FX FX MANAGERS
Ryan O’Grady CEO of ROW Asset Management
Interview by JCI for FX Trader Magazine
Ryan O’Grady started his career in quantitative financial research at the age of 17. He tells us how he developed a passion for systematic trading and ended up co-founding ROW Asset Management. During his career Ryan developed a forex strategy called the Global Currency Program. He gives us some details about the systematic, diversified strategy, which the company now uses to trade a wide range of currencies. Ryan and his team were early pioneers in trading large systematic money in Emerging Markets currencies and developed a strong experience in this field.
INTERVIEW
FXTM How long have you been trading foreign exchange for and what first
attracted you to
industry? Tell us about your career evolution?
RG When I was in high school, my Dad used to pay me $1 an hour to enter financial time series data from Bloomberg into Lotus 1-2-3. I got interested in the data, charting it, trying to predict where it would go next, and at some point he bought me “The Dow Jones-Irwin Guide to Trading Systems”, by Bruce Babcock, Jr. The book covered all aspects of systematic futures trading – how margin works, what sort of models existed, and how
70 FX TRADER MAGAZINE April - June 2014
this
Strategy Location
ROW Currency Newport Beach, CA USA
Assets Under Management $135 (Firm) Type Style
Instruments Currencies
Global Macro Systematic
OTC forwards (deliverable/NDF) 30
systematic strategies performed on a variety of markets. I must have read that book 100 times…I still have it in my office today.
My first office job was an intern in the Neuberger Berman fixed income department in 1990, when I was 17 years old. One of the traders on the desk was trading FX forwards based on simple technical rules, and I
made sure she was aware of my data entry skills. We tested revolutionary ideas like moving average crossover models.
The previous 5 years had seen some of the biggest trends in the history of foreign exchange (Plaza Accord), and the models we were testing generated outrageous profits. I became keenly interested in FX trading ,
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