The Hard Truth About Trading Success

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#603: The Hard Truth About Trading Success

In this video:
00:37 – Is trading Forex a real job?
01:42 – How to being a trader lucky?
02:05 – The realities of becoming a good trader.
03:00 – Good things are hard to achieve.
03:38 – Moving to the other side of the world to live.
04:13 – The commitment of becoming a karate sensei.
04:49 – I learned how to fly a helicopter.
05:33 – Playing the guitar and singing.
05:52 – Time to get off your bum and make a difference.
06:44 – What are you going to do to help yourself?
07:35 – Get on my Forex Masterclass.
07:46 – New course pricing structure available.
07:56 – Blueberry Markets as a Forex Broker.

Do you find that when you tell people that you are a trader or want to become a trader? They don’t think that you have a real job, and they think that you might be a bit lucky because you can work from home or just work on a computer. I want to talk about that because I’ve experienced that a lot myself in the last week. Let’s get into it a more right now.

Hey traders, it’s Andrew Mitchem here, the owner of The Forex Trading Coach. A video on podcast number 603.

Is trading Forex a real job?

I want to talk about the human psyche. I find it really interesting. Fascinating. You see, when I started trading some 20 years ago, I had a very young son at the time, and I’d finished being a dairy farmer because of divorce, and people looked at me a little bit strange.

They thought that I was starting this sort of what what was I doing? I meant to be looking after my young son. I didn’t have a real job. I was doing this weird, strange thing called trading on the computer. And I think a lot of people, you know, just looked at me a little bit sideways and thought, this guy’s just lost the plot here.

Why doesn’t he go and get a real job? And then fast forward some, what, 20 plus years later and after just spending the last four weeks in the US on holiday with my wife for her 50th birthday, the amount of comments that I’ve had either in person or online, or email from people to say, you’re so lucky you can do that.

How to being a trader lucky?

And I just find it fascinating, like lucky. How how is like trading lucky? I don’t quite get it, but people just think that because, you know, you’re either sitting at home on a computer or like, we’ve just spent four weeks traveling round on a road trip around the US. They think you’re lucky. And I find it absolutely incredible. And I’m sure if you’ve been trading for any length of time, you probably understand what I mean.

The realities of becoming a good trader.

So I’d like just to sort of set the record straight about what good trading is. If you trade, you know, and if you’re starting to trade or looking to trade, you need to know this. Good trading is not easy. Good trading takes a lot of time investment in yourself, both monetary and time wise.

A lot of frustration, a lot of going round in circles. And it’s not easy because if it was easy, everybody would do it, wouldn’t they? And if it is easy to make lots of money, everybody would be doing it. But the trouble is, most people are just lazy and that’s just the honest truth. You know, hard work, dedication, commitment, effort, those type of things.

Sadly, a lot of people lack, these days. Now, I had a think about this when I was just thinking about putting the video together, and I thought about things that I’ve personally done and, you know, the enjoyable things and how hard they are.

Good things are hard to achieve.

So back when I was a teenager, I was a reasonably good cricket player. Couldn’t bat, but I could bowl pretty reasonably well.

And I played at a, you know, quite a decent level, for my age. Never good enough to become remotely close to become a professional cricket, I thought I was, you know, the next level down and for a little while and pretty good. So when I look back at that, my whole life back then revolved around just playing cricket, talking cricket, eating, sleeping cricket.

That’s all I did. I love cricket, I still love cricket. And the time, the effort, the commitment that went into it was huge.

Moving to the other side of the world to live.

And then fast forward a number of years later, I decided to up and leave England and in my early 20s moved to the other side of the world, the strange place that most people had never heard of called New Zealand.

And you know, again, time commitment, money, effort, to do that and, you know, quite a bit of the unknown. And, you know, people go, oh, you had a crystal ball because New Zealand’s amazing. And you’re up in England of, you know, going to pieces. And it’s like, well, I kind of just had to think about these things and make my own decision and, you know, and do what you feel is right. And so that was interesting.

The commitment of becoming a karate sensei.

And then fast forward a number of years after that, you know, I, got into karate in quite a big way. And again, time, effort, commitment, pain when you’re into that karate at that level. I was teaching people as well. And, all my kids went through karate and, just purely as a voluntary basis, the teaching and, you know, it was just a lot of time and commitment, a lot of travel, a lot of monetary commitment. When you’ve got five kids and, you know, that’s another thing that I got a huge reward out of and loved it.

I learned how to fly a helicopter.

Fast forward a few more years later learning to fly a helicopter. One of the most hardest, potentially dangerous things you can do. But the reward is incredible. You know, we’ve seen parts of New Zealand and flying over places that most people will never, ever get to see in their lives.

And so extraordinary, achievement and places that you get to see and experiences you get out of it. But if someone says, oh, you’re lucky to fly a helicopter, it’s just blows my mind that people can think that stupidly, it’s not lucky. It’s time. It’s commitment, it’s money, it’s investment. It’s, you know, giving up other things to, pursue that excellence of flying a helicopter.

Playing the guitar and singing

And right now, I’m learning to play a guitar. I’m learning to sing something that I’ve never, ever done in my life in 50 years. Those two things. And, you know, I’ve been playing guitar for nearly three years, learning to sing this year, both hard. Take time, commitment, effort. If you know anything musical, you know, what I mean.

Time to get off your bum and make a difference.

And so you bring all this back together and you look at it and people go, oh, you’re so lucky that you can trade and travel. Aren’t you lucky? No, it’s not like a tour. It’s. It’s a decision. To do something is a decision to get off your bum. It’s a decision to invest in yourself and your family and your financial and time and freedom, going forward.

So that’s my little, I suppose, rant for this week, a little bit different, but it’s just, I wanted to bring this up because I think it’s important to talk about these things. You know, we’re not talking about candles and Bollinger bands and things like that today, but it’s another part of trading that’s really important to, to understand and be aware of.

So I think that’s just something that’s, you know, topical and wanted to bring that to your attention.

What are you going to do to help yourself?

So. Well, I suppose my question after all of that is what are you going to do about it yourself? Are you just going to keep surfing through YouTube but you just going to keep, you know, looking online for stuff and just go round and round and circle?

What are you going to make a commitment to invest, in your time yourself, your future and, and jump on board? You know, you know where we are. We’ve been doing this for over 16 years. Clients in 109 countries. I don’t think there’s many forex educators out there that can honestly say that, I don’t know of any.

So, there may maybe 1 or 2, but I actually don’t know of anybody who’s still around now teaching and helping people. Who is in, you know, helping and teaching people back when I started. So that shows our, commitment and effort and daily dedication that we put into making this work for our clients.

Get on my Forex Masterclass.

If you’d like to find out more, I do have a, short 17 minute masterclass that you can jump on to. I’ll put a link to that here. If you’d like to talk to myself or one of the team, I’ll put a link to that as well.

New course pricing structure available.

If you’d like to find out about the new pricing structure that we launched last week. Send me an email, Andrew@TheForexTradingCoach.com. And I think it’d be pleasantly surprised.

Blueberry Markets as a Forex Broker.

And if you’re there looking for a really good forex broker that you can trade forex, metals, commodities, indices, cryptos, have a look at Blueberry Markets and I’ll put a link to them here as well.

So once again this is Andrew Mitcham at The Forex Trading Coach. Enjoying the great outside. And you take care I see you this time next week.

Bye for now.

Episode Title: #603: The Hard Truth About Trading Success

Find out more about Blueberry Markets – Click Here

Find out more about my Online Video Forex Course

Book a Call with Andrew or one of his team now

Click Here to Attend my Free Masterclass

Click Here To Follow my 30 Trader US Update

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The Freedom of Trading Anywhere, Anytime

Podcast:

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Click Here to Attend my Free Masterclass

Click Here To Follow my 30 Trader US Update

Click Here To Learn How to Gain 1% Daily

#602: The Freedom of Trading Anywhere, Anytime

In this video:
00:34 – I’m back home in New Zealand after 4 weeks in the US.
01:07 – TFTC Coaching remained the same.
01:22 – Lessons from trading while on the road – see here https://theforextradingcoach.com/the-30-minute-forex-trader-us-travel-updates/
02:09 – Less is more approach to trading.
03:03 – Trading in 5 minutes a day and set and forget.
04:13 – The power of an amazing trading community.
05:55 – New course pricing structure available.
06:50 – Blueberry Markets as a Forex Broker.
07:30 – Summary of our US road trip.

So I’ve just got home to New Zealand, and I’ve spent the last four weeks trading and traveling around the US on a big road trip with my wife. I’m going to talk to you about what you can learn from my experience, and how it can help you when trading and traveling for yourself. Let’s get into that more right now.

Hey there, Traders! Andrew Mitchem here at The Forex Trading Coach with video and podcast number 602.

I’m back home in New Zealand after 4 weeks in the US.

Back in beautiful New Zealand. Back in the winter here. Lovely dark blue sky day. Sunny days. Really great to be home. But we had a great four weeks traveling around the US. I drove on the wrong side of the road for me, and I covered over 4000 miles or 6500km, and we visited ten states.

Now, on that trip, I carried on trading exactly the same as I would have from home. Obviously the time of day slightly different.

TFTC Coaching remained the same.

But everything that I did was exactly the same as I would do from here as far as our coaching is concerned. We still had our live weekly webinars, our live webinars for clients to join in, European session and US session. We still posted our daily trades each day. We still had our form site updated and so everything carried on.

Lessons from trading while on the road – see here https://theforextradingcoach.com/the-30-minute-forex-trader-us-travel-updates/

But from a trading perspective, what I gathered from that trip is you don’t have to trade all the time to do really well. And so for me, I took some monthly chart trades. In fact, I’ve still got a New Zealand US dollar sale trade on.

And this week the New Zealand dollar. In fact just yesterday just crashed. And it’s really help that trade. But longer term on the monthly chart we have a sell trade from the beginning of August. Now if you’ve been following me you would have seen that I documented my trades that are taking on the monthly charts, the weekly charts, the daily charts and other time frame charts while I was in the US.

So I’ll put a link here. You can have a look at those 14 videos that I took while I was there. And you can see the trades are taken and the results of them.

Less is more approach to trading.

But it just showed to me that it doesn’t matter whether you want to travel and trade or whether it’s just normal life going on and you’ve got job, family, you know, sports, hobbies, whatever it might be, and you think that you don’t have time to trade, well, it’s just not true.

You do have time to trade. Everybody has 24 hours in the day, but you don’t need to spend so much time as you think, actually doing the trading once you know what you’re doing. And so I looked at the charts at the beginning of each week looking at the monthly charts, and at the beginning of the month, beginning of August, we looked at the monthly charts and took that trade I mentioned on the NZD/USD

And then each day we looked at the daily charts. Now, because that’s 5 p.m. New York time. At the same time, the 12 hour charts, the 8 and the 6 hours closed. And so we scanned those, three other time frame charts as well. And we post those trades on our membership site, for clients to follow and have a look at.

Trading in 5 minutes a day and set and forget.

So if you did nothing else, then just maybe looked once a day at the daily charts and those other three timeframe charts at the same time. You can do that and literally 5-10 minutes a day and take your trades and leave them. The other thing that I find that with, traveling is you do you spend less time looking at charts, which is a good thing.

You don’t need to be glued to your charts all day. And people get stuck into that routine. They kind of feel that they need to be there looking at trades, looking at charts, interfering. You don’t. You can place your trades, leave them and walk away. And that really is the best approach that set and forget approach. It’s far more enjoyable.

It’s less stressful. You just, you know, you’ve got your low controlled risk if you trade the way that we trade and you know, you have high reward to risk trades if you trade the way that we tried. And so you can just leave the trades and walk away. Now the only thing I did is, before the weekends, I just closed out anything that was from daily charts or lower, but weekly charts, monthly charts or any crypto trades, just leave those open, until the following week. And of course, cryptos over the weekend. So that just means that you could just trade, travel, do whatever else you want to do.

The power of an amazing trading community.

Now, another really important factor which you cannot put a value on this. It’s the price of the power of community. Now, we are incredibly proud of what we’ve built over the last 16 plus years. Here at The Forex Trading Coach.

We have an amazing, group of clients from right around the world, all trading the same strategy and all helping each other. And I think that’s very unique in the trading world. And it’s just incredible. Incredibly powerful to see. While I was away, other people stepping up, helping out, taking trades, posting trades, answering questions as well. You know, we were still there to do that, but obviously with traveling, it’s just, you know, a little bit slower to get responses and the ability to talk to other people who are all trading the same strategy, the same method, or they’re taking the same trades, looking at the same charts at the same time, and to discuss things with them, their experiences or trading, whether they, you know, found it easy or hard or they’ve left trading come back or they’re on prop firms or, you know, all these different type of, real life situations that people face when they’re trading and the ability to interact with other people and to view their trades and to discuss things is massively important.

Because otherwise trading is just a real lonely business. You’re kind of sitting there on your computer when your laptop and your by yourself. And so I really, really appreciate our clients and our students that we have on board and our mentors and everybody. They’re all on the same page or helping each other.

New course pricing structure available

So look, the other, news, since I’ve been back is we have completely changed our pricing structure. In the past, we’ve always had one upfront fee, and it’s been like that for the last 16 years. Now I’ve just decided to change things up and, you know, just traveling around, you realize that financially, things are quite tough for people out there. You know, even in America, I was amazed with the price of food and how I used to think food in America was very cheap.

No longer the case, very expensive. Like supermarkets, etc. like that. Eating out. So what I’ve done is I’ve created a document, and on that document you will find a completely different pricing structure, so you can jump on board with us at a vastly reduced fee, and then have an ongoing monthly fee to continue with our daily trades, our webinars, our forum site if you wish to, and you can stop that at any time if you wish to as well. So I’ll put a link to that document, or you can just email me and I’ll send you that document.

Blueberry Markets as a Forex Broker.

And if you are out there looking for a highly recommended broker, I can, I can recommend Blueberry Markets. They’re based in Australia across the water here behind me. And about 3.5 hours that way by plane. And they are a great bunch of people. Very good. Broker. Most people around the world can offer, can open their accounts with them.

