Berita & analisis pasar

Karen Wong ( Linkedin ) is a private FX & Equities Trader, Sydney Chapter Secretary of the Australian Technical Analysts Association and technical contributor for Guppytraders.com. Karen’s entire career has been focused on private trading primarily across equity markets. Her technical analysis is regularly used to help the community pursue the development of this speciality, particularly with her engagement in the Sydney ATAA chapter.

This edition uncovers the perspective of private traders: Her background and how she got into trading Her trading principles, methods, and indicators Fundamental and technical analysis How to utilise technical analysis and its key principles

Andrea Marani ( Linkedin ) is the CEO of OpenMarkets and longtime operator in the financial services space. A South African at heart, the now Aussie financial operator has many runs on the board with organisations like Investec, Rabobank, Shaw & Partners, plus Global Trader. OpenMarkets is a Digital Trading Platform that provides clients with direct access to markets via a range of digital technologies.

This chat with Andrea offers an interesting look into his background and wealth of experience across financial markets. We covered numerous topics, including: What he misses about South Africa and why he moved to Australia Early memories of making wine Highlights of his career The impact of technology on financial markets Open Markets and its focus New products he’s excited about

Khim Khor ( Linkedin ) is GO Markets’ COO and Executive Director. He started out as a Sales Manager for the Asia business, when this demographic was just opening up for the CFD/Forex industry. Five years later he stands as COO and is an integral part of the GO Markets team with a unique and innovative perspective on Asia.

As a lifelong student of Economics, Khim has always had a penchant for understanding how markets work. In this episode we’ll cover: His time and role at GO Markets Growing up in Malaysia, and sambals The Asian market Trading & gambling in Asia compared to Australia Asian investor perspective USA & China trade relations What sitcom best resembles GO Markets office - Transcript Disclaimer: Go Markets is a derivatives broker and Jordan Michaelides is the managing director of Neuralle Media. All opinions expressed by Jordan and podcast guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Go Markets, an AFSL license holder.

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for financial decisions nor as an indication of future performance. Clients of Go Markets may hold positions in the derivatives mentioned. A financial services guide and product disclosure statement for our products are available at the www.gomarkets.com website.

Jordan Michaelides: In this episode we spoke with Kim Khor. Kim is Go Markets COO and Executive Director. He started out as a sales manager for the Asia business just when this new demographic was opening up for the most of the CFD and Forex industry.

Fast forward five years, he stands as CEO and an integral part of the Go Markets with a unique perspective on Asia. A lifelong student of economics, Kim has always had a pension for understanding how markets work and, of course, his notorious obsession with sambal. This is a great episode where we cover, of course, sambal and growing up in Malaysia, his time and role at Go Markets, the Asia market itself, trading and gambling in Asia compared to Australia, the Asian investor perspective, US versus China Trade Wars and Relations, and what sitcom best resembles the Go markets office.

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your podcast app and consider sharing with one of your friends. With that all being said, let's get into the episode with Khim Khor. Kim, thank you for joining me on this nice sunny Friday.

First question for you. How spicy do you like your sambal? Khim Khor: *laughs* Hot and spicy, of course.

Jordan Michaelides: Do you know it was you that introduced me to sambal? I'd never had sambal before and I remember back in the day when I worked at Go Markets, I used to always buy in the morning for a snack and one day I saw you having your sambal and thought I'm going to try this on my sushi, so I was had sushi and sambal. Khim Khor: Well, you have a good taste.

Back then when I brought a sambar to office, a lot of my colleagues actually complained about the terrible smell. Jordan Michaelides: What was the other thing used to bring in? They were like little fried prawns.

Khim Khor: Fried prawns? Like a tempura? Oh, they were dried shrimp.

They’re very popular in Malaysia and are used in all different kinds of cooking, particularly sambal. Jordan Michaelides: In Sambal it's amazing. Whereabouts of Malaysia did you grow up?

Khim Khor: Kuala Lumpur, but I was born in Penang, the island. Malaysia used to be colonized by the British, they used to have Air Force there, and Australia used to have a Navy base on Penang at a place called Butterworth. Jordan Michaelides: My boss is from Penang, he was saying that a lot of people in pain don't really speak Chinese or Malay, they all speak English.

That's the common language. Khim Khor: Yes, that's correct. Jordan Michaelides: What's the common language in Malaysia, do most people speak Malay or Chinese?

Khim Khor: The official national language is Malay, but Malaysia consists of three major races, so if you're Chinese you'll be speaking Mandarin, a dialogue like hokkien which is popular in Denang. Indian’s mostly speak Tamel because they are from South India and of course Malaysians will speak Malay. Jordan Michaelides: I've always been fascinated with Malaysia.

I've still yet to go, I want to get to Penang by the end of next year. That’d be great. Now, many people internally would know you as the friendly neighborhood, Malaysian, always bringing in your amazing delights to the office.

You were at the firm at the same time that I started. You've stuck around, worked your way all the way up to an Executive Director and COO. You've got an interesting background, looking at your LinkedIn profile, you studied it in Tasmania, right?

Khim Khor: Correct, it was back in 2000 that I started there. Jordan Michaelides: Okay. So, you did economics, honors as well, workeds as a wealth manager, project director, strategic consultant; What was the catalyst that drew you into Forex?

Khim Khor: I would say back then the motivation was money, when you're young. You’ll see from my background I graduated from the University Of Tasmania, and my first job is was a wealth planner, a financial planner. I did really well back then and in fact decided to a job opportunity from RBA.

