John Slazas — Founder, MKT.TRADE

John Slazas has spent more than 35 years building trading systems, starting as a runner on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in the early 1980s. In 1984 he founded JS Services Research and Trading, a technical research firm that supplied trading strategies to exchange members and institutional trading houses, and through it developed two proprietary frameworks: the Price Map, a behavioral model that identifies inflection points in market sentiment, and MarketColor, a quantitative model for gauging a market's technical state and directional probability.

In 1989, Slazas founded Stellaris Futures LP, a Class A clearing member of the CME operating as a give-up execution specialist, before stepping back from clearing and execution in 1992 to focus full-time on strategy development — the discipline that has defined his career since. He mentored under independent floor traders and developed expertise across day trading, position trading, sector and calendar spreading, options volatility trading, and arbitrage, across both futures and options markets.

Today, Slazas is founder and strategic architect of MKT.TRADE and MKT.CAPITAL, and a founding partner of Darma Capital Trading, where he applies decades of fact-based technical analytics to both digital assets and traditional markets. MKT.TRADE is, in effect, the platform expression of the decision-making framework he has refined since his days on the CME floor.

On the Roundtable 100 Blue Ribbon Committee, Slazas contributes a technical trader's read on market structure and sentiment shifts — a discipline distinct from the fundamental and venture-oriented lenses other committee members bring.