Hey everyone, my name is Max. I’m from the UK, and I started trading Oil Futures when I was 16. I was fortunate to be mentored and backed by a great trader early on. Fun fact: BabyPips was actually one of the first resources I used, and I still recommend it to people today!
I traded full-time for around 4 years, but I’ll admit I was never the best trader and mentally I always found it very challenging. That said, I’ve been lucky enough to work with some brilliant traders over the years, so I know what it takes to succeed in this game.
Now at 30, I’m not very active in the markets anymore. These days, I’m more focused on the tech and software side of things, building tools to help traders speed up the strategy development process and make trading analysis more efficient.
I am looking forward to connecting with everyone here, learning from your experiences, and contributing where I can!
Hey Max, welcome to the community! It’s awesome to hear about your journey starting so young with Oil Futures. I totally agree, BabyPips was a lifesaver when I was learning the ropes too. Transitioning to the tech side sounds really exciting – I’d love to hear more about the tools you’re developing. Looking forward to connecting and sharing experiences!
Thanks mate - I can’t code myself. I’m part of a team building an AI-powered platform that helps traders automate analysis without coding (using natural language)
Hey Max, great to meet you! It’s impressive that you’ve been in the trading game since such a young age. Given your background in both trading and now tech, I’m curious—what do you think is the biggest challenge traders face when it comes to strategy development, and how do you think technology can help solve that?
If you can’t code your strategy development process is gonna be manual. And that is just such a long painful process. I’ve spent endless amounts of time in spreadsheets collecting data around strategies I’m working on, as I am sure many people on here have too.
And then that manual process makes it difficult to collect good valuable stats over a long enough period in a quick enough manner. It’s just impossible to be efficient in those circumstances.
But I think strategy development is a skill on its own. Too many people put themselves in a box of “I’m an XYZ trader and I trade XYZ strategy”.
Be curious find a scenario you like the look of, ask questions about the market, and then find the answers in the data.
If you choose to trade CFD’s using an account that’s regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (or by Australia’s ASIC, or by any European Union regulator), then in practice the maximum leverage you can get is 1:30, simply because those regulators aren’t permitted by law to regulate higher-leverage accounts than that. That’s perhaps what you were thinking of?
But it’s definitely not a crime for anyone in the UK to choose to use higher leverage, if they want to give up all their rights to protection from a real regulator with both the power and the willingness to help them, if ever they have a dispute with their broker.
It’s the kind of thing we all decide for ourselves.
Personally, I’m not anxious to use higher leverage than that anyway, but some people, especially those with little experience, would feel differently because the world’s full of losing traders who believe that lack of high leverage hinders people’s ability to trade profitably, and there’s certainly no shortage of unregulated counterparty “brokers” who like them to continue thinking that way.
All those “brokers” choose to avoid real regulation so that they get the protection, rather than their customers, when there are disputes.
And “strangely enough” those are exactly the brokers whose customers seem to have almost all the problems. So, for many people, it’s not really a very difficult decision which kind of broker to use.