Jordan Michaelides: Really? What were you going to be doing there? Khim Khor: How it worked back then with my university was if you graduated with first class honors you will be automatically given a job with the RBA.

Well paid as well, but for certain reasons I didn't take up that opportunity. I thought that will be a routine job, running statistics and things like that so it could be a bit boring for me. Jordan Michaelides: Who knows, you could have been on the board of governors *both laugh* Khim Khor: So, I worked for Genesis back then, which is under Challenger, I believe, Kerry Packer's group, for two and a half years and did really well, so, everyone got a pay out, my boss retired and I decided to do something totally different to my background, that was modular housing.

Jordan Michaelides: How did that come about? Khim Khor: That was back in 2005-2006 when Australia was at the beginning of the mining boom, so the concept of fly-in-fly-out work created some of opportunity with mining workers living in a quite bad conditions around the mining areas. They we're spending a lot of money hiring private planes in and out so the solution was to build an energy efficient seven star like hotel, like a portable modular concept, which we’d pitch to all the big mining companies.

Jordan Michaelides: How did that go? Khim Khor: It went pretty well, we were on the verge of finishing the prototype and due diligence with one of the biggest iron ore mining companies in Australia. Some personal things fell through because of the business partner.

So, it didn't work out but not because product was no good, just because in business these things happen. Jordan Michaelides: Yeah, you can just have a whole bunch of things happen at once and it just makes it impossible to continue. When you came to study here, did you intend to stay in Australia?

Was your original thinking, I'm just going to go back home and get some sick job because I've got this degree in Australia? Khim Khor: Actually my initial intention when starting the University was Canada, Ontario. That’s where I went to college.

When I tried to apply for university, I apply about six or seven around the UK, Canada and Australia and the University Of Tasmania happened to be the first university to recruit me. Jordan Michaelides: What do you miss the most about home when you think about it. I know you get back every, every now.

Khim Khor: Food and family, I suppose. Jordan Michaelides: In Malaysia it's always the classic thing, isn't it? Food and family, but life's pretty good here I think.

When you were growing up, thinking about your family, are there any particular lessons that you learned or you hold with you today that either of your parents imparted on you, maybe they did that directly or indirectly through you seeing it? Khim Khor: I think my grandpa and my father have a big influence. Okay.

They always teach me when you want to do things successfully, you have to be extremely focused, because the power focus leads to great success. The reason being, if you’re able to focus on one thing and do it right, the rest will just follow suit. Jordan Michaelides: I was saying before, you've worked your way to the near top.

I'm curious and I think most of the audience would be curious about the role of, essentially, head of operations. Initially you started here as a sales manager and worked your way up to VP of Asia which we'll get into Asia in a moment,and now executive director and COO, how did this whole opportunity arise? How do you view it in hindsight, your time starting here?

Khim Khor Back to what I just mentioned, focus is what lead to where I am today. I started as a sales manager in Go Markets, specifically targeting Australia clientele and throughout the process, I suppose, some luck and some fate, Go Markets decided to break into the Chinese market. Because of my background, I do speak other languages, so that gives me certain opportunity to perform.

Jordan Michaelides: I remember initially, you were obviously pitching to clients when you first started in English and then all of a sudden we get a few random clients who'd say, Chinese, Chinese, on the phone and we just started palming them off to you, and it just grew and grew and grew. I guess that's where the pivot to Asia came for the business, I think. I'm just thinking about the role itself, being CEO, what does that actually mean for a company like Go Markets?

Khim Khor: The rule compared to sales back then has changed significantly. Back then my focus was all about conversions of sales. Be that from Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, the focus was to provide the best user experience for my client, try to answer questions as professionally as possible.

The focus now is altogether different because now, on a management perspective, the daily routine will be more about problem solving and managing people. Jordan Michaelides: The remit for operations, I'm just thinking about the structure of the business, you've got the CEO, compliance team, trading team, operations. Do you oversee all of those people beneath you and speak to the CEO or how does that work?

How is everything split up in the business? Khim Khor: At the moment I classify us as a small-medium enterprise… Jordan Michaelides: But it’s pretty big for the industry I think, I feel. Khim Khor: It depends who we compare it with, like, I compare us to IG, CMC, those listed companies, we are small.

Jordan Michaelides: A company like a Pepperstone is of this going to be bigger, but you know, you guys are just that level just below them, I think. Khim Khor: Yeah, that's true. In terms of organization structure it will be simpler.

I mean, we have upper management and basically the staff. We don't have so-called middle management. From a communication perspective, decision-making perspective, we are more flexible, which is also a strength.

Jordan Michaelides: Yeah, being agile is always a good strength. What do you think is the most crucial aspect of your role? What is the one thing that is most important?

Khim Khor: Problem solving. That's absolutely what I've done in the last two years. Jordan Michaelides: Now getting into Asia, I said before you were VP of Asia, is there someone who's in charge of that market now and you split those up or how does that work?

Khim Khor: Back then we had a slightly different shareholder structure, they introduced the Chinese market by hiring a Western face which is a good strategy because Asia tends to have more confidence if your company has a white face, we have a guy named Adam Bevan who used to run the China business. I work alongside and help him because I can’t relocate into China as my family's all based in Melbourne. Then for personal reasons the head of China decided not to proceed further, and I was given an offer to take over the whole Chinese business.

