The World’s EASIEST Trading Strategy That EVEN A Child Can Learn

I can write trading strategies in a second. If I even explain to you how simple my trading is, you would probably laugh and think that how is this possible? But my trading is ridiculously simple; it's not hard. A 5-year-old could trade how I trade, if I'm honest. The strategy, the risk, and the psychology are 33, 33, 33. There's not one that lasts without another. If you think it's the system that's going to come in and make you money, you are wildly mistaken, which is why I said to you I don't trade using technical analysis anymore. Technical analysis was, was kind of like my… but I've only got where I've got to because of the risk management and the psychology. Technical analysis—I, I feel like I know it like the back of my hand—that I don't even need to look at it anymore, and I don't care if I'm right or wrong because of the psychology. So that's actually the strategy is the last part I need. I started writing articles for all of these companies: Zer Edge, Trading View, FX Street. I look at just naked charts. I, I, I have nothing on my charts at all. You look at the charts so much that you know where the indicators were placing. If I look at a chart, I know what a MACD is doing without having the MACD on my chart. I know what an RSI is doing; I know what a fib is doing. I don't need them on the chart anymore because all of those indicators, all of those things lag the data on the chart anyway. The price action is the key; it's like the Matrix—you, you just don't need it anymore.

If you could have known something before you got into trading, what would that be?

The number one podcast in the trading space, the fastest growing, and that's Banks up every single one, one of you. Welcome everyone back to the Words of Wisdom podcast. We are back once again and still the number one trading podcast in the world and the fastest growing, thanks to all of you and our incredible guests. Talking of which, today we have a 15-year trading veteran with us today. He trades the stock market now, I think, has been through a progression in that journey. Uh, he's the founder of DnD D Capital, which I'm very excited to speak, speak about as well, and he has written articles, if I'm not mistaken, FX Street, Forex Factory. I want to say they've taken, they've all taken them, but it's the one and only Raj and D, brilliant.

Thanks, R.

Thanks for having me, man.

It's my pleasure, man. People won't know me and you actually, we worked together very briefly in the past, um, lost, lost touch. LinkedIn brought us back together, but since then you've done incredible things, you know, gone on to do, as I said, DnD D Capital, which we'll get into, and thankfully I've been able to, to build this thanks to the trading community, and here we are. But we, to kick things off, I think like you've had an incredible journey, um, you know, you see, I don't know if you started with Forex, but one thing I learned from my research is you started actually in sports.

Yes.

Yeah, started football.

Yeah, yeah. So, uh, yeah, I used to trade, I used to play at a football academy when I was young. I grew up playing in football academy, so Brentford moved… I tried like Brentford were in League Two at the time, like now obviously it's all changed the names, but they were in League Two at the time, not, uh, not the best team in the world, but uh, obviously as time went on, I, I tried to make it to the Premier League. Maybe it was a bit of a mistake of mine when I was younger, um, ended up not getting signed. So, uh, as I was going through my education, I, I, I did Sport Science at college and at university, and uh, and then ended up working in the gym, which led to trading somehow. Ex-people probably be thinking how does that make sense? Yeah, it was, uh, it was interesting because I, although I always had interested in shares and uh, in trading anyway, I didn't know anything about it up until that point. But when I first took a job, I started working in the JP Morgan gym in the downstairs at Blackfriars, and uh, you know, some of the listeners might, might even know me from there because some of them were traders, and um, you know, I just started making good money coaching, fitness coaching, training people for marathons, triathlons, and all kinds of events. And when I started making money, uh, I, I started to ask them like, well, where should I put it now? And like, so random, some of my first investments from working in the gym were in companies like Tescos, things like that, whereas I would ask them for like tips, effectively saying, look, you know, I've, I've saved a bit of cash, what do you think I should put my money in? So British American Tobacco, Tescos, and lo and behold, I, I started making good money holding those shares for a while, and it just peaked my interest, and I got more and more interest and started asking them more and more questions. So I, I, I had a good foundation from asking real good traders in all different areas of trading just questions and stuff, um, but I didn't know what I was doing at all.

So interesting, because it's the very rare, very, very unique and rare story.

Lucky, lucky.

Yeah, well, it's interesting you say that because a lot of traders, especially the, you know, verified and veteran traders, they talk about look, and it's such an interesting thing because it's like you make your own look, but then there's also like this element of maybe fate or whatever it's meant to be, but there's something that happens where, you know, everything aligns, whatever you call it, it is an element of a lot of people's journeys, I think, without even realizing.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, I'm a firm believer of like taking advantage of opportunities when they get in front of you. So yeah, obviously it was luck, but I ran with it when they gave me the opportunity, when, when they, they were open for, for asking questions and, and helping me or whatever. I think it was just not like I was open to learning, I took their advice on board, and obviously it was not, it was pretty soon after I started making mistakes with trading. So it was, yeah, take their advice on board, and I thought it was easy, like just to buy and hold and make money, and I didn't get through a bad period for a while. It took me a long, a long time from that first trade that I placed to actually find a, get into a negative situation from trading.

Really? Was that a good thing or bad thing?

I, I think looking at others' journeys now, obviously I, I coach some traders and I look after some traders, so looking at other people's journeys now, I, I feel like it's better to go through the bad times first than it is to be successful at the beginning because you lure yourself into a full sense of security if you're good at the start, which I was, and uh, that just made, made me overconfident and have a little bit of an ego at the time. So I've, I've obviously had to try and learn from that.

What do you think made you good at the beginning then?

Um, my hands-off approach. So, uh, what, what initially I was doing was buying shares or when I started trading currencies, I used to wake up really early in the morning, and my first session in the gym was 6:30 a.m. I used to do the open almost every day. I used to place my trades, go off and work for the whole day without even thinking about them and come back and check them when I finished work, and that made me a good trader, but at the time I was, I was so ignorant, I didn't even know that that was what was making me a good trader, just my hands-off approach. That was the best thing I, I ever did at the time, and in hindsight I did go back to it, but it took me a long while to learn that lesson.

Interesting. Yeah, it's normally it's, it's such an interesting one because I've recognized that in my own journey as well, and I've seen and a lot of other traders is like they start off doing something right, they go off and change something, yeah, and in the end though they have to end up going back to where they were.

Yeah. I don't, I don't blame anyone really for it because if you're doing something well and you think, oh, if I dedicate more time to this and if I put more education into this, I'm going to get better, because the rest of life teaches you that if you're a doctor or you're, you know, working as an engineer, the harder you work the better you get at something, but I, I don't think that's the case in trading, in my own experience and also coaching traders, I don't think it's the, the, the main thing. I think the main thing where you can do your learning is for your mind, not in the skill itself. So that, that was a big realization.

Definitely. Talk to us about that transition then. So you went from obviously being the PT, getting these, you know, this advice essentially and, and sort of talking with these traders, luckily professional traders who you could literally verify because you're in the building with them. Yeah, um, where was the transition from there of you becoming, you know, more active in trading and, and you know, really making a career out of it? Was that, was that thought at the time to make a career out of it?

You're, you're going to laugh, and I don't know if I've ever told this story, but when we were at the gym, we used to get the City AM, the, the, the newspaper, and um, when we were bored and I was trading and making money, I used to flick for it to read the news stories about the city, but then I started looking at the job adverts that sold me because I worked it backwards. I saw the salaries that they were earning, and I thought I want to be on that side of the table. How do I get there? And then I looked at the jobs that it took for people to get there, and I, I genuinely started at the bottom. So I, yeah, so when the gym closed down, um, the gym closed down four years after I started working there. Two of the staff that were working there opened up a firm in Windsor. I started as a, I started as a clerk and as a broker on the phone. Clerk was just writing the transactions for FX transactions, making sure the reconciliation was done for physical FX transactions. It was a long time ago, so it doesn't happen anymore. And then, um, I used to genuinely make, make two to 300 calls a day, sales calls, selling futures, sorry, forwards and options in currencies. So, uh, I used to sell to corporate companies, and we used to have a trading desk that used to process the transactions for, for selling physical foreign exchange. Options contracts were what I used to sell the most, and then that, that rolled on to being electric. So then it, it stopped being phone selling, it started being on the computer, like people sending in orders, and I grew up in that industry, but where I moved into analysis is that my boss who was working at the company in Windsor, I moved to a different company in Windsor, he was a member of the Society of Technical Analysts, so like with Axel, Clive, and all of these guys, and I asked him like you're writing these reports and sending them out to the customers, I want to get involved because I want to know, uh, that side of the business. I want to know why the currency markets move. I want to know what you're writing about the financial markets, and I, he, I got sent on the course, and that, that was genuinely probably my trading career really began. It didn't start until up in that point. I was a, I was a broker.

Mhm.

And a broker is a completely different job.

Yeah. As soon as I started getting to analysis, then my trading career really, really began.

What was your thoughts on the analysis side? Um, was it something that you were excited about? Was it something you enjoyed when you started to learn about it?

Yeah, because, um, again, purely ego, I would say that, um, people thinking that you know what you're on about is quite a nice thing, and this, this is me being completely honest. If people look to you as the area of where they're going to learn something or the area of expertise and people ask you questions on Treasury desks and things like that, it makes you feel good, but um, it doesn't prepare you for trading. So I, um, you know, I learned a lot about the fundamentals, as you know, of the financial markets, interest rates, you know, CPI readings, you know, GDP readings, all of this kind of stuff, combined it with a technical analysis, and yeah, it made me learn more about the markets, and I learn about the how the market mechanics work, but it, it didn't help with the trading, but I thought it would at the time.

Yeah. And then in terms of taking that course…

Yeah, right, the Society of Technical Analysis. I struggled with that. You got it with my, my podcast of Axel, which is great though. Today, today literally it was like kind of me individually meeting different people from a similar network, you know, um, which was fascinating, uh, but yeah, but like what was that like in terms of taking that course, you know, was it in terms of foundation, in terms of, uh, being that was that your first point of call in terms of technical analysis?

Uh, for technical analysis apart from reading other people's reports?

Yes, it was. Um, I, I, I was, I was relentless when I was young. So I, I had all of the books already. John J Murphy, I had like Dalton and Steel Meire, I had all of the big technical analysis books before I even got to the course, and I'd been studying them for a while and working in the industry, so I knew a lot about technical analysis before I took the course. The big thing about the course was is when I got there and I did the, the seminars with all the other people and I got to network, uh, building up the network of people that I could talk to about trading and people that we could get on the same wavelength, um, there were big pros and cons to this, which, which I will tell you about, but, but it, that was a game changer for me, meeting people like Axel. Me, me and Axel were quite close for a while because he was head of education, and I was one of the curators, um, at the LSE, and I was also like, um, like the helper that, you know, effectively used to do the, give the flyers out to the students, um, I used to sit there and just in case maybe one of the lectures couldn't turn up because it was snowing, I used to fill in for them. I used to do things like that, and to be at the London School of Economics and meet those lecturers and lecture myself there was an invaluable experience for me. That was one of the best experiences of my career, I'd say.

Why?

I think like, let's say for example, Jeremy Pie, Steven Goldstein, Axel, um, these guys, and there's so many I can mention, but, but those guys, um, I would obviously, uh, put, put in some other people in there, uh, I watched their lectures probably 15 times each because I was the, the effectively the teaching assistant. Mhm. So I had to repetitively watch these things over and over and over again, and it might surprise you, I never got bored. I never got bored. I listened to every single lecture like so, so many times, and every time I'd pick up something new, and like even I'd ask questions in the lecture sometimes if they change something or if a new speaker had come in, even like, I, I'm obsessed with this industry. I, I, I wanted to be the best, and uh, that effectively was, was a big, big part of, of enjoying that part of my career.

Do you think that necessary in terms of a learning process to be obsessed, to, to be meticulous in the process of learning?

