New year, new featured trader! We’re starting this year’s Member Feature line-up with yet another exciting interview!
With his straightforward and engaging personality, combined with his steadfast dedication to learning forex trading, @THE_GOATE has been a valued member of the BabyPips.com community since 2020.
Trading stocks as early as high school, @THE_GOATE has always been fascinated by financial markets. This interest eventually ushered in a career in the financial sector and he eventually found himself drawn to forex trading. However, despite this experience, his forex trading journey has been far from easy.
From getting scammed and blowing his first account, to even stepping away from forex for a while– he’s been through it all! And yet none of those experiences stopped him from pursuing trading. With the help of his friends, he set out on a mission to become a profitable trader.
He did a lot of reading, watching videos, demo trading and he even purchased a forex course! Applying everything he’s learned, he was able to develop a trading strategy which he calls “Price Action Naked Trading Scalping” or PANTS. Although he is still planning to develop other strategies in the future, developing this strategy helped him become the experienced and promising trader he is today.
He enthusiastically agreed to share his story, and even share proof of his achievements thus far!
So, without further ado, we give you… @THE_GOATE!
1. Tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? What are your hobbies, interests, favorites?
People who have read my bio will already have seen some of this but for those who haven’t here goes. I reside in Jamaica in the rural parts. I used to work in the financial sector and have been trading stocks since high school in the mid 80’s. In another life, I worked as a draughtsman at a telecommunications company. These days, I am into farming.
As far as hobbies go, I really enjoy reading a good espionage or western novel as well as watching a good sci fi movie. I love writing too and will occasionally pen a letter to the papers down here but these days I hardly do so because they edit it so much the gravamen of what I am trying to get across is messed up. Playing arcade games online makes the cut as well and I like playing chess too but haven’t played in quite a while. Part of the reason for that is not many people around me can play the game.
This is off topic but have any of you guys been down here and enjoyed our jerk pork, or a Julie mango, or ripe banana, or plantain? As far as fruits go if you haven’t had any of the above down here you’ve missed out on a whole lot. On the occasions when I was in the United States and had pineapples and bananas etc. that were pleasing to the eye and big in size but the taste was way off, and I used to wonder why. Eating a pineapple (or banana) that has been picked green and treated with chemicals to delay ripening until the time it takes to get to the shelves is a different tasting fruit from eating a naturally ripened pineapple that was picked just yesterday. Trust me.
2. How were you introduced to forex trading? How has it changed your life since?
When Ponzi schemes were the rage in the United States we had already had our share of them down here prior to that. There was one denominated in Jamaican dollars called cash plus offering 10% per month, I think. People mortgaged their houses to put money into that thing. Around the same time back then there was another one that was denominated in US dollars, but it was ostensibly centered around forex trading and this intrigued me.
Unfortunately, I got misled and was badly burned to the tune of just under US$50k. Google “The con man and his mentor” and you’ll understand. I kept away from forex but always intended to make a return. I was encouraged (hastened) to do so by two good friends late 2019 I think. Seems like I did it the right time, just before Covid 19 and the epic downturn everywhere.
Been demo trading again since mid March 2020 and at that time of 34 trades I only lost 3. It was a strategy I was trying out, learning the forex business in phases. My goal was just to win trades. The next goal is to focus on stop losses and profit targets. Somehow I never got around to the stop loss part.
I wouldn’t say forex has changed my life dramatically as yet because I am still working on recovering the money I lost and that is a work in progress. What I can definitely say is that it has had the effect of making me sleep badly as I have had to be getting up at 2 am in the morning to make trades, lol. Exciting though.
3. Tell us about your trading style. What were your first strategies in forex trading?
My trading style? Hmmm. I can’t recall exactly how I traded back in the day, but I can tell you that it wasn’t working. Since then I have done some amount (a lot) of reading and watching of videos and absorbed as much information as I could about this business of forex trading. I also went back over a forex course my friend and I had purchased back in the mid 2000s. (I saw that same course selling for over 7k last time I checked.) I have what I like to term a problem. I like to do everything I do as elegantly as I can. Elegant in this instance is not as in a dancers move or how a female looks in a dress. What it has to do with is essentially accomplishing a task in the easiest, most effective, least expensive way while at the same time having an outcome of high quality. Just google the word elegant and you’ll get it. Incidentally I consider forex trading an elegant way of earning an income. So, after imbibing all things forex I applied the elegant concept to the matter.
I distinctly recall at one point that guy over at no Nonsenseforex saying in one of his videos that we should learn all we could about forex trading and then when we are done discard everything we learned. At the time I thought him to be an idiot and that statement to be garbage but as it turned out that is basically what I ended up doing for the most part.
I used a sledgehammer and reduced all I had learned about forex to rubble and then assembled my own strategy from the broken pieces. A Frankenstein creation I call it P.A.N.T.S. short for price action naked trading scalping. The name says it all and I don’t use indicators or stop losses. The journal thing I don’t do either because when I make 20 plus trades in a day how the devil do I write them all down much less go over them? That is a lot of work.
