Have you ever wonder what it might feel like to wake up each day and actually do something that you enjoy, something that you have invested time into and something that keeps you interested no matter how good or bad the times may be? That’s what trading feels like to me, and most of the time I can’t wait soon enough for the next morning to come around so I can start working on a fresh set of charts.
Initially, making money from trading was a primary focus for me. Going back to the end of 2008 when I first became drawn towards speculating in the Spot FX Markets it was because of the huge potential financial gains, however trading FX is not about making a quick buck, but making small and consistent gains over time - something which took me a little time to come to terms with.
Ever since I was 18 years old, the legal age to gamble or speculate, I was very much interested in online poker and the occasional visit to the casinos for Black Jack and Roulette with my friends after work at my regular c0cktail bar job. At this time in my life I had no idea about Retail Trading from home, as at that time it was a very new form of speculating on the financial markets with very few retail brokers on offer.
I was known by my friends as having no limits when it came to playing Black Jack, Roulette or even Cash Poker. There would be several occasions when I would quite happily place individual bets which were northwards of £1,000 - an amount which my mum would kill me for if she knew what I was doing, let alone being in a Casino at all! Needless to say on most occasions I would walk out with an empty wallet and think about what could have been…
Contrary to the fact I was in a Casino expecting to win, I will admit that I am not a stupid person. I have always had an interest in finance, and developing ways to make money from a statistics point of view. This is where I belive I have found a middle ground with Trading Spot FX. At first I was making lots of money, and I mean lots of money relative to the income that could be generated from a normal job at my age, however as a naive ‘newbie’ most of this was lost back into the market. But one thing kept me coming back to the markets…you make your own odd’s, you are against other people or funds and there is no ‘House odd’s’ like that of a casino. To put it simply, trading is down to skill and making your own edge to exploit profits - treat trading as a business and you will succeed.
To cut a long story short, at the age of 21 I went to university for a standard three year degree in Finance with Risk Management. However getting my degree was a secondary factor as to why I chose University at all. I went to University as I knew this would give me the needed three year window to learn how to trade while financially supporting myself from a student loan.
I literally spent a minimum of five hours a day testing new ideas and back-testing data sets to find an edge. I would say with a high level of confidence that in total I spent over five thousand hours learning. It would not be uncommon for me to finish university at 4pm and go to the twenty four hour library until 2am most nights. You’re probably thinking “how can someone really have that level of self-motivation?”, well the answer is simple. Once you find an edge that has shown to make financial gains you want to test as mush historical data as you can get your hands on just to see if it would fail.
I aced my first two years in University, making top grades, which in all honesty I expected as I find working with numbers and relating them to financial situations quite simple. However in my third and final year trading was getting serious, and I was in way over my head. I knew I was on the edge of making a breakthrough, but not quite ready. I even tested my unfinished trading strategy on a live UK trading competition which had over 8,000 participants and finished in the top 20.
It did not take me long to find out what was missing from my trading system, and to find this involved spending a lot of cash by blowing several live trading accounts. The answer was simple, yet fixing this has been the hardest personal challenge for me since staring back in 2008.
I was hardwired to gamble, and always have been since the days of the casino visits and late night online poker. All I needed to figure out was how to suppress this feeling which in all honestly, even at the best of times, was uncontrollable. For example I would make money from a trade and that would be me done for the day, I could easily walk away. However, after a loss I would chase more and more, and in most, if not all circumstances I would double down on the stakes at risk - which as we all know can only end one way given enough time! There was one occasion at University where I was in a lecture about Global Politics, a topic which bored me to no end. I opened my laptop and started to trade the US session while the lecturer was continuing to talk away to the class. Not only was this a boring two hour lecture, but I also managed to blow a $5,000 live account at the same time. I remember thinking “what the f*ck, I bet that’s the most expensive lecture anyone has ever paid for at this university” - needless to say I got up and left and went to have a hot shower.
Taking a loss in trading is totally natural and normal, and it’s this that I have finally come to terms with. Follow the trading plan, a plan which you have already proven to be profitable over time, and you will end in the green. Making my trading account public is one way which I hope will help me suppress my instinct to deviate from the trading plan. I know that if I can do this the money will come, and lots of it in the not to distant future.
I finished university broke, as all students do, with a good degree but no job. It was decision time and I had two options that I could choose. Do I go for a full time job and save for a few years, quit the job after this time period and trade full time, or trade with a small retail account during the day and work nights behind c0cktail bars? I actually went for the first option and got a job offer at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in their middle office, which I then declined after thinking about it. Shortly after that I went for a random interview in London to work on a Caribbean Cruise Line as a c0cktail bartender which was, and still is the world number one in luxury small Cruise Liners. This ‘random’ interview backfired as not only did I get the job, but my close friend also got the job on the same cruise - how much fun would this be!
Needless to say, something held me back, and with less than one week to flying out to Singapore from the UK I made the phone call to cancel my position.
I wanted to trade from home, and make my own money from scratch. I thought to myself that I don’t want to be the person working on that Cruise Liner, I want to be the person who takes a vacation on that Cruise - a clear difference.
At the end of the day i’m young, I have time to recover if trading does for some reason not work out in the future. Regardless of this though I have a lot of people interested in what i’m doing, not only friends but also other people in the same profession. I’ve made a lot of sacrifices to be where I am now, not only from a financial prospective but also personally on a relationship front.
I’m sure people all have their own stories as to how and why they got into trading, and the decisions that were made. However, the biggest lesson I have learned is that finding a trading edge, be it from statistics like my self, or other forms is only have the battle. Phycological elements are real, something which can’t be quantified into numbers. Underestimate this and no matter how good you edge is you wont succeed.