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Yeah, I do. I think it is, but you also have to, to reduce it when you, when you've learned enough. So, um, I would call myself at the time a technical analyst, a generalist. So I knew about point and figure, Market Profile, all the indicators and everything like that, but then there was a time then in the future, obviously I didn't know it at the time, that I realized I, I didn't need it anymore. So I learned it all, I understood it all, and basically I'm still a technical analyst at heart, but I don't, I don't really use it that much, if I'm completely honest. So it's, it was, it was learning everything, learning the foundations, picking and choosing what I wanted out of it, and then completely forgetting about it as well at the same time. So it's, it was a very strange thing I did, but I wouldn't have been able to get to that without doing it.

Yeah, I think that's the important factor is a lot of people reminisce on, on the past and they sit there and regret time wasted, when in reality that time, you know, wasn't wasted cuz it led you to now.

Same. I, I reflect on my journey of, let's say working for 10 plus years, 10 plus years to get to this point where people may deem I'm successful, right? But in that 10 plus years, there's at least seven of them where I failed. Yeah, of course, not only at trading, but like all loads of other businesses, of course, and easily we could look back and go that was a waste of money, waste of time, but I wouldn't be here if I didn't do that.

100%. I'll give you an example. So, um, Thomas Anthony, who is like the specialist of Elliot Wave, right, at the STA, I, I loved Elliot Wave, and I, and I do like the principles of Elliot Wave, but if you're trading stocks and you're trading like the S&P 500 the way it is now, you're not, you're not looking for a wave count and this thing. If you're looking at a weekly chart or even a daily chart sometimes, this thing is going to keep, you know, it keeps moving in that direction. So like maybe on commodities or other markets, finding out where it's going to fit for you and where it's going to work is a good thing, but they're the kind of things I had to unlearn. I looked at Elliot Wave for a while and thought it was, this is for me, I really like it, when it wasn't, you know, even moving averages. I disregarded moving averages very early on because they're so lagging, and like moving average crosses, death crosses, you know, things like that, golden crosses and things like that. I then, because that didn't work for me, disregarded that, and I've only recently come back to it in the last four years really because it serves me a different purpose now than it did when I first learned it.

So what was that, that difference?

So as an insight, before I would try and trade around moving averages, trade the crosses and things like that, whereas now I, I don't use it for that at all. I just use it for my bias. So like, for example, on, on the way that I trade stocks on a daily, if something's trading above a 21-day moving average, my bias will be long for that most likely, unless we're getting some very negative days and we're super extended away from it. If we're trading into it and then back out, I like that pattern quite a lot for my day trading. So I, I never looked at moving averages like that when, when I first learned them. I looked at them as trading tools, not tools for my bias, whereas now I just use them as tools for my bias, and they, they're really, really helpful for me, whereas before they weren't.

I love that distinction there, that that sort of switch in, in how you perceive it.

It's the same thing; nothing changed about it.

No, just how you treat it, how you observe it, and then how you use it. It was there the whole time. I was, I was just using it wrong, wasn't I?

So I love that. I think most people probably do, right?

Yeah, which is interesting because when I sat down with Vel, yeah, you know, in terms of technical analysis from a retail perspective, Mhm. when you hear technical analysis, you, you just think chart patterns, right, most of the time, and indicators, of course, but equally when you think of those things though from a retail perspective, it's just like, ah, head and shoulders, ah, wedge channel, and that's it. But when speaking to Axel, it was more deeper than that, where, yeah, okay, you have a head and shoulders or yes, you have a channel, whatever it may be, but it's the nuances, it's the rules, it's the data behind it that is actually what be, what's one being taught, but also if you're going to use it, that's how you use it correctly versus a retail trader. I think they see a cheat sheet, you know, the classic cheat sheets you get on Google, people print off, and that's it, and all they do is go, ah, I see a head and shoulders on this chart, so I'll sell or invert or whatever, correct, um, versus understanding that okay, you can call these and what people try to refer them as, which is even funnier, is retail concepts, Mhm. which, cool, okay, that's fine, but then you're still not using them correctly. No, you know, you're not treating them correctly; you're not actually respecting the art of trading, which is going deeper than just a surface level of like, oh, let me look at this picture, yeah, and then look for that picture in the market.

Correct. And this is the problem, I think, for me. That's what determines a retail trader versus a professional trader, but you're not going to get to know that without the experience. I mean, things like this podcast and, and you know, they're invaluable tools because we're just like anyone else in the sense that I went through all of that. I, I, I did, I tried all of that. So I was very pedantic when I was learning at the STA when I did, when they showed me the indicators and they, you know, they'll probably remember this, I went back and tested each indicator 100 times on each time frame and went back with the results. So when they went and said, well, RSI was an overbought oversold indicator, it wasn't for me, you know, but I had to prove that to myself. I did the work to prove that to myself that I can't use it like that. Every time it went into overbought territory, actually if you kept buying it you would make more money than it, than it coming back. So anybody that sells the same, you see what I mean? But you're only going to get that from time later on. You, you, you have to do, you have to pay your dues in the market to understand these things, and, and then lastly what I would say is now I, I look at just naked charts. I, I

I have nothing on my charts at all. If I do have it, it's probably for the other people that are in my group, and you, you look at the chart so much that you know where the indicators were placing. So like, if I look at a chart, I'll know what a MACD is doing without having the MACD on my chart. I know what an RSI is doing; I know what a fib is doing. I don't need them on the chart anymore because all of those indicators, all of those things, lag the data on the chart anyway. The price action is the key. So if you at your charts enough, you suddenly, it's like the Matrix; you just don't need it anymore. Like, and I, I don't need any of that anymore, and it just comes from experience. It's like building that muscle, you know, but it takes that time. Like, like the person, an interesting way to look at it is like if you are someone who trained for 10 years, MH, right, to get to a level where you're in a a 1% or even let's say, let's say even be more generous, 10% bracket of the top lifting or the top performance in your room or whatever it may be, but that 10 years was necessary for you to get into that level. And then when you're in that level, to maintain it because of the 10 years, it's less than you, the you know, when you first started to find yourself in that level, right? It's the same principle with the markets. It's like you paid your dues to a level where you're now in that 10% of performance, 10% of, you know, having to be able to trust your intuition, to have the confidence to see the whatever there patterns or indicated, be able to recognize it without having to even play on, yeah.

But a lot of people, I think, search for a strategy that does that for them, thinking, if I learn that strategy and, you know, if I find the right Coral Mentor who has that strategy that I can then learn within a month or a week, and I'll suddenly be that way versus five years. Let me give myself five years, maybe even longer. Yeah, I, I love that, but I really, really like that because I have had people come to trade with me that come in to trade, to learn the things and leave because they think that that's what the most important thing is. No, I, I, I can guarantee anyone that the strategy, the risk, and the psychology are 33, 33, 33. There's not one that lasts without another. If you think it's the system that's going to come in and make you money, you are wildly mistaken. If you think it's the psychology, it could probably be done alone, but it can't be done without the risk management. None of them can be done without each other, so they're all 33, 33, 33, which is why I said to you, I don't trade using technical analysis anymore because I don't need to because of the other two. I think technical analysis was, was kind of like my route in, but I've only got to where I've got to because of the risk management and the psychology. The techn technical analysis, I, I feel like I know it like the back of my hand that I don't even need to look at it anymore. I, I, I can look at a chart and think I can have a view, and I don't care if I'm right or wrong because of the psychology, and then I don't care if I'm right or wrong because of the risk, as long as that's managed right. So that's actually the strategy is the last part I need, yeah. The other two are more important than the strategy for me, but you can't, you can't live without developing a strategy in the first place. If you didn't, yeah, exactly. If you didn't build that foundation first, correct, that wouldn't be the case, but because you did put so much work into it, yeah, it's actually the case where you can then focus on the others. But talking of psychology, what was that journey like for you, like from as you said you had a good start, yeah, then you had a bad period, yeah. What, what did that do to your psychology then?

So, um, I'll explain. So I, I, this is crazy, right, because even to this day, standard, it's a good thing that I did. So I, I started with a two $0000 etor account. I turned it to $4,000, oh wow, in like a very short space of time, probably about 2-3 months. Okay. Now, for anyone, in terms of a percentage return, that's incredible, but I, I didn't know anything. I was ignorant, so I looked around and thought, well, Traders are millionaires, like, what, this isn't good, you know what I mean? I turned around and thought, well, if I can do this trading as slowly as I was opening the positions in the morning, looking at them after work, what would happen if I took some time off work? So I did that. I took two weeks off from work, at the gym, stayed at home, tried to trade, day trade with the same strategy, lost half the money in two weeks, took it down to 2000. Obviously, by that time, I was, I just, I was demoralized, and I just left the money in there. I was lucky enough that I didn't lose all of it. I left the money in there, and that was where I started buying the books and doing the sta stuff and, and you know, getting, getting a bit more down my journey. And then, then I used that money as kind of like investment in myself, um, and you know, I was still working, so, so as like any retail Trader, I had a full-time job, and I was learning on the side. And that euphoric period of doing well, one, it made me realize that yes, this is possible; I can earn money from the financial markets. Uh, the second thing was, I, I didn't learn the lesson very well because it took me, and I have no problem saying this to anyone, 4 years for me to start becoming a just past break even. So it was a 4-year journey because I didn't have a network, I didn't have a D and D capital, I didn't have like a a society that I could go and talk to people about trading where everybody was open. So I was just learning from books, YouTube videos, Mark Douglas, you know, both Steves, so Ward and Goldstein, and the psychology stuff really, really started to kick in at that point because I really thought, well, I'm so good at technical analysis, I should be making money, but it didn't work that way for four years.

Interesting, you mentioned that cuz like just I literally just had the podcast with Steve, yeah, um, and one thing that we really highlighted, which I think is a bit more of a uni uni uni is a bit more of a unique, sorry, um, approach that I don't, I think I imagine, obviously because you've studied his work, it wouldn't be so, so much of a unique thing to you, but I think in terms of the retail space, definitely very unique in terms of understanding your personality traits as a human being, yeah, to then match your asset class and your trading strategy to your personality, um, and that was a big topic. We were talking about how like if you, you know, are you really aggressive, bit, you know, if you're on edge a bit more, you're fast-paced, fast thinker, obviously scalping, and then obviously alongside that, probably a volatile paer, uh, versus if you're trying to have that, if you have that personality, but then you're going to like a a pair that hardly moves, it's maybe a longer-term perspective, but equally you're trying to swing trade, M, you're probably going to be struggle to manage that and then wonder why you have a negative experience. Did you going through that process of, of that, you know, bad psychology and learning about psychology, is that a process you did to get a bit more insight into your personality to match to trading?

So now we, we, I don't have a Trader at D and capital that hasn't gone through a personality profile and a risk profile, so from Steve, so there's not a Trader that I trade with that doesn't know their personality profile and their risk profile. I myself was quite lucky, um, I would probably say in an about 2012, 2013, where one of the funds that I was trading at had the foresight to, um, employ a trading psychologist, and I'd never seen a psychologist up until that point. And since then, I've seen a psychologist and a psychiatrist, so I, I from that learning experience, I took it as far as I felt like I could, and I'm still going through that journey. It's never, it's a never-ending journey of self-discovery. So yes, I fully, fully agree, but you know, me, me and Steven, we, we say that the best traders that we both know and best traders that I know know themselves very well, and they have a lot of self-acceptance, but for some human beings, that's harder than others. Some people are like, yeah, look, I really don't care, you know, I don't care what people think about me, blah, blah, blah. Some people are like really K, they're not, they're not open even to themselves. So that, that journey for me probably took a bit longer than it would for some other people. It took me a bit of time, so I went, I went through that journey, yeah. 100%. What were some of the key lessons you learned that helped you to elevate, um, the self-acceptance?

