Ilan Levy-Mayer Transcript
Ilan Levy-Mayer joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive today’s guest is Ilan Levy-Meyer. Ilan Levy-Meyer is, and has been an associated person with the introducing broker Canon Trading Company located in Beverly Hills, California, since February of 1998.
Before joining Canon, Ilan graduated from Fort Hayes State University in May 1992. Ilan started out his career as a professional basketball player overseas, where he played until he suffered a major knee injury. Ilan could no longer play basketball at his full potential and decided to expand his education.
He received his MBA in finance and marketing from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in October 1997. While studying for his MBA and after receiving it, Ilan worked as an institutional account executive in a startup internet company called Internet Zahiv Ltd, which translates to Gold Internet between December 1996 and December 1997.
In January of the following year, Ilan moved to Los Angeles, where he began his career in the futures industry. The experience Ilan gained from working for a startup internet company helped him establish the online trading division at Canon Trading Company. Better known as e futures. com, which was one of the first online futures trading companies in the industry.
Well, good afternoon, Ilan. Welcome to the show!
Ilan Levy-Mayer: Thank you, Brian. I don’t have to be here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. So great to meet you. I know we chatted a little bit before we hit record and do some correspondence, but really love your background starting out in Israel, becoming really good at basketball, coming to the States, becoming a great college player, and then professional in Israel.
I just love those types of stories, but I know you’re based in LA now, so we’re just a couple hours apart. So, Ilan, I’m going to jump right into your first question here. From professional basketball to the futures industry, your career path has been quite unique. Can you share how your experience as an athlete shaped your approach to trading and business?
Ilan Levy-Mayer: Yes, I can. I actually thought about it once I saw the question on the paper, and it made me think about it. And I think the biggest thing is what athletes called the grind. And called the late Kobe Bryant talked about it a lot, but the grind that if you going to wake up in the morning and practice and then go and have a good breakfast and rest and then go in the afternoon and practice.
or lift weights and have a good lunch and rest. And then you’re going to practice again. That means that you practice six hours while most of your competitors probably practice an hour or so. And the same applies to business, not necessarily so much in the amount of hours, but maybe the quality. But also, you know, back when we played basketball was like, make your free throws at the end of practice.
And make sure you stretch before and after so you prevent injuries. And if you did it, you had better chances of succeeding. And the same with training and business. If you do not follow up with your prospects. Sometimes you don’t feel like following up. Like sometimes you don’t feel like doing sprints or lifting weights.
But you have to find that inner discipline. And go to the grind so you can benefit from the results. And I think that’s probably the biggest thing that playing professional basketball and even before as a kid, as a high school, as college, you have to handle both school and playing basketball. And sometimes it’s long practices, the road trips.
Figure out how to manage your time and how to make yourself do
Brian Thomas: what you need to do when you need to do it. Love the story and the work ethic, you know, you mentioned Kobe Bryant and the grind, but we all know as athletes, we’ve all played sports at different levels. You’ve obviously played at a much higher level, but essentially that work ethic in athletics does carry over into the business world as you talked about.
So, I appreciate you sharing that and correlating that for us in our audience. Ilan, you were instrumental in launching eFutures.com, one of the first online future trading platforms. What challenges did you face in establishing this online division and how do your previous experience in a startup internet company help you navigate them?
Ilan Levy-Mayer: A good question because it was 1998 and back then when you were a commodity broker, people would call us. And when they would call us, we would usually have two headsets, one to talk to the client and the other one to talk to the trading floor because everything was on the trading floor or the order desk, depending on how large the client was.
So, Brian would tell me, Hey, you want to buy 10 December gold at 2565 limit for the day. And I would tell you, hold on, Brian, and then on my other headset, I would call the order desk or the trading floor and I would transmit this order. And Brian would pay me as a broker, probably 25 for each contract that you wanted to buy or sell for my time and for my service.
Sometimes you would ask me opinion. So, to think about trading online was scary because like, okay, how, how would we do, how do we know that the order is going to make it? But what happened is the CME, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange came up with what I believe was the first electronic contract, the Mini S& P 500.
And that contract traded completely electronic on their system, which is called Globex and still is called Globex. And then we connected with an online platform called Leo Web. So, the first challenge was just do it. Second challenge was to convince my partner and the people in the office, but it makes sense because first day that we traded online and we had a, I believe one or two clients.
And there’s an office who made 10 a gross profit, everybody was laughing, like we just, you know, you do an option trade with a large client and you do many, many times more than that as far as revenue. But what happened is another client and another client, all of a sudden, the power of numbers started to speak more and more people got used to online doing many things online.
And so that was a challenge. The other thing was also, you know, myself, I wasn’t sure if that was the wave of the future or not. I thought so. I believe so. And I also thought it would be, you know, that this way as a broker, I can handle hundreds of clients while as what we call a broker assist of full service.
I was probably capped at giving my full attention to maybe 20, 25 clients. Those were the challenges. And luckily for me, after basketball in Israel, before I moved back to the States, I worked in a startup company that was an ISP, an internet service provider. So, I got familiar with IP addresses, domain names, secure transactions.
How does the internet work? How do websites work? And that really helped position us first as a company online where, you know, back then it was Yahoo and Alta Vista and InfoSeek, search engines, they’re all dead, God bless their soul. But we were able to, you know, you would search copy futures and there you go.