Unfortunately, if you’re in the US, you cannot. But Blueberry Markets. I’ve been with them for years. I know them, personally, having met them in person. Speak to them, you know, weekly. Great people. And a good option for you to just to consider if you’re out there looking for a broker. And I’ll put a link to them as well.

Summary of our US road trip.

So that’s it for me. Really glad to be back into New Zealand. Like I said, had a fantastic time when the state seeing some iconic, places, some amazing, barbecue food. Highlights for me would be some of the music we saw in Memphis and Nashville and New Orleans, some of the iconic things like the New Orleans Paddle steamer up the Mississippi, the alligator tours, and of course, spending, some really valuable time with Paul Tillman and his family in the Smoky Mountains.

So, great time to be away. Great. Great. Place to visit, for a road trip and lovely people. And easy to get around and to trade at the same time. And make money while on holiday is the absolute ultimate, isn’t it? So that’s what you can do.

So once again, have a look at the link that I’ve got on here if you’d like to come on board with us at The Forex Trading Coach

And I’ll see this time next week. This is Andrew Mitchem, enjoying the sunshine back in New Zealand. And, we’ll talk soon. Bye for now.

Episode Title: #602: The Freedom of Trading Anywhere, Anytime

Find out more about Blueberry Markets – Click Here

Find out more about my Online Video Forex Course

Book a Call with Andrew or one of his team now

Click Here to Attend my Free Masterclass

Click Here To Follow my 30 Trader US Update

Click Here To Learn How to Gain 1% Daily

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Why Quality Trades Beat Quantity in Forex Trading

Podcast:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Book a Call with Andrew or one of his team now

Click Here to Attend my Free Masterclass

Click Here To Follow my 30 Trader US Update

#601: Why Quality Trades Beat Quantity in Forex Trading

In this video:
00:36 – Trading from the US while on vacation.
01:00 – July and August can give us tougher trading conditions.
01:58 – Less trades but focus on higher quality trades.   
03:00 – Look at a variety of time frame charts.
04:01 – Get onto my 17 minute masterclass.
04:08 – Blueberry Markets as a Forex Broker.
04:11 – Have a chat with us, ask us a question.

Andrew Mitchem
As you probably know, if you’ve been trading for any length of time, what time of year you trade can also make a big difference in your trading. Currently, summer here on holiday in the US with Paul Tillman and sometimes the summer conditions are not always the best, but we are heading towards the end of the northern hemisphere summer and, good conditions ahead. So let’s get into more right now.

Andrew Mitchem
Hey, traders! Andrew here at The Forex Trading Coach with video on podcast number 601.

Trading from the US while on vacation.

Currently on holiday in the US for vacation. Been here for a few weeks. And currently with Paul Tillman and his family here in North Carolina. Currently at Grandfather Mountain a little bit hard to see behind us. We’re up in the mist at just over 5000ft.

Andrew Mitchem
Point of this video though, is that we’re here trading as normal whilst on vacation or on holiday, and we’ve had a couple of really good weeks since I’ve been here.

July and August can give us tougher trading conditions.

And despite that, we are in the kind of the quiet time of year and Paul living here will know more about that. But northern hemisphere summertime, July, August can sometimes be tricky conditions.

Andrew Mitchem
But as Paul is going to explain to you, we’re heading out of those conditions and into some good ones between now and Christmas.

Paul Tillman
Right? So right now a lot of people are on vacations, holidays, school is out. A lot of good weather. People are out traveling. So the volumes just naturally going to be lower. Not as many people trading. So the conditions are what are it tougher or more sideways price action? Not as much. In terms of defined trends up and down trading conditions are are okay, but they’re not great.

Paul Tillman
Definitely see better. Earlier in the year, before the northern hemisphere summer, and we’re coming into, a nice time here in the US fall all the way up to Christmas. We’re trading conditions will be very, very nice. We’ll have much better trends and, much more quality and high probability setups to pick..

Less trades but focus on higher quality trades.   

Andrew Mitchem
So the important thing is there is that although we’ve had some great trades, we haven’t had a lot of trades. And so it’s more about the quality of the trades that you take. And so each day we go through the daily charts and just yesterday we had two trades on the daily charts at the beginning of this week.

Andrew Mitchem
And we also had seven trades on the weekly chart.

Paul Tillman
Lots of those.

Andrew Mitchem
Yet the week before we had very few on the weeklies. But we did have a few trades for the month of August. So we’re looking on the completion of a candle on the close of a candle, but we’ve been very selective on the trades that we do take because of these conditions.

Andrew Mitchem
So it’s really important to remember it’s the quality of the trades that you take. Not so much the quantity. We’ve been really selective on the trades we’ve taken over the last couple of weeks. Just two trades yesterday on the dailies, but seven weekly chart trades and not so many on the shorter time frame charts just because of the nature of the market conditions right now.

Andrew Mitchem
But as Paul mentioned, you know, we are turning into that sort of August into September time. Where are you going to get better trading conditions? So more important to, to look at the charts on the close of the candle. But also you’re probably going to find more shorter time frame opportunities as well.

Look at a variety of time frame charts.

Paul Tillman
That’s right. The great thing is our strategy works on all the time frames everything. Now we trade as low as 30 minutes or 1 hour all the way up to monthly. So lots of opportunities. You don’t have to try to, you know, do 50 or 60 trades in a week. As Andrew mentioned, it’s all about, quality of the trade more than quantity.

Paul Tillman
I was telling, coaching client, the other day that, you know, would you rather make 50 trades and make a couple percent a week or make ten trades in a couple of week? And obviously, the less trading, the better. Go out, do stuff with your family, go live the rest of your life outside of trading. So it’s all about that quality trades and those trading conditions are going to turn right for us here shortly.

Andrew Mitchem
Yes. Right. Exactly like right now. We, about 2:15 local time. So we’ve got like, almost another 2.5 hours before we even need to look at our charts today and that, today being a, a Monday here, we’ll be looking at the daily charts. And also we scan through 12 hours, 8 hours and 6 hours at that 5PM New York change of day. So be really selective. Look at the markets and the time frames that are showing the best setup.

Get onto my 17 minute masterclass.

Andrew Mitchem
Now, if you haven’t been on our masterclass, you can click on the link here to a short 17 minute on demand masterclass.

Blueberry Markets as a Forex Broker.

Andrew Mitchem
If you are looking for a good, high quality broker, I’ll put a link here to Blueberry Markets.

Have a chat with us, ask us a question.

Andrew Mitchem
And of course, if you have any comments for myself or Paul or questions or trading topics conversations that you’d like us to talk about on future videos and podcasts just like this one, leave a link below and we’ll be glad to help answer that for you and to enhance your trading.

Andrew Mitchem
So once again, this is Andrew Mitchem and Paul Tillman here in North Carolina having a great time on vacation with see in this time next week. Bye for now. Bye for now.

Episode Title: #601: Why Quality Trades Beat Quantity in Forex Trading

Find out more about Blueberry Markets – Click Here

Find out more about my Online Video Forex Course

Book a Call with Andrew or one of his team now

Click Here to Attend my Free Masterclass

Click Here To Follow my 30 Trader US Update

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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How to Stay Profitable in Any Market

Podcast:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Find out more about Blueberry Markets – Click Here

Find out more about my Online Video Forex Course

Book a Call with Andrew or one of his team now

Click Here to Attend my Free Masterclass

Click Here To Follow my 30 Trader US Update

#600: How to Stay Profitable in Any Market

In this video:
00:35 – Joined by Paul Tillman in the US.
00:55 – How Paul joined TFTC as a client and then coach.
01:42 – Paul’s role at TFTC.  
02:18 – The TFTC strategy has never changed.
03:34 – Why would a strategy work on just one pair or time frame?
04:13 – Paul’s advice to people who are looking to become a good trader.
05:03 – Join my Masterclass.
05:14 – Blueberry Markets.
05:45 – Paul’s best financial decision.

 Andrew Mitchem

The Forex Trading Coaches over 16 years old, and we’ve been providing information for traders right around the world for a long time. And this is video podcast number 600 where I’m in the US with Paul Tillman. So let’s talk about the longevity of what we do and the quality of what we offer and how we can help you to trade successfully.

Andrew Mitchem

Let’s get into that a more right now.

Andrew Mitchem

Hey traders. Andrew here The Forex Trading Coach with video and podcast number 600.

Joined by Paul Tillman in the US.

Andrew Mitchem

I’m joined here in the US in Asheville at Biltmore House with Paul Tillman.

Paul Tillman

Hey everyone. Glad to see here. 600 episode big milestone.

Andrew Mitchem

It is indeed. And one of the things that we like to talk about at The Forex Trading Coach is the consistency of what we offer and the longevity of what we offer.

How Paul joined TFTC as a client and then coach.

Now, Paul, maybe you could just give a bit of an introduction of yourself and how we got to meet each other and work together.

Paul Tillman

Absolutely. So, Paul Tillman, I live here, in North Carolina, and I joined Andrew as a client just over ten years ago. I tried to find red flags from a previous experience, and Andrew didn’t have any, so, I joined in, and after two years, I said, hey, Andrew, I’d love to, help work with you. And, I have that kind of representative of, trading here for the Forex Trading Coach, in the US and, this side of the world.

Paul Tillman

So, it’s been eight and a half years. We’ve been working together. Andrew came along, and visited here in North Carolina about eight years ago to check things out, make sure everything was legit and good. And, it’s been a wonderful, eight years, together.

Paul’s role at TFTC.  

Andrew Mitchem

And, Paul, your role in the coaching business and helping people.

Paul Tillman

Sure. So I’m the Director of Coaching here. I help out with, one on one coaching sessions as well as, the webinars. We do a US webinar. Our forum site, our chat room area, daily trade suggestions. Just general coaching help. Trading help. Yes, sort to do a little bit of everything.

Andrew Mitchem

Nice. And one of the things with the 16 years that we’ve been running is that we offer consistency not into only what we do as well, but also the strategy. I think that so.

The TFTC strategy has never changed.

 Paul Tillman

That’s right. Yes. So ever since I came one and sort of history that the strategy hasn’t changed. We’ve added things like a U.S webinar, we added our forum site and chat room area, that real community of traders. But nothing’s ever changed. It’s not the next shiny object. Or we do something for six months and then we change it.

Paul Tillman

None of that. It’s the same strategy since the very beginning, and that helps with consistency. And you’re doing the same thing every time, which look at you consistently profitable or retired. Yeah.

Andrew Mitchem

And the only other thing, I suppose we have added, because the nature of the market is there are more time frames available now, especially for traders using MT5 where you get other charts like 2 hours, 3 hours, 6, 8, 12 built in. And of course there’s more markets for a lot of people as well. You know, we now offer or look at metals and, and cryptos and indices and commodities because they are now available to so many more people, which is, pleasing from our point of view, because the strategy, which was of course, a forex strategy works exactly the same.

Paul Tillman

Yeah, it works on every time frame and every market. I mean, all the exotics, cryptos, commodities, ones that Andrew mentioned it all works on all of it. Which is which is great. You don’t have to have one strategy for a certain set and another one for another set, which is just confusing and not worth it. So, it works with everything.

Why would a strategy work on just one pair or time frame?

Andrew Mitchem

It’s. That’s right. And one of the things that I found personally when I started trading, like, well over 20 years ago where people were having strategies that they’d say, this only works on the EUR/USD, on the one hour chart and nothing else. And I couldn’t work out why that was. And so the beauty of this is that it works on all time frames as well as all markets.

Paul Tillman

Yes, you don’t have to worry about it. Just use that strategy, apply it and look at your time frame. Put the trade in and let it go and do its thing.

Andrew Mitchem

That’s right. And so look whether it’s longevity of the strategy, looking for the longevity or the free information that we post each day on the, free daily trade suggestions, these webinars, as we say, or these, podcasts, number 600, we can help people from right around the world.

Paul’s advice to people who are looking to become a good trader.

So as someone who did join as a client in the early days, what of what would be advice that you would suggest to maybe someone watching or listening to this about what to look for.

Paul Tillman

So be a new trader. You avoid a lot of the pitfalls. They say 95% of traders fail. And you know what? I believe it, because of the lack of coaching, the lack of education, the changing strategy that we just mentioned, every so often. So, we are happy and proud to be in that, 5% of traders who do succeed.

Paul Tillman

Yes. It requires a little bit of effort. There’s no get rich quick schemes out there. But, you know, what about efforts, the education and coaching, everything we provide, we give you all the tools to be successful. And we always tell people when they first coming to us, you’ll be we hope to be your last stop in the journey to be consistently profitable.

Join my Masterclass.

Andrew Mitchem

That’s right. So, look, if you’re out there looking, to potentially join us, I’ll put a link here that you can jump on to a masterclass that we hold as a free, short masterclass that teaches you all about how we trade and how we can help you.

Blueberry Markets.

Andrew Mitchem

If you’re out there looking for a broker, you know that we work closely with blueberry markets. For so many people around the world, can use blueberry markets. Unfortunately, not here in the US, but most other countries can. And, Yeah, it’s just awesome working with Paul. Really enjoy our relationship that we have. We talk daily about trades and helping clients and looking forward to another 16 plus years as well. So because it just works, it’s an enjoyable community that we built and it’s just people helping people, which is so good.

Paul’s best financial decision.

Paul Tillman

That’s right. Yes. This financial education coaching decision I’ve made, and it’s been great getting to know Andrew and his wife, our families hanging out together. This is the third time around and, yeah, we’re going to go, enjoy more North Carolina and, did two, trading this week right now solidly.

Andrew Mitchem

In a couple of hours from there.

Paul Tillman

That’s right.

 Andrew Mitchem

So, thanks, everybody for watching or listening. Once again, this is Andrew Mitchem, Paul Tillman at The Forex Trading Coach. We’ll see you this time next week. Bye for now!

Episode Title: #600: How to Stay Profitable in Any Market

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How to Trade in 5 Minutes a Day While Traveling the U.S

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#599: How to Trade in 5 Minutes a Day While Traveling the U.S

In this video:
00:23 – Trading while on holiday travelling the US.
00:59 – Results from the first 2 weeks.
01:41 – Trading and travelling in Europe too.  
02:59 – 30 minutes of trading in the week.
03:10 – Follow long here https://theforextradingcoach.com/the-30-minute-forex-trader-us-travel/
03:42 – Catching up with Paul Tillman next week.

