Hot Metal Trading is a proprietary trading firm. We build and run automated strategies on CFTC-regulated exchanges, trading our own capital with software we write ourselves.
Hours a day our markets trade
Decisions made by software
Founded, Pittsburgh PA
Approach
Software that trades, measured against the tape.
Systematic
Every position is sized, entered, and exited by code against pre-registered rules. No discretionary trading.
Low latency
Native infrastructure co-located with the venues we trade, built for microsecond decision loops.
Risk first
Hard exposure limits, continuous reconciliation against the exchange, and automatic shutdown on any invariant breach.
Evidence driven
Strategies ship with a measurable metric and a named falsifier. If the tape disagrees with the thesis, the thesis loses.
Our research & systems group
We feel the move before it is visible.
Along each flank of a fish runs a line of tiny sensors called neuromasts. They do not see and they do not hear. They feel displacement in the water: a predator turning, a school changing direction, a wall approaching. The signal reaches the fish before the thing that caused it does, which is why a school can wheel as one body with no light and no leader.
That is the edge we build for. Not a better forecast of where a market is going, but an earlier reading of a move that has already begun. Lateral Line Algorithms is the group inside Hot Metal Trading that builds and keeps that sense sharp.
Sensing
A price is a pressure wave.
Markets reprice unevenly: the same fact reaches some prints before others. Our systems watch for the pressure, not the headline, and act only in the window where it has not yet reached the quote.
Method
Calibration is the organ. Speed is only the nerve.
Plenty of desks are fast. The difference is knowing how much to trust a reading. Every stated probability is scored against its own history, and carries an uncertainty that shrinks only as it earns data.
Sizing
Size follows trust.
Position size is a function of how well the model has recently been right. When the evidence is strong the book sets the ceiling; when it is not, we take the minimum and learn.
Discipline
Trust follows results.
When recent outcomes drift from what the model stated, size falls to the minimum automatically and comes back on its own as calibration returns. Nobody has to decide to be brave.
Rules
A good sense is useless to an animal that cannot keep still.
- Every constant that shapes a trade lives in a signed policy file, verified on boot and stamped on every order.
- Every change ships with a falsifier and a date: the reading that would prove it wrong and undo it.
- One change at a time, so every result has one cause.
- Evidence is weighed in dollars. A rule that wins nineteen times in twenty and loses money on size is a losing rule.
- Exploration is paid for in minimum size, never in a share of capital.
- Every loss is reconstructed from the raw tape before anyone proposes a fix.
The firm
Built in Pittsburgh.
Hot Metal Trading is a wholly owned subsidiary of RMonaghan Venture Studios, a Pittsburgh venture studio. The name comes from the Hot Metal Bridge, which once carried molten iron across the Monongahela between the city's furnaces and its mills.
We trade only our own capital. We do not manage outside money, offer investment products, or provide advice. We operate exclusively on exchanges regulated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The firm is small and engineering-led. Research, infrastructure, and execution are one team and one codebase.
Contact
Engineers, exchanges, and counterparties welcome.
We are not raising capital and do not respond to investment inquiries. For everything else:
desk@hotmetaltrading.com