100%, I, you know, I had to accept things about myself because I'm, I'm was very stoic, going through a football career, everything was ego, whoever shouted the loudest, whoever was the toughest on the pitch, you know, that was a strong part of my character and personality, when actually I had to embrace my softer side. I, I really did. It helped when my daughter was born, but, but when I embraced the my softer side, uh, you know, it, it helped my trading to no end, uh, because that's where some of my creativity comes from. As I, I've always been a strategy designer. I can write trading strategies in a second, but unless I opened up to that, I wouldn't have been able to create some of the strategies, but it was secondary. It was, I had to accept that part of my personality first before that was going to come, of course. And I was always seen, um, like being in a leadership role. I've always been in a leadership role. I was always felt like, no, you have to be tough all the time, you have to have, you have to be like, you know, an alpha man, like a bit of a macho person to do this job because it's a testosterone-filled environment. It's not the case. It really isn't the case because if anything, that match man, that Alpha mindset, essentially, yeah, is almost negative or counter what is necessary because it brings so much ego with it. Can't take a loss, yeah, yeah, because you don't want to look weak. So that, that going through that psychological journey taught me how to accept losses and taught me how to, how to bounce back from those losses much easier than I ever did before, but I didn't, again, it was things I didn't know. Subconscious, exactly. Subconscious. I, I was going to ask you just then actually, in terms of how did you handle adversity, so that when you didn't get signed in football, for example, how did you handle that?

At that time, I was so closed off as a human being. I didn't, I didn't care, I, because football is about, um, opinions, so one coach could want exactly what you want, and another coach could think you're great, and another coach could think you're rubbish, you know, so it's, it's a lot of that, that life is about opinions, but because I was relentless, I would try and try and try and go everywhere, so I ended up playing semi-pro football for Kenish Town, so, uh, so while I was at University studying, in my mind, as long as, long as I was always playing football, I had a chance. So even when I was playing semi-pro football, I was still getting called for trials in different places, so I still went for those trials, not getting signed, not getting signed, not getting signed, and then I just started working in the gym, and it kind of fell into place, and I enjoyed working in the gym. I enjoyed the environment, so the knockback, I, I should have been more sad about it, interesting, but I, I wasn't. I was so relentless to get out of the situation I was in, growing up in general, I was, I had a one-track mind to be the most successful human being I could. Nothing was going to stop me, like as a freight train to get to my goals. And then that mindset coming into trading, though beneficial, yeah, did it have its little, you know, issues in terms of when you had, when you hit failure, or was it actually beneficial because then when you were taking losses, etc., you still persevered anyway?

Yeah, so that's how it worked at the beginning, so I, I didn't, I didn't mind. I kind of brushed the losses off, you know, quite easily, but it was later on in life when I started to work on my psychology that I could learn from the losses. At the beginning, I, I wasn't learning from the losses very well because I was winning for a long time, but then when I, it did hit my ego because I, I was sitting there thinking like, I'm spending money on this, I'm not making the money back. Like every retail Trader, anybody that joins a course or a trading community, you're investing in yourself, and if you're paying for something and you don't feel like you're getting better, that's a demoralizing situation because of your ego. You might have to justify that to your family, to your wife, to whoever it is, but if you persevere with it, you'll get there, but nobody's going to tell you that at that time, you know. I, I've had people who have trained with me in other, in other institutions that I've been in that have honestly spent like sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds on fake courses, rubbish things, whatever, before they've made it. So, um, and I just say to them, look, you've done that now, there's nothing we can do about that, you know, I'm, I'm sorry you've been through that situation, but you can't carry that in with you to this journey because that you'll ruin your shop, yeah, you know. So we have to do a lot of unlearning as we get into the next part. No, definitely. I loved one thing you said there. I've never heard of it before, uh, but I love it. It's, uh, strategy designer, yeah. I love, is that an actual term, or is that something you've, you coined?

No, I've, I've worked with some algorithmic companies, algorithmic trading companies who have gone from, um, trading proprietary trading systems which are discretionary to having to write them on a program to then put them through Python or C++ or whatever. I've been, i' I've worked with some companies to do that, and when I've gone in, like honestly, if, if anyone gives me any indicator, any timeframe, anything, I can develop a strategy for it. So strategy design is huge; it's, it's a whole industry in itself, but it doesn't mean that the trader is going to get it. Like if it's algorithmically done, it's obviously a bit different, and machine's running it, but the other thing about algorithms, a lot of people might not realize, is you switch certain ones off and on at different times throughout the year or different seasonalities, different timeframes. So even then, it's not that simple, but you have to design them, so somebody has to do it, and I, I, I am able to do that. I love that. I didn't even know that existed. I understood coding, yeah, people code, um, and if you had a strategy, you know, that made sense, but actually being a designer of them to then have coded, um, even if they're not coded, would you, can you design them, and then, you know, it's got Edge, and you pass it on to someone, though, like I said, you know, that person might not be able to perform with it, CU that's on them as an individual. Is that some, is that a possibility?

Yeah. Very controversially at the moment, let's take a break for a minute there, guys, cuz I want to tell you about our sponsor, Trade Zella. Trade Zella is the number one trading tool for all Traders. Doesn't matter whether you're a crypto Trader, a Futures Trader, or a Forex Trader, whatever Trader you are, all you do is connect your trading platform directly with Trade Zella. It automates and makes your trading journaling so easy. If you want to be a profitable Trader, you need trading Edge, and that is exactly what Trade Zella does. It allows you to identify Edge, maintain your Edge, and optimize your Edge by automating your trade journaling, in-depth analytics, back testing, bar replay, and so much more. Now, W gets you 20% off your yearly subscription with Trade Zella, so use W for 20% off your yearly subscription or RIS 10 for 10% off your monthly subscription. The link is in the description below. Let's take a break for a minute there, guys, cuz I want to let you know about one of our sponsors. Alpha Futures is offering the best one-step evaluations in the industry. They have the largest end-of-day based drawdowns in the entire industry with up to 90% profit split and lightning-fast payout speeds and offering Advanced and standard accounts to fit your needs. Alpha Futures is truly offering the most elite plans for the lowest total cost to entry in the industry. You can start as low as $79, and thanks to the podcast, using Code Riz RZ, you can get 20% off any of those challenges. Go to the link in the description below, and let's get back to the episode. Uh, am anti, you know, machine learning and AI at the moment, just, just right now, uh, because the, the whole part of community or part of Traders, like a Trader can outperform a machine at the moment because there's intuition, gut, there's, there's things that a human can do that a machine can't, and I, I have both. So even with an algorithm, how easy is, is it in your experience for people to c fit data when they're back testing?

Yeah, all the time, you know, this stuff doesn't, that doesn't work like, randomize data. It works, so retail Traders don't, don't, a lot of them don't realize that and don't know that. So you can take Eurodollar, or you can take Apple, or whatever you want to take, S&P 500, look for all of the data and think, oh, this strategy is working when you're back testing because you've looked at the chart, worked out what indicators work out best around the chart, and then suddenly you find out it doesn't work in real life because everything is 50/50 in real life, and that's, that's where a mathematician comes in. So part, part of my background is, I, I've done a lot of probab probability and statistical work, and uh, I, when, when I was developing some algorithms with some companies, um, unfortunately, they, they didn't understand that. They thought, well, if you optimize the data and optimize the data, it's going to make you, it's going to make the system better, but unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. So that's why I like humans trading because humans can see the real world and react to being present where robot con. That fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. One thing I got to ask you, kind of a little bit off topic, but we'll get back straight back on topic after, but from what I can tell, you know, one very energetic, very clear-minded, someone who's got a hell of a lot of knowledge in your mind, more so than I'd say the average person could probably hold and retain, you know, is there anything in terms of like, you know, I don't know, like, uh, that you need to do in terms of routine, a lifestyle that allows you to operate in that way?

Yeah, so my, my exercise regiment, every single day, my routine is, is very, very important to me. Um, I meditate, um, probably about 15 minutes before my session with the trailers, before the open, so I do things like that. My eating routine is pretty much the same every day, apart from dinner, so I, I have this, I have a routine every single day, but what, what you, what I'd say about that is, is I realized the more I dumbed down my trading and my brain, the better my trading was. So I, I went through a classic period of overeducation. I, I overly educated myself, looking for the Holy Grail, when now, if I even explain to you how simple my trading is, you, you would probably laugh and think that, how is this possible? But my trading is ridiculously simple, and it's, it's not, it's not hard. Anyone, a 5-year-old could trade how I trade, if I'm honest, so they would just have to learn it and stick to the rules. I love that. I love that we can get into your strategy, uh, you know, very, very shortly, but in terms of, as you said, overeducation, but I think that's allowed you to potentially, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but because of that, though, though there's a negative maybe on your trading side for a period of time, um, but in reality, it's allowed you to do all these different things, such as the, the strategy designing, but what I knew you for, and I didn't realize, like, you know, prolific Trader as well, and, and doing all these different things that you're doing now. What I knew you for was for like articles, like writing articles for these well-renowned, um, blogs, websites, uh, I don't know, companies essentially, yeah, and finance, uh, even maybe behind the scenes, I didn't know about, so they're very much public-facing ones. We're probably writing reports for actual, you know, trade, you know, hedge fund Traders and so on, to take action on. Like how did you find yourself in that role?

Yeah, so, um, when I traded in for the fund, I left, um, basically our fund was dissolved because the company had made enough money, and they shut it down. Okay, so, uh, so we were backed by, by some guys who were from Qatar and Kuwait. When they made enough money from the fund, they closed it, and I found myself out of a job. I was made redundant, and they gave me a good package, so I was quite happy, but I, I, I was jobless, and every trading role I applied for, they wanted a PhD in, in physics, PhD in maths, and that wasn't me, so I wasn't getting another job in trading. So I thought, well, what can I do now? I, I went over to news and Analysis, so, um, have you ever seen a sark, an audio squark? Yeah, that's what was my job. So I went to, uh, basically, um, a couple of squawk companies, I won't mention any names, their rival, so I won't mention any names, yeah, um, and we had all of the news systems, all of the journalists, all of the TV screens up, and we're looking at like 20-30 screens, um, at a time. There's four of us in a, in a desk. As soon as breaking news comes out, you know, Saudi Arabia have cut oil production by 700,000 barrels or whatever, and you know, the market goes crazy, yeah. So that was my job, so that was a a really good insight into the trading world, and it helped me a lot because sometimes the best news would come out for a company, and the stock wouldn't move, and I would be like, what, what's going on? This is odd to me. There was one a particular airline company who used to, um, they used to make airports, right, and uh, they, we won a contract with hro and Gatwick, um, Spanish company, and uh, their share price wasn't moving. The thing is, is that sentiment was so poor on the day, investment sentiment was so poor on the day, regardless of how good this news was, it wasn't moving the stock higher, but when sentiment picked up again, the stock shot. So it, it made me learn things about like Market breadth and, and when things happen in the market, and this was all just observation because I was reporting the news, like, you know, there was another example where like, you know, JP Morgan upgrade a stock to being overweight from neutral, and the, the stock price would just shoot off, and it would go mad because we reported it, Bloomberg reported it, whoever, and, um, that, that helped me start to learn what actually moves the market, what moves sentiment, why does sentiment exist? And then I started writing articles for all of these companies, SO, ZeroEdge, TradingView, FXStreet, Zerodha as well, Kitco, yeah. See, you wouldn't know that it was me that wrote some of the Articles at ZeroEdge, but yeah, I used to do some of the European stuff. I didn't work, I didn't work with him.

For very long, but it was for a while, um, and yeah, I, I, I developed uh, selling my articles to like few companies around the world. Steal them as well. What? Yeah, that, that was the thing. So like uh, there was, there was a couple of companies that, that would kind of plagiarize my articles and send them to their, to their traders and stuff. But that, you know, it is what it is. You just come to the territory, I suppose. 100%, 100%. But it's incredible though, because I know the value in those was you. I used to remember seeing feedback on them. I even would, you know, take a look at them and again, I was someone who very limited, even to this day very limited fundamental knowledge. But you could really take a lot from it.