What’s it like to trade and travel the U.S. at the same time? I’m in Nashville. I’m going to update you with some great results that we’ve had in the last two weeks since we’ve been here. Let’s get into that a more right now.

Trading while on holiday travelling the US.

Hey traders! Andrew Mitchem here at The Forex Trading Coach video in podcast number 599.

I hope you can hear me. All right. With the background noise here. I’m just off Broadway in Nashville in the U.S. we’ve been over here for almost two weeks, and I’ve been documenting my trades that I’ve been taking just once a day for literally five minutes.

And the market’s been fairly quiet both week so far since I’ve been here on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. But, sort of Wednesday and Thursday and Friday especially, it’s just really taking off and we’ve had some excellent trades.

Results from the first 2 weeks.

So if you did nothing else and just followed the trades that I took last week, and you had a risk of just half of 1% for trade, you’d have made a 4.4% account gain.

This week so far, and I’m recording this on Wednesday evening here in the U.S. and of course, we’ve still got probably the best trading, conditions to come for the week so far. We’re up 2.5% so far, and that’s just trading daily charts. I’ve taken a two hour trade and, an eight hour trade and a 12 hour trade this week, and that’s it. So very little action happening on the charts. But when we’ve had the trades setting up that we’ve taken off been incredibly good.

Trading and travelling in Europe too.  

And so if you’ve been following me for some time, you didn’t know that a number of years ago. I did exactly the same as this on a trip around the UK, in Europe with my family.

This time we’re here in the US, for my wife’s 50th birthday. Just the two of us having an awesome time. I’ve done over 2000 miles so far in two weeks, so it’s a lot of driving as well. You kind of forget how big this place is, but my point being is that it doesn’t matter whether you’re traveling around the US or around Europe or traveling anywhere, it doesn’t really matter.

You could just say, well, I’m going to be at home doing normal things. I could be, you know, doing normal work or family riding things. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. The point being is that you can trade and do incredibly well with very low risk per trade, low drawdowns on either your own account or if you prop firms is your thing, whatever it whatever works for you, your normal life can carry on and you can just trade once a day.

Follow what we do. Get to learn how to do that for yourself, and whether you want to do cool things like this, you know whether the place is buzzing. You know it’s early hours of the evening. It’s only 7:00 here local time.

30 minutes of trading in the week

It’s fantastic to be able to travel around the world, literally spend 30 minutes in a week, tops.

Follow long here https://theforextradingcoach.com/the-30-minute-forex-trader-us-travel/

Absolutely tops. And have results like that 4.4% last week, 2.5% so far. This week on close trades. But you know, who knows what this end, week might end up with. But what I’m going to do is keep documenting those trades, keep taking them, and you can follow along.

So, there’s a link that you’ll find here where you can look at the videos I’m making sort of four or 5 or 6 videos a week, depending on what’s happening in the market.

And you can follow along with those trades. And see how they progress and do exactly the same for yourself. So have a look at the link bits on here.

Catching up with Paul Tillman next week.

And, I’ll see you this time next week. Where I’m going to catch up with Paul Tillman, for our video on podcast number 600.

So once again, this is Andrew Mitchem. Off to enjoy the night life. I hope you like the shirt by the way. This is the Beatle Shirt. Off to enjoy the nightlife in Nashville with some music and some great barbecue. I’ll see you this time next week. Bye for now.

Episode Title: #599: How to Trade in 5 Minutes a Day While Traveling the U.S

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Book a Call with Andrew or one of his team now

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Forex Tips for Passive Investors by Andrew Mitchem, Patrick Grimes & Steven Primo

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Click Here to Watch Prop Firm Masterclass

#598: Forex Tips for Passive Investors by Andrew Mitchem, Patrick Grimes & Steven Primo

In this video:
00:25 – Top trading strategies for passive investors. 
05:50 – Why I choose to trade the FX market. 
11:47 – The ability to Buy and Sell.    
15:03 – How much time do you need to trade daily?
25:00 – Why so many retail traders lose money.
41:40 – Do you want to invest in your trading education?

Patrick Grimes:

Right. This is Patrick Grimes and I’m really excited to be here today with some awesome people to talk about a completely new alternative investing strategy we have not dug into to this level before.

Top trading strategies for passive investors. 

Two heavy hitters to talk about it. And that is top currency trading strategies for passive investors, also known as Forex. What is that? How does it work? What are the risks? We’re going to dig into all that today. How to be successful at it. Is it passive, is it not? These are all really cool things, and I’m excited to learn about it along with you. I haven’t done this, and this is one of the passion projects. This is my passion project here. This is our Alternative Investing Mastery series and put on by Passive Investing Mastery and myself.

And why are we doing this? We’re doing this because we want to educate investors to achieve mastery in the art of passive alternative investing strategies. So you keep your life back. You can be passive, but you get into alternatives. You’re just all about the stock market, this is not the right event for you or the right series for you because we’re about non-correlated investments outside of the stock market. Ones that don’t rise and fall together.

Now, we educate here. It’s important for us. I’m on over a hundred podcasts and books. I’ve written articles and forums and others. It’s all on my website. I actually give away a couple of bestselling books for free on our website, if you’re interested. I actually sign them and send them out, help inspire people along their journey. And we have this bi-weekly webinar series, which seems to have turned into a weekly webinar series, always featuring a Blue Ocean approach of different alternative strategies.

Now, we’re doing this because we believe financial security happens through a lot of different allocations into different markets, which can only be achieved into these very unique kind of novel alt strategies. And we want you to get to that point where you have true, not just independence, but security, and the abundance, the financial abundance you need for the causes you care about most. That’s our mission here. We do that through education and through sponsoring best-in-class alternative investments, which you can check it on our website.

The next event, before we go any further, make sure you jump in there, one week from today, Venture Capital for Passive Investors: Syndication Strategies That Works. I don’t do a lot of venture capital. It’s not really my bag, but a lot of people do. And a couple friends of mine that I’m in large, very large real estate deals with that have invested huge and were some partners in some of these deals. Isaac Bennett works for a venture capital firm. I’m in some Masterminds with him. And he is doing real estate and venture capital. Trey Taylor is a family office. He manages his own and all of his relatives, his extended family’s funds, and he also does angel and venture. So we’re going to talk about it. He’s going to be there as well. It’s going to be a fascinating conversation. Known both these guys for some time. And what are the different funding options and venture capital risk rewards? How to leverage syndications? What are angel investments and family office and high growth startups? What are these things that allow you to really build that true resilient portfolio?

So we’ll go through all of that today. But today, currency trading strategies. Really excited about this. So let’s go to our panelists right now. We have Andrew Mitchem. It’s tomorrow for him. He’s in New Zealand right now, so I appreciate you jumping across the pond virtually for us, Andrew.

Andrew Mitchem:

Lovely to be here, Patrick.

Patrick Grimes:

And by the way, Forex is not like real estate. It is global. You’re trading global currencies. So these educators is over 108 countries he’s trading in right now. It doesn’t matter where this expert is, if he’s somewhere on the planet Earth and he’s got something relevant to say for you and America about Forex trading. So he’s a full-time currency trader and investor since 2003, founder of the Forex Trading Coach, providing training to traders in over 108 countries. Pretty awesome. Developed a profitable trading system after initial challenges. I would love to hear more about that. Advocates for the flexibility and freedom offered by currency trading. Really excited to have you here, Andrew.

And on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, where I’m kind of sitting in the middle, is Steven Primo. Primo is the Oracle here I think on the call. Is it okay if I call you that, Primo?

Steven Primo:

That’s fine. Everyone calls me that as well. That’s fine.

Patrick Grimes:

Well, I’m glad, because it made sense. 48 years as of this year, he’s been trading. He has been trading for 48 years, starting in 1977 as a floor reporter on the Pacific Stock Exchange. Former stock exchange specialist for Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, managing markets in over 50 stocks. Co-developer of the PTS Primo Charting Platform focused on trading education. Once again, perfect. Glad to have you here. Featured in Stocks & Commodities magazine, he’s contributor for contributor for TradingMarkets and the FX Street and Trader Expo. His proprietary methods for trading are used in over a hundred countries.

This is a global strategy. Couldn’t ask for a better group of guys. Let’s start with Andrew and then go to Steven, and I’d like to hear why are you excited to be here today educating us on currency trading strategies? Go ahead, Andrew.

Why I choose to trade the FX market. 

Andrew Mitchem:

Hey there, Patrick. Hi everybody. I’m here today because I absolutely love trading in Forex market, and it’s just completely changed my life over the last 20 years, and the more that I can help do that to other people, the better. It’s an awesome market to trade.

Patrick Grimes:

And Steven.

Steven Primo:

Hello everyone. Thanks for inviting me today. And similar to what Andrew said, I’ve been trading for 48 years, but roughly about 20 years ago I really wanted to start sharing what I had learned, because you can only go so far if you’re just sitting in a room trading by yourself, but to a point you have to share with other people and that extends your next level of trading. So I started teaching and I’m excited to teach people. It really is a lot. It gives you a lot more satisfaction than just sitting alone in a room trading by yourself.

Patrick Grimes:

All right. So here we go. We’re going to dive into the discussion, but first I want to make sure that we see have a lot of people here participating in the chat. David, Amital, Bill, Kenneth, Anise, thank you so much for already jumping in there and starting to participate. Keep your questions coming. We’re going to have lots of questions during this event, probably 40, 60. We’re going to answer questions as they’re relevant to the current topics that we’re talking about. I may punt on some questions and then towards the end when we reach those topics, weave those into the conversation. If we miss one, that’s our bad, but we’re going to go back through it after the 45-minute mark and go through a very laser-focused Q&A. Do our best to get through all of those questions. But keep them coming. We usually have 40 plus, 60 plus questions, so it’s a very lively discussion. Looking forward to this today.

So without any further ado, let’s jump into the discussion. So, what is currency trading? It’s what we’re going to start out with, and we’re going to break it down in very simple terms. I like to say that so that my grandmother’s knitting circle can understand. So let’s break that jargon down very simply. Andrew, what is currency trading? How does it work?

Andrew Mitchem:

Yeah, Patrick, so to break it down real simply, currency trading, when you trade currencies, you’re actually trading what’s called a pair. So you don’t just trade one stock or one thing, you trade something against something else. So as an example, the Euro/US Dollar. It’s traded as the Euro/US Dollar, as a currency pair. And when we look at it, we can either buy or sell that currency pair. So if the Euro/US Dollar looks like it’s moving up, effectively we’re looking at strength in the euro, weakness in the US dollar. If it looks like the Euro/US is falling, that means we’re effectively looking for selling euro and buying US dollar. So they’re all traded together as currency pairs.

There are eight main currencies that we look at, and that would be the Euro/US Dollar, Swiss franc, Canadian dollar, Australian dollar, New Zealand dollar, Japanese yen, and the British pound. So it makes it really easy because it’s mainly just eight currencies to look at.

Patrick Grimes:

So Yuan, the Chinese Yuan is not on that list.

Andrew Mitchem:

We do have those as well. But for people that are wanting to start this as something new, I would probably focus on those main eight currencies. They’re the most traded. The cost of doing the trading is very small in terms of the spread, the liquidity’s fantastic, and what we do when we start looking at technical trading, it has the highest reliability. Yes, you can trade the Mexican, the Swedish krona and lead on to other currencies and other markets, but I would focus for someone new especially on those main eight currencies.

Patrick Grimes:

Amital is saying, “What is Forex?”

Andrew Mitchem:

Yeah, so Forex is foreign exchange currencies. It’s just short for foreign exchange. It’s basically currency trading, Forex, it’s the same thing.

Patrick Grimes:

We wanted to call it currency trading instead of Forex, so it didn’t sound so foreign. And so it is, yeah, one and the same. Here, Steven, let’s hear your thoughts.

Steven Primo:

Yeah, I ditto exactly everything, the same thing Andrew said. The main thing is that the trading is actually simple, because I’ve noticed from my experience in trading currency pairs is that when they run, when they go in a certain direction, they really go. I mean, these are some of the best trending markets available. And since we feel that the best way to become a consistent trader is to be in sync with the trend, I think there’s a real advantage to trading currency pairs. If you’re able to find out through price behavior what the trend is and get on board, you can really have some nice gains and really have some nice profits.

Patrick Grimes:

So this is interesting to me. So I did some research in advance. About 24%, you talk about the pairs, 24% of the trades are between the euro and the US dollar. That’s fascinating. And I think it said 66% are in those nine most common currencies overall. So the majority of it is in those top currencies. So you’re really talking about trading between, call it nine or 10 different currencies for the majority of it, and then a quarter of that or the majority of that is actually the US dollar and the euro. Is that right?

Andrew Mitchem:

That would be exactly right. And that is exactly what I would focus on for those reasons, given the quality of the trade setups, the cost of doing it. It’s so much better just focusing on that. And the beauty of Forex trading is you don’t need to know about a hundred different companies or anything like that. It’s just eight currencies and what moves them. And as Steven said, the moves that you can get are huge.

The ability to Buy and Sell.    

The other beauty is you can of course buy and sell. So you’re not just buying something and kind of hoping it’s moving up. You can make exactly the same return by selling, let’s say the Euro/US Dollar and getting a profitable trade when that market falls as you can when you buy it. You just need to be on the right side of the market.

Steven Primo:

Right. And what we had talked about before in terms of keeping it simple, I think a lot of, especially beginners, can really get overwhelmed deciding what market to trade. The great thing about currency pairs, as we’ve stated, if you stick with those select numbers, those basic ones, it keeps it a lot simpler, especially when you’re learning how to do it. So you’re not going through 5,000 stocks or tons of crypto that you don’t understand where they are, you’re just focusing on this small number. It makes it lot easier to get involved.

Patrick Grimes:

So Anise here, who follows you, said that Primo makes it simple. A great educator. So David’s saying, “Share, baby, share.” So, very excited about that. And we’re hearing a little bit about Mitchem’s humble beginnings in the chat. So you guys have got a great following here, much more exposed to my audience than I originally understood. This is great.

So let’s talk about how active and passive is this, because this is actually a Passive and Alternative Investing Mastery strategy session. A lot of the investors are like myself. I was a hardworking professional, successful at what I did, I was good enough to be able do what I did to be able to make some money to be able to invest. But I’m busy on my day-today. So how do you talk to investors about evaluating the active and passive methods by which you go about investing in this? Why don’t we start with Steven?

