The Venderin Oriental Challenge

Vanquish Trading 1

Note: this post contains affiliate links

In 2019, two poker players decided to set up a prop bet to see how long a person could survive in a hotel room:

Alati and and fellow pro poker player Rory Young were talking when Young posed a question: "How long do you think you could last in a dark room, with no human interaction?"

Well, Alati went bold and said he could make it 30 days—so Young told him to put his money ($100,000, to be precise) where his mouth is. 

"I was like, 'Oh, that's interesting—would you ever consider putting any money on it?' and he said, 'Yeah, but it would have to be a large amount to make it worthwhile,'" Young said, per Bradley. "We talked a little bit more and within an hour we had something booked."

While you can read the result of that bet here, I came up with something weirder.

I would like to think I’ve been on the forefront of retail trading for a long while now. I learned to trade options thanks to WallStreetBets (a truly wild story, one day I’ll memorialize it) in 2014, taught myself institutional finance through Money Stuff, wasted a lot of time building retail sentiment trackers in 2017, etc. Throughout this adventure, I’ve met so, so many individuals that will never see a “real” trading desk, nor would they want to be on one, because markets are sufficiently vast such that there’s a myriad of ways to trade profitably at many different sizes.

Now that the chaos of 2020-21 is truly over, I have my own arsenal of traders (and friends) I’ve met along the way, but I know there has to be more out there. So when my good friend told me that he’s starting a legitimate sim-to-funded trading combine, I was interested in hearing more.

The idea of a combine is pretty simple — trade a paper balance according to some rules, and you get paid out if you do so profitably. Of course, this has some catches — it’s not easy. There have been plenty of combines that set up rules where the slightest mistake is punished so heavily that you might as well be playing pachinko instead.

That’s why, when my buddy approached me about Vanquish Trading, which I’m now affiliated with, I vowed to try it out myself, as I would never recommend a product I wouldn’t use myself. Here are the “stocks” rules, for example,

Consistency = no single trade can be over 30% of total PnL

which seem perfectly fair to me. But “seems fair” isn’t good enough — everyone says that they’re on your side! So here’s what I came up with:

I booked a suite in a 5-star hotel, and with my affiliate $50k account, I’m going to try and beat the combine myself in the month of November and pay it off, thereby putting my money where my mouth is.

From my CC statement — I’ll round down to $8000 for now

So many people will post images of contextless gains and luxury goods, but after a certain point in time, risk profiles diverge such that you can’t really get a sense of what someone is doing, and it turns into flexing or “forex lifestyle” content rather than a legitimate attempt to understand how to convey lessons in trading. So, I’ll start 8k in the hole and see what happens.

If you want to follow along, you can check out my X profile or join the Vanquish discord for free and hang out — just request access to the “Malt Liquidity” room when you verify. There’s nothing I love more than rambling throughout a trading day, as it prevents me from overtrading. And, of course, if you’d like to take a stab at this yourself, you can check out the combine yourself here (by clicking the image):

Beyond the rules of the combine, I’ve come up with a few props myself for the month of November (and will be adding to this as I progress):

• O/U 15.5 McDonald’s (or equivalent) visits for the month

• Must maintain a 14k steps per trading day average

• No alcohol during weekdays

Please do give more suggestions, I’m gonna have as much fun with this as possible.

By the end of the month, I hope to have a much better idea of how to write “Bid and Tonic” posts, and hopefully there isn’t too large of an egg on my face at the end.

Some Housekeeping

Part of what drew me to Vanquish, beyond knowing some of the people behind it really well, is that there’s some very legit players behind it all. The CEO is Michael Sapanski, for example, a longtime (nearly two decades) industry veteran in the hedge fund industry, but what really struck me is that he used to be a trader at none other than Diamondback Capital, the hedge fund that took on Preet Bharara and won. I was wondering where I had heard the name before, and then it struck me — while writing my insider trading longform, I remember seeing a name mentioned in “Black Edge” that looked a little familiar:

(I really don’t forget anything I read)

And so it comes full circle — Cohen’s retired, having nothing left to prove, and owns the Mets, which means that perhaps the title of next-gen GOAT and the Yankees are up for grabs (rest in peace, man, Aaron Judge really is Dak Prescott at this rate.) I’m looking forward to this one a bunch, more to come soon.

If you think that a 16% benchmark in a month is impossible to hit, well, you might be right, but please share so as many people as possible can laugh if I fail

And here is my linktree for X, Discord, and Vanquish, with more to come soon