But just to touch on before we move on, I think it'll be a very powerful lesson for the audience in terms of sentiment, you know, how, how, why is that important? What is it that you're looking for, you know, and, and why or how can traders use that in the everyday trading? Yeah, so I, I, I look at a few tools. So gold is one; the fixed income bond markets is another; stocks is another; and you know, there could be something that's like in fashion or something like that. The combination of all of these is kind of where the billionaires, trillionaires, head fund managers, you know, whatever, the the flow of money goes in certain places at the moment. Crypto is King right now, right, because of Trump. But the flow of money has gone there because people have accepted it, because then somebody had reported it, somebody had to do that. People knew that, that, that was going to be in his, in his demands of what he wanted to do, you know, for his manifesto, getting into power. So these are all of the things that we have to think about, but that money has to come from somewhere. So what's, what's not in fashion? You know, why is that getting there? So let's say Green Tech, for example, right, electric vehicles and all this stuff that was a booming market recently, but you know, you look at Chevron, Exxon, those kind of companies, they were on the decline. But Trump isn't an environmentalist, so then that money is going to come out of Green Tech. Green Tech would have got done a lot better had it been, um, Harris what that won, you know. So those shifts in where the paradigms of money are going, they, they help us make our trading decisions longer term.

So like MST, who, MicroStrategy, who are on the back of Bitcoin, you know, we know about that; we know how they're leveraged; you know, we know how that company works. The money, money's going to be moving around that like it is with Tesla. So those, those companies have increased in volume, but that volume's got to come from somewhere else, and other, other companies now are just not as in, not in fashion, you know. So we look at the the trends of the market and the shift of the flow of money quite, quite a lot. So is that what you would define it as? Because it's something that LS Borcel said as well, like the key, the key to being a trader is following the money flow, is what he said. And bear in mind he was from the pits as well; he, he goes it's the same principle now; it's following the money flow, like when it's hot in healthcare, when it moves to railway, when it moves to so and so, trying to be ahead of that. Yeah, who's the contrarian trader? The, the one that J.J. Shap, yeah. See now, I, I, I've never, never spoken to him, and I really would love a conversation with him because I'm the opposite of this guy, really. 100%. But he makes money, and I make money, so I would love to have that conversation because I'm not going into any trader and saying to them, you know, trade against the trend or, you know, look for the tops or, you know, that, that's, that's not me. Because like, really, for example, Tesla, I've traded maybe 15 times in the last 30 days, 40 days, you know, and it's made me money, but the trend is going up. I'm not reversing that trend. I'm not the one that's betting on that trend reversing every time. And yes, I, I understand his perspective, and there's more than one way to skin a cat, right? So I, I respect the way he does things. I'm the opposite guy to him. If, if, if money is flowing into those areas, I, I put it down as a river, yeah. So a river's flowing, I'm trying to get in and out of that river; it's flowing in that direction; I'm not trying to swim against that tide and get tired. Yeah, that's, that's not me. So yeah, like I, I, I would just love to have a conversation. We make that happen. So we make it happen for sure. He's a great guy, and I think you would have a great conversation.

Yeah, to, to, to just offer you some from our conversation that I had with him, yeah, the way he, yes, he does it that way in terms of he's like the opposite of what the masses are doing, but similar to what we just talked about, the money flow, yeah. I think this might make sense to you in terms of what he does, but he goes like he looks at the sentiment. If it's really, really everyone's buying, everyone's long, mhm, but then an economic data comes out and it doesn't move, yeah, it doesn't shift; it actually does sometimes the opposite. Perfect. That's where he will then look to say, okay, something's wrong here. And even if it's not long-term, it's just a short-term, you know, fit his rule set, fit his uh, criteria in, out, whatever that looks like, yeah. And then it might continue again; that's fine; that's perfect. 'Cause I look at the stocks that are doing well, but when the market's going down, they don't fall as much as everything else. So I, I look at that in the opposite way, yeah. So it's exactly the same thing, isn't it, really? So when we're having a bear market, let's say Nvidia's holding up or, or Microsoft's holding up, and they're holding up well in a bear market, but everything else is selling, when we get back into the bull market, that's the one I like the most normally. I love, so, so yeah, it's the same thing, but the opposite. But definitely, we're going to try and put you guys in touch for sure.

But in terms of your trading, so you're doing obviously these reports, right, um, but you're trading. One thing people might not realize at home though is that you, you know, you're a profitable trader; you're a very consistently profitable trader for a long period of time, yeah, uh, have a track record. And one thing that we discussed when we talked about was like, yeah, the returns might not be what you see on social media, hundreds of thousands a month, etc., yeah, but you're making, you know, multiple six figures a year. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's an interesting one. So I, I'm not one to turn around and say like I'm a multi-millionaire trader, blah, blah, blah. I'm not that guy. But what, what I can say is that I'm, I'm consistent. So in our live trading room, our trades are all open to everyone. So every day I get up, they can see my trades; they can see my stop losses; they can see my targets; and, and we trade live in front of everyone. They also know the performance of the fund. So every quarter roughly, I, I have the, the statement, and I put the statement up, and I have binary win-loss information, risk-to-reward information, slippage information, and all this kind of stuff up for everyone to see. One, so they can see like how humanized the the situation is; second, because it's, it's something that everyone can reach; it's not something that's, that's out of this realm for any human. Um, and then like it grounds me because unless I'm that transparent and open with, with our community, I then have to stick to my rules. So if I'm there and I, I've said to everyone, yeah, two to one risk-to-rewards, you know, make sure you're in around the 50% win rate, if I'm not doing that myself, I have no right saying that to anyone else. So everything's open, and I just take one trade every single day. So if everything's open, they then can see that I'm practicing what I preach; I'm seeing that they practice what they preach; and we're all like an open and honest communication, you know, with the whole community, and that's the ethos of our company. I love that. I love that. And what do you think in terms of that misconception though? 'Cause people, I'm sure there's people out there where, you know, making 10, 20, 30, whatever it may be a month, uh, thousand, that is 10, 20, 30,000, they go, that's amazing; that is amazing; that's a goal of mine. But equally, I know there's a lot of people out there who are like, that's not enough; I want to be seeing 100k, 200k, 300k. What are your thoughts in terms of what is not only realistic but what's okay, you know, what is actually enough to live, you know, be, be, have that freedom that people are after?

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Yeah, so if we reverse engineer this, I would say most recently, let's say the last, let's say the last 18 months, the last 12 months, my, my best month, I probably would clear like 21, 22k, something like that; that would be my best month. But then I look at in the sense, what was my maximum drawdown as well? There's not been a month where I lost more than 2,000, really. So I would look at it like that. I would reverse engineer it in terms of how much risk are you willing to take to hit those numbers? And, um, also, can you control your jealousy, right? And this is something maybe a lot of traders won't talk about. I have traders that I have traders and friends that trade Bitcoin and have rode this run-up, and I've had traders that trade Bitcoin that sold at 50k, you know what I mean? No one's going to like, if you trade like that and it works for you, you know, applaud these guys because in that run-up, the most recent run-up, how do you know where to get out of that if you're a long-term holder, even now at 100k? Yeah, how do we not know the way that the market's running now that you should take out your money from 100k, and it's going to go back down to 50, or if it's going to hit 150k in the next three months? It's uncertain, and it's random, and you have to make that decision and live with it. This is my decision, and I live with it; that's the way I see it. So every single month, every single day, I give myself a risk tolerance. My job is to make as much money out of that risk tolerance as I can. If I hit my risk tolerance for that month or that day, I hold my hands up and walk off, and that's the only way that I've managed to make sense of this industry because I've rode through the other problems of, you know, adding to losing positions, you know, letting things run too far and then coming back to break even because I was too greedy, you know, things like that. I've gone through all of these things. So having it systematic and, um, statistic-based gives me the idea of where I need to take my targets, where my stop losses need to be, you know, and it doesn't work every day, like, like today's trade in Google, it pipped me out by minuscule amounts before it went off in my direction, but that's my choice; that's my stop-loss. Yesterday when I traded Tesla, it shot off in the first minute, and I won within 30 seconds, and I, I was happy. Yesterday I won twice as much yesterday as I lost today, and that's, that's me; I can live with that decision, and I'm happy with that decision, and that's what makes me consistently good, you know, and, uh, and I, there are more than one, there's more than one way to trade, like, um, Steve talks about traders who harvest profit that are more even on their risk rewards, one to ones or whatever, and they'll, but they'll have need a higher win rate. I don't, if I need a, if I have a 50% win rate, anything above 33% win rate for me, I'm making money because my risk-reward is 2 to 1; that's it. So as long as I'm winning more than 35% of my trades, I'm either break even or in profit, and that's the way the market owes me nothing, you know, and I just try and live my life like that every day.

What was it like getting to the point where you could follow those rules, you know, stick to that one trade a day, stick to the one to two, like the rule, whatever rules you put in place? Because I'm sure there were times before that where you had rules, but you didn't stick to them. Yeah, this is where ego is a good thing sometimes. So because I'm in the community that I'm in, um, they force me to, to follow my rules. If I was by myself, sitting at home in my bedroom, not doing this with anyone, I don't, I don't know if I would have followed the rules as well. Now I can say I would because I've gone through it, and I've learned how successful this is working for me. So I can say that I would follow those rules by myself, but if I went through that journey and I wasn't by myself and I didn't have the community to lean on, because some of them, you know, I, I have said in the, in the trading room, the live trading room, look, oh, I've lost my trade today; I'm so tempted to take another one, but I'm not because you're all there watching me. I've said it; I said, I say it to them. So, you know, we're all honest. So even that accountability is really helpful for you, massively, massively. If you don't have a trading partner or a trading mentor or a group of friends that you're trading with, you know, you're missing a trick. I love that. I love that. I've always thought similar in terms of some of these live, uh, live stream traders, for example, probably have a better performance on stream than they might have off-stream simply because of that accountability, that viewership, yeah. Um, but talk to me in terms of D and D Capital, where did that come into your journey?

Yeah, so at the London, London Traders Show, not the last two, it about, it was just over two years, just around two years ago now, um, I was fortunate enough to meet an asset manager from the states who, who came from America for the show, and we arranged to meet, right? So that was, I didn't know why. So we messaged on LinkedIn, hi, I see what you're doing, seen your trades, I like your ethos, blah, blah, blah, you know, can we meet up for a coffee? That I just thought, okay, cool. I didn't think any of anything of it. He got, he got to the UK, and he said, look, I've tried funding four or five groups, and it hasn't worked. He was like, they, they've all talked a good game, and it's not worked. So he's like, I'm going to try with you, but because of my experience, I'm going to start really small. And I was like, okay. It was, it was an inconsequential amount of money for me because of my trading account, so I was like, all right, we'll give it a shot. So myself, James, and Aen, we started trading with this 25 grand account, and we had risk on that 25 grand account, which is only 5 grand, right? So we were, it was a very sharing, yeah, it was a very small trading account. I took the lead on it, right, and, um, we started taking our trades, and we started roughly making about £300 a week, $300 a week, sorry, in dollars, and it got a bit consistent from the strategy that we were using. Then he upped it, and we, we took it to 50k, yeah. And then from 50k, we were using roughly about 10 grand re, uh, leverage, but we, we only really leveraged 5 grand because it wasn't our money; we still didn't want to lose it; we're not idiots. And we then did it again; we started making about $700 a week. And then we did it again with 100k, and we started making about $1,250 a week and $1,500 a week, and we thought, right, this is working now. So, um, I then left the job that I was working at at the time where we were coaching together, and, um, I thought that's it; I'm going into this; we've developed something; we've, we've got backing now that we've never had in the past. We then, we then under assets under management to its peak got up to 1.2 million. So we were trading and trading and trading, getting into casino money, getting leverage, doing quite well, you know, we had, um, a small party of investors and stuff as well, which I'm so grateful for. It was such a humbling experience because sitting there having traders that I trade with trusting us with money, thinking that like, look, you guys start a company, see how this goes, and it, it really, really kicked off; it really, really went in our direction. But I think because of the psychology, the open and honest ethos, the money management techniques that we ran, it was a combination of all of those, and, um, and yeah, we've now fully, we've got, we've got six traders that have come off the back of this one-year experience that were, you know, effectively doing really well, producing really good results. We've got about six, six, five or six other traders that are middle ground, and a lot of them are new. So we, we've got a huge community of traders, but actually blooding the traders through to trading a fund is our job; that's what we're trying to do. But I can honestly say now we've got six traders that have come through that whole process that are going to be fully funded with us, and are some of them are fully funded with us already, and we're going to go and produce, take their results out and go out again and go out again and multiply this to, to try and get bigger and bigger. So we're, we're a bit like the turtle traders in a way, but just a modern-day version of those. I love that. Yeah, so talk to me about performance; what does good performance look like? Do you know?