Steven Primo:

My opinion is I don’t think everyone or traders should be one or the other. In other words, you shouldn’t be totally active in something involved and just staring at every PIP or tick. You shouldn’t be totally passive either. I teach my students that they should be actually involved and part of the process, because that’s how you’re going to really become consistent. I think no two traders should ever trade alike. Some traders have a larger account. Some are new. Some have been trading 30 years. Everyone has different risk parameters. So that will determine how active you are, how passive you are. Another determination is thinking of what timeframe. If you’re going to be intraday trading, you have to be a lot more actively involved as opposed to someone who’s looking at weekly or monthly bars and you can pretty much set your parameters and then sit back and watch. So it all depends.

The first step I believe that traders and students of mine have to make is you have to determine what type of trader you are. Are you the type that wants 20 trades a day or you want one trade every couple of months? And then you can decide how active or how passive you should be. But I don’t think it should be a hundred percent one side or the other. That’s just my philosophy.

Patrick Grimes:

Andrew, you have a take on that?

How much time do you need to trade daily?

Andrew Mitchem:

Yeah, sure. Look, I completely agree with Steven. The beauty of currency trading is we have the option to look at various timeframe charts. And the way that I believe that we both trade, myself and Steven, is it kind of doesn’t matter what currency pair we’re trading and what time frame chart.

So to talk about how much time you need. I always say to people, once you know what you’re doing, you could quite easily trade in 30 minutes a day, probably less. But also, you could trade on weekly charts or monthly charts like Steven said, and just look at your charts once or twice a week or a month. It depends what you want to do. But I still think you need to have some involvement in what’s happening. You can’t just sort of put something on and then forget about it. I still think while you’re learning, especially, you need to understand how the market works, what you’re looking for in terms of price action and candle patterns. But it certainly isn’t something that you get that perception online that you have to be there at certain times of the day, where you have to sit watching every PIP of movement, like Steven said. A lot of people start like that and they fall into the trap of doing that because people think that you have to trade more to do well. The reality is trading less is better and just having higher quality trade setups.

Patrick Grimes:

So when it comes to passive investing, it’s either you’re just, like you pointed out, you need to be active. So you don’t want to just buy something and forget about it, right? You’re not necessarily going to be a long-term holder when it comes to just a Forex investment is kind of what I’m hearing.

The other way investors can be passive, and I’d love to dig into this a little bit because I know somebody who I rub shoulders with occasionally and they put together a Forex trading strategy. And when I think the Japanese, it was the Japanese bond inverted and that it caused a big challenge for their strategy. Their strategy was a bot, it was the way to make it passive, and they lost some money. They lost some money for two reasons, one was because it was leveraged and two was because it actually traded negatively into kind of a down cycle on the end.

And I guess these algorithmic tradings, the strategies, they kind of account for 70% of the daily trading volume. And daily trading volume is massive. And then there’s a bunch of them that are using these bots and some are using AI bots now. And I’m actually… These people are out there AI trading Bitcoin right now as well. But let’s hear your guys’ thoughts on these algorithmic trading methods, these bots, these ways that people are trying to make these things passive, hear what your thoughts on that.

Steven Primo:

Well, right off the bat, I can tell you I’m totally against it, and it’s only because… I mean, a lot of people think I’m old school because I’ve been trading so long, but as I stated earlier, you have to be a part of the process. I think one of the main reasons why traders fail in any market, currency pair, if you’re an investor or whatever, is when you take yourself out of the game. Now that can be either having a fund where someone does it for you or relying too much on an indicator telling you whether to buy or sell, but you have to be a part of the process. And so I’ve had a number of students I’ve educated before that said, “Well, why don’t you just have algorithmic trading or just something just spits out buys and sells.” It goes against my philosophy where you would not be a part of the process. It’s just something that I’ve learned through the years.

And to tell you the truth, when I left the floor, I was hired to manage money and also to teach systematic trading at a number of firms. And I taught these systems, which were very similar to what’s going on now with AI, but they were all systematic. You just had to put in the numbers and they spit out the buy and sells. And they had fantastic research going back 10, 20 years, 80% wins. It was just unbelievable the different markets. And then when 2008 hit, they all crashed. Everything went down. And what happened to all the research? What happened to all the great 10, 20 years of fantastic numbers? It all goes out the window. So it was because you have to make adjustments. You have to be able to go with the ebb and flow of the market. And that involves what we were talking about. It can’t be just passive. You have to be a part of the process.

Andrew Mitchem:

Yeah, absolutely.

Patrick Grimes:

So you taught algorithmic trading, sorry, but you are no longer a believer in it after the 2008 because you feel like you actually need to be there having that human judgment, seeing something like in 2008 and interfering with the algorithms. Right? Is that what I’m hearing?

Steven Primo:

Exactly. The simplest way I could say is that I’m not even a big football fan, but I know in football, the quarterback can come up in a line of scrimmage and have a play already and everyone knows what the play is, but then he sees that the defense has shifted. It’s different. So he’ll yell out what’s called an audible, telling the rest of the team that we’re kind of changing and editing things a bit because the defense has shifted, so the play won’t be able to run the original way. It’s no different when trading. You see that, wow, you have to be a part of the process because maybe there’s more volatility today. Maybe there’s no volatility today. Maybe your risk is larger. Maybe it’s less. So you’d be able to change ebb and flow with what the market’s showing you.

Patrick Grimes:

We’re addressing some of Bill’s questions here about how do you know what moves around in the currencies. And also Michael, “Is it manual or algorithmic?” It sounds like it’s a little bit of a combination between the two, but you’ve got to be ready to do the audible. The engineer in me really struggles with this, because I was an automation and robotics engineer and I think of things as systems and processes, but having that human audible is necessary and why we don’t have robots everywhere on every manufacturing floor right now. Andrew, let’s hear your thoughts.

Andrew Mitchem:

I couldn’t agree more with what Steven said. Maybe we’re both old school, but I think he’s absolutely right, and I can tell you from a of personal experience that I’ve tried every bit of AI, every trading robot, every algorithm there ever was, bought them, tried to create them, and they just don’t work. I think a lot of people run into that pitfall of they see something that has been back-tested that looks really good in hindsight and it goes live and it just doesn’t work.

I really cannot stress enough from personal experience how much human common sense and seeing something and reacting to it will massively help you not only in your results but also in that actual knowledge that you have of being able to do this for yourself. Whereas even if you had a system that you got from somebody, how do you know when that stops working if you don’t have that knowledge of how the markets work? How do you know when the market’s changed and you need to adjust the parameters? Just buying something, leaving it to run with your money, your hard-earned money sat there, it’s a huge gamble. And I personally, I love the fact that I have the knowledge of what to do, when to do it or when not to do it.

Steven Primo:

That system usually stops working the minute we start trading it. That’s when it usually stops working.

Andrew Mitchem:

Really. And we’ve all done it. So the issue is that people see online and YouTube and other play TikTok and things that all these [inaudible 00:22:07]. Because someone’s generally trying to sell something, and I promise you it doesn’t work.

Steven Primo:

Right.

Patrick Grimes:

Let’s talk about this… Give me a [inaudible 00:22:20]. So it sounds like it’s a lot of book smart, or there’s a book smart component to it, then there’s a street smart component to it, and then there’s the science and technique, and then there’s the art. Are we talking it is the arts the audible, is it 50% art or is it 10% art and 90% algorithm and science and technique here? What do you guys think?

Steven Primo:

Well, for me personally, I put about 25 to 30% rule-based pattern recognition or just looking at price behavior. And it’s rule-based. It’s not systematic. And then I would put basically… Or I should say, I’m sorry, sorry everyone. I mean 70% rule-based. And then 30% I leave for intuition, for experience, for audibles calling, being part of the process. So 70% rule-based and 30% I leave for making my own process and decisions.

Patrick Grimes:

I love how you could answer that question. Andrew, what are your thoughts?

Andrew Mitchem:

If I had to go first, I would’ve said exactly the same. This is quite spooky. Because it’s the way that I suppose that over years, you have trial and error and you figure out what works. And yes, when I see a trade setup, I have rules for my entry and exit levels based on the way that I trade, but there is certainly a little bit of discretion in what I look at on the charts as well. But it’s like anything, it’s like any skill that once you can do it, you can kind of do it. It’s like watching a kid ride a bicycle. It’s very complicated to start with and then when you know how to do it, you just jump on the bicycle and go. And I believe that kind of art form of trading is very, very similar. You have things you have to do and then you have other things that you kind of just get over time.

Patrick Grimes:

The art form of trading, right? And we like to say the mastery in the art of passive alternative investing here. And so there’s an art to it. So let’s dig in a little bit more. What are the actual ways that people would engage? I’d say you’ve got to go learn something, you’ve got to go educate yourself, and then you’ve got to go practice. And again, the education, you’ve got 70% rule-based, you got to practice to get the 30% intuition. You got to be out in the field actually doing this.

Why so many retail traders lose money.

How have you investors learn, how long does it take to actually gain the confidence necessary that you see for them to be successful at this? I mean, I’ve seen some numbers out there. We were Googling around trying to figure out, it says between 72 and 84% of online Forex traders lose money.

Andrew Mitchem:

It’s higher.

Steven Primo:

I was going to say same thing. I think it’s higher.

Patrick Grimes:

And 29% of retail Forex traders achieve capital gains, meaning they actually get a gain. So those are not numbers that I’m typically seeing in real estate investments. So help us understand how do you educate to beat those numbers, to beat those statistics, to get over that book knowledge, rule intake, and then to learn the art for your students to be successful. What’s that process?

Steven Primo:

I’ll let you go, Andrew.

Andrew Mitchem:

Okay, so for me it’s finding a strategy that suits you as an individual person. That’s what it comes down to. And look, it took me four years of going round in circles and buying things and beating my head against a brick wall. I’m not a sort of person that gives up, but I kind of got very close. For me personally, I then realized that the system that I had to trade meant I wasn’t looking at charts all day, and I had to actually have some logic behind it. Because when you start as a new trader, you can get demo accounts, like free virtual money accounts. And the downside is that people get inundated with indicators and all these lines crossing over everywhere and arrows and dots and things. It looks really cool, but the trouble is they fail to look at what’s actually happening in the price and they fail to understand the things that the big players look at, like support and resistance and news events and things like that.

And so for me it’s about someone needs to use the demo account, treat it like it’s real money. The danger is they’re going to start off with a 100,000 demo account and they go, “Fantastic. I’m making all this money,” by just guessing what they’re doing. And of course, when you go live, you’re probably unlikely to go to a hundred grand live account. So I tell people to start with maybe a 10,000 demo. Treat it like it’s real. Make the mistakes that you’re going to have with your risk management going wrong and your lot sizes incorrect and things like that, that everybody will do. But treat it like it’s real and develop a strategy and a system that you understand that you have confidence in, that you trade professionally on a demo account before you even think about going live.

Patrick Grimes:

Is that a year? How long-

Andrew Mitchem:

It could be. It could be. If you’re doing it for yourself with no help, absolutely. Like I said, I took four years. And it’s very tempting to get to those stages where you go, “Oh, this is not working,” so you try to reinvent the wheel again or you buy another indicator or robot, like I just talked about, and you’re kind of very easy to get distracted in today’s world online. So it’s about stripping all that down from… If you’re doing it yourself, if you’re doing it yourself from scratch, it’s about picking the best of different things and working out what’s going to suit you as an individual person.

Patrick Grimes:

Steven, let’s hear your approach. It’s a great answer, Andrew. How do people get in there in this world where the majority of people are losing money? They want to get into this asset class, they know they need to educate themselves not only just on the books and the rules, but they got to build that intuition, they got to get that art of it down to make those audibles. How does somebody just starting out get in there and how long does it take them before they could go live and actually start winning?

Steven Primo:

Well, I believe that that statistic is actually higher. I believe upwards of 85 to 90% of all first-time traders lose money, and when they say lose, it means that they actually lose everything, not just to have a bad month. They give all their little nest egg away. So I remember myself when I first started trading on the floor, I had a terrible time. For the first year and a half, I couldn’t make a dime. And I was lucky to have some mentors who saw what I was doing, and I remember what they said. They said, “Steve, your trading just is far too complicated. You have too many indicators, you’re watching far too many things, you’re in too many systems, everything.” And then they said it’s the easiest thing in the world to over-complicate your trading, but it’s the most difficult thing in the world to simplify it.

But once I started to simplify things, that’s when I started to become consistent little by little. So I think regardless if you’ve been trading 20 years, 30 years, 50 years or a couple of weeks, you have to keep it simple.

Now, having said that, I think you have to find a good mentor or a good teacher, Andrew I think would be perfect. Just listening to him, he’s the type of person I would want to go to if I was trying to learn how to trade Forex. And you want to take everything from them but also get your hands on everything, books, periodicals. And then you have to practice. There isn’t any other profession in the world where you don’t have some form of practice or paper training. Think of an athlete. They have a practice before the game or even they have the sessions before the actual season starts. An actor has rehearsals. It’s the same way with trading.

I liked, in fact, I loved Andrew’s idea of instead of using the $100,000 demo account, which I know everyone does, I’ve done before in the past, you start with a 5 or 10,000. That’s a great idea. Start with that, because that’s closer to reality, what you’ll be doing. And the thing is I tell my students, “Ask me questions. Whatever you want and whenever you want. And when you finally get to the point where you stop asking questions, that’s when you can start actually trading with real capital but keep it as small as possible.” So with some people it’s maybe takes a couple of weeks to get to that point. Other it may take six months or a year. It’s different for everyone.

Patrick Grimes:

This is great. And what’s the payoff? The payoff of actually getting good at this is huge, right? Because people are making money in it. The industry has grown 432% between 2019. That’s huge. Right now in the US alone it’s 1.9 trillion daily average turnover. So there’s a lot of trading going on daily. And I think somebody threw in the chat here that there’s 6 trillion per day overall in Forex. I don’t know that one, but we’re talking like… And then I saw some other numbers that professional Forex traders typically achieve monthly returns ranging in five to 15%. Now is that what you hear? Because those numbers seem mind-blowing. And monthly returns, and that annualized. To be really good at what you… Once you can get at this, you’re a couple of years in, you’ve done this, we’ve gone through, had a mentor, you’ve got good at it. Answering the questions. We got a couple questions from Anise, Robert, Michael. What are these returns? What’s the payoff? What’s the expectations that people should think about for a Forex trading?