Jordan Michaelides: So, is there anyone who's in charge of Asia Pacific or anything like that now? Khim Khor: In China we have a functional team, when I say functional I mean from operational perspective, they can work independently, we have about 28 staff in China, and six staff in Taiwan. The majority of the Chinese business is handled by the Chinese team, so my role is overseeing if they have issues or problems that they require assistance with then I step up and help them.

Jordan Michaelides: I had no idea that there was a whole Chinese team. Are they remote workers or… Khim Khor: We call it a third party service provider because in China the regulation doesn't allow you to do any sales activity directly. Jordan Michaelides: I guess that's why so many people go and open offices in places like Hong Kong or Singapore.

When I left Go Markets back in 2013, things were starting to pivot towards Asia, you were saying Adam Bevin was starting to grow that part of the business. How do you think it's changed the company? For example, what's the percentage of clients now for Go Markets in China, Asia and the rest of the world in comparison.

Khim Khor: I think now it’s around 50/50, 50% is Asia, not just China but Southeast Asia as well. Jordan Michaelides: In Asia, I think there's about 1 million millionaire sin China alone, so there's a lot of wealth that's been created in Asia. Based on your perspective, you've had your time with both types of clients.

How is the mindset different from Asian and Chinese investors or traders to locals here in Australia? Khim Khor: The Chinese, I believe in their blood are more speculative than Westerners, I think that can be proven by just visiting and casino in the world, you can see the high ratio everywhere because they like a punt. Jordan Michaelides: is that cultural thing or a historical thing?

I always thought it was because China and some of these other countries have been poor for so long, or communist in some way, now they've got all this wealth they're wanting to live the best life that they possibly can and that's what they love to do. Gambling is a major thing for Confucian culture, I think there's an element where it’s almost like you'd like to lose the money. Is that true?

Khim Khor: I don't think anyone likes to lose the money, I think the philosophy behind why China tends to have such behaviour is they tend to speculate more than westerners. It’s from historical culture, one of the reasons you just mentioned, they might have been on a poor side for long time and when a little bit of wealth becomes available they tend to leverage that and they're happy to take that risk. That's why I say it’s in their blood, it’s who they are.

Jordan Michaelides: So when you say they're more speculative, what do you mean by that? Are they willing to put in higher hands in different commodities or CFDs or are they just more aggressive? Khim Khor: More aggressive.

Their vision is, if I can use $100 and take a punt overnight I could potentially make 1000, unlike Austrian traders. You can see from the historical trends, we call it a life cycle of a trader, meaning that average trader in the leverage, Forex or margin derivative perspective, the life cycle of Asian trader tend to be much shorter. Interesting.

Jordan Michaelides: Really? So they get in and out and they're done with it. Khim Khor: Yes.

They either double it or they lose it. That’s the nature of it at the moment. Let’s talk about China alone for a minute, china only been prosperous since 80s, so the wealth effect in China is not driven by financials, it’s been driven by property the last 10 years.

If you’re talking about wealth generated in the last 10 years, property is about 10 times bigger than the stock market. Jordan Michaelides: Prices in Shanghai and Beijing are just out of control. Khim Khor: Right, it’s out of control.

But having said that, you also need to look at how China has been printing money the last 10 years. If you look at the stats, they actually print 10 times more than America. Jordan Michaelides: I know they do that to peg their currency, but I didn't know it was about 10 times more.

We're in a really interesting stage at the moment of the lifecycle of Asian investors. China's here to stay clearly, it’s the superpower with America, at least locally. We've gone through this whole stage, I think in the last two years where everyone's been paranoid about Chinese investors buying real estate and other assets.

I think it's been shown now that Indian investors are starting to actually overtake Chinese investors just because it's, we're going through that cycle. Where do you see the Asian investor mindset going over the next few years? What are they saying to you?

Are they still interested in Forex and real estate and stuff like that? Or is it something else entirely? Khim Khor: From the Asian investor perspective, a leverage product, like what we ofter at Go Markets will never die, as long as there are Chinese, they will keep doing it.

The differences here is the amount of money they willing to invest will be co-related to their wealth effect. I give you one example. Just now you were talking about the average price of apartments in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen.

They are selling at average of approximately hundred thousand RMB per square meter, which is about 20 to 30,000 AUD. So, they say I'll open an account with Go Markets, if they only spend 0.1% to test it out that's not a lot of their wealth and they can afford to lose it. But in China, the differences it makes to the world is because of the population.

You have 1.6 billion roughly, Shanghai’s population alone is nearly 30 million. You look at the numbers themselves, they’re very powerful. That's why you see for the last four or five years Forex brokers, nearly everyone now has huge exposure in the Chinese market, which is also a huge risk.

Jordan Michaelides: It's gonna be very interesting, particulary because a lot of people talk about the trade war at the moment. That's a big thing. Khim Khor: Indeed.

I suppose it’s flexing of muscles between the two big players. Jordan Michaelides: What position have you built so far from that? Have you just been observing what's going on?

A lot of the talk at the moment is that the US stock market is overvalued and flushed after 10 years of quantitative easing and China's in a weird spot because they've had to export a lot of labor and construction to keep their economy booming, particularly with the one belt one road initiative. Where do you sit on that at the moment? The China US dynamic.

Khim Khor: If Trump is re-elected in the midterm election in November. My personal opinion… Trump is a businessman or businessman / politicians, if you look at his style of how he conducting business and relate it to politics, I think they are highly correlated. At the end of the game, I don't think that he will try to create a situation to put China in a huge losing position.

