After I sold my company in 1994, I started to research investing in the stock market, and frankly, it scared the daylights out of me! My Research made me very nervous because there were many long periods of time in the past where an investment in equities would have returned nothing. Or worse, would have lost a significant percentage of my nest egg!

Dow Jones Industrial Average over 105 years

Instead, I wondered if there was some way to earn profits when markets went down, instead of just doing what everyone else does in the stock market by going LONG. I also wondered of there was a way to lower my risk by diversifying, and invest in more markets than just equities – at the same time.

So I spent the next 20 years researching and developing trading strategies that would profit from both up or down moves, and I discovered the futures markets. Futures allow you to trade many uncorrelated markets from commodities like Corn and Wheat to foreign currencies, to gold, energy, bonds, and even the stock market indexes. Long or short trades, plenty of margin available, and most importantly, the futures markets offered me the diversification I thought was necessary to avoid a 20 year bear market.

Automated trading systems (also known as algorithmic trading), are simply methods of executing orders using automated pre-programmed trading instructions accounting for variables such as time, price, and volume. This type of trading was developed to make use of the speed and data processing advantages that computers have over human traders. In fact, one major advantage that a computer program has over a human trader is that computers are objective, whereas human traders are emotional. Market participants are mostly driven by emotions, and the crowd tends to make the same emotional mistakes at the same time. As a systematic trader, we can take advantage of these situations and do the opposite, resulting in profits when the errors in judgement due to emotions are eventually corrected.

In July of 2019 I formed a Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) firm called AlgoLab Capital Management, Ltd. which is registered with the CFTC and listed as an NFA member. In October, 2021 I decided to close the CTA firm AlgoLab Capital Management. We were performing for our clients, but I found that the compensation wasn’t commensurate with the amount of work and responsibility required by our regulators.

 
In this inspirational episode, Nell Sloane speaks with Greg Kolodziejzyk, a record-holding athlete and the founder and CEO of AlgoLab Capital Management, where he’s been actively trading futures as a proprietary trader for over 25 years. Greg talks about his athletic and entrepreneurial journey, how he became involved in trading futures, and the main features of his risk-adjusted returns program. In this episode, you will learn: – How Greg’s inner drive led him to create AlgoLab – What different markets AlgoLab trades with their CTA product – What the CTA’s margin to equity ratio is – How the CTA’s automated strategy drives the trades – And more!