“My Days as a Trainee Crypto Trader”

Christopher Newhouse is a graduate trader at GSR, a crypto-native market maker focused on providing liquidity to institutional counterparties as well as market making for individual token projects. He started about a month ago with a graduate class of 7, and was the only US hire this year for the graduate trader position. After some initial training in London, he’s now on the desk and here’s what his average day looks like.

06.00-08.00: I wake up around 6am, make a quick breakfast and head to the gym. I usually shower and get ready at the gym so I can just take the bus straight to the office. GSR has a hybrid working model, so sometimes people work from home on Monday and Friday. It’s great to have the flexibility to choose when to come into the office, but I try to come into the office as much as possible as a junior in my career. I’ve really appreciated being able to turn in my chair and have a conversation with others, and I like being able to walk over to my buddy’s desk and shadow him during the day while I learn some of the day-to-day operations.

08.00-09.00: When I get to work I catch up with some colleagues, get something from the kitchen and take a look at some of the systems and chat to see what happened overnight. GSR has dealers in all different time zones, so it’s quite easy to transfer our daily tasks to the next time zone and we don’t have to work beyond our local hours. I take a look at some news articles, but in crypto it’s a little different; I browse some popular Twitter pages to see if anything interesting has happened in the ecosystem and read some news about a few tokens that haven’t been published officially yet but seem to have affected the price action. I browse through some additional news-related Telegram chats, and check out crypto-native news sources like The Block and CoinDesk to get a broader picture. I try to focus a lot on the derivatives and options space in crypto as I find it the most interesting, so I also look at some more traditional metrics like term structure and biases in cryptocurrency options and think about some ways traders might be trying to structure their views in the options market to get more color on where people might think the market is headed.

9.00-10.00: We have a weekly global follow-up meeting to find out some of our strategies going forward and to summarize what kind of projects we are working on. It’s great to be able to hear the other projects going on and the views of other traders on where the market might be moving.

10:00–12:00: I typically perform my day-to-day operational activities, which include quoting clients for spot traders, pricing options for derivatives traders, monitoring our risk systems for malfunctions, and settling liquidators and accumulators. Occasionally, I will make adjustments to trade orders that need to be changed, execute trades for clients and continue to monitor and adapt to the crypto markets to ensure the team is aware of any interesting flows or ongoing trades.

12.00-13.00: We are a market maker for multiple DeFi alternative vaults. On Fridays, I help my Buddy, Embert, quote and price a variety of options listed by some of the DeFi options vaults. We keep track of where vaults have previously traded as well as size and take this into account when quoting and trying to win the vaults. Any flow we win from the vaults I make sure to order and then I deploy our automated staking engines to make money.

13.00–13.30: GSR has a free daily lunch for those in the office. I order my lunch early in the morning and it gets here sometime. I usually just eat at my desk and read through interesting news or updates on Twitter, Telegram and popular crypto news sites to see if anything interesting is happening.

13:30 – 14:30: When there is downtime and daily operational activities sort of slow down, I read some books that were suggested to me by Mike and John, two of our traders in Europe. The books cover Vanilla and Exotic options, and I can ask them questions I have about Slack. GSR is not a place that throws you straight into the fire or has a ton of intimidating people, everyone is on the same page and knows the learning curve is steep and everyone is willing to help you get up to speed.

14.30–15.00: I have conversations with a few traders as I am still new and introducing myself globally. I like to hear more about what kind of background people have before they end up in the crypto space and why they chose crypto. GSR has a ton of knowledge and experience on the traditional side of things, but everyone here has a passion and interest in crypto. GSR definitely has the feel of a more crypto-native culture rather than a bank. Some of our traders even wear shorts in the office, which from what I’ve been told doesn’t really happen in a bank. We have traders in a number of different time zones so the work/life balance is great and the environment seems to be much more exciting and fast-paced than what I’ve heard from my friends in the banks.

15.00–15.30: A client requests a quote for a few different options for altcoins. GSR specializes in pricing and monetizing alt-coin options, and this is where we differ a bit from some of the other crypto-native brokerages and shops: we don’t just quote Bitcoin and ETH options, but some more esoteric options for altcoins that we want. We use proprietary models and pricing mechanisms and we end up quoting the customer and winning the deal. We book and secure the trade and allow our gamma scalping engines to monetize the option.

15.30–16.30: I have taken the lead in summarizing our daily risks at the end of US hours, noted some interesting trades that have occurred during the day, and come up with various interesting metrics to share with the team related to our trading activity and portfolio holdings. I spend this time scanning through some of the data streams such as GenesisVolatility, Laevitas and Skew.com to retrieve interesting options/derivative data related to flows and volatility. I use some of our systems to run a scenario analysis showing our different risks and positioning across different levels of volatility and price and send these documents to the team.

16.30–17.00: Traders who work from home are still connected to some of our voice chats and I have some downtime in the markets so we discuss some of the macro environment behind crypto as well as some interesting thoughts on the NFT markets. Even though GSR is a crypto-based store, many of our dealers have deep backgrounds in traditional finance, so I’m definitely able to get the same quality of education and learning. Macro is macro and options are options, be it crypto or traditional finance.

17.00–17.45: A client comes in and asks for a few offers for a few different tokens with pretty poor liquidity. I quote them and figure out the best way to do some of these trades, order them and head home to my apartment to end my day. I’m still learning, so I’m reading through some of my books and jotting down questions I might want to ask some of our traders the next day.

In the evenings, I like to cook in my apartment, spend time with my fiancé, or work out in the gym. I have plenty of time to do things outside of work. Right now, though, there’s a crypto conference in New York, so I’m going there for a couple of hours to network and discuss the market.

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