He's a good manipulator, he knows how to play his game really well. Let's say this particular trade war is creating a lot of uncertainty and volatility, which financial markets love. If you ask me to classify who is the best trader in the world, I say Trump.

Jordan Michaelides: I completely agree with you, he's a very good persuasion artist. That's his thing, he's a negotiator and he uses this and then all of a sudden he comes out of the blue, like with Xi Jinping and says, let's strike a deal or something like that. And that will calm marks markets down.

That's where you think it's potentially going to go? Khim Khor: I think, if Donald Trump wins the midterms he’s got another four years then he's done. He got 4 years left to fight his war to make American great again.

But China is different, he can just change the party structure and stay permanently, effectively we can call him an emperor. He's not short on money, he's not short on time. He might say, you know what, you’ve done a good job, Trump.

No problem. Bye! *both laugh* Jordan Michaelides: I never really considered that. from my own podcast we interviewed a geopolitical strategists who works at Australian national university, he’s used and respected by government when it comes to the Communist Party of China, and he was saying no one really grasp the reality of what he's done. He's effectively made himself a dictator.

He's completely got all the different areas of the party under control and he can stay there until he's bored or he wants to retire or he dies. And the Chinese have a very longterm mindset simply because their culture has existed for so long. You see a lot of articles now from the government political machine where they talk about the fact that we've got ages.

You've got to slowly, slowly chip away at things and gradually, gradually build up years. The salami strategies. Khim Khor: That's correct.

In China it's quite a unique political situations, in particular, if you look at the last 5,000 years of Chinese history, since the early twenties when China community's party was a formed, compared to the historic dynasties, this particular part has existed for less than a hundred years. When President Xi Jingping changed the rules structure and allowed him to be in a position indefinitely, that drew a lot of criticism, seeing that the China is going backwards because China should be moving forward to become liberal, to become democratic. I once had a constructive argument with a professor from Melbourne university, I asked him a question… Assume that you have a family with one kid, of course you can be more agile, more flexible talking to your kids about right and wrong, this and that.

If you have a family with 15 or 20 kids you need certain rules, policy, house rules, right?. That is a huge difference. So yes, democracy is good, but I wouldn’t say communism is bad.

I tend to be neutral in a way that you have to look at the circumstances. Jordan Michaelides: I completely agree. I've been to Japan twice in the last 18 months and everyone loves the Japanese culture, but it can also be debilitating for people who live there.

People come back and say, Oh, the trains are so good, everything's so clean, blah, blah, blah. I think that, the differences between monocultures like Japan and multi-cultures like ours. They all have their pros and cons.

It depends on where you want to stand to look at things. We haven’t got much longer left, so some short, fast questions for you to wrap up and give the audience some perspective. I’ve asked every guest so far since, if you were to choose a sitcom, what sitcom best reflects the Go Markets office, what would it be?

Khim Khor: Honestly, I haven't watched sitcom for long, not since friends? Jordan Michaelides: A lot of people have said the British version of The Office, but I don't know, I still can't put my finger on it that's why I want to hear from everyone else. What is your morning routine?

Khim Khor: My morning routine, a coffee and then check through my mailbox. Problem solving all day, then back home. Very boring *laughs*.

Jordan Michaelides: What does your evening look like? Khim Khor: Go home, relax, watch some movies. See the kids.

Jordan Michaelides: If you had to name your best purchase with the most positive impact under $200? Khim Khor: Books. The latest one I bought is How Not to Be Wrong, by Jordan Ellenberg.

It’s about the power of mathematical thinking, about decision making based on mathematics. Jordan Michaelides: Do you read regularly? Khim Khor: I used to force myself to read at least seven books a year, since I've become COO the only time I have time to read is on a plane.

I do fly quite frequently, so try to complete my target of seven, but this year I'm lagging behind. Jordan Michaelides: Favorite documentaries or movies? Khim Khor: The Big Shot, that is a brilliant film.

Jordan Michaelides: If you could have a billboard anywhere in Australia, where would it be? And what would it say? Khim Khor: Hamilton Island, and it would say “life is simple, be happy”.

Jordan Michaelides: We've hit our time. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you Khim.

Khim Khor: Thanks Jordan.

David Hall ( Linkedin ) is the Co-Founder of Tapaas and former Principal Architect across numerous financial institutions including Westpac, Macquarie Bank and Citigroup. David made his way into the industry through a unique opportunity at Salomon Brothers, an organisation that had a lasting impact on David. Twenty years later, and many runs on the board with institutions as a financial systems architect, David now runs his own business – Tapaas.

Tapaas is an analytics platform that accelerates profit from insights for finance markets enterprises. The platform provides analytical power to growing companies, that was only previously available to the premier financial institutions that David used to work for. David has a fascinating background and life experience as an expat.

We covered a vast array of topics, including: What he misses about America and loves about Australia His father and lessons learnt from him Experience travelling as an expat, particularly in Japan Financial innovation at organisations like Salomon Brothers Tapaas and its work with retail brokers Principles for applying risk & technology - Transcript Disclaimer: Go Markets is a derivatives broker and Jordan Michaelides is the managing director of Neuralle Media. All opinions expressed by Jordan and podcast guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Go Markets, an AFSL license holder. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for financial decisions nor as an indication of future performance.

Clients of go markets may hold positions in the derivatives mentioned. A financial services guide and product disclosure statement for our products are available at the www.gomarkets.com website. Jordan Michaelides: In this episode we spoke with David Hall.