Andrew Mitchem:

Well, Patrick, I knew you were probably going to ask that question or somebody was, and you probably can’t see it in front of here on my camera, but I’ve said on here, I’ve written it down just to make sure that I quoted this right, and I said, of course it depends on your risk. How much risk you take depends on your return. But we are massive advocates of incredibly low risk for trade.

But considering that, we would like to suggest that you’re probably, once you know what you’re doing, going to make between 5 and 10% return per month on your account. Just last week we had a 3.6% gain. We’re going to do 3.6 gain in the week, but I’m trading only a quarter of 1% of my account risk for trades. A really, really tiny risk. So a very low drawdowns. Are we going to do 3.6% every single week? No, we’re not. Some weeks will be more, some will be less of course. But I’d very confidently say that once you know what you’re doing, with very low risk for trade, there’s no reason why you can’t make 5 to 10% on average per month.

Patrick Grimes:

So let me just understand. So you said hypothetically you have a hundred grand in your account, you said you’re only trading maybe three grand of it, and then of that three grand, you got a 3% on one year, or what was that? What was the numbers? You’re not trading it all all the time.

Andrew Mitchem:

No, no, no. So if you’re on a $100,000 account and you’re on a 0.25% risk per trade, the most I’m risking is $250 on a trade on a 100,000 account. Very, very tiny. That’s just me personally because I trade on things called prop firms as well. I said to my clients I would never risk more than half of 1%, so a $500 risk on a $100,000 account. Per trade.

Patrick Grimes:

Per trade, and that trade is once a week?

Andrew Mitchem:

So if a trade goes against me, I lose half of 1% of my account size.

Patrick Grimes:

Okay, got it.

Steven Primo:

I have to commend you, Andrew, because I usually am 1%. But wow, a quarter. That’s amazing. That’s great.

Patrick Grimes:

And you’re getting 5 to 10%.

Andrew Mitchem:

Well, I think keeping your drawdowns low is key.

Steven Primo:

I’m sorry?

Andrew Mitchem:

I think keeping your drawdowns low is key in trading in currencies, because there’s two things that, like probably with all the people you deal with, Patrick, is your head and your heart and you have to control, because it’s emotions and it’s money. So I like to say to people, get those two under control. How are you going to do that? Have a strategy that you have confidence in, but also make sure that your losses are very small, but when you have gains they are several times your risk.

Patrick Grimes:

So we’re answering Kenneth’s question here about the returns and the risks and how that is. So you did say, and the audio is a little bit hard for me to hear sometimes, Andrew, so 5 to 10%, is that right? You said? And that was-

Andrew Mitchem:

Between 5 and 10% on that per month.

Patrick Grimes:

Per month. Oh my gosh. So the statistic I saw was monthly 5 to 15 and my mind was blown. You’re actually saying you’re seeing, a seasoned investor, you’re getting 5 to 10, and of course there’s a huge bit of volatility, but you’re also able to mitigate your downside risk to a quarter of a percent. And I just heard Steven say he’s doing 1%. Steven, let’s hear your take on what would people, they’re out there, they’ve been doing this a while, what do you think is reasonable under your tutelage, your guidance after they’ve gotten good at this to be able to achieve in terms of returns?

Steven Primo:

Well see, my take is a little bit different. I don’t feel that you can quantify it by saying this is what you can averagely make, what a student can make after trading for so long or learning. I think everyone’s different. I have some students that have been trading and students of mine for a couple of years and they make phenomenal, and other students in the same courses are basically breaking even, and then there’s others that are making 20 or 30%. Everyone comes in with different parameters. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

I really think what we try to do as traders, we try to make trading into a nine to five job. Like, okay, well if I get this, I’ll make 60 grand a month, or if I take this job and learn this skill, I’ll make a 100,000. Trading is not like that. Trading results are directly proportioned to how much work you put in, what you’re controlling with your risk, what your account is, and how much you use that 30% of intuitive reaction. So I don’t think you can… I always tell my students it’s not the type of thing where you say, “I’m going to make $500 a week.” You can’t do that. Because what happens if one week you don’t make 500? Well then the next week you have to make 1,000 to get back on track. And then if you lose 300 that week, then you’re really in the hole. Then you really dug yourself lower, and mentally, psychologically, you really dug yourself a hole.

So I think the best thing to do, the best thing a trader could do is, once again, practice and learn. And being able to trade another day is the best result you can get. That’s what you want. Because so many traders, that 80, 95% level, wherever, they’re gone. They can’t come back anymore. So you just want to be able to come back again, because that will ensure longevity. And in my opinion, longevity is really success.

Patrick Grimes:

Correct, and we talk about that a lot, capital preservation and keeping your risk low. And what we talk about is if you invest $100 and you lose half, you’ve only got 50 left. It takes a hundred percent return on that to get to break even. But if you lose all of it. It’s an infinite return required to get back to your 100. It’s impossible. It’s asymptotic the more you lose. And so you may be out of the game. That’s what Steven’s talking about. Live to go another day. Don’t risk it all.

That actually brings me back to what I haven’t heard you say, and that’s leverage. One of the things that freaks me out about Forex and Bitcoin trading and everything, the reason why I don’t get involved, because I’m actually a lot about low leverage. 2009 I was highly leveraged on a pre-development and I lost my ass when that market took a swing and it dragged me through the coals for years. I learned a lot about leverage. In Forex, they’ll do sometimes a hundred to one. That means you put $1 in and now you’re trading $100. And that could collapse you much more than your principal. Tell me a little bit about how you guys think about leverage, and these are just these frightening numbers to me, and why I should be a little more comfortable with it, with Forex trading.

Andrew Mitchem:

Because I’m outside the US, you have a lot more restrictions over there with your brokers, but outside the US, you can trade up to 400 to one. I’ve always traded at 100 to one, personally. It makes no difference to me. Leverage is a double-edged sword, of course. It can be your friend or it can kill you, depending on if you don’t know what you’re doing and if your risk is not sensible. But if you keep your risk very low, the leverage isn’t really an issue for me. I’ve never had a… Because I’m only risking a certain percentage per trade, it doesn’t matter what the trade is, what the direction, what the currency is, what the timeframe, what the size of the stop-loss is. To me that becomes irrelevant. I look at patterns and candle patterns, which we could potentially talk about later. So every trade has the same low and known and equal risk.

Patrick Grimes:

Yep. Wow.

Andrew Mitchem:

Because I don’t have lots and lots of trades open, the leverage is never an issue.

Steven Primo:

Once again, we’re on the same length. Because we’ve been trading this long, you start to see what works and what doesn’t and what you should put your attention on and what you shouldn’t. He’s been trading… I think when you get past the twenty-year mark, you start to see what’s of importance and what’s not. And leverage makes absolutely no difference to me because I know I’m only risking 1% of my capital. That’s all I care about. So it doesn’t matter if I have a thousand to one or two to one, if I’m risking 1%, $100 or something, that’s it. That’s all I’m concerned about.

Andrew Mitchem:

One other thing to add to the last question, if I can. You talked about, it kind of brings on from the leverage, you’ve got to trade when the market conditions are right, like anything. Sometimes there’ll be fantastic conditions and you’ll see quite a number of trades. You’ve also got to know when to not use that leverage and don’t kill yourself by doing silly things. If the market’s not showing you the trades, don’t trade. There’s nothing wrong with not trading. Sometimes that’s the best thing to do.

Steven Primo:

It’s true.

Patrick Grimes:

Okay, so we’re getting to that point where we’re actually at the 45-minute mark. Maybe we weaved in about half the questions here. We’ve got about 30 questions to do during the Q&A. Perhaps you can start out, let’s just do a final question of what’s the best advice that you can give an investor that has no idea what Forex trading is, but they’re interested, they’re attracted to it, they want to learn, they want to get involved. What’s the best way to get started in the game? And how do you make sure that you would guide them of saying not losing money and making sure that they’re going to be successful in the long run? Why don’t we go Andrew and then Steven. Then after that, we’re going to have you guys tell everybody how they get ahold of you, reach you, and then we’ll go to the Q&A.

Do you want to invest in your trading education?

Andrew Mitchem:

Okay, so if you’re brand new, you’ve got to make that decision on whether you want to do this alone or whether you want to do this as part of a group. That’s really what it comes down to. Do you want to spend a lot of time developing something? Do you want to potentially pay someone to get something that’s kind of proven? I think having a community is massive. Doing it by yourself, like Steven said at the very beginning, it gets incredibly lonely. No one to bounce ideas off. Try not to get caught up in the whole social media hype. Try to avoid all the flashy indicators that the brokers will have on their platforms. Get on a demo. Make it real. Treat it like it’s real money. Treat it like a business. Your 10 grand account, pretend it’s a million dollar account, just treat it like it’s real.

Yes, you’ll make mistakes, but don’t gamble. If you’ve got a gambling mentality and if you’re focused on how much money you’re going to make or give up your job tomorrow or next week, don’t do it. Learn the system. Learn how to trade properly, learn the theory, the strategy, the method of doing it, and if you do that properly, the money will follow later. It’s just going to take you a bit of time, but it will follow if you take the time to do your homework first.

Steven Primo:

Great answer. I would say in the beginning there’s a lot of soul searching you have to do, especially if you’re a beginner. Because I can’t tell you how many students I’ve had that said, “I want to learn how to day trade. I think it’s amazing. I’ve heard this guy at a party that said he makes a 100,000 a month, he has 10 trades a day and it’s sexy and exciting.”

And then you go there, and I’ve taught them, okay, well, I’ll teach them some day trading strategies, and they can’t pull the trigger or else they just lose money. Because they’re not trading according to their persona.

Or else someone would say, “well, I’m an investor. I’m very tight with my money. I just want to invest.” And then they find it incredibly boring and they can’t just wait every month for one signal.

And the first thing you have to do is find out what type of a trader you are. Would you want to be in front of the market watching it all day long or do you want to just passively look at it once a week or something?

And then once you do that, like Andrew said, get your hands on everything. Look online, but don’t overcomplicate things. Just keep it simple. Paper trade. And the easiest thing I can tell students right now when you’re looking at Forex markets, or any market, doesn’t matter, is to look at a chart of anything. For example, I’m looking at the Euro/Dollar right now, a daily chart of the Euro/Dollar, and apply a 50 period moving average to it. That’s all you have to do. A 50 period moving average. And what we teach our students is when price is above, then that’s when you should have a buyer’s bias. When price is below, you’ll have a seller’s bias. It’s that simple. But that one little step will help you to become a consistent trader.

Now obviously you have to add some structure in the form of a strategy or some pattern or some signal, but just look at any chart you want, any timeframe, and that little technique will help you. It doesn’t cost anything and you can do that right now. For instance, right now the Euro/Dollar is pushing up against its 50 period moving average, which is suggesting it may want to go higher. So this is just something to help you see if you would like to learn how to trade this way. And it’s very simple, doesn’t cost anything, and you can do it right now.

Patrick Grimes:

Okay, so here’s the chance. You have two gurus here, one that’s nicknamed the Oracle. Let’s have you guys both, Andrew and then Steven, tell the audience how they can reach you. What do you have to offer? I think you both train and coach in this strategy. Do you have any free giveaways? Make sure you drop your information in the chat. We now have put up a slide with your contact information, the call to action web address that you gave us to give out. Make sure you screen capture that, take a picture of it, and drop it in the chat. Andrew and then Steven, go ahead.

Andrew Mitchem:

Yep. So I’ve been coaching for 16 years, Patrick. As we mentioned, we’ve got clients right around the world. And I just really encourage people if they have any interest to jump on the Masterclass that I have on there. It’s on demand, so it doesn’t matter where you live in the world. It’s only about 20 minutes long. I’ve got eBooks on my site. I’ve got calculators for risk calculators. But the first thing will be to jump on that Masterclass, have a look at it, see what we do. I share some trades on there, some very basics about trading, how we trade, how we teach. And then it’s up to the individual to decide if this is something that they want to pursue further or not.

Patrick Grimes:

Steven.

Steven Primo:

Okay, people can contact me at ProTraderStrategies.com. You see there underneath my name. That’s my sister site. Every week I give free webinars. I also talk about all the different courses and the different strategies I have. In fact, if you go there, I’m giving a free webinar tomorrow at 10:00 A.M. Pacific Time, and I’ll talk about a strategy, one of the first strategies I learned from my mentors that I continue to use to this day. And I’ll give you a couple of the entry rules to that tomorrow. And you can see, it doesn’t cost anything. You just go to our website and sign up there. And you can find out more about us.

And once again, I’ve been trading for 48 years, if you can believe it, and I’ve seen and traded just about everything imaginable under the sun, and so I know what works in terms of consistency and I know what doesn’t. That’s really all we teach, ways in which to become a consistent trader. We’re not promising the world. We’re not saying you’re going to retire in six months. But we’ll try to make you consistent or help you at least get started in the right direction. My teaching is extremely simple. It’s not complicated. In fact, we make it that way on purpose, so whether you’ve been trading 50 years or a couple of weeks, it makes absolutely no difference. So lots of great information. And as I said, we have a free webinar tomorrow. I’d love to see you there in the class.

Patrick Grimes:

Andrew, Steven, thank you so much. So we’re going to… Before we jump into the Q&A, if you don’t know who I am, it’s Patrick Grimes with Passive Investing Mastery. We not only put out education, but we also have investments. We have an income fund, which provides steady Eddie cash flow, predictable cash flow through notes, fixed income notes. We have 90 day, six month, and one year notes, 7, 8.5, and 10% in a diversified loan pool. It’s a pool of loans to commercial real estate. We also have class A and class B shares. Those give much higher cash flows and varying right along with the profitability of the fund and at 13, 14% since inception. So really strong cash flow. Opportunistic with high interest rates. At a time when the banks are pulling back, we’re able to get great loans on performing assets and profit from that.

