TTU79: The Romance of Trading Commodities ft. Mike Coleman of RCMA Asset Management – 1of2
Top Traders Unplugged
Niels Kaastrup-Larsen
4.8 • 670 Ratings
🗓️ 13 April 2015
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our next guest lives in Singapore, where he founded a firm that trades in the commodity markets. In this episode, we trace his upbringing in the UK and his first job at Cargill to the start of his firm. We discuss the growth and downsizing periods he has gone through and how he builds a successful business.
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In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
- Where Mike grew up and how his upbringing shaped his career.
- How he was interested in travel from an early age, and found out about commodity trading in his final year of university.
- How he started out as a commodity merchant with Cargill.
- How he fell into rubber trading which led him to Singapore in 1984.
- About the beginnings of RCMA.
- How the commodity markets have changed over the years, and what kinds of companies are still working with commodity trading.
- The most important things he learned at Cargill that helped in the management of his own firm.
- What he learned before computers become ubiquitous on trading desks.
- What Mike likes to do in his spare time.
- How to make sure you are set up for success when you start a business or firm.
- How you get through the hard times of your business as an entrepreneur.
- What he does to organize his firm to make it run in the best way possible.
- How they’ve dealt with a boom and bust phase in their business, including personnel.
- The way that he has built the culture in his business.
- How investors should read a track record from a discretionary trader.
- What patterns he looks for when trading for commodities.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Maybe it's the way most businesses start, that you're a naive optimist. |
| 0:08.0 | So we were definitely very lucky. |
| 0:13.0 | A lot of people, they develop investment product to meet the market need. |
| 0:18.0 | What me and Doug did was a bit differently is that we gave the market the product we had. |
| 0:23.7 | And we were very lucky timing-wise |
| 0:26.4 | that that happened to coincide with a period |
| 0:28.8 | when the market really wanted the product. |
| 0:32.8 | It's not every day you meet a trained robber trader |
| 0:36.4 | who at a mature age of his life decides to set up |
| 0:39.7 | his own fund management business and ends up building it into one of the world's largest |
| 0:45.7 | discretionary commodity only fund management businesses so you can imagine that i learned a lot |
| 0:51.9 | from speaking to my guest today and and I'm sure you will too. |
| 0:56.0 | Imagine spending an hour with the world's greatest traders. Imagine learning from their experiences, their successes, and their failures. |
| 1:05.0 | Imagine no more. Welcome to Top Traders Unplugged, the place where you can learn from the best hedge fund managers in the world, |
| 1:12.6 | so you can take your manager due diligence or investment career to the next level. |
| 1:17.6 | Here's your host, veteran hedge fund manager, Niels Kastrup Larson. |
| 1:35.6 | Welcome to Top Traders Unplot, where my goal is to give you the clarity, confidence and courage you need to invest like or invest with one of the top traders in the world. |
| 1:40.7 | It is the stories that you never get to hear, set out as the most honest and transparent |
| 1:45.7 | account I can make of what goes on inside the minds of some of the best investors in the |
| 1:51.9 | world. |
| 1:52.6 | Today you're listening to episode 79. |
| 1:55.6 | If this is your first episode you've heard, you might want to go back and listen to all |
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