Lucas Downey

Growing up in a small town in Louisiana with a passion for what made some stocks great and others not so great, Luke Downey performed his first investing exercise as a teenager. With the desire for financial knowledge, he moved to New York City directly after graduation. After a brief stint at a day-trading firm, he landed a job on an institutional trading desk handling large orders of stock and derivatives. The rest was history.

Luke served as Head of ETF Sales at Cantor Fitzgerald. While in this seat, he began to notice the importance that institutional trading activity had on the movements and direction of stocks. He spent years observing these activities and in his free time, with a partner, began designing quantitative models to look for unusual trading activity. He later moved to Jefferies, LLC as an SVP of Derivatives. There he published stock research based around the unusual activity signals he was developing. He later left Wall Street to work on this research full time at www.mapsignals.com.

As a former institutional sales trader on Wall Street, Luke understands the importance that large institutional trades play in uncovering the leading stocks of tomorrow. The best stocks, the outliers, will always be found by the brightest minds on Wall Street. Recently, Luke created 2 options courses with Investopedia Academy. He believes that trading options doesn't have to be complicated. These courses focus on the practical uses of options in an easy to understand format.

Luke earned a bachelor's degree from Louisiana State University.

"No matter what your end goal is in finance, always have a process. The journey is oftentimes more memorable than the reaching of the goal."