It's, I love you ask that question because that's literally 90% of my job is I rock up to the session, win or lose, I, I, that's not a consequence of my performance. My performance is how do I handle myself throughout the day? So, um, if I turn up and I've eaten well, I've exercised, and I'm, I'm there, if I execute my stop loss and I have no slippage and my, my I've hit my risk limitation in a good way, that's good performance. If I've hit my winner and I've hit my target, that's good performance. Anything else in the middle is rubbish. So my performance is the key part to what I do, and I just try and keep it as neutral. And I've got a sign on my trading desk that says Optimal Performance, and I look at that before I start trading and I think, am I optimal at the moment? If I'm not, how do I get myself in an optimal state? And I have a pre-trading question list and a post-trading question list. My pre-trading question list is like, have you meditated today? Have you visualized your win or loss situations? What's, what, um, stocks are in your watch list? What ones aren't? Um, am I ready to trade for the day, kind of thing? And I put them in percentages, so what's my energy level like today? What's my stress level like today? They're in percentage terms. Then at the end of the trading day, I come back and look at it: how well did you perform, percentage? How good was your risk management, percentage? How good were you at taking profit, percentage? And I, I, I look at them all against each other, and I can always go back to them. Would you say that process, the word process fits in there in terms of, uh, you know, how you performed, the performance essentially is the process as well? Yeah, because, um, that's what Steven essentially was, was really focused on was process, yeah, and, uh, the way I tried to define that or visualize the definition was like having a some form of flowchart, but not just for your trading, but as you mentioned there, like, have I done this outside of trading? Have I meditated? Have I done the visualization? Visualization is something I want to touch on in a second, but yeah, is that basically same terminology, but just, well, different terminology, but same meaning? Yeah, it's the same, um, but obviously these are just things that are good for me. So, um, I've got some, that's your process, yeah. I've got some traders that are really funny, so like, you know, James, he puts his trading hat on; he's ready; he has a hat, genuine; it's a hat. I love it. Uh, I've got some other guys that, you know, like, like Felicia, for example, needs a nap; she needs sleep before trading. And I've heard that before; I can't imagine doing that; like that's the worst thing for me, you know, uh, you know, turning up with a coffee, you know what I mean? Like it's little things that are just get you switched on and ready to perform. What they're saying, what NLP, right? NLP, they, they talk about, you know, using smelling salts, for example, to especially the, they in NL, it's an NLP technique, I think, which I can't say the word; I'll try on the pod. Neuro-linguistic programming. I got it. You got it. The bad figures I say all the time; I can say all the words in my head, but when I try and say it, I don't know what happens between here and here; it just gets messed up. But, um, but I remember seeing it, um, that in sales, for example, in sales, they use that technique to prime themselves into the, the sales mindset, and I'm sure it's the same of trading, like whether it's a song or a nap or the hat, for example. Oh, you just reminded me of one; I listen to Prodigy, uh, at my energy levels. So I, when I'm making my coffee before trading, I, I have to listen to something uptempo, like some drum and bass or some, some Prodigy or something like that to get me ready. Um, and I will always do that. So yeah, that, that's gives me that energy, that buzz before I'm getting to trade. Not that I'm adrenaline-filled when I'm trading; I'm not; I'm quite Zen, but I need, I need those routines. Yeah, you need that, the, the blood flowing essentially to be alert essentially for your trading, correct. But in terms of performance as well, on a trading performance perspective, in terms of, uh, percentage return, what does that look like from the fund perspective? Yeah, what are you trying, what is it that you're trying to achieve on both side profit and then tra-?

Yeah, I have no goals. I don't live my life with goals at all. I, I trade every single day to do what I can every single day. So, um, I, I take what the market's going to give me. So I rock up to the day, I know how much money I'm willing to lose; I don't know how much money the market's going to give me back. I will, I will take

The trade I will hit my trade, and I'll keep doing that every single day. The day that that stops working is the day that I'm done, right? So I, my, my balance is trailing, so um, roughly, if we want to talk about average performance, something like 6 to 10% a month is something that I'm happy with. But there's been months that I've taken 20%. So what I'll do then is I'll, I'll shift it up. So I would never risk more in my professional trading career than 20% of my account balance, ever. I will never, I would never.

When you say that, you mean not in one trade; you mean draw down, drawdown, yeah? So if I'm trading with 100 grand, I won't go below 80, yeah. And even as I'm getting into profit, I'll do the same thing. So, so like I said, I'm in casino money, yeah. So we won't go from 120 to 100. No, I will always shift that up as that time goes on and until um, the data tells me that that stopped working. So we evaluate our trades every like 50 trades or so, um, or like some people do it in every 20 trades, but for me, it's every 50 trades because of the, the law of averages, to stretch out the data. If my trading performance is poor within that time, I'll start to have a think.

And don't get me wrong, there were times during this journey where I was very, very close. Three times in this journey over the last 18 months, um, the D and D journey, yeah. I, I've been through eight losses in a row trading interest, and then eight losses in a row, and then maybe one or two winners and another six losses in a row. So I've been getting close to my drawdown sometimes, um, and then I've, I've adjusted, and then I've caught back up, and then I've, I've gone on to, to go it. So if you look at my equity curve, it's like a chart; it's very much like a chart, but there have been some very close calls to get into, to draw, to drawdown 20%.

And, uh, again, having to do this in a live trading room environment is horrible; is absolutely horrible. Because I say to them, I've had a full losing week, obviously taking one trade a day. You know, if I don't get better next week or the week after, I'm going to have to stop trading to allow the rest of them to continue to trade because we're a fund; we split the money. So, um, I hold myself to the same standard as them. I would then have to go back to the drawing board, trade the simulator again, trade small live again, and then level up again. I do the same process with everyone, including myself, yeah.

Is that, that level of quality control of yourself as well, well others, but also putting it on yourself as well? Do you think that is part of the, not secret, but is that part of the, the success, the part of the reason why you perform the way that you have and continue to perform the way that you do is because of that focus on those details, the focus on excellence, essentially? I would say so, but then it also, it takes out the outstanding returns at the same time, as the same time as it keeps you consistent and good. You're, you're never going to have an outlier that, you know, produces 50% in a month or, you know, like big.

This is what I was going to ask you about. Obviously, you mentioned about having these losing streaks and then couple wins, then back. I'm guessing you keep your risk static? Yeah, yeah, that's the, that's the problem, if you want to call it that, with the way I trade, but I accept it. I, I, I won't be able to live with myself if I screw up the opportunity for the other traders. If I, do you, do you use that as a rule of firm across the fund, or is that a rule that you have across everyone? Yeah, so all of our, all of our traders, we agree the risk limitations per trade and their account. Okay, so it's all automated. So if you came to me as a trader and you said, okay, I'm willing to risk $1,000 a day, um, and then when I say that, what I mean is everyone has the same rules, or you, you will speak to the trader and give them the rules, and they just have to trade within that rule, yeah. Because they're at different stages of their careers, so, um, the, the better traders are up to like $1,000 risk a day, the, the smaller traders can have anything from $50 to $100 risk a day, you know. So, um, as they're getting through their journey, we adjust the risk parameters, and they have automated liquidation on their trades and automated liquidation on their account. So if they ever achieve those levels, their money gets pulled from them, so that's a, that's automatic, and everybody agrees to that at the beginning, otherwise they can't trade with us.

Amazing. What, what would the, what is the setup like for them in terms of, you salaries or profit splits, etc.? All of it is profit split until really we get to casino money territory with the trader. So if we get, if we get a trader, so we've had, we, we lucky enough to find some good traders, some really, really good traders, and what we'll do is we, we up their funding. So for every $1,000 a trader makes for us, we'll give them another $10,000 to trade with. And I, I don't know any other company in the UK that does this. I, I know there are some like SMB Capital in the states, and there are a few others around the world, but we're the only company that, like, for example, if you make a grand, we'll give you another 10; if you make another grand, we'll give you another 10. As soon as you're out of your own money, your first lost risk money, you're free with us, and we can change it. We'll take all of the risk and then split the profits 50/50 if that's what you want, or if you want to keep trading how you want to trade and take 80% of your profits, you can. But most people decide that we will take the risk on the trader because then that it's easier for them to trade psychologically; they're a lot better. But we need something out of that, cuz we're funding them, right? So everyone, and our funding is essentially at this stage unlimited because we've done okay, so we're, we're up on that level, and everybody agrees to those terms. So it's a, it's an interesting model, and it's, it's not for everyone, because I do understand at some stage, and this is the case for any business, uh, a trader could do really well and enough money and get off and trade on their own in the Bahamas, right, which is, which is a risk for us, but every, every company has that risk.

Well, I think, uh, in terms of community, in terms of the setup that you have, the quality that you're trying to produce, similar as you mentioned SMB Capital, it creates a family-like environment, an ethos, a brotherhood, um, you know, whatever terminology you want to use, it creates that closeness of where, yeah, people there will eventually be people who do want to go, even if they have that feeling, but they'll still always be close to you, correct? Um, and you'll still won't have any, you know, saltation in your mouth because you're close to them and you love what you, the, the growth that you had together. 100%.

Um, what is the process of you finding traders though? Is it purely you're training them up and then getting them, or are people able to bring a track record to you and you assess it from there? Both. So if somebody brings a track record, what we need to do is assess their risk, yeah. So we, we put them on a sim, see how they handle the risk, get them on a small live account, see how they handle their risk, and then go on. So we have to, we have to always do that. In terms of finding traders, really, it's funny, we've got traders that come from builders, plumbers, you know, any job really, policemen that come and work out whether they can trade or not. So, um, my favorite kind of trader is somebody who's street smart. I, I do value people who are book smart in a different way, but I think like somebody, if I could describe them as a market trader selling apples and oranges that work out the, the true value of things, are my favorite type of traders, because you can, you can smell if something's not valued correctly. You know, I worked in a sports betting environment, which we haven't spoken about, through the probability stuff, and no, I need to come to that, but we will. The best people in that environment were the ones that realized that the odds were wrong when the odds were wrong of pricing a football game or pricing a, a tennis match or like somebody playing golf; that's everybody piles on so fast, and they, they make really good traders in terms of probability.

So were there, though, probabilities wise, like what can people do to help train their mind in thinking in probabilities and trading with probability? Yeah, so there's a thing about this, so there's applied probability and theoretical probability, right? Applied probability is somebody that can play poker, somebody that can, um, who can look at sports betting, you know, things like that, uh, that's so important to trading because, um, like, like we talked about going against the grain and things like that, like if you're looking at a chart like the S&P 500 at the moment, spy, whatever, QQQ, the odds are it's going up, like you just stare at the chart, the odds are it's going up. You then, as a trader, have to work out, well, how am I going to, um, establish myself and position myself within that to take advantage of that trend or, or whatever it is. So the probability you've got straight away, you're looking at a chart, it's, it's 45 degrees from left to right, first of all, the probability of it going up rather than going down, you're already winning; it's, it's there, it's showing you that. Second thing you've got to do is enter the game and work out how you can take advantage of that probability, slant and get an edge in your favor. That little one, 2% edge in your favor is enough to make money in the market. So every day, if I'm in a bull market and I go long every single day, only an idiot's not going to lose, you know, like lose all their money, in my perspective, because you just have to make sure you've got the correct stop loss. And even if you just flip a coin every day to go long or short, you're going to make money at some point, and that's the kind of games and examples that I do with my, with my traders and also with some of the interns that I've had in the past. We used to roll dice, we used to flip coins, we used to play cards, just to test the markets, apply those principles to the markets, and it works. There's nothing else; just raw probability data works.