Now, if the operator needs or wants out, we also have an acquisitions fund that’s taking advantage of the best commercial real estate buying opportunity of our lives in commercial real estate acquisitions. It’s a great opportunity to just pounce right now. And literally I lost everything in 2009 and 10 and I wasn’t able to win from that, but right now we are winning extraordinarily so from this downturn in commercial real estate. So jump on that.

We also do non-correlated investments outside of real estate. We’ve done energy before, and now we’re doing litigation finance, litigation funding, which is the process of profiting from lending to attorneys who are working under contingency and we get returns derived from the settlements, providing access to justice just like our debt fund provides access to housing for tenants. And so we do completely non-correlated legal industry, unrelated to Forex, real estate, the stock market. Completely uncorrelated to all those. Really strong, steady-state growth of the legal industry. We get to profit from those investments in litigation funding portfolio. So really excited about those.

I also have a book, if you guys want it and give away books. It’s an Amazon number one bestseller, Lessons From Thought Leaders. We’ve got some amazing people, Navy SEALs, Phil Collen, lead guitarist of Def Leppard, actual rock star, NFL, NBA players, investors, entrepreneurs in there. I tell my whole story. I lost it all. The rise and ebbs and flows through my high-tech career. How I built my single-family, struggled, traded it up to a larger multi, diversified, and then founded Passive Investing Mastery. It’s a really cool story. Hopefully it inspires you along your journey. I give it away. You can download the ebook and or you can get a hard copy. I sign it and we send it out. So I hope that that is a give back that we do to try and inspire people along into their alternative investing journey.

Just scan that barcode or go to our website, PassiveInvestingMastery.com/book and make sure you put the name of this series in the note, because we get a lot of random form fills. And unless I know where you came from, I’m not going to sign and send it out. So you should put something in there and we’ll get that to you.

Before we get to the Q&A, the very next event is on Venture Capital for Passive Investors: Syndication Strategies That Work. Two really great colleague friends, experienced guys that I’ve known and liked for some time, Trey Taylor, family office, as well as Isaac Bennett, works for a venture capital firm. And we’ve invested heavy in real estate together. But these guys are also out diversifying into venture capital. We’re going to learn a lot about that. It’s going to be educational for me and you.

But let’s dive into the Q&A. We need to be laser about this because as typically happens, we get way too many questions. I think we have some 50 questions. I think I was able to layer in about half of them, but what I’m going to do is I’m going to go to the top, and I ask that Steven and Andrew, if we could try and just be pretty laser with these and try and get through them so we don’t miss the chance to get all these questions answered as we go. A lot of great shout-outs to people that have been following these two individuals. A lot of really encouraging comments made about what was said. A lot of the traders on here just giving the thumbs up, Amital, Anise. A comment from Anise says, “Currency trading is often referred in futures markets. If I’m not wrong, Forex is referred to spot markets, but it’s essentially Forex Exchange. One currency pitted up against another.” Let’s hear your thoughts on that.

Steven Primo:

I personally… Once again, kind of going back to that leverage. So what? All I’m looking at is price movement. I really am not concerned about a title or what it’s based on. I’m really just looking at price and patterns and specific things in a strategy.

Andrew Mitchem:

Yep, absolutely.

Patrick Grimes:

Go ahead Andrew.

Andrew Mitchem:

Oh, sorry. Absolutely. You’re looking at the spot market, what the price is right now. Is there an opportunity to buy that pair, sell that pair? You could use something, like Steven said, with that 50 EMA. You could use things like strength and weakness. You could look at a monthly chart and that’s moving up. You can look at a daily chart and only look for buy trades. There’s all sorts of things you can do, but essentially we’re looking at the price. Is there an opportunity here or not? Move to the next chart.

Patrick Grimes:

And so with all the rise and fall of these, and it feels a lot like stock market trading to me. And so Kenneth asked the question a while back, “How does currency trading compare to investing in the stock market and in bonds?” Maybe you guys can address that a little bit.

Steven Primo:

I would think the only difference would be how much you’re risking. And remember, you’re in charge of your risk. So that would be the only difference. If there’s a lot of volatility, let’s say, in the stock market but there’s no volatility in the pair that you’re looking at, well then, that would be a difference because you’re probably less risked with the pair. But to me, the only difference is since I’m looking at patterns and different ways in which to view the trend, it’s really all about risk.

Andrew Mitchem:

I’ve never traded the stock market, so a little bit hard for me to answer that one. What I would say is, regardless of where you live in the world, the Forex market’s a twenty-four-hour-a-day market, so it makes it a lot easier. You don’t get big gaps and spikes like you potentially could in stocks. You can buy, you can sell. You don’t need to know a lot about different markets. You can just look at the eight currencies that we mentioned. You potentially, depending on your strategy, can now look at cryptos and indices, metals, commodities. It offers so many options. Once you know how to trade, you can trade.

Patrick Grimes:

Well. The fact that you can limit your risk is certainly appealing over the stock market because in this particular case you’re literally dialing your downside protection. Very interesting. “It sounds like a lot of work,” Donald said. And we talked about in the beginning you got to learn, you got to put in some time to learn the craft. But after while, you’ll be able to do this like a wizard. And the upside’s big. Once you get good on it, once you get over the statistics and over the hump, get properly trained, people do tend to make pretty strong returns.

We already addressed how do you mitigate risk and how we talked about indicators for currencies, Michael and Bill. We talked about algorithms versus manually, Michael. I think I wove all that in there. And there’s questions in here about, “Man, probably I am nearing retirement,” Gaines says, and I’m not really sure he wants to manage these investments, possibly due the learning curve. “Are there other fund managers I can invest with that will do this for me?”

Steven Primo:

I’m sure there are. I don’t know of any because I’m more of an educator. I’m not involved in the fund side, but perhaps Andrew knows more about that than I do.

Andrew Mitchem:

I would say exactly the same. They’re out there. You could look at copier services, you could do all sorts of things like follow what other people do. It depends I think if you want to do this for yourself or not. Yes, you could invest with other people, but I think the issue then comes down to if you want a hundred percent passive, great. If you want to learn a little bit, then you probably want to learn how to do it yourself.

Patrick Grimes:

Right. And there’s another one here about, “Is there a list somewhere where I can go,” from Robert, “and find good or safe brokers to start trading with?”

Steven Primo:

I would pick rather than say… I would pick with someone where they allow you to do it yourself, where you don’t want to pay for someone’s advice. Since educators like Andrew and myself are teaching you what to do, there’s no need to pay for a broker to tell you what to do. So in the beginning, especially, try and keep your commissions or a brokerage commission if there are any, sometimes they’re very minimal, as small as possible, because that also comes and plays into the risk. A of times I include my commission costs, that’s part of my 1%. So even though it’s very minimal, that’s all included. So it’s just another expense that you want to keep down as much as possible.

Andrew Mitchem:

Yeah, there’s heaps of good brokers out there. If the question’s specifically about what brokers are there, then I’ve got a list of brokers I personally used for years myself who I’d recommend. I would say that having a lot of clients in the US and staff member in the US that you are a little bit more limited in the US with which Forex brokers you can select. I can certainly give you a list of two or three that I hear are very good.

Patrick Grimes:

Reach out if you want to hear that. Andrew and Steven perhaps can get you going on that. There’s a comment here from David about Steven being on a cruise ship with that water level rising and falling as he’s talking.

Steven Primo:

Well, the way it’s raining over here in Los Angeles right now, I may be on a cruise ship pretty soon.

Patrick Grimes:

I hope your neighbor’s not chipping away at an ark right now.

Steven Primo:

Yeah.

Patrick Grimes:

So let’s see. We’ve covered a lot of these. “The market can be a beast at times.” That’s true, right? Comment related to investing in the right times. Bill, we talked about algorithms, black swan events a little bit, and we talked about the 2008 and how the algorithms didn’t work out so well. And audibles, I think we covered that. If we didn’t, please place additional questions below. Kenneth asked about how inflation and interest rates impact foreign currencies. What are you going to… And I’ll add to that, how do you see shifts in this new administration affecting foreign currencies?

Steven Primo:

Go ahead, Andrew.

Andrew Mitchem:

For me, it doesn’t really matter any political event, anything like that, and any news event doesn’t matter because I’m only trading what I’m seeing on the charts. So I can have personal thoughts of what’s happening in different currencies, different countries, interest rates, employment figures, all that, but I still look at what’s happening on the chart. And why do I do that? It’s because what’s really happening in the market. The danger is you could see your monthly non-farm employment change figure, and you could go, okay, we’re expecting, pick a figure, 200,000 jobs and it comes out as 250. We could go, wow, it’s fantastic. It’s better than we thought. But last month may have been dropped down. So news trading to me is always tricky. Fundamental trading is tricky. Look at the charts. They tell you what’s really happening.

Steven Primo:

Yeah, I stopped looking at news over four decades ago and I’m living proof that you really don’t need it. I mean, I’m not telling you to not look at it if you feel you need that, but there’s really no need if you know what you’re doing. I’m not getting back to stocks to take away from currency pairs, but a perfect example is that if you looked with that 50 period moving average back in 2008, a weekly chart of the S&P price was below the 50 period moving average for consecutive days. This was in 2007. So just looking at that, that information alone would’ve told you there’s negativity in the market prior to all the fundamental news that came out later on. So the price really tells you many times in advance just to keep it simple. So sure, if you want to look at news, I personally haven’t looked at any news in almost five decades.

Patrick Grimes:

There’s a couple of questions in here. Well, David made a comment that, “After 15 years of trading, one thing I have learned is the most is what not to do.” So there’s other questions in here.

I think we’ve mostly answered about the expertise needed, Michael, to be successful. I think I drilled in. I actually asked that question because of yours. I think we talked about the time and the effort required to be successful. How much people are losing that aren’t successful? 80% people not actually making money when they start out. Really important that you do it the right way, educate yourself.

And then there’s comments in there about it being semi-passive. Once you learn and you’re on board with it, you’re not working night and day at it, but there can be some semi-passive approaches to it, even as an active. Would you agree to that?

Andrew Mitchem:

Yeah, absolutely. As Steven said near the beginning, you could trade once a month, once a week, once a day. It’s up to you. I personally trade no more than 30 minutes as a full-time trader of chart time per day.

Patrick Grimes:

You’re full-time 30 minutes a day, that’s your full time?

Andrew Mitchem:

30 minutes chart time. 15 minutes at 5:00 P.M. New York time and 15 minutes at 5:00 A.M. [inaudible 01:01:02].

Steven Primo:

I think Andrew was the kindred soul here. Because we’re right along the same wavelength. Exact same way I feel about it.

Patrick Grimes:

I’m going to write a note to get some people that disagree about stuff. No, I’m teasing. So what are the factors, I guess, to evaluating… Sorry. Actually this is a better one. So PIPs, why don’t you talk about what PIPs are. And the other one that I wanted to look at, I’ll find it eventually, but why don’t you start out with what PIPs are.

Andrew Mitchem:

Okay, so a PIP is a price index point, I think it’s officially called. So 1 cent of movement has 100 PIPs within it. So it’s a hundredth of 1 cent movement. Now, you don’t need a very big movement in the Forex market to have a lot of gain or loss if you get it wrong. So it’s a hundredth of a cent. The issue is that a lot of people count their success in PIPs. If you have a look online, everybody goes, “I made a hundred PIPs on the trade.” To me that’s irrelevant. I, as mentioned, risk let’s say half of 1%. If I have a three to one reward-to-risk trade, it means I’m risking one part, half of 1%, to make three parts, one and half percent. So for me, regardless of the trade, regardless of its stop-loss in size, its timeframe, how long it’s in the market for, have your low control risk, high rewards of risk trades, and forget PIPs.

Steven Primo:

Yes, the way I define PIPs, it’s just a unit of measurement. That’s all it is. And every market, tradable market, has a unit of measurement. Stocks have 1 cent, futures have different units of measurement, and PIPs are just a unit of measurement in currency pairs.

Patrick Grimes:

A couple of questions I think we’ve already answered, Ferdinand, we talked about leverage. I wove that one in there. We talked about comparison and contrasting this versus other investments, other passive investments, Donald. If there’s any further questions, go ahead and drop it in. Anise is saying thank you so much. “High risk is a killer and suicidal, especially in Forex,” Anise is saying, and I think we all agree with that. Let’s see. So how did COVID impact the strategy?

Steven Primo:

Oh well, I can just speak. If you remember the beginning of COVID, when it went straight down, the market, we had some of the best gains ever because our strategies generate buy and sell signals. So all we’re looking for is just a real strong movement, and the movement was down, and then when the market started to go back up, and even with currency pairs, when you have the volatility, I think it really doesn’t matter. What you’re looking for is really trending volatility, regardless of what market. What you really don’t want is that kind of when the pond just dries up and there’s no movement at all, that’s where you get that whipsaw. And that can happen at any time. You don’t need COVID or anything. That can happen in the summer months. So what you’re really looking for is a really strong trending market regardless of what it is, and then you just jump on board.

Patrick Grimes:

So let’s talk about correlation to stocks. As we talk about a lot of non-correlation, meaning things that don’t rise and fall, what the majority of passive investors have, and then there are ROA, 401(k), or the stock portfolio. Do you see Forex investment returns correlate somewhat to the stock market?

Andrew Mitchem:

I’ll have to let Steven answer that one.

Steven Primo:

Yeah, I personally don’t know. And I don’t look at that either. Once again, I hate to be a broken record, but no, it’s of no interest to me. I teach my students to focus on the one market you’re trading. That’s all. Because as my mentors taught me, said, “Steve, you’re overcomplicating things. You’re looking at too many different indicators and markets all at one time. Just focus on a few things.”

And so, I think when you start to do that, look at different correlations and everything, you start to go down that path, a slippery slope of when you’re making things a little bit too complicated. I know I think differently from other educators, but that’s what I just like to focus on. In fact, I only look at one market at a time. So if I’m trading currency pairs or I’m futures, stocks, that’s all I’m looking at.

Patrick Grimes:

So Donald is saying he’s retired and looking for fixed income. Is there a way to use Forex to get fixed retirement income?

Steven Primo:

Go ahead, Andrew.

Andrew Mitchem:

Fixed retirement income? Does he want to do this for himself?

Patrick Grimes:

It sounds like it.

