Born in Lebanon, Marc Malek traveled to the US to pursue his higher education in 1987, subsequent to going to the French Lycee in Beirut. Marc graduated at the top of his class at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1992 with the Highest Honors. While at Caltech, Marc studied how Artificial Intelligence and Neural Networks can be applied to Decision Support Systems for effective decision making under uncertainty.
In his junior year at Caltech, Marc received a grant from the Pentagon through NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to decide the optimal placement of tanks in a battle zone, boosting the opportunity of winning, utilizing a portion of the new mathematical methods he was developing. That exploration was published at the University and had applications in trading different securities that provoked his recruitment by the Wall Street powerhouse, Solomon Brothers, in 1992. Later, gathering over a decade of expertise in managing currency-based investment products, spanning various roles in analysis, trading system design, trading, and fund management, Malek laid the foundation of his own firm, Conquest Capital. He has served as the senior-level stints at UBS, first as the worldwide head of the exotic FX derivatives group, and later as the executive director in charge of FX proprietary trading in Europe.
Malek also reveals that Conquest Capital LLC is registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as both a commodity trading advisor and commodity pool operator and is also a member of the National Futures Association in such capacities. “We are glad for the compliance and risk management approaches and methods that we have initiated inside Conquest. Our internal reports, for example, our Compliance Manual, Employee Manual, and Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Policy, are updated in any event yearly, and all individuals from the firm are needed to sign an affirmation to recognize their comprehension of the content contained in that,” he shares. “With the appropriate policies set up, and the culture of the firm settled, we feel our internal procedures and controls really go above and beyond our regulatory prerequisites. It is with this appropriate establishment and culture of compliance that makes continuous maintenance a considerably less troublesome errand and general modifications and routine testing become familiar aspects in our ordinary course of business,” he adds.
FX: Short-term Market
“FX is special in that it has generally been a 24-hour market and is fluid at virtually any given point in time, including periods where trades are shut. This distinction makes a degree of gap risk that is absent in other markets,” explains Malek.
Despite the fact that 24-hour electronic trading has changed the landscape somewhat, different instruments are as yet keyed off of exchange trading hours and see liquidity weaken during off-hours periods. “Additionally, in light of the fact that FX has verifiably been a 24-hour market, 24-hour models based on past data are more solid since they are trading FX as it has consistently been traded rather than the way in which the market has evolved in the past few years,” explains Marc Malek.
Malek elucidates short-term strategies are intensely reliant on liquidity. “Consequently, we confine our strategy to the most fluid currency markets. “Trade size doesn’t develop linearly with assets, however. We have invested a huge amount of research in signaling diversification and having a huge library of systems that have been created after some time. With the constant evolution of our trading methodology, we have had the option to diversify the number and kind of models we trade,” he says.
Marc Malek recommends that FX is an energizing and rewarding space. “As a rule, the main standards for a fruitful trader are discipline with entry and exits and the persistence to allow trades to come to you rather than chase them or search for them. Overtrading and poor discipline are the two most common reasons for losses and blowups,” he says.