Only thing I have an issue with is like those MT4, MT5 brokers or, or different brokers that change spreads and change commissions; that takes that, skews the odds away from you. So we trade via an exchange, so we've got no spread on our trades, just, you know, literally the buy and sell on the New York Stock Exchange, and that makes it fair, whereas, you know, we pay for that, obviously, um, the, the fees and commissions, SEC charges, whatever, but it's not the same as trading on an MT4 and MT5 with a spread and a commission. And the more people come to us to trade, the more people actually realize that, like, your odds are fairer on an exchange than they are for a broker that, that messes around with this because it's centralized, yeah. And also same with like futures wise is like centralized versus CFDs, you know, people like, I remember a lot of people using level two data, right, on futures, so it makes sense, it's centralized, you can trust that data. And I remember one guy tried to launch a course talking about level two on Forex, and I was like, what, do this, what does this mean? That doesn't make sense. And I'm very limited knowledge on that stuff, but that already I was like, that doesn't make sense, cuz the whole point of the, a law of futures, at least to, you know, to CFD traders who trade indices, for example, they should just trade futures because it's centralized. Again, this is something a retail trader is not know, and they have to be educated on. So like, you know, a big part of our education when we get a really good retail trader is explaining why you should trade like Dax mini futures versus trading Dax on IG or wherever the hell it might be. What's the difference in trading them? One might be more expensive, but even though it's more expensive, you've got real data, real pricing, you're playing on the same field as Goldman Sachs as JP Morgan when you're doing this, so the probability of you winning is much higher straight away off the bat than it is with something that's got a completely unknown variable of a variable spread and, and a commission. How are you going to factor that in? That's like when your sports betting, if you bet on Liverpool every single game, yes, Liverpool are likely to win every single game, but there's a spread there. Why don't people do that same thing in the financial markets?

One thing I want to, to, to talk about as well is that transition though, seeing as we're on that topic, I think it's very important because you didn't start with where you're at now, right? Stocks, you, well, you started with investing into stocks, uh, but then you've been through the whole journey, right? No, you've been through Forex, yeah, you've been through Futures, yeah, I have. You been through options? Yeah, have, yeah, like, because, because, because like any retail trader, I was chasing the holy grail, yeah. Well, especially in the UK though, in the UK Forex is massive, like huge. I don't really hear about future stocks or options in the UK. Yeah, I mean, in, in trading FXs, it was a really ego-driven lesson that I learned because I was a, a forwards and options broker in Forex, so I used to get access to the flow data when I was trading, um, you know, at the companies that were trading physical Forex, so like, for example, like taibach naira, you know, Euro, we had a desk for each individual currency, and, um, I used to get the flow that was coming through, and I used to be able to see the transactions go into the market and see the difference that those transactions made in the market. So I then automatically thought I should be better at it, so trading all the currency pairs. But the way I see it right now is that if you're trading euro dollar, you've got Euro buyers and sellers, you've got dollar buyers and sellers; there's four variables. If you're, if you're trading gold, gold goes up, gold goes down. If you're trading stocks, stocks go up, goes down, say with oil. But with, with euro dollar, you've got both sides that you have to work out, you know. So there's more variables in the FX markets for me than there is just trading Apple up and down on the day. So that's what I find a bit tougher in, in, um, in FX markets. The other thing about FX markets is that I, I employed a strategy, and I created a strategy that was performing averagely, and I was making a small amount of money. Again, this was year four, year five into my trading journey, mainly about year four. As soon as I picked up that strategy and moved it into stocks, it started making money, and I, I hated that; it, it really bugged me because I was like, I've just developed a seven-year trading career in the FX markets, I've worked in the inside and out, I would call big institutions making their orders, selling their orders, buying their orders, selling them, treasury systems and stuff like that, and I can't trade that market. I was like, it really bothered me because I knew about central bank, I knew about interest rates, I knew about inflation, I knew about economic data, and I couldn't crack that market. It had, I, it just worked in stocks that I knew nothing about, but it was because they trended well, and I just had to accept that I could only trade that well in that market. I wasn't good in a two-way market like Forex, but it worked in stocks.

What are your thoughts though, in terms of, uh, generally for the trading community, what do you think they should be doing? Should they be looking at stocks? They be looking at where, where do you think really better performance might be found, or does it not matter? The market is more considered to your, I guess your strategy and your personality? Yeah, so I think the personality thing is huge, but I think trading FX is the hardest market to start with, really, personally, I do, yeah. Um, if we go and pull out a weekly chart of the S&P 500 or Apple or Nvidia or, or whatever you want, and they're going up really, really, really nicely over that time, if you go and do that in euro dollar or you go do that in GBP USD, you've got a completely different looking chart, even if you add gold in the mix. Gold trends up nicely, doesn't it? So that's your answer, like, only without being bad, only an idiot would fight against that, like, really, it's your ego. So, um, you know, people, it's fashionable in, in London, uh, in the London session, in the London markets to go and trade FX because that's where the volatility is, but you're not helping anyone; it's not working; it's really, really, really tough. And also, like you said, it's an OTC market; there's no data from that market that you can get that's reliable; you're relying on liquidity providers and the broker giving you the best bid and the best offer; all of that data is hidden. In stock markets, it's not hidden. So, uh, so yeah, I'm, I'm completely biased from that perspective, but I have had, I just, I got traders right now currently that trade the FX markets and make money, but it's just not me.

Well, that was one question I wanted to ask about D and D, to be fair, it was, um, if you had traders who traded futures or FX or whatever, would you still take them on board? Yeah, we do. So they, they basically, like the European session and the London session, they start at 7, 7:30, so, so normally it's 7:30, they trade together up until 8:30, and then they post their trades live in the trading room, right, throughout that whole time. Then the, the markets go a bit quiet, whatever, and we come in at 2:00, and then we trade until about 4:00, and then they go quiet again, and we normally have a session at 7:30 in the evening. So there, there's periods throughout the day where the chat room's busy and where it goes a bit quiet, um, so yeah, they, they do talk about those markets, but the, the weather success comes in in the morning as well, is the Dax as well, gold futures, you know, oil futures, so they do trade other things, copper, Ros trades copper. So we do have, um, multiple asset classes that go there, but none of them are more successful than, than any of the others, which is, which is interesting. Are, as a company, like, uh, I would probably say stocks is our main product because of the liquidity that comes in the US; it's the most popular market; it's the quickest moving market; it's the, it has the most participation, and it just happens to be that way, you know. Even the swing trades, they, they do really, really well. So we got swing trading community as well, and they, they do really well in stocks as well as FX and stuff, so it's a, it's a complete mix; it's multi-asset. Yeah, you, you're more bothered about performance, by sounds, rather than like assets, for example. I am, but we, we are seeing the fund growth happen more in stocks than it happens anywhere else. Yeah, no, it's interesting you mentioned that because one particular trader who was part of SMB's team as well was, still is, to be fair, um, his name is Lance, and I remember watching a podcast of his, and he talked about like the only edge he can find is in, uh, small-cap stocks, yeah, if anything. So, um, you know, small caps again. And the interesting thing is, from being again, UK and just Forex, you retail, pure retail sort of background, literally all I ever knew was Forex for so long until I really got into this side of the industry in terms of doing podcasts and meeting traders, do Futures, options is like a whole different animal to me, like when they talk about Greeks, these Deltas, it's not as, as it seems, right. But, but with going back to the small caps, when I was writing for Kito, um, they, they have junior miners and, and you know, big miners that they look at, and I was thrust into that world as well. So like, Greatland gold in the UK, and there's a few other companies that are small-cap UK gold mining companies and general companies, they have a huge following, like I did really, really well out of a company called Cas minerals, and I'll tell you how I found them. So I went to the Shares Awards with TradingView, um, I was on a table sitting next to the founders of Cas minerals who were picking up an award for being best small-cap stock of the year. I got to talking to them, and they had amazing concept, so they, what they were doing is in, in South America, um, they were shaving down copper, um, putting it in the, in the big containers, shipping it over to China, then smelter it up into copper rods for, for production, but all the other companies at the time were, were sending the copper rods in, in the containers. So they were able to fit 30, 40% more copper in their containers; that was at the time, that was their, their thing, and I thought, brilliant, put some money in it, happy days. They got, there was a merger and acquisition, stock price shot up. So I think the technical knowledge that you need for small-cap stocks is slightly higher unless you're going off the back of like pre-market volume or pre-market volatility data and volume data, you can get to see what's in fashion, like the AMC's, the, and all of those kind of GameStop and all that kind of stuff, like you can, you can make money from those, but, but if you, if you know the ins and outs of certain markets and you think they've got a good concept, it's only a matter of time before they, before they blow up sometimes. But then there are big pump-and-dump schemes as well, like, um, I think they were called Twio, MICT, or whatever at the time, them as well, they were had really good press, they were building and building and building, and it was fraud. So you get your, you get your problems with small-cap stocks as, of course, as well.

Definitely, you get a lot of pump and dumps with the small caps, correct, which is, I, I can't, I don't have time for that. Like, I think it's Timothy Sykes, yeah, his whole strategy, yeah, is identifying pump, uh, pump and dumps, yeah, which is brilliant; it's, is, it's really, really good, but again, that wouldn't fit, I don't think my money management, e, but, but I do, like, like I said, I really respect people that find that edge, yeah, and that, that's, it's just really finding that edge all the time; it's awesome. Definitely. Um, I've been looking at this, yeah, throughout the podcast, we haven't used it, yeah, it's about to, run out of battery, so I might as well touch on it, which is, I have some quotes, oh yeah, quotes that define Rajan's journey for a minute there. I was about to quote you, but it's not you; this is apparently defining your journey, maybe it is, quotes from you. It says, your ego has no place in trading; markets don't care about your preferences; you follow what works, yeah, right? What do you think to that? Yeah, I, I, I agree, because I don't think like some people say the market's trading against you or whatever, or you're always on the other side of the market. Market, I try and think as the market being as neutral as possible, and it's you fighting against yourself. So if you win that battle between yourself and how you're perceiving what's happening with the market, I, I think you, you'll end up conquering the markets because it's there, and it does whatever it does, whether you're in.

It or not, you know, so like Apple can go up, whether you're in it or not. It's it's got nothing to do with you. If you're in it and you choose a certain amount of risk and you lose, you have to hold your hands up and say, "I chose the wrong amount of risk that day." So the market doesn't care about you, in essentially, it really, really does, especially when you trade how we trade on the exchange. You really, really see it because there are there are traders that can hold on to trades much better than me. So we've got certain methods of profit taking, and there are traders that can really run a trade 8 to 1, 9 to 1, and I can't do that. I just my composure when I'm in a trade and I'm winning is statistically, it averagely gets to there. I'm coming out when I hit the statistical average. I'm I I can't watch a an out of, you know, a fat tail trade go really, really far because I just don't have that composure. I can tra I'm try and train myself to do it, but I'm not there yet. So that's how that's me, but the market doesn't care about that. I care about that. The the trade could hit 10 to 1. I can't handle sitting in it to 10 to 1. I need to take my 2 to 1 and go home. That's me. So that that's how I know that's the truth. That's kind of what this say on on the next quote. It says, "I'm comfortable being uncomfortable."

Trading is about staying composed whether you're winning or losing.

Yeah, definitely. Um, I I think people handle losses better than they handle gains in my experience in trades, individual trades. I think anybody's happy, like not happy, but you know, like they can understand when something hits their stop loss because they predefined it and they're like, "Yeah," well, you'd hope they did. Yeah, they're like, "Okay, I' I've put this in. I've lost my $100. I've lost $1,000, whatever. I'm done." Yeah. But when some something's going up and they don't know how far it's going to go, that's when I see them get more uncomfortable because it's the unknown and the uncertainty that they can't handle as humans. Yeah, whereas on the downside, they can handle the uncertainty and randomness because they've set a stop loss. So the good traders that I train, I normally see them really, really comfortable with losing money, and they get more uncomfortable with winning money because they think, "Oh, this could be the winner that makes me the millionaire." Every time they think that. So it is an interesting con one thing we haven't touched on, which I think is important, is Edge.

