Gutrade is a podcast featuring interviews with traders, journalists, analysts, researchers and various other personalities in the financial industry. We look behind the scenes and into the minds of traders, try to get answers to the many questions surrounding trading and investigate some of the myths in the industry. It is all aimed at individual investors in a format that hopefully entertains as much as it informs.

While trying to touch on as many subjects from as wide a range of investments as possible, the emphasis frequently slips back Options Trading with a lot of the focus on the Australian Market.

The host, Gunnar Haid, holds two degrees in engineering which, some would say, explains a lot about him. In his defence, the times when he was working in the engineering field full time outside of University (in Contaminated Land Management – if you want to call that engineering) are long gone. Right at the end of the last century he ventured into the field of Information Technology and founded a mildly successful firm that he left in 2008. He claims that the firm is in fact still around.

Since then he has occasionally been called back into the IT industry as a “missing link”, wedged between high level system engineers in IT Service Provider firms and the clients of such firms. Call it client relations expert or whatever you like, but he seems to have a rare ability to communicate and liaise with both sides of that equation better than most people. For almost a decade he was also proudly a member of and ended up chairing the Academic Advisory Board for a very successful Information Technology College in Sydney's CBD. And almost one could say to conclude the circle, lately he is back enjoying and applying his contaminated land management expertise.

Over the years however, his focus shifted a lot to the trading of options on the Australian stock exchange. While immersing himself into the subject, he found himself in an industry that is not only powerful and respected but also releases a seemingly endless stream of information that mostly sounds interesting and appears newsworthy. Yet there seems to be a lot of questionable information wrapped into industry jargon by experts whose statements are void of facts, not based on properly conducted research and still are reported and repeated with a stunning lack of critical thinking.

In that light the idea for GuTrade was born.