29.6. This was an “easy” 30-cent profit. Such trades happened pretty often at that time. This was a very lucrative strategy for a few years (now too crowded).

2008, for example, was a fantastic year for opening orders, both on the Nasdaq and the NYSE. Despite markets collapsing, I made a lot of money on the long side, and the short side worked very well too.

I worked well with Ole Richard for many years, and together we developed several uncorrelated day trading strategies. Without these three people, I’m pretty confident I would be in a much worse place.

  • Oddmund Groette

I’ve got an Msc from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh (1996), in addition a to a business administration degree the Norwegian School of Management (BI – 1994). Did my mandatory military service in between.

After university, I worked two years as an auditor (1996-1998).

I co-founded Aksjeforum.com in 1998/99 - one of the first websites about trading and investing in Norway. It was later acquired by Digi.no in 2001.

I have written 4 books about trading (in Norwegian). One of them has sold 30,000 copies, a record for a financial book in Norway.

From 2001 until 2018 full-time independent prop trader (Series 7 in 2001) and investor.

2018-today: Investor, writer, analyst.

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