Sean McLaughlin was born and raised in Buffalo, NY, and graduated from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Today, he lives in a small mountain town near Boulder, Colorado with his wife of 23 years and 9-year-old son, always in search of a great trail to hike.
After graduating college and suffering through a brief six-month stint as a Mutual Fund Salesman for MetLife, Sean began his trading career in 1998 at a Proprietary trading firm in Tampa, Florida. In his first four years, he was engaged in intraday scalping — primarily NASDAQ stocks — during the final blowoff top of the “dot com bubble” and subsequent tech and internet stocks crash. It was a trial by fire as the stock markets experienced a level of consistent volatility that had previously been unseen and hasn’t been matched since. Sean has spent the subsequent 20 years unlearning all of the bad habits he acquired during those early formative years.
In 2002, Sean began exploring the futures markets after learning about and researching the famous “Turtle Trader” story. This fascination and total immersion prompted him to launch a small hedge fund with a handful of investors to execute a trend-following strategy in commodities and financial futures. And this led him to relocate to Chicago to become a Member of the Chicago Board of Trade. Sadly, the largest of his fund’s investors decided to walk away with his 58% returns (net of fees) after only 18 months in business, thus necessitating the closing of his promising fund.
After the fund closed, Sean took advantage of his location (his office was on the 28th floor of the CBOT building) and exchange membership to try his hand at trading electronic mini-dow futures from a booth on the upper rim of the big Dow Futures pit on the floor of the CBOT. While it was an exciting daily endeavor to step on the floor and be part of the heart of the action, it was a short-lived dalliance. He couldn’t find an edge.
Undeterred, this led Sean to focus on learning about and building options strategies which began around 2007. He was greatly attracted to the ability to express his market opinions in defined-risk “bets” with advantageous leverage opportunities. Though he’d dabbled with options since the beginning, it was during this time that Sean began becoming primarily engaged in equity and index options.
In late 2010 while continuing to trade his own account, Sean joined StockTwits—the world’s largest social platform for finance—and became Director of Community where he was a key player in 10x-ing the growth of the audience. While there, he also hosted and produced a popular Trader podcast that interviewed 40 of the biggest names and successes in the trader/social media space, and he created and oversaw a network of 35 trader meetup groups in cities around the U.S. & Canada. During this time, his love of community and trader network building for the purposes of mutual support and mentorship took shape.
Since 2018, Sean has served the financial community as Chief Options Strategist for All Star Charts, sharing his unique style of options trading, leveraging the best-in-class technical analysis offered by the All Star Charts research team.
In all endeavors, Sean has been consistent in building a support system around himself and for others that he wishes he had when he started out back in 1998.