I trade the one minute chart because I have a good idea where price will be in the next minute as against a swing trader who may have to wait up to a week to see if his guess was right on the 4hr chart. In the meantime a news event could upend his calculations. I also don’t need 50 or even 20 pips. In the wide world of track and field there are blue ribbon events like the hundred meters and not so glamorous, less visible and publicized ones like the 10k walk. I am doing the latter so to speak. If you take a few seconds to think about it all you need is a big lot size and take 2-3 pips to make money from forex.
Here is another of my stupid ideas. It will take 50 steps for you to walk across the room. That’s 50 steps. Now if you walked across that same room in a manner similar to how the market moves (5 steps forwards and 2 backwards a few times) you might end up taking 90 steps. If you don’t see the point I am trying to make there you are obviously one of the bright ones.
I see people looking at results I’ve posted in the past and brush them off claiming it is too much work for so little returns. What they don’t see is the other large account which these trades are copied to, but then again not everyone has vision. That is also my solution to trading a large account without the anxiety kicking in. And for those who like to dissect the results I put up I have one more from a live account here for them.
By the way at one point when I was counting I had 292 trades of which 1 was a loser. That one came about because I was switching from charts to charts during trading and lost concentration, so I made a wrong click. I could have waited for the trade to come back in my direction but I was impatient. I do have a lot more to say but space won’t permit me.
I just want to add that traders shouldn’t take as gospel EVERYTHING you hear other people say even if they are successful. Take this for example. I heard Cue banks in a video saying if you are trading USD/JPY in say 2014 and in 2016 you are still trading USD/JPY something is wrong and you should be evolving to bigger things. At first it sounded brilliant to me but upon examination I have concluded that it is garbage. If You trade USD/JPY and it works you don’t need to go up to US30. Focus on being consistent and keep on making your money the way that works for you. We can’t all be Usain Bolts. Speaking of Usain, he is having some problems down here because an investment firm he had US$12 million in for his retirement is now telling him his account balance is now US$12k.
Scammers come in all types of shapes and forms. It will be interesting to see how that one pans out. There are also people telling you not to focus on targets and money just focus on the process or some garbage like that. The money will come, they say. I have seen sprinters with impeccable form but when they run they come 4th and 5th while other guys who are simply determined to not get beaten and who look awkward as hell are winning everything. I will never understand how I can trade and not focus on money and targets,
4. Can you give 3 trading habits that have helped you the most in your trading?
I would love to say consistency, consistency, consistency, but that would sound too cliche. Instead, I will say consistency, patience, and persistence.
5. Name one inspiring trader who you look up to and why?
The trader I am today is a composite of a host of traders. All of them have contributed in various ways to how I trade today so choosing one out of the lot would be grossly unfair. One of these days I will compile a list of Youtube clips from forex traders that are a must watch for most traders.
I would like to make mention though of one trader whose video I have gone to sleep watching/listening to at least thrice per week for some time now in the hope that the material will seep in at a subliminal level and stay there. What he says especially fascinates and resonates with me because it is so close to my style of trading. His name is Jean-Francois Boucher and in an interview with Etienne Crete he discusses his scalping strategy. His range trading strategy is something I plan to seriously delve deeply into when I find some time.
6. What was your biggest trading challenge in the past year and how did you deal with it?
My biggest trading challenge this year had to do with fundamental analysis; namely trading the news. My thing is technical analysis, so this was foreign to me. I was trying out this new strategy which seemed feasible to me. In a nutshell I traded on an NFP day and all went according to plan until I realized too late that there was another news event the following day. I had to learn on the spot how to hedge in regards to forex and barely came away with my shirt on my back, lol.
7. If you could have given advice to yourself at the beginning of your journey, what would it have been?
If I could go back I would have flogged me mercilessly and told me…find yourself a #%@!$ mentor!!! I am not telling anybody that having a mentor is a must but having one will in all probability drastically reduce the length of time it takes for you to catch on to this forex business and save you a ton of money and stress. You can learn everything about how to surf from the internet but…go figure.
8. How do you stay up-to-date with the ever-changing financial markets?
I honestly believe the strategy I currently employ in my trading is impervious to changing financial markets hence no need for me to “stay up-to-date with the ever-changing financial markets”. I do however like to watch videos about the journey, styles and experiences of other forex traders so that if for any reason going forward I decide to vary my style I will have some stuff in my forex trading tool box to draw upon.
9. What do you like to do in your spare time, besides trading?
I greatly enjoy reading paperback books such as the Destroyer series, the Executioner series, the Death merchant series, and Louis L’amour westerns. Writing too. I also enjoy drinking that good old 63% J Wray & Nephew white overproof rum with my friends up the road. I have some here at home but I don’t even look at it because it’s not the same as when you’re drinking with friends.
10. What is your current non-forex related goal at the moment?
That would be to publish at least 10 more erotic fiction short story ebooks between now and the end of December under my pen name Iami N. Cognito.