Success leaves clues. Finance Strategists sat down with Peter Reznicek of ShadowTrader. He shared his thoughts on the past, present, and future of the company, as well as insight gained from running the business. Q: Who are you and what’s your background? I am Peter Reznicek, trader, and educator specializing in teaching people how to leverage complex options spread through my Weekly Options Advisory. My company, ShadowTrader, has been helping traders since 2006. I've been a student of and actively trading the markets full time since 2000. Q: Who has been your biggest influence, and why did they have such a significant effect on you? Without a doubt, this would be James Dalton who is credited for bringing Market Profile theory to the masses through his seminal book, Mind Over Markets. Market profile is a completely different way of seeing the market and it changed my entire game almost overnight when I started applying the theory to my own analysis and trading. Q: Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give your younger self? Probably to not be afraid to network more with others in our business. Trading can be a very insular pursuit but there is an immense value in connecting with other traders and getting feedback on what you are doing. Also to step back and see the bigger picture. Trading is all about perspective and if you are too myopic you will miss the forest for the trees. Q: What is ShadowTrader? ShadowTrader is a trading education firm that offers advisory services across many asset classes including stocks, options, Forex, and pairs trading. We were the first 3rd party entity to be embedded inside of the think-or-swim platform with our ShadowTrader Squawkbox which continues to have thousands of listeners to this day. Q: What makes ShadowTrader different from its competitors? I would say it's our basic approach to analyzing the market which is different and somewhat proprietary. Most educators simply show you boilerplate examples of chart patterns and say "buy here" or "sell there" but this rarely works consistently in the real world because it doesn't bring context into consideration. ShadowTrader is all about the context around the movement of price. This context can be extremely nuanced as anyone who has attempted to short term trade the markets can tell you. Every day is different and you need to be aware of all of the myriad different things that are actually causing the market to move how it does, most of which is never what people think it is because their attention is constantly misdirected by the media or newsflow. Q: What led you to ShadowTrader? I was working at the time doing some live day trading in a competitor's chat room. The other two principals of ShadowTrader were impressed with what I was doing over there and asked me if I would be interested in starting my own advisory/education business within think-or-swim which was a very young company at the time. We started the SquawkBox broadcast soon after and simply kept expanding outward from that first product ever since. Q: What has the experience of building the business taught you? Mainly that you have to keep grinding and that your reputation is always your most valuable asset. The space we are in is very competitive and there are a lot of charlatans. Any endeavor that has the potential to make a lot of money quickly with relatively little effort is going to bring out the worst possible business people who will want to exploit the human desire to get rich quickly. We strive to underpromise and over deliver in a world where most are doing the opposite. Q: Where do you see things headed for you and the company in the next 5 years? We see ourselves continuing to innovate at the forefront of options education. The market five years from now will probably be a very different environment from the market now. We expect to be fluid with those changes and keep bringing our subscribers the most salient and actionable content there is to offer. For more information, visit shadowtrader.net
Introduction
Who is Peter Reznicek?
Business
True Tamplin is a published author, public speaker, CEO of UpDigital, and founder of Finance Strategists.
True is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance (CEPF®), author of The Handy Financial Ratios Guide, a member of the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, contributes to his financial education site, Finance Strategists, and has spoken to various financial communities such as the CFA Institute, as well as university students like his Alma mater, Biola University, where he received a bachelor of science in business and data analytics.
To learn more about True, visit his personal website or view his author profiles on Amazon, Nasdaq and Forbes.