David is the cofounder of Tapaas, and former principle architects across numerous financial institutions including Westpac, Macquarie Bank and Citi group. David made his way into the industry with the unique opportunity at Salomon brothers, an organization that had a lasting impact on David and his career. 20 years later, and many runs on the board with institutions as a financial systems architect, David now runs his own business, Tapaas. Tapaas is an analytics platform that accelerates profit from insights for financial market enterprises, primarily through allowing them to analyze their risk.

The platform provides analytical power to growing companies that was only really available to the premier financial institutions that David used to work for. David has a fascinating background and life experience. We covered a vast array of topics including what he misses about America and loves about Australia, his father and lessons learned from him, his experience traveling as an expat, particularly in Japan, financial innovation organizations like Salomon Brothers, Tappas and its work with the retail brokers, and then principles for applying risks and technology in this business.

If you enjoyed this episode, do subscribe on your podcast app and consider sharing this one with a friend that you think may enjoy it. With that all being said, let's get into the episode with David Hall. David, thank you for joining me on your Friday.

I've heard it's a nice cold day up in Sydney and surprisingly a very warm one down here in Melbourne. First question I've got to ask, and I think we were chatting about this beforehand, what do you miss the most about the United States? David Hall: That's an interesting question because, actually, what I find is when I go back to the States, it's what I miss about Australia that affects me the most, and that is, I just love coffee, and when you go back to the States you kind of suffer with things like Starbucks, so I always go hunting for a proper cafe if I can find one.

Jordan Michaelides: Whereabouts did you grow up in America? David Hall: I grew up in the suburbs of Washington DC, just outside the Nation's Capitol. Jordan Michaelides: When I send through the notes, I really like to understand lessons that were imparted onto people so we get a real idea as to who they are.

Typically, it's from their parents, it may be something that's direct or indirect. You noted your dad worked for the US Government for both senators and congressmen, I'm curious as to what particular lesson he imparted on you when you were young. David Hall: As I said, he worked for senators and Congressman, and, the amazing thing about politicians is how they get to know people.

They remember you, they remember your name and things like that. My dad, even though he worked with some really important people, he always made sure that he would spend time with the average guy, you know, the cashier at the local shop, and just ask them, how was their day, what's their name, get to know a bit about them and make them feel like somebody actually cared. The lesson I took away from that is that even though we have really busy lives, we need to always take time to get to know each other and help people out.

Jordan Michaelides: What was his job? David Hall: A couple of jobs, but, they would be either the legislative assistant or the administrative assistant. Back in the day I remember he would come home from work in the evening with a briefcase full of letters from the constituents.

He was the guy that if you wrote to your Congressman with a need or a complaint, my dad was the guy who would read it and then basically determine how the Congressman respond or dictate the responses. Jordan Michaelides: I noted here that when you think about what you wanted to be as a kid, you loved rock and roll and, I guess, you thought you'd grow up to be a rock star like most kids think. With that influence of your dad and the work that he did in that field, why not politics?

David Hall: Well, one of the memories I have of childhood is that every four years, because of the election cycle in the US, the night before the first Tuesday in November, the entire office staff would be over at our house wondering whether they were going to have a job the next morning or not, and I thought, I don't want to work in an industry where you could possibly get pitched out once every four years. Jordan Michaelides: I can imagine it's pretty turbulent in that regard. What's the earliest memory of your childhood?

I noted you spoke about playing with your dog and walking in the woods. Which woods were you thinking about in particular? David Hall: In the suburbs where we lived, there was a national park kind of area, it's a creek that flows into Washington DC and you could ride your bicycle from out in the forest all the way into this city following it.

It was quite amazing, quite beautiful. Jordan Michaelides: What's it called? David Hall: Rock Creek Park.

Jordan Michaelides: Now thinking about your early career, and obviously we spoke about that political element before, I noted here that you studied at the University Of Maryland, you studied business accounting. I did accounting, banking and finance, I'm curious does accounting differ much to business accounting or is it sort of the same thing? David Hall: The primary focus of the accounting degree was ultimately to become a CPA or a certified public accountants where you could work at a big firm and audit large fortune 500 companies and that sort of thing.

It did have a bit of a technology involved because back in that day, that was when people were first starting to think about using computers for accounting. Jordan Michaelides: And so you entered the commercial world at PWC and went on to Salomon brothers. I know that in your notes you spoke about how much the world was business was changing and how technology was becoming such an important element here, particularly probably at your time at Salomon.

I've noted you spoke really highly of Salomon, but I'm curious, how did you sort of fall into the world of finance tech in particular? David Hall: Fall is probably a good point. Working at PWC, an advisory business, you are measured on how heavily utilized you are, so, as soon as you saw yourself finishing a project, you would want it to be shopping around for your next one if you are wise.

You could wait to have somebody come and pick you for their project, some random event, or you could hunt around. My specialty at the time was implementing these very large mainframe general ledgers. We would work for companies such as Freddie Mac, which is probably infamous now because of the GFC, I worked on implementing a general ledger there.

Imagine trying to come up with the account numbering scheme for one of the biggest financial institutions in the United States, account numbers matter because if you make a mess of them it's going to be quite impossible to produce meaningful reports. When that project was finishing, I spoke to a friend who was in New York and I just asked him if there was anything that required my skills that he knew about. The day after that I got a call from his boss asking me if I wanted to move to Tokyo, Japan.

I was engaged at the time, we were going to get married within a couple of months and basically two weeks after the wedding we packed up everything and flew to. This was 1991, and that was actually the last time I lived in the United States. So, I flew away for a one year project and destiny has taken me a lot of different places since then.