Yeah.

Yeah, because one thing from speaking to, you know, these incredible Traders such as yourself as well and and some traders that you put me on to as well, so thank you for that, is Edge. Edge is like the reoccurring theme that sticks out like, and some go to the point where they say like, "Edge is the number one thing. Like if you don't have that, it doesn't matter how good your psychology." Like, and also they say that psych some of them say psychology, trading psychology, is [ __ ].

Yeah, it's the edge. And what they normally mean by that when they break that down, cuz some people get very, very in their feelings when I say that or or when they say that, is that a lot of Traders use it as an excuse, yeah, trading psychology for the fact that they don't have an edge and they're trading without an edge. So equally when they take these losses or whatever the situation may be, they go, "Ah, the market or my I my mindset can't handle this," blah blah blah, but in reality, they actually have no data and no Edge yeah in the first place.

Yeah.

Um, so if you fix that problem, a lot of your psychological issues that become real, the ones that do identify themselves, probably more personality based or risk based, whatever it may be, MH versus I just I found my all my greed or I I just Revenge traded.

Yeah.

Uh, because you now understand your data. Yeah, what are your thoughts when it comes to to Edge? So if anyone asked me what my Edge is, yeah, it would have nothing to do with trading, and I would say it's my discipline. So um, I there have been three or four times in my life where I have fundamentally changed as a human being, which means that I am capable of changing, right? So uh if when people say, "Oh, like people never change," that's not true. That I get I'm a human that can attest to the fact that somebody could change. So the biggest one of the biggest ones for me was when um, you know, I I started training and exercising and I lost weight. So through that period of time, for me to prove the discipline that every single day I could eat well and I could exercise well every single day, if I can do that, I can follow my trading rules and I could set the same stop losses and targets every single day and do the same thing every single day, and um the results end up taking care of themselves. So that will that's where my Edge is. My Edge is in my discipline, regardless of what trading strategy that I'm using. If I can execute it perfectly, as long as statistically it has an edge from the testing that I can do, being you know, designing trading systems, I then can play out that edge as long as I have the dis to play out that edge, and that's that's the key for for me as a Trader. Any system I know I can work out, whether it be an RSI based system, a MACD based system, a price action based system, you know, a statistical based system, as long as you sit down and do the same thing every single day with a stop loss and a Target and you walk off, you can achieve it. Trading to me, that's that's what achieves trading success, nothing else.

I love that. I love that. And uh one interesting thing I did want to talk about as well, it's a story I've thought about in my head a lot um periodically, and it's nothing to do with really kind of is it's to do with us more than likely um if anything, and it's like where we where we actually met, where we worked um there was this eforce. Technically speaking, I don't think you really worked there. It was more they they robbed your articles, and therefore they were like, "Oh, please don't just come come by," um but anyway, it was one of these FX, you know, sort of retail environments um but anyway, the main thing I wanted to say was there's a big EOS there, right? The people who owned it was about image, image, image, image, and they constantly tried to push me to buy a Rolex or some sort of watch.

Yeah.

And I I never really been into it, still to this day, not really into it.

Yeah.

And uh the big mindset behind it, cuz I used to say like, "Why?" And they'd be like, "Oh, so you know, I can take you into meetings, and people will respect you more." Yeah, and my reply was always like, "But people respect me now." Yeah, so they respect me, I don't need anyway, they kept trying to push me, I always rejected it, end up parting ways anyway.

Yeah.

Years later, for the work that I've done with the podcast, one of our guests, Umar Ashra, then gifted me this watch.

Wow.

And it always sits in my mind of it's like just a mad thing where it's like these are had this different mindset where you should be respected because you have one.

Yeah, right.

So that's why you need to get one. Yeah, and then it's always like played on my mind where it's like, "Did I stick to my values thankfully?" And then someone ended up getting me one because of the respect. Yeah, do you know what I'm saying? And I was just like, "It's crazy," like, and that's what I love about you as well in terms of like you, especially in this, you know, the UK FX space, like you've gone down a path which has been super professional and super, you know, genuine, and now you're going into a path as well where you're creating a hopefully an incredible fund and doing it in such a genuine and and wholesome way that I think is going to perform extremely, extremely well, and I I'm thankful that we get to do this podcast because I think more people should know about it as well because as you know, most funds, funding, should I say that people are aware of now and used to are just the sort of I don't know what you would describe them as CU people took the term prop firm to them, but in reality, it's not the right firm uh the terminology should be more evaluation firms or funding uh simulated fund funding companies.

Crazy, isn't it? Like I so going going back just to unpack that, so yeah um so what what happened, the actual story was all the stories were is that yeah, my articles were were being taken, whatever was fine, then when it was brought to my attention uh they then they then offered me money to to keep producing them because I was obviously there, so you know, holding my hands up, I didn't know at that stage what this company was was like and they ethos about it, so you know, called in for a meeting, met them, blah blah blah, you know, didn't know what to make of it at that stage because I don't know it's very hard to know if somebody's telling the truth, which is why I feel so bad about the retail industry. Right then um as time went as time went on, literally my ethos has always been like, "I need to be able to go to sleep at night," right? So if I if even if the situation is bad, if I'm producing good quality stuff, the people will learn something there, and they will the the true colors will shine through at the end of the day. So if I'm giving people the information they need to get to become successful or get some insight into this industry, I'm going to do that, and Happy Days, they've learned something, even if they're in a bucket shop, they've learned something from me, right? So that was the way way it went through. So then after that, that ethos of you know, having the watches, having the cars and all that, I was watching that from a distance, and I was like, "Oh my God, like what is going on?" I didn't know what whether to run for the hills. I had no clue. What I found really interesting about the situation is how many people were drawn to it.

Yeah.

That was insane because uh I have the uh the history of writing articles for different companies, writing exactly the same articles, sending them to one place and it getting 1.2, 1.3, 2 million views, writing the same article, giving it to somebody else and only 1,000 people looking at it. There's no difference between the Articles. Yeah, so seeing the marketing and the promotion and how that all works, based on image, based on culture, you know, that was an eye opener for me, and I I found it amazing but why people fall for that, you know, same thing with Andrew Tate and all this kind of rubbish, why people fall for that and how that works is is astounding. I I I haven't got my head around it, and you know, you don't know what to do with it. You really don't know what to do. That I think it plays on people's insecurities and people's hopes and dreams.

Yeah.

So you you show people what they want, you tell people what they want to hear, you show them what they want to see and what they want, and you tell them it's easy because that's they what they would love to believe. Yeah, not even even if they don't believe it, but they would love to believe that. Everyone would everyone would love to know that trading is easy. It's funny, right? Because in reality, if you do it well, some people describe it as the hardest way to make an easy living, right? And um I I think that's true. Like I I genuinely trade for 40 minutes a day. Yeah, I do a bit of analysis work beforehand in the group and talk about what's going on in the markets. My actual trading lasts about 40 minutes. So I could make money and live or 40 minutes a day work I could, but but it's taken us so much time and so much skill and so much effort to get to the point in which I can do that now. So it's it doesn't it's not as easy as I make that sound. So but if somebody's coming in and selling it like that, there's a problem there is a there is a real problem with our industry and describing it like that. But I don't mind um because as well it led you to this exactly.

Yeah.

No, no, i' I've always said the same thing. I've said the same thing where it's like I wouldn't change anything, even no matter how bad it was or Etc um because I wouldn't be here now and especially now in particular, taking this verified Trader route Etc um for the same principle, like my whole EOS has been to try and provide value and help everyone. Yeah, unfortunately, sometimes you not that you're not doing it, but it's like you can do better, right? And you might not see that straight away, and thankfully I've you know I've got good people around me and plus I like to reflect on how can I do this better Etc and then having people like yourself and and other professionals to help refer other professionals and so on because the one not worry but one worry that people might think or risk is like, "Oh, you go verified, you're going to run out of Trader straight away." Yeah, but the weird thing is yeah is now that I've started [ __ ] there's loads there's loads of verified Traders, loads of avenues that you can go down um you're just not looking. This is the thing, right? So so let's say if we talk about the Journey of where I went from so you know from man to TradingView to KCO to ZeroHedge you know to FXStreet you know to to doing this you know for for all those things um the sense that you get from body language and from talking to people, the way they talk about trading, their passion and all that kind of stuff like you you get to know people, and then the thing is is that they move on. So I've had traders that I've worked with who are total shell Goldman Sachs you know uh I've got Traders at JP Morgan that I know and things like that and like that Network because if you're genuine and they stay genuine and whatever you get to know everyone, and that's how that Network builds up because like now like a good friend of mine is head of trading, he's he's the director of trading at JP Morgan, right? So I'm sitting there thinking like, "Well, look, if I'm not sure what's going on, what's his view," you know, like I'll go and have a coffee or a beer with him, and we can discuss what's going on in the markets, and is he seeing things how I'm seeing things? Is there a disconnect here? And we wouldn't have that we would if if there wasn't a genuine connection and he he thought I was an idiot and you know whatever I'm a job and vice versa for him. I thought they were just taking fees off people. It wouldn't feel like that, would it? But you get you gauge that body language and the same same thing with you like when when that we had that situation I I would sit there and there were people that would come to me and really want to learn and Forge a career out of this industry, and I could I could really tell which is why I got you know the red flags you know and all that kind of stuff, but there were people that I I still came in touch with from there that that ask me questions about trading, and they're still trading, right? And that was their entry into it, and I'm I'm happy for that, you know. So I think finding that happy medium of working that out and finding the right people is probably the the key, and it's the best part, and the only way to find the right people and find the right path is to go through it, you know, like to think that okay, I'm only going to be able to find the best path straight away is uh it's a bit naive, you know, especially in this day and age like most people find trading from like IML like the amount of people came in through IML, for example, which thankfully I think is gone now uh but regardless though the amount of people who came in who have gone on to actually become really great Traders, but that was their entry. It's just a prime example like you know, something could be seen as negative, but that was why I've seen the uh um who was it? It's uh I think the founder of of Thinkorswim or tastytrade.

Tom.

Tom, yes Tom uh hopefully be interviewing him uh soon, but I was watching a podcast he was on, and someone asked him like, "What do you think to Nancy Pelosi you know doing insider trading?" And he was like, "I don't care like it doesn't matter like all I care about the the the thing that gets more people trading that's great." That's what I think that's what he said is I think the anything that gets more people trading is amazing uh not that he was referring to IML or anything like that, but I'm getting is I think it's a similar principle. Okay, cool. That might be a negative thing or you might deem it as negative or it might not be the best way to start, but if it's getting more people interested in trading because I think personally, regardless of whether you become a Trader or not, having knowledge of the financial markets is very powerful, regardless even if you work a 9 to 5 and that's all you do and you're happy with that, but by having the knowledge of the financial markets, I think one very important thing is that you will not panic when you're seeing all this these headlines, yeah, right, especially recession headlines or crash this so crash that yeah because you understand the market mechanics and and what's going on, but more importantly, on top of that is even if you're not a Trader, by having that knowledge, you can make Sound Investment uh Investments for yourself, you can which can pretty much if you do it over a long period of time and again, time Horizon is very important, which I think we should talk on, but if you do it over a long period of time that can create the Financial Freedom anyway just from the investment side. Yeah, so there's a few people I will introduce you to like uh David Bell pick uh Michael Brown like a few of these guys, right? And they they they came into the industry roughly at the same time as me, and we all kind of are aware of each other, you know, I I wouldn't you know we're not close enough to say oh lot we're friends, but what from a distance because we've all worked at rival places or different things on LinkedIn on Twitter, things like that. I've seen them stand the test of time as that goes on. The amount of people I've seen drop off during that period of time has been amazing, but they they all of these guys that I just mentioned are still in the markets and still doing good things and you know are producing reports and and trading themselves, you know, and they wouldn't have lasted that long, and the the quality of the information that they're giving out to this day is still such a high standard that that you know you notice it throughout your years. So like now if I'm like you know thinking about the fed or something like that, you know, Michael Brown works at um um I think Pepperstone I think one of the Brokers, and I just searched name LinkedIn, well oh yeah, he's put something about the recent NFP report or the FOMC report, you know, is he in align with with me? And I know I can trust him because I've been working in the industry the same amount of time as he has, and I've been reading his stuff the whole time, right? And that that element of it is is so important. So yeah, I fully get what you mean about the people dropping off and and the trust factor, and that's how that's how you develop it, the the you know, at the end of the day, if somebody stands the test of time and they're still here, they must be doing something good in a way, but you still need to check them out.

