The Night Without a Twist: Inside a Prop Trading Firm's U.S. Election Play

At the AXIA trading desks.
Tuesday 5th & Wednesday 6th November 2024,
London, England.

“It can’t be this good! Just wait…” so says Mario Kyriacou. He’s dressed in all black sweats, trainers—and right where the crown lies heavy fits the trader’s most favoured headgear: Make America Great Again in classic red.

The demands of a forward-looking prop firm place Kyriacou in many roles, but tonight he plays the traditional risk manager. An entire wall of monitors—and more—lines his room: The Risk Room. Grids display trader positions, other information, P&Ls, and pending orders. Other windows show monitoring, trading, tracking, failsafes, and price ladders—all forming the central nexus of a 150-trader firm spanning London, Limassol, Wrocław and beyond. And his instincts are sharp—“Amedeo—check the risk, see if anyone’s tryin’ to fade that crap,” he interjects into the long night as some flow and headlines blip the price ladders. After managing so many traders, each with their attitudes, behaviours, styles and risk profiles—he knows the response mechanisms, that Pavlovian desire for that one more mouse tap; one more small fade that surely will turn out well…

But now he stands before these monitors, chest out, hands behind his back, looking further—beyond—like a ship's Captain fitted with their Navy command ball cap on Deck. Because just over the beyond is always trouble.

Yet since midnight it’s been clean—too clean. The traders firm wide are doing well, building P&L slowly, squirrelling it away, and waiting for something. Shorts in Treasury futures, the Euro; longs in the S&P and CME’s Bitcoin futures. It’s all paying out.

But where is the twist? The drama! The markets just keep… going. No sharp reversals, no counterintuitive stuff going on. If you wanted the Trump Trade, you could just get on, and the market doesn’t want to even give you a real challenge getting it. The traders keep building and building, some crossed six-figures P&L on the night long ago, others are about to cross that threshold too. But there is always that moment, Kyriacou says, where it all goes to hell; that clincher moment—the twist!—the fight!—and then the traders resurface, pull through and go home. He calls all of this a “wobble,” but he isn’t one for dramatics either.