Andrew Mitchem:

If he wants to do it for himself, then fantastic. Put a bit of time in to learn how to do it properly and you’ll definitely do very well over time. Just depends of who he is. I suppose if he’s retired, he’s got that time to put into the education, the learning. Fantastic. You’re never going to get a straight perfect line. That’s the thing. Market conditions change all the time. When we said that 5 to 10% per month, some months you’ll probably have losing months. It just happens. Some months you might have 20% gain. There’s never a straight line in any equity [inaudible 01:06:12].

Patrick Grimes:

Sounds like the answer is no. You can’t get a fixed income. You can get some income though possibly. So what are the tax implications of gains and losses in Forex trading?

Andrew Mitchem:

Tax implications?

Patrick Grimes:

Yeah, how are they taxed, gains and losses?

Andrew Mitchem:

I’m not an accountant and I would imagine every country would be very different.

Patrick Grimes:

Steven.

Andrew Mitchem:

I can tell you what I personally do.

Steven Primo:

Once again, I’m sorry, I’m sounding like a broken record. It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t even look at that. I just look at if I’m profitable or not. That’s the price of doing business.

Patrick Grimes:

Okay, and-

Steven Primo:

Most of my trading, excuse me, most of my trading is day trading. I know not everyone day trades.

Patrick Grimes:

Let’s see. It sounds like Brad’s talking about an opportunity for compounding gains as your reinvestment. David, “Takes a lot of discipline and persistence.”

“Can I do it with retirement accounts?” I would think, of course, self-directed retirement account. And we can help you out with that, James, if you’re looking to get something allocated into self-directed.

We’ve talked a little bit about correlation, geopolitical events. You guys don’t even watch the news anymore. So Mike, I think we answered that question. What role do central banks play?

Steven Primo:

You’re going to get the same answer.

Andrew Mitchem:

Same answer. Look at the charts.

Steven Primo:

Yeah. This is more along the side of the fundamentals. It’s just… You know, traders, I’m not talking about investors-

Patrick Grimes:

Your indicators don’t involve all that. Your indicators are [inaudible 01:07:56].

Steven Primo:

Yeah. Traders don’t get involved.

Patrick Grimes:

Yeah. Okay. And I just did look up the tax implications and it looks like it can be handled in various different ways depending upon what you’re doing. So probably need to talk to your CPA about that. There’s no easy answer to that one.

I’m going to go through these. There’s some people really hanging in here to the very end. “How does currency trading fit into a passive investor’s broader asset allocation strategy? So what part of my portfolio should be allocated into this?” And so what would you guys say? So if somebody comes along, they’re like, “Hey, I have $5 million. I’m not real sure how much I should start playing in the sandbox of Forex with.” And so maybe I start small, but eventually, what allocation do you think is responsible or the right choice in this? What do you guys, what do you think, Andrew and Steven?

Steven Primo:

Right off the top of my head, I would say 25%, just right off the top of my head, of my account, whatever I had.

Andrew Mitchem:

I’m going to have a different answer to Steven for the first time. And that to me, it doesn’t really matter how much you have because it… It depends if you want to put how much of your own money into it as well. Learn how to do it properly first. But with these things called prop firms around, if you can trade properly, you can use someone else’s money and make a percentage gain on that as well. So you don’t even have to put any money of you own into it.

Patrick Grimes:

Interesting. Yeah. So in our world we like to show the allocations of the wealthy, and Lily, if you look at any of our webinars, we’ll show the Wolf wealth from middle income, high income, ultra wealthy where they have allocations of 10, 20, 30 plus percent real estate, 20 some percent in other alts, and the rest in bonds and stocks. And so, you really need to look at allocations in those kind of pie charts. And you set up a call. And you’re really about pie charting your allocations and understanding what you think the allocations are, what risks do you see in each of those allocations. And do you see those rising and falling? Do you feel like you’re well indexed into non-correlated investments?

But typically, our belief is you need to be on lots of different investments. So foundations in lots of different market fundamentals. So we would never say something like 25. We usually say no more than 5 to 10% in any one strategy. And hopefully within that strategy, you’re diversifying into different kinds of investments within there. Again, it’s about capital preservation and diversification, and that’s my belief.

And again, none of us, I don’t think, are financial advisors, CPAs, or attorneys. So this is not finance, tax, or legal advice. But that’s typically my answer, Lily. Set up a call. Happy to chat more about my own personal strategies.

Gary asked if I have to be a credited investor to invest in Patrick’s funds. And that’s true, yes, you do need to be an accredited investor. 200,000 in income, 300,000 combined with your spouse, or a million dollars in net worth, not including your personal residence, in order to invest in the Passive Investing Mastery affiliate funds.

And we just have a few more. Michael’s asking again, “Is there a way to do it truly passively?” And it sounds like the recommendation is no, you really need to participate to some level from the gentleman here, Michael. And then let’s see, “Just put my name as Session please. Currency trading…” Okay, so Session, again, some great [inaudible 01:11:39].

I think we pretty much got these questions handled. We’re towards the end. “This should be treated as a business. This strategy should be treated as a business if you’re serious about it.” And although we’re saying the full-time trader, these guys are at 30 minutes a day, you do treat it very seriously like a business. I’d probably agree with that. And I think that gets us to the end of this. If we missed your question… Maybe the last question, “Do your research on prop firms if you want to go that route.” Okay, so that was just a comment, but I think we got it all.

Steven, wish we could have seen you, but I understand. No problem.

Steven Primo:

Maybe next time. Maybe next time.

Patrick Grimes:

There are days when I would like to turn off my video all day too. I’m sure the audience have seen enough of my face. They probably wish I did the same. So hopefully we didn’t get anybody seasick with your volume thing going up and down. But really great to have you, Steven. Andrew, amazing job. This was an incredible panel, really rock stars, really strong in these asset classes. Couldn’t be happier with your guys’ answers, your participation.

Everybody here. Don’t forget, one week from today we’re going to talk about Venture Capital for Passive Investors: Syndication Strategies That Work. I have two really solid guys that are going to come in, talk big advice for people who are actually doing this and do it successfully. And so really excited about that. One week from today. Andrew, Steven, you want to say your goodbyes, we’re going to wrap it up now.

Steven Primo:

I just want to say thank you for inviting me and I just want to say it was a pleasure meeting you both, Patrick and Andrew, and I’d love to work with both of you again. It was great.

Andrew Mitchem:

And likewise, thank you so much for inviting me. Nice to have someone from outside the States, different part of the world. And Steven, yeah, it sounds like that we do very, very similar things and think the same, which I suppose like you said, over time you get to work out what works and what doesn’t. So yeah, thank you for being here. Thanks for participating with me. I really enjoyed it and thank you Patrick and all your team.

Patrick Grimes:

All right, the replay will be out in a couple of days and we’ll make sure to pass it to Andrew and Steven, and we’ll look forward to seeing everybody else one week from today right here to learn about venture capital. You guys all have a good evening.

Episode Title: #598: Forex Tips for Passive Investors by Andrew Mitchem, Patrick Grimes & Steven Primo

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Trading on Vacation: How to Do It Right

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#597: Trading on Vacation: How to Do It Right

In this video:
00:24 – Trading and travelling.
01:06 – Follow me on my 4 weeks road trip around the US.
02:14 – Where you live is irrelevant.   
02:46 – Sign up to be notified when I make a new trading video https://theforextradingcoach.com/the-30-minute-forex-trader-us-travel/
03:26 – My Europe trip from 2019, see here https://theforextradingcoach.com/the-30-minute-forex-trader-updates/
04:20 – Blueberry Markets as a Forex Broker.
04:39 – Watch my Masterclass.
04:50 – Have a chat with us.

In today’s video, I’m going to talk about how you can trade and travel at the same time and enjoy both. So let’s get into that and more right now.

Hi there. Traders! It’s Andrew Mitchem here at The Forex Trading Coach with video and podcast number 597.

Trading and travelling.

Today I want to talk all about trading and traveling. I’m here in New Zealand still. Although it’s the middle of winter it’s a stunning day. But by the time you get to watch this video, I’m going to be in Texas and we are in the States for several weeks for my wife’s 50th birthday, and we’re doing a tour of the US.

And while I’m in the US, I’m going to be trading and traveling and I’m going to be documenting that process so you can see how easy it is with my strategy to be able to trade while you are traveling, while you’re enjoying a holiday or vacation, or whether it’s just normal life with, you know, everything that happens with work and jobs and kids, hobbies, etc.

Follow me on my 4 weeks road trip around the US.

What I want to show you is whether it is traveling or not, whatever it might be that you want to do, you can trade at the same time and you’re not getting in the way of you’re traveling and you’re trading doesn’t take all day. So that’s what I want to show you. But by the time you get to watch this video, all being well, I will be in Texas. And because today when you see this video will be a Monday, we would have looked through the weekly charts and the daily charts, and it would have taken us 20 minutes that say tops and place the trades, and that’s it for the day.

And then during the week, each day I’ll be looking at the, daily charts again, just at exactly the same as normal. Apart from it’s just a different local start time because I’ll be in the US. It will be in the evening or afternoon time. 5 p.m. New York time is when the daily charts change over.

So for me, normally that’s, the morning of the next day here in New Zealand, but because I’ll be on that time zone or close to that time zone, it’ll be in the afternoon when I’m seeing those trades and placing those trades.

Where you live is irrelevant.   

Now, it doesn’t matter where you live in the world, because the way that we trade using my strategy is that we use limit orders.

So you don’t have to be there at 5 p.m. New York time. And again, I’m going to show you that because there will be some days over the next few weeks while I’m in the US, that there’ll be other things happening. I’ll be doing something, I’ll be traveling, whatever it might be, that I cannot be at my computer at 5 p.m..

And it doesn’t matter, because later on that afternoon or evening I can still go and place the trades. And that’s the beauty of the way that we trade using my strategy. So I want to document that.

Sign up to be notified when I make a new trading video https://theforextradingcoach.com/the-30-minute-forex-trader-us-travel/

If you’d like to follow along and be notified of when I’m releasing videos and some will be live, I’m looking at doing a few Facebook Live, a few YouTube live, videos showing me taking the trades and analyzing the charts and of course the results.

So nothing is going to be hidden. It’s all going to be aboveboard. Whether results, you know, favorable or not. We’re going to show you everything that all the trades that I’m taking while away, the reasons why I’m taking them and the outcome and the results. So if you’d like to find out how we do that and you’d like to follow along on that trip while I’m in the US, I’m going to put the link here and that you can sign up to and be notified of when I release those videos.

My Europe trip from 2019, see here https://theforextradingcoach.com/the-30-minute-forex-trader-updates/

If you’re out there just looking to see how we do that, and you’d like to see what I’ve done in the past, a number of years ago, when I went over again with my family, took the kids this time. This time were not, I went to the UK and Europe for about a month, and I have a series of videos from several years ago that you can go and view straight away.

I watched the whole lot through when we do exactly the same process. You can see me taking the trades, analyzing the market so you can see them on my membership site, and I can, show you the results of all of those trade. So I’ll put a link to that as well. The UK and Europe trip. But if you’d like to follow along with this particular trip and be notified of when I, take those, trades and take those, I’ll make those videos live. Sign up to the link that you’ll find on this page. And, it’d be great to have you follow along.

Blueberry Markets as a Forex Broker.

If you are out there looking for a good broker, I can highly recommend Blueberry Markets. If you’re in the US, then you cannot trade through blueberry markets. But pretty much everybody else, anywhere else in the world can trade through blueberry markets. And I highly recommend you consider them at least. If you’re out there looking for a broker.

Watch my Masterclass.

If you’d like to, watch my masterclass, it’s a short 17 minute on demand masterclass. I’ll put a link to that here as well. Explained about how we trade, how we teach, and how you can come on board with us.

Have a chat with us.

And if you’d like to, look at joining us, or if you just want to have a call with, one of my team, it won’t be me because I’m be traveling. But if you’d like to have a call with one of my team, all you need to do is look at the link here for booking a call, and you can schedule a time to have a chat with one of the team. As I said, for the next few weeks, it won’t be me.

If you do email me, I’ll still email, back to you, personally while traveling. But, the team will be certainly looking after all the course for the next few weeks while I’m in the US. So looking forward to some more sunshine like this in the US.

I think it’s going to be a little bit hotter. Of course it’s summertime, over there, winter time here in New Zealand. So, use the links and follow along with how we tried to see how easy it is to trade just once, maybe twice a day, and do very well with low risk, high reward to risk trades and to enjoy trading and travel at the same time. So use the link and I’ll see you in the next video. Bye for now.

Episode Title: #597: Trading on Vacation: How to Do It Right

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How to Pass Prop Firm Challenges with Andrew Mitchem & Etienne Crete

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#596: How to Pass Prop Firm Challenges with Andrew Mitchem & Etienne Crete

In this video:
00:05 – Passing a prop firm challenge.
00:19 – Talking prop firm challenges with Etienne Crete.
00:45 – Horror stories from traders starting a prop firm too early.   
02:08 – How to start trading on a prop firm account.
03:13 – How to pick a prop firm.
06:10 – How much should you risk per trade.
08:10 – Treat a demo, a live and a prop firm account the same.
10:25 – Have a proven strategy first before getting on a prop firm account.
15:28 – Does the prop firm have the markets you trade available?
17:15 – How to find us and how to join us at The Forex Trading Coach

Passing a prop firm challenge.

Andrew Mitchem
If you’re on a $10,000 prop firm, you know, you you’re risking quite tiny amounts, but that’s fine, you know? But just go very, very small because just don’t get stopped out and you’ll eventually, you know, if you’re trading good enough, you’ll eventually get to that profit target.

Talking prop firm challenges with Etienne Crete.

Etienne Crete
Sitting down today with Andrew Mitchem. we want to do an episode specifically about prop firms and what it takes to become a funded trader, but also kind of scale things up. And you get to the next level of performance to scale it up to, we can make more money trading with more capital. So Andrew welcome back on the podcast. Continue here.

Etienne Crete
Let’s start with this. I actually get people who reach out to you and kind of ask you about prop firms and how they should go about it. What’s your first train of thought into what is the right time to go for prop firm?

Horror stories from traders starting a prop firm too early.   

