About Smarter Money

I spent a decade working as a software developer at financial institutions. Part of that time was spent consulting at large banks such as JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and TD Ameritrade where I worked on software used for client onboarding as well as FX (foreign exchange currency) trading. The bulk of my financial software development career was spent at Tradeweb Markets where I worked on the Global Credit platform used by institutional traders (banks, hedge funds) to buy and sell investment grade and high yield corporate bonds.

Working at Tradeweb introduced me to the concept of Fixed Income which I previously knew nothing about. Most people would recognize bonds and CDs as an example of Fixed Income. However, there are many other financial instruments that are under the Fixed Income umbrella. They include Mortgage Backed Securities, Interest Rate Swaps, Credit Default Swaps, and others which are often complex derivatives. If you ever watched the movie The Big Short you would have heard the term Credit Default Swaps. The movie was based on the real-life story of hedge fund operator Michael Burry who made a significant amount of money using Credit Default Swaps during the financial crash of 2008.

One of the first projects I worked on while at Tradeweb was Portfolio Trading which was a new way to trade large bundles of bonds – literally billions of dollars’ worth of bonds being bought and sold. The product won numerous industry awards and went on to generate millions of dollars in trading fees. Some of the larger transactions earned the company as much as $100,000 for a single trade.

After leaving Tradeweb I decided to start this blog to create educational content about finance and help you maximize the earnings from your savings. I encourage you to create an account and leave comments regarding what you’d like me to write about.