Cameron McLean

Equity Derivatives Trader,
London UK

Biography

Hi I’m Cam. I’m an Equity Derivatives Trader from Sydney, Australia. I’ve been based in London for the last 2 years after spending nearly 10 years living in Cape Town, South Africa.

I love trading and throughout my career I have traded multiple strategies included index vol, single stock vol, index arb and prop strategies such as pairs trading and momentum strategies. Although for work I’ve only ever traded equities, I have an interest in all asset classes including commodities, fixed income and alternative classes such as cryptocurrency. For my Master in Finance thesis I researched systematic approaches to asset allocation and analysed a simple but effective trend following approach before improving it with my own ideas which included adding bitcoin as an alternative asset class.

My other passion is coding. I chose software development and design as a subject in high school and since then I have always enjoyed programming. I’ve learnt multiple languages including VBA, R, Python and Go as well as HTML, CSS and SQL (if they can be called languages). I love learning and challenging myself to build new tools and apps - in another life I think I would have chosen to become a full stack developer. I’m analytical and hate black boxes and wherever possible I try to build and model an idea from first principles to fully understand how it works. Coding has complemented my trading, allowing me to analyse large sets of data and build tools to identify trading opportunities.

Other than trading and coding, I enjoy keeping fit, travelling and enjoying good food and wine with my wife. We have two beautiful children and I hope one day that I’ll be able to help them learn to code and/or trade financial markets.

Interests

Trading
Technology
Coding
Psychology

Education

Master in Finance, 2018
INSEAD, France/Singapore
Bachelor Economic and Social Science, 2006
The University of Sydney, Australia

Experience

Equity Derivatives Trading

Macquarie Group

Oct 2018 – Present London, United Kingdom

Relocated to the London office to continue trading South Africa whilst also building vol trading capabilities in EMEA.

Achievements include:

Migrated all risk and trading operations from the South African non bank entity to London bank entity navigating and solving several regulatory, compliance and operational risk challenges.
Helped launch Exotic Autocall option business for the EDT Vol business including pricing and executing the first trade over a basket of US/EU stocks
Developed several Python based tools and dashboards to automatically generate daily reports, conduct risk and P&L analysis and identify volatility trends and trading opportunities.

Equity Derivatives Trading

Macquarie Securities South Africa

Jan 2009 – Sep 2018 Cape Town, South Africa

Head (post 2015) of the trading desk responsible for all equity derivatives trading, delta one and index arbitrage trading, prop trading and equity finance and treasury functions in South Africa.

Achievements include:

Approached and partnered with Macquarie research division to initiate prop trading strategies based on internal alpha models, converting academic research into tradeable systematic strategies adapted for desk risk appetite
Designed and developed a VBA based vanilla and exotic option pricing tool used by all members of trading, structuring and sales teams to price derivatives, conduct market and credit risk analysis and streamline post trade bookings and generate trade confirmations.

Equity Derivatives Structuring

Macquarie Bank

Apr 2007 – Jan 2009 Sydney, Australia

Joined Retail Derivatives Structuring team responsible for pricing, monitoring and life cycle management of Retail Warrants, Instalment Warrants, CFDs, ETOs and OTC ZCC products.