WHO SUPPORTS CliK USERS?

OTA and CliK are special. They are special because of the people who work at OTA, both in front and behind the scenes. Meet Dan Degrave. Dan is the Senior Director of Student Services at OTA in Irvine. 

Dan has spent the last fifteen years in the Financial and Trading industry as an Institutional Trader, an Institutional Trade Desk Manager, and an Equities and Futures Trade Desk Manager. He has managed large Customer Service, Technical Support, and retail sales teams. He was a designated compliance principal (for the firms that he has worked with) for 12 years, including the designated regulatory branch manager for all business happenings for TradeStation® in Chicago, IL. (including new accounts, trading, retail trading, trade operations, and events). 

“Early in my career, I accumulated financial licenses for all asset classes, which included principal licenses. I accumulated the licenses while working full-time during the day. I earned the series 6, 63, 7, 24, 3, 34, and 30 licenses. It is a substantial amount of effort to gain any one of those licenses, yet alone all of them to together. Yet, it was rewarding. I learned a lot throughout the process, and it allowed me to take on greater responsibility at the companies that I worked for, managing different teams and different processes.” 

Gus Sauter was someone who Dan looked up to in the financial services area. Gus was the head of investments for all of Vanguard®, and he was able to take a multi-dimensional thought process and approach to the market. Gus understood indexing and organizing mutual funds to benefit the long-term investor. He was able to understand the trading side of things and how to gain a competitive advantage within trading. Dan appreciated what Gus did both professionally and personally. 

Dan shared that there is no magic secret to learning the markets or being confident trading in the markets. It takes a recipe of dedication, learning the rules and steps, feeling comfortable with supply and demand analysis, understanding the details of each market that you are trading, having the ability to manage your risk and your emotions in trading, and having the ability to easily use a platform to turn your trading ideas into trading opportunities.

Dan’s philosophy on trading? The most confident people who he has seen, turn trading into a math problem where they manage their risk and find consistency in a particular strategy.  

His favorite quote is “Limit your size in any position so that fear does not become the prevailing instinct guiding your judgment.”

Dan told me one thing that makes his job at OTA great is having the ability to impact the business in multiple areas.

“Everybody in the OTA organization cares about the students and the student-learning journey. That is different. In my experience at other financial organizations, I have not found a staff that all passionately care about its customers like we do at Online Trading Academy.”

I asked Dan, “What is the most challenging part about being in charge of OTA support?” 

Dan said that he has been learning throughout his time at OTA, but especially when it came to managing a team, remotely, and during a pandemic. Disaster preparation and recovery situations in the brokerage industry is something that you always prepare for, and he had prepped for events like hurricanes. Even then, it was not a situation where everyone went remote. The OTA support staff went remote, and still worked diligently to support the students, and communicated effectively without being together in one room.

“It is a fun challenge to move to a structure where we are aligned (with the hours and tools needed) for real-time platform support” Dan said. For example, Dan transitioned the phone service to where someone is available all the time. They have resource-sharing and back-up in place and are preparing a system that will be ready to support customers in real-time, while the markets are trading, and people are using the CliK platform. 

When asked his favorite things about CliK, Dan said, “CliK is progressively integrating OTA’s education with OTA’s proprietary tools inside the platform. Plus, CliK will progressively provide all the standard and advanced trading tools that you would get anywhere else. It is something that has never been built before. It is an incredible opportunity to be part of that team during the development of the product. We can create proprietary tools that connect directly to our education, and it has a positive effect on the trading confidence OTA students develop. Plus, with CliK, we have the ability to readily integrate multiple asset classes within one trading platform.”

I asked Dan what he would say to someone who was looking to get into financial education support. “The best advice I can give you is to always be open to learning from everyone. There is so much to financial education and the markets, that if you are not always learning you are not always progressing. There is always a new concept, there is always a new trading idea, there is always a new technology. Whether you use it for your own personal trading or not if you stop learning you will not be able to keep up with the financial industry.”