Wil Undy

8.30 AM

I wake up to the cascading sound of my 7th alarm, jump in the shower and then grab the train into
work. Once I’m in, I head to level 7 to grab brekky - smoked salmon and cream cheese on toast, and a hot
coffee from our in-house barista.

10.00 AM

I load up my Bloomberg, check the overnight futures moves, and read through yesterday’s wraps
from each team to find out how they did and what’s happening in their market.

We then have a floor wide morning meeting where we chat about the overnight news, our positions, plans for the day, and anything interesting we’ve noticed lately. We finish it off with a morning market, where we trade on random facts. Some of my personal favourites have been ‘fastest mile ona pogo stick’, ‘percentage of the year someone had been listening to Spotify’ (answer was way too much!), and ‘how long would it take to walk from Timbuktu to Delhi?’

10.45 AM

Since I trade Hong Kong, my market opens a bit later. The Japan and Korea teams will start trading around this time and the floor starts to get louder. There’s a real energy on the floor, especially on busy days.

11.15 AM

Will pop for a second coffee and have a quick chat with whoever is around, before completing final
pieces of set up for trading.

I’ll be running scripts to check my limits and pricing are correct. I also keep an eye on what is happening in other markets, and what adjustments I need to make to my trading based on these.

12.15 PM

Market open - the most exciting time of the day! When the market opens, the adrenaline starts pumping as you instantly react to what’s happening and try to execute your plans. I’ll be watching
my trade tickers, trying to get an idea of the flows and what the prevailing dynamic on the day is and make sure I’ve got the right position on.

2.00 PM

Normally market quietens down about now, so I’ll grab lunch and start working on my projects. Some of my normal projects are looking at logs of interesting trades that happened but we missed.

3.00 PM

HK lunch starts now. I have a meeting today but if I don’t, I’ll either go for a quick walk or go play some table tennis with some of the other HK traders.

The meeting is with my Squad Lead and the Tribe Lead to request a larger risk limit for one of our strategies. I go through the document I’ve prepared, talking about the reason for the request, what the expected P& L increase is, as well as various loss scenarios. I answer the team’s questions. In the end, it’s approved contingent on us implementing additional checks.

4.00 PM

Re-open and it’s busy again and so I’m fully focussed on the screen making sure we’re executing good trades. Once it quietens down, I start chatting to one of the developers about the new limits checking script which was requested in my earlier meeting. We fully spec it out and agree on a timeline for it to be finished.

7.30 PM

The Japan and Korea traders have headed home now, but HK trades till 7.30 pm. I quickly finish my end of day procedures, sending the daily PNL wrap, and switching off all my auto traders.

If it’s a Friday, I’ll pop up to level 7 for a few beers and some poker or a game of pool.