Definitely.

Definitely. In terms of time Horizons, what are your thoughts in terms of time Horizons? We obviously we know that're coming into trading, most people will come in with a short-term Time Horizon on their trades uh and their performance. Yeah, we know that that is not the case and you should have a longer time Horizon. Yeah, but in terms of your your trading performance as well like so a big question we get to be fair is like data you mentioned about a lot of people might review a 20 trades. Yeah, you you choose 50 in terms of actually identifying an edge in the first place like whether it's I know we've talked about back-tested data versus live tested and so on. Yeah, but like what are your thoughts in that like how much is you a good amount of data set to make an informed decision or at least start to make an informed decision on? Yeah, so in my last firm, I was a swing Trader, so I was known for it, so I used to hold trades between three and six months at a time.

Oh wow.

And compound on them as they went good like went well. So my best trade uh today was uh the S&P 500 prior to COVID, so you know, 2019 um leading up to that I had like eight or nine positions in the ball run, and every time it broke the moving average, it broke back above I was buying again, and it happened about six times during that run. I actually spoke to Axel about it the November before um before COVID hit, and he said to me, "Oh, I think it's going to turn now." This was just before COVID, just because of divergences and stuff, and I was like, "Uh, well, I don't really mind because all I've done is kept an 8% drawdown on the trade, so if it dropped 8%, I I would get knocked out of it automatically." So I just had had that running um lo and behold, COVID came out, it took me out, then I moved to I was in The Firm the next one through COVID, and the next ball run happened, and I did I I did the same thing on NEO uh Apple uh NASDAQ and another couple of companies, and again that was that that actually enabled me to earn enough money to help open this company, really was was that trading account. I liquidated the trading account, used the money to survive and invest in the company to open the fund anyway. Um then when when we got access to the data that we have access to now, I day trade only. I don't swing trade anymore. So if you trading with a retail brokerage, I believe that they can't manipulate the price of daily price data at all really apart from the overnight fees and charges and maybe the spreads around earnings. So it's an edge that is for me if you're a retail Trader and you're trading with any of the retail Brokers, you know, CMC Markets, IG, whoever you're trading with, you have to trade long term. You you could make money long term because I've done it and I've seen it and I've seen other Traders do it, but day trading is harder when you're trading with a retail broker, but when you're in a professional Futures environment or stocks environment that is professional, you can day trade and do bit do a lot better. So it depends on your infrastructure as a Trader. Um I don't I believe it would be very, very hard to day trade with a retail broker uh but it obviously can be done, but I think it would be super, super hard. I would trade Futures, you know, trade DAX uh oil, gold um you know, copper Futures because that's achievable with the amount of money that that people could have as a retail Trader rather than day trade FX or stocks or whatever for a retail brokerage. So I changed I completely changed from swing trading to day trading because of my market access that I I I had. So my answer would be is if you're a retail Trader, I would focus on swing trading if you're turning into a professional.

Trader only really day trade if you have the correct market access. I love that. Yeah. One thing I want to ask as well, and we'll do some like quick-fire questions, so like this one is: what would your message be to these traders, you know, who are really just only focused on—it's a mass amount of the retail market—I would say are only focused on these evaluation companies? Right, they have—I think they serve a purpose—yeah, but what would your message be to them to, to focus on in, in terms of trying to build an actual trading career, or at least, you know, have a, a profitable, consistent—you even if it's a personal career? Yeah. So I would, um, from our perspective as a company, there's one thing that I just don't understand. Okay, so if you're trading a funded account and you take your funded account to—let's say you start off with 100 grand worth of funding—and you take it up to a million-dollar worth of funding, why would you ever let go of that trader if they hit the trailing drawdown? They've just proved they can take you from 100 grand up to a million, just because you've hit a drawdown? Why would you let go of that trader if you were a real company? Okay, our company, if, if a trader comes to me with 100 grand and they take me up to a million, even if they take it down to 500 grand, I'm keeping them; they've just made me 500 grand. Mhm. That doesn't make sense straight off, off the bat. That's my first problem with it. The second problem with it is: if it's not real money, yeah, and you're trading with simulated funds, why are you being charged a commission and a spread? Makes no sense; that, that, that to me makes no sense whatsoever. They all say simulated funds; you get an MT4 and MT5 account, which can be MT4, MT5 can be manipulated in certain ways, um, you know, you get all of the data behind the scenes as well. I, I just don't understand this thing, um, but it is what it is. You know, with the My Forex Funds thing, um, we had accounts with them because it was, it was very early on in the industry, so Ross, um, Asen, uh, James and myself, all, all together, it totaled way over being $2 million with, with My Forex Funds that we traded it up to. We all opened the evaluations at the beginning and kind of passed them, and we all built up together, trading together, and then when that cut off, we all sat down and thought, "Look, we need to look around now." There are some really good funding, funded account providers. I have definitely seen some, um, that, that pay out, um, regularly, like Alpha Capital; like there's a few, there's a few other really good ones. I can't remember the names off the top of my head. Some are now moving into the future space, aren't they? Yeah, and they're legitimizing their businesses, which I think is brilliant because they've got the customer base; they can now go into a legit area, and they can provide the correct stuff. So, um, it's, this is all an evolution of an industry, isn't it? It's, it's like finding out who can last the, the, the test of time. But My Forex Funds and Surge Trader, that was an unsustainable situation. I, I really struggled with the, the ethics of the business, even though I did it myself. I, I passed it; I was just trading the indices with them and stuff, and I, I passed them because I was trading like DAX, and I got a few good long positions. Uh, the other thing was is that I've had a trader, um, two traders now who are in our group that have passed, made money with them, and been refused payouts. M, so, um, one of my traders, um, did really, really well, trades gold only, um, asked for a payout, and they refused it and said that he was arbitraging. Honestly, the guy doesn't know what arbitraging means, so they didn't, he didn't get his money; they closed his account. Another trader of mine, uh, did really, really well, um, again, I'm not naming any companies or anything, made, made a lot of money, 11% over like a 4-month period, got to the point of a payout, and they said, "No, you, you hit your stop-loss 4 months ago," and she was like, "What? Like, why didn't you tell me four months ago? First of all, second, can you show me it?" And basically, they couldn't show her it, but they said that the spread widened and it took her out of her position without her actually, uh, without her actually losing it. So it was, it's just one of these things. I, I, I'm really interested, and I do definitely know there are some legit companies because some of our traders are getting regular payouts from these guys, so I do know there are good ones out there. But if it's me, I would sit there and think, well, if I've turned this 100-grand account to a million and I lose it because of a trailing drawdown, how does that help anyone? You know, it doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. So if you're a good trader and you came to me and you were a good trader, I would be fighting to keep you if you made that much money and everything you do is legit, like just, uh, real funds, I'd go to your house. If, honestly, if I've got a trader that's turned 100 grand into a million and I want to keep them, I'm, I'm doing everything I can to keep that trader, like even if they lost, you know, 100 grand of it, 200 grand of it, that doesn't mean I'm kicking them out; no way. So that, that's just a really odd question that I, that I found, and, uh, yeah, the only thing, the, the other thing about this is, is that it's bringing more traders in to start to realize, um, to realize what's going on, which ones they can trust and which ones they can't trust, because there's huge comparison sites and all of this kind of stuff, and that's an industry in itself now, isn't it? It is, it is. Yeah, 100%. But, um, yeah, sorry, uh, question-wise, was you the fund that you have is all real capital? Yeah, it is, right? Yeah. So it's, so funny, so what, what happened was is, um, when we started to put more money into this, I, I, I actually had to take a flight; I, I went to the Cayman Islands to, to visit the fund because when we got like our investment in and we were all investing in our money to open our accounts and get this ball rolling and, and put our money to get this access, this market access that we have through the SEC and through getting registered as a trading firm on the New York Stock Exchange, I was got so worried about what happened with us because of My Forex Funds that I thought, "I'm going to go." So I came back from Italy; Asen was supposed to go, uh, he couldn't end up going. Four days later after coming back from Italy, I took a flight to Cayman. Never been to Cayman Islands in my life; didn't know what it was. I thought I was going to something that was like, Jersey, Isle of Man. Turned up there, it was paradise. I don't if you ever seen it; I was swimming with turtles, stingrays, honestly, like it was, it was brilliant. So I was still working European hours, getting up at 4 in the morning, working till about lunchtime, and then I was swimming with the, with the stingray in the sea, like in the afternoon. But yeah, I went to, I went to see the, the fund that was backing us, just to make sure that the money was real, and I saw their office, I saw their staff, and you know, we had a couple of meetings, deposited the money, got the accounts open, etc., came back to the UK; we've had multiple payouts and stuff, you know, and that, with that. So all of our money is basically held up in a bond; it's, it's a bond that's attached to the company, so we deposit into the bond; they provide us with the market access; the bond is their collateral for providing us the market access; we trade in and out, and our bond balance goes up, up and down every single day, so that's how we're structured. So, um, our payouts come from, from our bond, so that's how, like when a trader makes money with us and we leverage them up, so their account is, is, is segregated; it's on its own, and then, like, basically, if we give them another 10 grand to trade with, it's a bond, so we're all, all the money's protected in that way, so we, that's how we structured our company, just, just to make sure that, look, if the markets do completely capitulate and we have a flash crash, for example, the money is not in the same accounts. I love that. So I love that. Final question for you, for I've been asking today, which is: if you could have known something before you got into trading, right, what would that be? Yeah, I think the psychology side of understanding the personality. I think, um, you know, it's, it's an odd one because nobody's going to go and see a psychiatrist knowing what they need before having done it, but that would have been the one. As soon as, as soon as I really accepted parts of myself that I didn't want to accept through that journey was, was when my trading started to get so much better, like, and this doesn't only include professional life, this includes personal life as well. So, uh, you know, I, I really had to soul-search, like, because the more that my ego crept in in my personal life and to myself, just not, not understanding myself correctly, was, uh, was really harming my trading, right? And, um, and then once I went through that journey of breaking down psychologically, like I wouldn't have even been able to have this conversation with you the same way we've had this conversation with you unless I'd done that, you know. So, um, if you do everything with honesty, like an open heart, and you're willing to learn and like you do have a good enthusiasm and you're passionate about it, it's going to make this journey much easier. It really, really will be. But yeah, having, you know, real, real self-acceptance, having a dedication, discipline, you know, you'll make it in this industry; grit, you know, is, is a huge, is a huge thing. Those things, you're going to have the ups and downs of, of trading, right? You know, accepting that it's an emotional journey is, is so important. If you have grit and you have, uh, the discipline, I eventually think the traders will make it. Love that. Yeah, I love that. Rajin has been an absolute pleasure. I know that the audience would love this; I have a really great feeling about this episode as well. Thanks, and hopefully we'll do it again in the future. Also perfect; happy to. Thanks, R. Definitely everyone at home, drop a comment of your biggest takeaway from this episode. Links for Rajin will be in the description below, so make sure you check that out as well. Other episodes will be on screen, including the day trading show; check that out, and until next time, everyone, take care.