T3 Trading Group

T3 Trading Group
  • Honesty
    (5)
  • Quality
    (5)
  • Cost
    (5)
  • Support
    (5)
  • Prop Trading Opportunity
    (5)
  • User Experience
    (5)
5

Summary

T3 Trading Group is a legitimate proprietary trading company. They honestly seek to help and enable the retail trader into becoming a fully licensed and registered proprietary trader.

There are a multitude of reasons why a person should become registered. The number one reason is to gain access to leverage and massively reduced trading fees.

Finally, by becoming part of a legitimate proprietary trading company, you will gain access to people that are actually making a living at trading.

T3 Trading Group has included special benefits to TradingSchools.Org readers, which I have described in this review.

Thanks for reading today’s review of T3 Trading Group

T3 Trading Group is a proprietary trading company, and a stock brokerage. T3 Trading is also a member of the NASDAQ. Everything about T3 Trading is regulated and under the auspices of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra).

T3 Trading should be considered the ‘gold standard’ of prop trading legitimacy, regulation, and investor safety. The company also maintains state licenses in all 53 US states and Territories.

They have been around since 2003, and they know what they are doing. This is not a ‘bucket shop’ operation.

The company is based out of One State Street Plaza, 10th Floor, New York, NY. The headquarters is a massive, 12,000 square foot office that houses administration, compliance, IT technology, and a giant trading floor. The trading floor is every bit what you would imagine; banks of desks lined up, with computer monitors stacked in the hundreds.

t3 trading group

The company is listed with Finra.Org as follows:

T3 Trading Group is a sprawling operation. In the past 10 years, T3 Trading has essentially bought out or merged with nearly all of their competitors. The result is that T3 Trading Group now has offices located in various locations throughout the United States.

With any large organization, it is easy to get lost within the structure and hierarchy of staff. For the purposes of this review, I want to only focus on the Atlanta, Georgia office of T3 Trading Group. The owner of the Atlanta office is Anthony Guarraci, and he was ultra helpful in putting together the information to write this review.

Before we go any further, I want to take a moment to talk about the differences between T3 Trading Group and T3 Securities. You are probably wondering, “what is the difference?”

T3 Trading Group

T3 Trading Group is a limited liability company. In a nutshell, T3 Trading Group represents all of the proprietary traders located throughout the United States. These would be traders that either work out of one of several different retail trading floors, or work at home. The choice of location is up to the individual. Some folks might like trading in a group setting, some might like working from home on a PC.

What exactly is a proprietary trader at T3 Trading Group? Quite simply, a proprietary trader is someone that makes a deposit of funds into a pooled trading account. They are allowed to trade those funds, just like any normal stock brokerage. It really is, as simple as that.

The advantage of trading as a prop trader through T3 Trading Group is additional leverage and reduced trading costs. Let’s take a look at the ‘newbie’ cost structure.

  • Minimum Deposit $2,500
  • Buying power up to 50:1 for day trades
  • Buying power up to 6:1 for overnight trades
  • 50 cents per hundred shares traded
  • 95/5 profit split
  • $100 monthly software cost

Another advantage of being a prop trader at T3 Trading Group is the ability to capture rebates. For instance, suppose you are day trading Apple stock, and executing limit orders. The electronic trading venue known as Edge X is currently paying .24 per 100 shares.

So if you purchase Apple on a limit order at $150 per share. And then quickly sell Apple on a limit order at $150, then Edge X would pay you .24 cents in rebate. So your total trade costs would only be .26 per 100 shares.

With this rebate in mind, now you can understand how large algorithmic trading companies like Virtu Financial (almost) never lose money. Their business model is to capture rebates. They are not in the business of predicting where a market will go, they just want to quickly buy and sell for the rebate.

Can the retail trader replicate something like Virtu Financial? A few years ago. Yes. However, the market has now become crowded and the days of “building a bull dozer to pick up pennies” is over. The best you can hope would be to develop strategies that have a short term edge, preferably systematic, and then work the edge. The following is an example of a workable short term strategy that I personally use. Anyway, let’s get back to T3 Trading Group and T3 Securities.

What is T3 Securities?

In a nutshell, T3 Securities is a stock broker. They are no different than TD Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, or any of the other retail stock brokers. However, the primary function of T3 Securities is to serve the interests of traders contained within T3 Trading Group. The prop traders must push all of their trading volumes through the T3 Securities channel.

Just like any stock brokerage, T3 Securities earns a commission from the trading volume of the traders. So, if you are a prop trader, and your commission rate is .50 cents per 100 shares, then this commission is earned by, and paid to T3 Securities. The stock brokerage is part of their business model.

How successful are the prop traders at T3 Trading Group?

According to Anthony Guarraci, who has been a full-time prop trader for the past 18 years, the failure rate is about 92%. What exactly does that mean? Essentially, about 90% of the people that attempt this journey is going to fail. That is a hard and simple truth. But it’s the truth. You might not like what you are reading, but TradingSchools.Org has never served up bullshit, and we are not going to start anytime soon.

But what about the 10% that actually make it? This is where things get interesting. The 10% that survive, usually make a mountain of money. According to Anthony, a yearly income of $300k to $500k is not uncommon. I have to be careful not to fill your imagination with pie in the sky fantasies. But the truth is that prop trading is like any other industry…only a sliver is going to make a mountain of money.