Salomon Brothers was the customer. Jordan Michaelides: You seemed, at PWC, to be working on a lot of, like you said, general ledgers. Simulations for banks is what I assumed it was.

It’s curious that you went to Japan then, it must've been quite exciting. How long did you live there? David Hall: I lived in Japan for eight years.

It was an amazing experience. After being there for the one year project and having gone through the experience of adjusting to their culture and learning the language and learning to survive, it seemed a bit silly to just turn around and go straight back home. The other thing is that Salomon brothers is an amazing company and the environment you come into when you arrive there… back in the day, imagine, not everybody even had PCs, and in Salomon's we had these things called Sun Microsystems.

They were like super computers on everybody's desk because these guys knew the value of technology in finance. When an opportunity came to then start working on a subsequent project, which was far more interesting, and finance focused than a general ledger, I raised my hand and they hired me to stay there. Jordan Michaelides: I noticed here, you were very impressed with the way that Salomon brothers ran itself.

I'm curious as to what you think created that sort of that innovative environment. Why do you think they were more ahead than say a JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs at the time? David Hall: You might get into some serious arguments as to who was ahead *laughs* I think, well, these are organizations that truly understood risk.

They understood that there's no way to make substantial gains without taking on some amount of risk, but, there's also no way to retain those gains without managing that risk. That's what they've done for over a hundred years and when technology came along I think they just realized that was going to be part of the game. Jordan Michaelides: You said before you, you oved from America and you haven't been back since.

Now you live in Australia, in Sydney. On your notes you spoke about how while your wife and you were living in Japan when she had the opportunity to go do some work in Australia. You came to visit, you fell in love with Australia and you know, happily ever after, you still live here now.

What particularly about Australia do you love? Why did you not want to go back to either Japan or America? David Hall: There's an amazing culture here that is a confluence of kind of European, Asian and middle Eastern.

In America, in New York especially, they think of themselves as the melting pot and I guess they are, but I think Australia a melting pot of a different flavour. What I really like in Australia is, it feels to me, like your local cafe, your local shops and so on are run by proprietors who actually own the place and care. It hasn't been completely overrun by franchises and strip malls.

It still has that sort of feeling to it and I hope it stays. Jordan Michaelides: I think there's certain elements of the Australian culture which make that sort of stuff very hard. I remember watching a documentary recently about why Starbucks failed in Australia, and it's always interesting to me that it goes back to that egalitarian culture where people don't like the big end of town.

They much prefer smaller players or people that they can relate to. I don't know why that is. I think it’s that myth of the fair go that we exhibit in Australia.

About that melting pot, on my other podcast I was interviewing a guest who's a demographer and he was speaking about how everyone claims they're the most culturally diverse place in the world, particularly places like New York, London, etc., but I think Melbourne and Sydney well and truly have everyone else sorted. I think New York has 16% of their population is born overseas, whereas in Melbourne and Sydney it's, it's getting about 50% now, and the diverse array of people as well. I think if you look at an index of the different nationalities, I think Australia smashes everyone else out of the park.

It's interesting, more than anything. I've seen all sorts of different cultures where, and you would've seen it as well, I love Japan, I've been to Japan twice than last 18 months. My partner and I were actually planning on getting married over there because we wanted to get married overseas.

I don’t know why, we just loved Japan, but their culture is very homogenous and, it's very, very different. Every one of those cultures has its own benefits I think. Jumping into to your career in the space that you're in now, you have worked extensively across the technical side of financial systems.

I'm not going to list all the roles, but in summary you've worked front and back of house across companies like Macquarie Group, Westpac, City Group, Salomon Brothers as well. And then of course in Australia, America and Japan. Now, the audience listening may have an idea as to what you actually do, but, for the novices first listening to this space of FinTech systems and what they actually are and how they run, can give us like a quick two minute brief on to what you actually do and what these systems are.

David Hall: What I actually do is a well kept secret people use to say *laughs*. Much of that time my role was architect. Going back to the PWC days, I came into this industry with a business background but also a smattering of technology and computing, and, what I found was these organizations were hiring people who had computer science degrees, who really understood technology, did not necessarily understand business.

So, my role has always been really getting to understand and empathize and listen and learn about what it is that these business people need, but at the same time truly understand what are the capabilities and the constraints of technology of the day. Also budgetary constraints, policy constraints, security, disaster recovery. I mean, you think about, there are many, many dimensions to making sure that a system is going to be fit for purpose and also deliver the desired final outcome that somebody is asking for.

I guess I'm, if you're really thinking about there are so many aspects to finance, you could be looking at trying to improve somebody's experience; one of the projects I worked on at City Group, what they were trying to do was effectively provide somebody a the credit approval for a mortgage loan within 60 seconds of them pushing ‘go’. Imagine this, you have filled out and completed a mortgage loan application which includes things like your employment history, your bank account details, a valuation from an appraiser of your house and lots of different things. But once you'd actually put all this stuff together and sort of push, go and uploaded it to come back to you with an answer in 60 seconds.

That's an aspect of the business where you're trying to think how could we win new business and change people's experience at dealing with the bank from something like waiting weeks and weeks. Say you're about to get married, the next thing you're going to want to do is buy house and this a big dream. If you find your dream house and then you've got to sit there and wait for weeks for your bank to come back and tell you whether you're going to get the money that's not good.

