Academic, Consultant, Entrepreneur... Trader: How to add that latter string to your bow.

There must be a very large number of traders who yearn to find opportunities to make a profit in markets, but often find their directional choice as to which way to trade defies their observations. Their leveraging and position sizing leads to catastrophic losses. There is a reason for the government health warnings on options, CFDs, forex and stock market brokerages that have cropped up in droves over the last decade and a half in particular.

It brings actual physical aches and pains – seizing up, and psychological humiliation of the embarrassing, shameful and degrading kind to know that one has sat perhaps for a great many hours, probably without stretching or exercising, watching a chart, perhaps many days or week, or even months, respite being the occasional coffee, meal or other less-than-ideally-healthy diversion.

Maybe the time was built meticulously scalping the market and building an account up, learning, making changes to strategies, testing, and getting ready to trade well for the future, only to end with putting a bigger-than-normal trade on what looks like a certain deal, that does the precise opposite of what it “should do”, and goes on, and on and on… or there is an act of disgruntled impatience with the process which has left the trader engaging in a series of senseless sprees which invariably end up as a string of losses. Because “damn it all the market is random anyway, I’m angry, it’s not fair and there’s no way of getting an edge, besides it doesn’t matter what I lose there’s always another day”.

This can be a hopeless, prospectless and frankly deeply depressing place to reach in one’s trading. There can be tears, arguments, frozen shoulders, stiffening of muscles, ligaments, arteries and even the loss of relationships with one’s children, spouse and family if trading is allowed to become an obsession and a losing one. I know because I’ve ended up there before in these kinds of dark, unfriendly places, until quite recently. It was deeply frustrating and demoralising. I didn't want to admit it to myself, let alone my wife, that I'd failed again at something I'd worked so hard at. Kept persisting though, knew that was key, as well as taking breaks and building up other businesses and opportunities.

For all the intellect, funding and learning that goes into the trading lifestyle for so many chasing the dream, there is a misfortune greater than any losing streak that ever occurred in front of the charts or the newsfeeds due to overactivity in a choppy correction or sideways move. That is the misunderstanding about the relationship between research, education and management of the trade, without all three of which the statis leads to what I call Hans-Solo-Frozen-In-Carbonite-for-the-Entertainment-of-Jabba-the-Hutt-syndrome. Another way of stating these three nutritional elements in the trader’s diet - or the blissful awakening that is the appearance of Princess Lea in disguise of androgynous alien bounty hunter - is reading and testing, learning and building a system and trading in ways that will work for different market conditions, account objectives and trading styles.

I use a series of frameworks to understand the market and to test out new ways of identifying and trading opportunities (research), learning how to read the market from different perspectives, maps in the price and time location of the present (education), the footprints in the sand, and in the pre-, during- and post- trade behaviours that involve making a decision, taking a trade, and then managing that trade to its fruition, whether ripe, juicy and delicious, or just another apple that falls by the wayside for nature to envelope. It’s these frameworks that can make the difference between a confident, professionally well-equipped trader who knows that they have the resources, tools and strategies to succeed in any liquid instrument,

Before introducing clients to the AI I've developed through learning, modelling, evaluating and natural language generation and its application to financial markets, I like to start my clients who are developing their acumen and building their executive education in these particular markets with conceptual models and we build in the requisite ingredients to make each of the inputs into successful trading, for the long-term, actually work. This begins with education and research, and it incorporates the process leading up to and the execution around trade decisions, carefully monitoring adjustments to the application of the strategies until results are achieved. Along the journey, financial independence is reached. And eventually, trading becomes an art with the clear goal being the perfection of that art to the best of one’s ability – elegant trading where each trade is placed for validated reasons and is not exited until metrics for exhaustion are aligned or some good reason to believe a reversal is truly in play, takes place. Preserving the capital and gradually building the account go hand in hand with learning tools to manage, build, support and develop the psychology, truly getting to grips with the language of the market and the trade management (another framework).

The problem is therefore a lack of understanding of the need to integrate several aspects of the trading life, to commit to months if not years of ongoing education in analysis and application of analysis into the real-time routes, and to perform the actual work of checking the setup, placing the orders and then monitoring, adjusting and optimising exits and post-trade analysis diligently and consistently over the long haul. These are not easy pills to swallow. But they mean the difference between amateur loser-ship under the guise of knowing, through to actual financial independence, and plentiful use of the expression that "hindsight is a wonderful thing", through to ever-increasing amounts of choice in what one can do with their lives, and the great satisfaction of having an approach that can have the edge, instead of watching the edge have you – and knowing it could be you soaking up the bliss of those trends that never seem to end until they are truly, fully and completely exhausted, and then some at times.

I’ve mentored quite a few folk through financial markets educational products, lecture courses, exams and trainings, live and recorded. I’ve done this in universities teaching corporate finance, investments and portfolio management, even corporate governance, econometrics and the Chartered Banker Institute accredited Consumer Ethics and Regulation in Finance module for MSc in Banking and Finance students at the Business School of one of the universities I also graduated from for one of my three degrees.