In my opinion, one of the more inspiring stories of a T3 prop trader is the story of a middle aged guy that spent his entire career being kicked around different blue collar jobs, eventually, his body gave out and he ended up driving a taxi cab.

Much closer to the end of his life, than the beginning, he decided on a radical career change. He decided he wanted to be one of those fancy guys he was always driving around in his cab. Somehow he stumbled into T3 Trading Group. With $2,500 to his name and absolutely no financial sophistication, he willed himself to learn.

It took a while, but he eventually turned his $2,500 into $14,000,000. Yes, you are reading that correctly. For him, the turning point was disassociating himself from his former friends and colleagues. He had to radically change whom he surrounded himself with. The synergy of working with people that actually earn a living at the game of trading made all the difference.

This is the mistake that most people make, they attach their hopes and dreams to a butthole they randomly found on the internet. Expecting to learn from a person with no track record, or no history of ever trading successfully. The end result is predictable.

T3 Trading: you need that pesky license

In order to open an account, and begin your proprietary trading journey with T3 Trading Group…you need a Series 57 Securities Trader license.

Don’t let this scare you. Although it might sound terrifying, it is not. In fact, it’s about as difficult to pass as a real estate license. In fact, the real estate license and the Series 57 license are administered in the same testing facilities.

Will you learn anything ‘ground breaking’ with your Series 57 license? Will you learn how to be a trader with your Series 57 license? Not a chance. It’s just the basics. The SEC understands that unleashing massive leverage into the hands of a newbie day trader can wreak all manner of havoc on financial markets.

If you are going to buy a tank, equipped with rocket launchers and machine guns, then it might be best to take a few lessons on driving a tank, aiming your rocket launchers, and reloading your machine gun.

A lot of folks say, “Ah fuck it, I don’t need any tank lessons. Just hit the gas pedal and pull the trigger.” The equivalent of this would be folks that look for a short cut. And they unwittingly get themselves into ridiculous ‘prop funding’ schemes like Bubba Gump Trading. Which acts like a prop trading company, but is nothing of the sort.

Getting your Series 57

The Series 57 is a lonely license. Since there is basically only one remaining prop trading company in the United States, the Series 57 is basically an entry application to T3 Prop Trading.

According to Anthony, most people complete the examination and test in about 21 days. But some have completed in as little as 10 days.

It just depends on how fast you want to consume the test materials.

Special offer for TradingSchools.Org readers

In the past couple of years, Anthony Guarraci and I have had quite a few telephone conversations. Mostly he calls to either laugh or cry about yet another ‘trading guru’ that we exposed as a fraud. Or a supposed ‘prop trading’ firm that is nothing more than an educational scheme.

Most surprising to Anthony is that most aspiring traders, that want to become professional traders have never heard of T3 Trading Group. They get caught up in all manner of internet ridiculousness, bouncing from funding scheme to funding scheme. But never finding the path of least resistance.

Hopefully, this article will serve as a launchpad. In speaking with Anthony, we came up with a plan to encourage the newbie (both old and young) towards a better path. Specifically, Anthony agreed to offer TradingSchools.Org readers a few added benefits:

  1. To all TradingSchools.Org readers that contact Anthony directly, he has agreed to provide all of the educational materials to pass the Series 57, for free. This is not a ‘token gift’. In fact, the Series 57 Course costs $475 through a 3rd party.
  2. Free membership to the T3Live.com trading room where some of the best traders at T3 trade with their live accounts. This is not a hokey trading room with simulated fraudsters. These are real traders plying their trade. Normally costs $200 per month, but free for TradingSchools.Org readers.
  3. And finally, some good old fashioned hand holding from Anthony Guarraci. He wants you to succeed, and he genuinely wants to help TradingSchools.Org readers.

What in the hell is hand holding? According to Anthony, the best prop traders at T3 Trading Group will average about 50% winning trades, with an average profit factor of 1.8. Anthony wants to help you achieve this performance goal. You might need some hand holding or a good ass kicking. Anthony will deliver either.

How to contact Anthony Guarraci? Anthony loves phone calls. In fact, he requested that I include his direct phone number. This way, he can quickly answer your questions without the burdensome back-n-forth of email exchanges. The only stupid question is the question that you are too afraid to ask.

He can be reached directly at 770-312-5990.

And he can be reached via email at anthony.guarraci@t3trading.com

Wrapping Things Up

Thanks for reading. This was a long post. But it’s been a post that I have wanted to write for a long time. Too often, I read emails from people that get suckered by ‘bucket shops’.

In fact, I exposed a bucket shop and the FBI arrested the clown. He is currently in jail awaiting sentencing.

Or educational providers that sell an educational package for $10,000 and then use a form of ‘three-card Monte’ to give you back $5k to trade with leverage. Complete scam.

Or these ridiculously stupid funding schemes from yet another fake prop trading company named TopStepTrader. Where you pay hundreds of dollars each month to trade on a simulator, and if you are lucky enough for Moses to split the Red Sea, then you might get a token funded account.

Enough rambling for today. Thanks for reading. Would love to read your comments below.

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