TTU27: Magician-turned Trader: “Reality Doesn’t Matter” ft. Scott Foster of Dominion Capital Management – 1of2

Our next guest was a philosophy major and a magician before he ever considered trading in the stock market. In Part 1 of our talk, he describes how philosophy and psychology determine his firm’s decisions and the story of how he started trading in a small town in Pennsylvania.

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In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• On the 20th Anniversary of Scott’s firm, he looks back on how it all started.
• Scott’s life as a magician and how the principals of magic influences his perspective on trading and the market.
• How he became a philosophy major and how he applies philosophy to trading and everything his firm does.
• How he started trading in the market, getting a group of his college friends to take out cash advances on their credit cards and investing it.
• The Austrian perspective on economics that his college was well known for.
• How he educated himself in futures trading and invested long before he ever met another trader.
• Scott’s initial lessons learned from trading in the stock market; how he lost almost all of his capital in one day and had the first sleepless night of his life.
• How he made the mistake of investing in coffee and cocoa in the late 1980s and what he learned from that experience.
• How he started his first firm in 1989.
• How Scott traded while living in rural Western Pennsylvania.
• How a philosophy major with no connections to the financial world used his network to find a mentor.
• The story of Scott becoming a principal at one of the biggest short-term CTAs in the world.
• The story of Dominion Capital Management, which he started in 1994 by moving to Chicago.
• Why he is based in Traverse City, Michigan.
• How his firm is a bit different and why they don’t have any mathematicians or scientists on their team.

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Resources & Links Mentioned in this Episode:

• Learn about the Square of Opposition that Scott explains in the episode.
• In Scott’s first job at a firm, the company hired people belonging to Mensa.
• Learn about how trading was conducted and firms operated before the use of personal computers and the Internet. Scott’s firm had a VAX computer.

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