Banks aren't all bad, a lot of the things we do in technology is to try and improve people's experience with them. Jordan Michaelides: It was interesting on some of the notes you mentioned about, I was thinking about how our audience can learn, you know, there's obviously exchanges and brokers that are listening but also traders. One of the interesting notes you had when I asked what can traders learn from them and how the house approaches risk was just how they view risk.

I mean, one of the things, and obviously it's sort of tied into the work you do is big houses know that you cannot manage risk if you cannot measure it, and it reminds me of, is it Peter Drucker, “what gets measured gets managed”. I love that quote. One of those things that people can learn from this space is that yes, technology, you may be cautious of it, you may have an opinion on it, but the reality is it allows you to do things that in the past were not really possible.

That draws me to the lessons learned in your own career and I'm specifically thinking about your career as a technical architect. What stands out to you is the biggest insight from your time in the industry? David Hall: As an architect, you've got to try and balance all of these various constraints.

You know, there's some desired outcome, but there are also constraints and technology problems and things you've got to overcome. A couple of main things: There’s a lot of people involved, each of them has a different perspective and also a different interests. So there may be the business leader who is trying to come up with a new product and get it to market as fast as they can and as cheap as he can, then there's also the risk manager who's concerned about if this product takes off, what's the impact going to be on our balance sheet, then there's the security officers who want to be sure that we're not creating a new opportunity for some sort of threat or somebody to break into our systems.

And all these things have to be balanced. One of the things I learned when I was living in Japan was a technique that they call ‘Nemawashi’, and this is basically the art of establishing consensus among a diverse group of people while always letting them save face. In Japan you would never a big business meeting where you throw some big controversial sort of issue that could potentially embarrass one of the executives around the table or put them in a tough spot.

You always made sure that if there was something, a big decision had to be made or a compromise, any of this, that you go and visit each one of them individually, privately. In Japan usually there's a lot of alcohol involved in these type of meetings, you want to make sure that they are on your side before you get into the big meeting. It's not a technical insight, let's say, but it is certainly important to try to get success in technology endeavours and projects.

Jordan Michaelides: It sounds like it's the ability to communicate with an audience and make sure that everyone's on board because at the end of the day, you've got to convince a whole bunch of people that this is the right thing to do. I found that so funny reading that and thinking, yeah, the amount of drinking that would have to be involved before that big meeting, which is so typical of Japanese culture. Then again, you also learn the techniques of lean and agile, where in the west we write on a bunch of post-it notes, whack it on the board, and all of a sudden we're doing a scrum.

It’s always interesting to see how those little things are imparted on us along the way. David Hall: Our current strategy required to get something done in large enterprise might not be the same strategy as launching a start-up and coming up with an idea. We did spend a fair bit of time white boarding and forecasting and that sort of thing, but really nothing really happens until you start building a solution and getting it in people's hands, so, the idea of the lean startup is to rapidly as possible find ways that you can take this hypothesis that you have that we understand a problem, we found a solution to it, we're going to actually get the solution in people's hands and get feedback on it and potentially pivot if it fails, turn and then rapidly learn and come back and iterate.

It's basically a philosophy we follow at Tappas with our company. Jordan Michaelides: Now, on Tappas, I think on the website it's known as an analytics platform as a service. Primarily you guys are focused on real time insights for clients, building platforms, offering a platform that people can use to plug-in all their different feeds and manage their exposures.

I know that you're primarily focused on FX retail brokers at the moment, why that space in particular? David Hall: Well, the idea of coming up with something like a platform as a service is really a cloud concept. We saw when we were starting the company, we knew from our experience working in institutional banks, in that trading space, the power of big data analytics and the power of taking tons of historical data and applying mathematical models and quant models and doing what we call back testing, hypothesizing back testing, proving out these things, and then finally releasing that algorithm into the real world, they'll start trading or something like that.

We knew of course, that to do this required tremendous compute resources, a team of really brilliant people, lots of money. At banks like Citi, Macquarie Bank, we had that, but Tom and I thought when we started the company, surely there's a need in the marketplace where there are organizations out there who could benefit from this same kind of capability but could never pull together the millions of dollars required to front up the team and buy the computers and all that. So, what we thought would be the solution was to build something, we'd offer it as a service, a cloud hosted subscription monthly model, then medium size companies would be able to apply this to their business problems.

At the same time, I was working in FX at Westpac, Tom got to do some consulting at a company called AxiTrader. It was mainly more IT strategy type of activity, but was noticing these retail brokers are processing tons of data, huge volumes, lots of ticks, lots of trades, with, let’s say relatively less technology capability than we would have in a big bank like Westpac or Citi. That's where the light bulb came on and we thought this could be an opportunity if we built a system that does the analytics, the streaming data, risk management, that there'd be an opportunity, and there definitely it seems to be.

Jordan Michaelides: We were chatting about it before, the industry was, and I think you had this really funny video on your website, where, people speak about how a lot of the industry was using spreadsheets for so many years. I think about my time in the industry five years ago and that was best practice. You’d pull a feed, whack it on a spreadsheet, marry it up with a few different sums of different orders and then all of a sudden you're balancing your book, which is hilarious, but the fact that you couldn't do it in real time was quite scary.

David Hall: I must say, I came out of my first sales meeting with an FX broker, almost stunned at the revelation that they were using Excel sheets and this copy/paste method to effectively try and get a picture of their risk and exposure when I knew this risk and exposure was changing every second. Jordan Michaelides: What was that first sales meeting like? Did it awaken them as to how big a deal this was, or how useful this tool could be?

