The importance of having an information advantage at trading

This is a great interview with Tom Costello, a veteran Quant PM formerly of Tudor Investment Corp and Moore Capital: I like how he doesn’t downplay his intelligence with this annoying false modesty you often see online. At the 59:00 mark he talks about being the smartest in school and college, but only being in the 25th percentile of JPMorgan employees. I too describe how growing people thought I was one of the smartest people in the world, which I dismissed, although in hindsight they were right. He’s open about being smart and credits at least part of his success to that, among other factors. He’s candid that intelligence matters if you want to succeed in this industry, and that lines up with my own experience too, even at the retail level. A theme of his interview is the importance of having an information advantage. He describes how in 2001-2003 he built a system that gave him an information advantage by automatically parsing headlines. For about a decade he was profitable with…