Dough Offers Poker Players Top Notch Trading Tools

If you take a stroll around the Rio this summer, you’ll be sure to notice the bright orange dough.com booth in the hallway, offering their services to poker players.

But what is dough? We caught up with Co-CEO Tom Sosnoff, who was integral in forming the company that provides a revolutionary combination of educational content and an easy-to-use, visual trading platform.

Sosnoff, known for his previous company thinkorswim, which sold to TD Ameritrade in 2009 for $750 million, has spent over 20 years leveraging his experience as a market maker for the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) and as one of the original OEX traders in the S&P 100 Index pit.

Card Player spoke with Sosnoff to see what his new project could offer to the poker world.

Card Player: What is dough and how can it help new investors get in the game?

Tom Sosnoff: Dough is a “see it, do it” platform that provides financial content and trading tools for new investors. Part of becoming a poker player is learning about the hands and the game play. It can be intimidating, but because of all the educational material that’s available for poker, millions of new people are playing it. The same is true for investing. There are terms and concepts that can seem difficult and confusing. Dough presents the important first steps for investing in a clear, logical way so you can get up to speed quickly and start trading with some basic strategies. It’s like inviting a new player to a low stakes game where you teach him while playing.

CP: Dough is one of the featured companies at this summer’s WSOP and even has high-stakes pro Faraz Jaka as a representative. What makes dough the perfect platform for poker players looking to get into trading?

TS: Poker is all about probabilities and having those probabilities work in your favor over a high number of hands and games. Poker players today have online tools that can tell them the likelihood of a hand winning a game. With dough, you see the exact probability of a strategy making money instantly, in real-time. And you can tailor a strategy to get the probability of success that you want. It’s like picking your own hole cards in Texas Hold’em. Faraz immediately saw the parallels between trading and poker. For him, trading is like playing a tournament every day because he can place a lot of high probability trades on dough quickly and easily.

CP: What are some of the initial obstacles or fears that new investors face and how can dough help them overcome them?

TS: That they’re going to be plopped into a situation like the final table of the WSOP with a million dollar pot and have no idea what to do! Investing is like poker in that you start with a small bankroll in a low-stakes game where the risk is controlled and mistakes aren’t fatal. A big difference between investing and poker is that while you are competing directly against the other people in a poker game, you can invest in exactly the same strategies and stocks that we trade on dough. In other words, you can play the same hand that we do. And you see the investments that we’re making live on dough so you can follow along if you want.

CP: Can you talk more about the doughjo and your stable of real traders? How does a dough user benefit from watching live trades?

TS: The traders on dough represent as wide a range of people as you’d find in a big poker tournament. Men, women. Young, old. Little trading experience, lots of trading experience. Small investment accounts, large investment accounts. But they all share the same goal of making money with logical, high-probability strategies. Watching how different traders choose different strategies for a given market situation is like seeing how two different players play the same poker hand. There’s so much you can learn by watching traders in real-time that you can’t get just by reading a book.

CP: What skills do poker players possess that make them ideal candidates to learn how to trade?

TS: Most of the traders I know play poker, and some even play in tournaments. Assessing the probability, figuring out the pot odds, determining bet size, and playing with a smart strategy are common to both poker and trading. Poker is a numbers game and so is trading. Poker players understand that going in, which gives them an advantage over non-players when they’re first starting out. Poker players have a head start in that respect. Experience playing poker can give you a framework to understand our statistics-based style of investing, which is all about probabilities and a high number of occurrences. dough makes the transition from poker player to trader very easy.

To learn more about dough.com, sign up for a free account today.

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