David Hall: Honestly, what I found to be the strongest sales tool is the experience of a catastrophic event at a broker *laughs*. Sorry for laughing, it's really not funny. I imagine the life of an insurance salesman is probably the same and the way you're coming out and saying, look, pay any of these premiums, and people say they can use that money for something else until they experienced that kind of catastrophic event, then they say, Oh, I really wish I'd, thought about that insurance policy, or, I wish I'd thought about that risk management system that could have notified me of this ballooning issue.

Actually, in that first meeting they had already had the catastrophic event because the reason that they were reaching out to us looking for a solution in that they had lost, I would say, the equivalent of 10 years of our fee in one day. I think it's sort of like driving your car, not everybody who drives has had a catastrophic car accident, right, but we all know that could happen. Jordan Michaelides: Now, we've got to jump into some short sharp questions, but one of the things I wanted to know, and I think this is important, is understanding from an 80-20 perspective, what are the 20% of things that truly matter?

We spoke about ignoring specific languages, fads etc. What are your general principles for applying a solution to a finance business? What are the things that seem most crucial to you in?

David Hall: In our current space there's quite a long list, but I'd say speed and accuracy and why that is, is that, whether it is a dealer looking at a risk management system or whether it's an algorithm that's making decisions, the data that they're using to make these decisions has to be accurate, otherwise, clearly the decision is going to be wrong and there's chance for catastrophic loss. The other thing is, you know, accurate isn't good enough because data changes, reality changes rapidly over time and so timely is also incredibly key. Where we invest a tremendous amount of time, whether it's, you know, programming in Python or some very specialized language we use for time series data analytics languages called Q, we spend a tremendous amount of time on the accuracy of data, making sure that all of our data feeds have automatic recovery and integrity checking.

The first thing we do with data that comes in is real time reconciliation. Before we would modify the position that we're displaying on our screen, we typically would match the trade from two different sources. For example, you get the feed from the MetaTrader or servers and you get a feed from liquidity provider from a bridge and you make sure that they all agree before you even display that data.

You need to do this in less than a second even though you're getting a thousand updates per second, potentially. The other part is just don't ignore the edge cases, and what edge cases are… in the technology world we talk about the happy path, and that is, when somebody sits down and explains to you how a certain process should work, they say this is how I want the system, this is the process, I want the system to be able to handle, that's kind of the happy path. That's what expected but oftentimes what happens is people do things that are totally unexpected.

We call these edge cases because they're kind of out there on the edge. The problem with edge cases is they tend to happen, especially in the FX world, where the systems run 24 hours a day, they always tend happen at three o'clock in the morning *laughs* We have this philosophy that says “don't call me at the beach”, and the point is I want to be sure that I've designed my software in such a way that if one of these edge cases happens, or if a network link fails for a little while or a system goes down or reboots and comes back up, the system is just going to come back up on its own, the connections are going to re-establish and the data starts feeding, the thing recovers on its own and that way you don't get woken up at three o'clock in the morning. Jordan Michaelides: That sort of stuff is always really important.

I can think of numerous examples where that's happened. Even for the pro traders or retail traders that are listening, thinking about ridiculous examples are managing for that risk is so important. You never know.

We're going to jump into these short, fast questions. The first one I have for you is, what are your morning and evening routines? David Hall: The morning routine usually starts around 6am.

I’ve got a big dog, and she has got incredible energy and she needs to be out into the field running hard in the morning. I should be running hard as well, that'd be good, but, at least go for a walk. We walk a couple of kilometres.

It's a great time where the mobile phone doesn't come because it might be raining or something, and I don't want to ruin the phone, I just leave everything in the house and go out and it’s basically clear mind time in the morning. Jordan Michaelides: Interesting. And for the evening, how do you decompress at night?

David Hall: Just trying to remember if I do. Hmm. Usually there's a break, with our business I've got people in Europe to talk to, here in Australia we do get the jump on the rest of the world because of our morning, we're the first ones in on Monday.

But you know, in the evening I usually there's a break, I have some dinner with the family and then, you know, once it gets quiet I'm back to potentially a couple of Skypes and things with people in the UK and then eventually just collapsed with exhaustion *laughs*. Jordan Michaelides: Now, if you had to gift a book to our audience, what would it be? David Hall: I'm sort of a tech geek at heart and I also like people, and I read a book ages ago called Peopleware.

It's a book about dealing with people who are software developers and programmers and what life is like in the world of creative process is like software development. It's really quite interesting on just treat people and how to give people enough space to do the work they need to do. Jordan Michaelides: I had here, and this is probably the most interesting answer you gave back on these short fast questions was, what quote do you live by or think of often?

I'm curious as to what your thoughts are there. David Hall: When I used to work for Macquarie Bank, Alan Moss was the CEO there and at our new directors dinner he said that nothing of real interest was ever achieved by just one person. He was telling us that you need to work together as teams, collaborate, put together something of people with diverse backgrounds and diverse skills if you really want to achieve something amazing.

I always think about that in anything we're doing, I think, how do I get more people involved? Jordan Michaelides: I did really like that quote. Now, last request for you, where can people find Tappas through the internet and social media?

David Hall: Sure. On Twitter it's @Tapaaslabs, and our website is tapaas.com Jordan Michaelides: I'd suggest for brokers and anyone's still managing things via a spreadsheet, definitely go check out the website. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on.

I think I've learned a lot. Very interesting to hear about your background of course, and thank you so much for giving up some time on your Friday. David Hall: My pleasure indeed.

Thank you, Jordan.