I also created one of the first ever online foreign exchange trading multimedia courses in 2005 which was used by thousands of clients of mine and those who marketed the courses independently after I sold the rights to the courses. This included producing daily analysis of multiple global markets, daily political and economic news analysis covering these world markets and the technical levels likely to be breached and/or reached in a variety of stock indexes, forex pairs and commodities. My subscriber base were loyal and many did very well for themselves I am sure. Some of them wrote to me about financial success they had achieved using my methods.

More recently I’ve taken to the idea of group mentoring with a go-at-your-own-pace course with 11 modules aimed at being taken over 90 days, but with lifetime access for those who like to visit and revisit great information. I’ve been creating a beginner, intermediate and advanced courses for aspiring and experienced traders that can only be taken in conjunction with group mentoring programs I’ve spent almost 15 years in the development of, and the requisite ￡10,000s and a Ph.D. in my case to ensure I learned well and from the best. some of those I've had the great privilege to learn from include: traders that are running hedge funds with staff to do much of their research and ideas and application that attract a large enough number of high net worth investors, and generate sufficient returns so as to enjoy offices in the best locations in the world’s global financial centres; traders that have been working on commodities and forex desks for the best part of three decades; asset managers whose names I cannot mention due to confidentiality, but who had, in their best times, achieved a name for themselves as being the world leaders in generating high investor returns over sustained periods. One trader had bought 100 apartments in a European capital with his trading profits in order to develop multiple streams of income.

For myself this year I made 25% in one trade (silver), put back into the market exactly the same due to a tedious mistake I've made a number of times of over-leveraging and guessing tops and which I have promised this time I will truly learn from (S&P 500), and as a result, over the last 3 weeks alone, in my spare time, I managed to control risk very tightly and still achieve a 150% return trading GBPUSD (that's 125% in a few weeks part time). This is in no way a guarantor of results, nor an estimation of what anyone else can achieve with my methods or anyone's methods. There's simply your own capital's risk involved when you take this on for yourself and take responsibility for your investment results. That said, these results have helped enormously when I took to driving a Jaguar XF portfolio this year, and am helping to support a family in a 5 bedroom detached new build while running high-income consultancy contracts during most of the day and I'm not operating from a tax haven either. I'm very confident in what I've got and in what I've learned, and I want to make the education arm of my trading business second to none, teaching 1000 traders how to become financially independent, step by step. However, I am also confident enough to know when to call it quits, like that ballsed up S&P500 short - and actually cutting the losses did me a huge favour as I knew it would. I'm determined though to make 5-10% each and every month, when there are days I can focus on my trading (say between 5-7 days per month) and my goal is never to take a risk of more than 0.5% of my high risk trading account size on any given trade.

The course and group coaching I’m offering to 10 people in January to March (2 hours per week on zoom plus your own study and application time) doesn’t just teach the ABCs of trading that can be found all over the internet in videos, portal sites and blogs. There’s a lot of basics out there. Some of it is good. Some of it is average. And some of it is frankly useless or appalling, and yet markets itself as indispensable! I’ve been around since the earlier days of the internet, in fact since when yahoo had about 60 sites listed, but that's another story, but the point is that I've watched the business of online brokering and trading unfold since pre-takeoff when I first got involved. I got out of the industry when I saw charlatans taking over with absolutely ruthless (and at times utterly unprincipled and unethical) marketing techniques. I decided to get out and get a Ph.D. and learn to do things properly. When the generally available information does get it right, in terms of accuracy, what it doesn't do contain absolutely critical insights that you would not tease out from reading a thousand articles on the same subject - insights you can apply immediately to your trading. My online courses teach the very ideas that I’ve learned from masterful traders over 15 years and ensure the application through group feedback, mentoring and accountability, with a long-term plan.

If you want to learn how to make order out of chaos with any market of your choice be it forex, stock, index, commodity or even crypto, and more importantly how to deploy tactically the frameworks I’ve developed to make other traders better at what they do, please get in touch about the possibility of a clarity call. My time is limited so clarity calls only take place once per week and the number of clients I can reach out to is finite. There is therefore a short questionnaire to fill out as an application stage, in order to be considered to be placed into one of my groups, as I can’t work with everyone, only those who are at the right level and with the right attitude and commitment to become masters at their game – those I deem have a high probability of becoming highly successful and learning in an accelerated fashion what I’ve distilled over 15 years of experiences (realistically about 5 years of FTE). There are no guarantees and you’ll be given the requisite health warnings at a later stage. If you don’t take action though, you might never learn one of the most fascinating and rewarding skills the 21st century still has available.

Send me a comment or a private message and we can schedule a time to talk. We're still at beta test stage for this product and service, so I pretty much guarantee if you're serious that you'll find I cut an outstanding deal out that suits your needs and development budget. You'll get access to my research and AI for 6 months too... but that's a secret to find out about later on.