There was an article by Canon trading. Uh, you looked about commodity brokers. There you go. There was an offer by Canon trading company to send you two free booklets about commodities trading. So, it was a combination of making our presence felt on the young, very young internet, and then also being one of the first to offer online trading.
Because obviously there’s a lot of people that were much more advanced than I was, or we were, and wanted to trade online very quickly. They did not want to talk to anybody, which is now the norm. And so that’s how it started. And my older brother, who’s also my partner now, was savvy enough to buy quite a bit of domain names.
Such as e-futures.com, futures brokers.com, discount futures.com, believe a a bunch of variations that have to do with commodities and futures. So, I just changed, I mean, mentioned some of those including e-mini.com, so that helped quite a bit in the beginning as well.
Brian Thomas: Amazing story and I remember those days we all invested in something or got involved in the internet in its infancy as you’d mentioned a lot of things going on it was an exciting time I was exciting until the dot com bus but other than that I appreciate the story for sure and Ilan.
Canon trading has been a respected name in the futures industry for decades in your view what are the key factors that have contributed to the company’s sustained success and reputation in a competitive field.
Ilan Levy-Mayer: It is. It’s a very competitive field and I want to say somewhere in the early 2000s, big companies like Schwab and E-Trade and Interactive Brokers got into the field of futures.
Before that, future brokers were future brokers like Canon Trading and others. And stocks trading was stocks trading like E Trade and Schwab, et cetera. But this big stock companies got into our business, to our industry, and that made it even tougher. However, commodities and futures are not a simple thing.
It’s, I’m not going to say it’s, you know, its rocket science, but it is a little bit more complex than normal trading and buying or selling of stocks. Different contracts have different expiration dates, different values, different mechanics, there’s option strategies, there’s spreads. So, our core group of about, I want to say six to seven of us have been with the company for 20 years and then some, and all of us know the markets, we know futures and commodities, and when understand what futures trading is, what it is about.
So, when somebody calls in, they talk to an experienced broker, not just a tech support or customer service. And that is the second factor, which is you’re able to speak to a human. You’re not going to be pressing press 3, press 5, press 6. If you call Canon Trading right now, you’re probably going to get a night disk.
But you’re going to speak to a human right away. So that’s big. Another factor is that integrity and compliance are a huge factor in our industry. And for us, especially because sometimes you can make mistakes by not knowing. So, you’re not even a willingly mistake, but you need to understand the compliance structure.
What is the landscape of regulations in our business and be straight as an arrow. So, we have high integrity, great human brokers, meaning people with knowledge that are, that care about their clients. And we all, when we speak to each other and we have our meetings. We talk about the grind, sometimes it is a grind, but we always speak about, okay, if we’re a client, how would we like to be dealt with?
How would we like to be treated? If your client was your older uncle or maybe your younger nephew, how would you treat him and what would you tell him? And so that’s what we try to do. And we do offer a variety of services in the field of futures trading. So that helps.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. The reputation is everything. And you know that it’s like one of those things, you know, contracts used to be a handshake, but I love how you did expand a little bit on the integrity part, right? That trust also having empathy. How do you treat each client individually and how that differentiates from client to client. So, I really appreciate that. That’s helpful.
And Ilan, last question of the evening, if you could briefly share technology has rapidly transformed trading over the past two decades, what are some of the most significant advancements in futures trading that you’ve witnessed and how do you think the industry will evolve in the coming years?
Ilan Levy-Mayer: So, speed, amount of data, accessibility of data, those have all grown exponentially over the last few years, 10, 15 years or so, and even more so. So now clients have access to data that before used to be, quote unquote, guarded by professionals and only known for professionals. And they have the reliability and access to trade a variety of markets from anywhere in the world, from anywhere in their own world.
Most of our clients’ trade from home with a laptop, some even with a phone. I don’t recommend it, but it’s there. The other thing is that what I think is going to happen and how the industry is going to change is that more and more clients will actually Trade the algos, and by that I mean, they will have different systems that they can select or different algos that they can utilize, and instead of trying to make the decisions themselves, they’ll try to figure out which algo is hot and which algo is doing better than other, and trade, quote unquote, the algos to a certain extent.
Everybody’s talking about AI. I’m not an expert by any means about AI. I just know that futures trading, when you talk about futures trading, let’s say, let’s talk about, for example, crude oil. There were 800,000 contracts exchanging hands today in one day, and that’s a normal, normal trading volume. So even the best AI for them to figure out what is the desire and needs and thoughts of all those market participants.
When AI does it, it’ll be, it’ll be interesting if it does. I think people will find out that it’s that futures trading or trading in general is one of the last battles that AI will try to win because it’s not easy. It’s hard. So not sure about that part, but it’ll be interesting. That’s for sure.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And you’ve obviously witnessed a lot of transformation over the years and AI is going to be involved at some point. And to your point, it may be one of the last industries to tackle, but based on what we’ve seen and discussed with hundreds of guests here in the last year, just on AI, there’s, it holds a big promise.
We just got to keep the ethics in place. And I think we’ll, we’ll do good by people, Ilan. It was such a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Ilan Levy-Mayer: I appreciate it was an honor and pleasure to speak with you and being on the show, and I hope that what I shared from our experience and story will help somebody and give somebody the motivation to do what they want to do.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Ilan Levy-Mayer Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