Andrew Mitchem
Okay, I find that so many people tell me stories. In that kind of horror stories, they jump in too quick. And I think people aren’t doing it realistically. They jump in because they see it as maybe I don’t have enough money myself. And it’s a it’s a good way of potentially earning funds and, and commissions, etc., but they don’t have any, background into trading properly themselves.

Andrew Mitchem
You know, they don’t have a strategy, the confident in them. And they have proven themselves first. And I think that’s the pitfall that too many people jump into.

Etienne Crete
Definitely like trying to get capital before you are profitable trader.

Andrew Mitchem
Yeah. I mean, I just tell people maybe you look at it and, you know, 6 to 12 months time, be real about this. Yes, look prop firm can be absolutely fantastic once you know what you’re doing. But spend some time upfront to learn the process of trading. Forget how much money you make. Don’t even look at money.

Andrew Mitchem
Just understand the process of trading. You know, low risk, etc., low drawdowns, because ultimately that’s the thing. It’s going to get you through a pot firm. And if you don’t understand that hitting that drawdown criteria is what’s going to make you lose your money.

Etienne Crete
How do you someone interested in the process? Because a lot of people are going to, of course, focus on the outcome, trying to get the result, how do you get them to, first of all, follow the process? But they kind of have to be interested in then involved in it too.

Andrew Mitchem
How to start trading on a prop firm account.

Andrew Mitchem
Yeah, it’s a tricky one because everybody wants the results and everybody wants the money. I suppose all I can do is probably a little bit like is keep going on and on and on with the same story, because ultimately that’s the best way you’re going to get a result. You know, you almost got beaten into people was like, please don’t waste your time away or waste your money, focus on the process of knowing how to trade or just make sure you’re consistently profitable. I do suggest to people that when they start, use a demo, you know, for a reason, be profitable on that. Go on to a small live account. Be consistently profitable on that, then maybe a slightly bigger live account, and use all those like that experience and those emotions that you’re going to have.

Andrew Mitchem
And get that right first before going on to a prop fund, because otherwise you’re just spending $500 and wasting you money.

Etienne Crete
In terms of platform, there’s a lot of choice. Are there? You can think, of course, so many different names is one that’s been around for a longer time, some that are newer and more competitive or kind of nicer offerings. How do you actually get to pick the prop firm and then maybe have some thoughts on this?

How to pick a prop firm.

Andrew Mitchem
But yeah, no, it’s I suppose you want to look at potentially, you know, a company’s been around for a long time. That’s always, I suppose, a good starting point. But the other one is I like, personally, I like prop firms that have slightly bigger drawdown allowances and, the some of those that I personally use that have two stages of a challenge before you go to live money, a lot of them would have like a 10% profit target and maybe like a 5% drawdown.

Andrew Mitchem
I think that’s it’s a little bit of a tight criteria for a lot of people. Whereas I’m now using prop firms that have a maybe like a 10% profit, 10% drawdown. And then you go on to another stage where you have to maybe make like a 5% profit again, within a 10% drawdown. And then you go to real money.

Andrew Mitchem
So yes, it might take longer, but having that bigger drawdown just allows a little bit more wiggle room for you as a trader. And I also think it’s really important that people don’t have a prop firm that has a time restriction. I, I really would avoid that. When you see these prop firms that say, you’ve got to do this, you know, 10% within 30 days.

Andrew Mitchem
And then realistically that might only be, say, 20, 20 trading days, you know, then the market conditions aren’t good every day. So, you know, they almost forced you to gamble. So, I would have something that doesn’t force you on a time restriction to get to your profit target. And also something allows a slightly bigger drawdown.

Etienne Crete
I think the, the time roll is mostly gone for a lot of performers. Most don’t offer this and most don’t have this anymore as a rule, because people are really tired of it. I think the rule that now is kind of simplify for people is the, the trailing drawdown. So the more you profit, even a few trades are open, but not close yet.

Etienne Crete
That counts as your highest like profit level, your highest watermark. Then the jobs calculate from there. So you could have a trade that runs like really fast and comes back and then that hits to your drawdown level.

Andrew Mitchem
Yes. So I suppose a lot of that then comes back to, as I mentioned, to try and have a prop firm that has a little bit bigger drawdown. To give you that flexibility, but also don’t rush to pass it. And probably, you know, the way that obviously everybody fails on a prop firm is they hit the drawdown and get stopped out or, you know, they get closed.

Andrew Mitchem
So making sure that your risk for trade is very, very low, I think is crucial as well. You know. Yes it may. Let’s say you’re doing on your own normal account. It might take you a month, but let’s say half that risk again and it might take you two months. It’s like, well really it shouldn’t matter. Just pass the thing within the drawdown is the is the most important point, not how long it takes you.

How much should you risk per trade.

Etienne Crete
How do you calculate the risk for a trade that you should go with? Is it the specific number that you always follow, or is there some math behind it? Or what do you tell people to focus on?

Andrew Mitchem
For me, I’m just talking purely me personally. I mean, what people do is entirely up to them. Of course, I personally risk only a quarter of 1% of my account on a trade, and if I split that position into two, which quite often I do, you know, like if I’m taking a buy trade, I’ll take a market order and a buy limit just the way that I trade.

Andrew Mitchem
I’ll have like an eighth of 1% of my risk on each of those two positions. So in other words, if both positions got stopped at, I lose only a quarter of 1%. So, you know, you need effectively four whole trades to go wrong to lose 1%. You know, so yes, it will take me longer to get to the profit target because naturally my gains will be smaller as a percentage.

Andrew Mitchem
But the chances of me being stopped out and blowing that I can really quite like small.

Etienne Crete
And then I’ll let people have this issue of they say, oh, well, of course you can do this because they have a big account. But what about guys who have the small account they trade? Well, maybe $10,000 might be able to take all the trades with 0.25%. How would they go about it?

Andrew Mitchem
They can still do that. I mean, if you’re on a prop firm, you know, with a I mean, most people that I so speak to are slightly higher amounts on a prop then, but yeah, like, I suppose if you’re on a $10,000 prop firm, you know, you, you’re risking quite tiny amounts, but that’s fine. You know, 1% is $100, so you’re risking $25 per trade on a $10,000 account.

Andrew Mitchem
It’s still the same risk percentage. I mean, I think if you went down to 10,000, you might have a little bit more difficulty with real, accurate position sizing. But just go very, very small because just don’t get stopped out and you’ll eventually, you know, if you’re trading good enough, you’ll eventually get to that profit target.

Treat a demo, a live and a prop firm account the same.

Etienne Crete
One of the beliefs people have is that the way you pass the valuation is different from the way you should trade the account. Once you fund it, like they try to pass more aggressively to kind of get the income faster. And if they fail, then we get to buy a new one. When they get funded, they they go a bit slower, a bit, more like, structured. Do you agree with that? And you kind of truth, everything the same and just follow the same stuff all the time?

Andrew Mitchem
I’m treated exactly the same. I mean, that’s to me, that’s how I would do it. And I see why people do that. But I don’t think you should. One of the things I’ve always tried to do with prop firms is not even really look at trading. I don’t trade the prop firm as such. I, I personally, put my prop firm onto a virtual server with a bit of trade copier software, and I just focus on trading my own live account, because if I can trade that one, you know, on it, because the head and the heart are two things that play with people’s mind, aren’t they?

Andrew Mitchem
When they get real money, you know, it’s emotions. So why do I want to see like multiple hundred, $250,000 accounts behind the scenes? Because it’s nice to play with what your brain. To me, it’s easier to focus on your live account or, you know, even the demo, but let’s say your own personal account and get that one trading in the right direction properly, and then have those same trades mirrored behind the scenes.

Andrew Mitchem
I just think that’s so much easier because if I have, let’s say, five prop firms, I’m not wanting to go into every single one and calculate the risk and the lot size. And it’s like, oh, now what a close part of the position. Okay, I go in five times. That’s just a pain. Focus on one account trader properly and have it copy behind the scenes.

Etienne Crete
That’s a good point. Yeah. You know, if you look at the account, I feel like a lot of people have pressure from the fact that they’re funded with the fact that they pass and then they can lose a capital. If you don’t think you want to just trade the same account, then that definitely makes a lot of sense.

Andrew Mitchem
Absolutely. To take the emotion out of the as best you can. Because realistically, if you’re on a 100,000 live money, you know, not many people are used to doing that with their own accounts. So it can really start to play with you with your head. So, just focus on your normal account. Get that right. Just do nothing different.

Have a proven strategy first before getting on a prop firm account.

Etienne Crete
Let’s go to some of the common mistakes people make with prop firms. What do you see as the main ones that people make when they go for a prop firm?

Andrew Mitchem
Yeah, I think it’s not they’re not choosing the right one. But it’s a it’s about not having this strategy sorted first. I think that’s the biggest issue is that honestly, is that jumping in too early onto a prop firm when as a person and as a trader, you’re probably not ready. So I would just say to people, just give themselves a realistic chance of getting it right, because you’ve got to have confidence, full confidence in your ability to trade that strategy before you go into it.

Andrew Mitchem
Because like you said, you might just fluke him, get through your your demo account or, you know, but when it comes to real, you start self doubting. So I just think, yeah, it’s a getting that confidence in yourself, your strategy, your ability to do this properly over a period of time and then consider it.

Etienne Crete
Have you fail any prop firm accounts before?

Andrew Mitchem
Yeah I did in the early days. Yeah I did, and I ended up, taking a few trades that were too big a risk and, and they got stopped out. So I learned from that, you know, pretty early on that just go lower and lower risk.

Etienne Crete
It’s interesting because I love people see prop firm as like, a thing you pay and then you should get the account. And sometimes, like in trading, you can never really predict whether a trade will work out to or not. So it’s good to take a step back and accept you could lose an account, you could be funded and lose it and just have to kind of get the consistency and get back to it to, get new account possibly. But yeah, it’s about the reason.

Andrew Mitchem
It’s when I probably, you know, was risking, a little bit, I mean, only very, very low amount of risk. But I had multiple trades open. And like you said, they take that I didn’t hit the stop loss level. But with the open trades and the amount of open trades, it did it. And I suddenly looked at it one day knowing I was pretty safe.

Andrew Mitchem
And I go, oh, that’s. So they’ve closed my account and I wasn’t aware of that rule. So that’s another thing to be aware of. So that’s why I reduced the trades, reduce the risk per trades. And ever since then I’ve been fine.

Etienne Crete
What do you think profits are going I think there’s been a lot of feedback for years. Has been some profits closing down because they had maybe bad practices, some of the ones opening up, of course, a lot of these new ones, it kind of always tried to lower the price and then always kind of try to make the rules match each other.

Etienne Crete
Also what do you think that’s going what do you think it’s going to become in the future of these platforms?

Andrew Mitchem
Is it tricky. And I suppose that, you know, I’m now personally using those ones that have been around for quite some time and I’m using ones that are associated with good brokers behind the scenes who I trade with anyway and know. So those are my kind of criteria when selecting a prop firm. You know, I know who they’re using as a broker.

Andrew Mitchem
I know the brokers are good. I know that that big. I know that there’s no issues with, being able to take a trade. And I think that’s probably the key where it’s going. Well, you’re right, like, I mean, we went through a stage, what, a couple of years ago when a whole heap of them appeared and then disappeared.

Andrew Mitchem
There was a few issues a few years ago when some of them couldn’t trade MetaTrader. Then they could, then they couldn’t. I think that sorted a lot of them out. Yeah. At the moment I personally don’t look at new ones. I’m not really kind of aware of who’s out there. I’ve got my ones who I like, and I’m kind of sticking with them and and I think leading on from that is that when you do find one who you like and you like the roles and you pay, it’s a good, etc., then what’s to stop you not opening more accounts, you know, rather than going searching for another, prop phone company,

Andrew Mitchem
you know, you could like as an example, I’ve got a client, one of my clients in Singapore, who each week opens a new prop firm account, he says, constantly opening new accounts. And so he, you know, some of them might get stopped and some of them will be hitting profit, like now. And, you know, and just with market conditions, you never know what’s going to happen.

Andrew Mitchem
So he’s constantly going through a valuation passing evaluation, maybe failing a valuation passing and just keeping lots of them going. And, you know, that’s, his aim is to get up to $1 million, pretty quickly on live accounts. And, and it’s like, get on him. But rather than having $1 million one account and, you know, I’m blowing it, why not have lots of smaller accounts constantly being opened and you accumulated, you know, totals a million or possibly more.

Andrew Mitchem
I think that’s another really good way of trading because you kind of then if you do have a bad week or so, you’re kind of not like losing everything in one go.

Etienne Crete
I think it’s a good point, but you definitely got to diversify with different prop firms too. I just wouldn’t trust one prop firm by itself. It surely there might be around. They might have some glitches, some issues with technology or something that will make it tough to trade. And having these other accounts can be definitely useful.

Does the prop firm have the markets you trade available?

Andrew Mitchem
Yeah, and also making sure that the prop firm that you choose, has the markets that you trade, you know, if you like as a forex trader. Yes. I now look at metals and cryptos and commodities etc. like that. So I want to make sure that prop firm offers those. There’s no good me in my real trading saying taking maybe 20% of my trades is non forex pairs.

Andrew Mitchem
And then I go to a prop firm or oh, they don’t offer bitcoin or they don’t offer XAU/AUD or anything like that. You know which of some of my, you know, favored pairs for example. So I think it’s really important that you find a prop firm that offers what you like. Also as an example, if you were trading, say, monthly charts or weekly charts and you might want to leave those trades open over the weekend in your real day to day trading, does that prop firm allow you to keep trades open every weekend?

Andrew Mitchem
You know, so all these extra little things that are determined by your own criteria, your trading strategy, making sure they align with their rules.

Etienne Crete
Give a preference for actual prop firms platforms or sometimes prop firms that are offered by brokers.

Andrew Mitchem
Yeah, there’s two that I’m mostly using. I mean, I can name them if you want. So I like The5ers. I’ve used them. I think, you know, they’ve been really, really good. And, blueberry funded is another, you know, the blueberry markets, they’re relatively new, but, you know, I know the guys at Blueberry Markets as the broker.

Andrew Mitchem
Yeah. Pretty. Well, and I think that they’re good. And so by having their kind of backing, with a prop firm’s good, there’s a number of other prop firms that are using EightCap, and they seem very good as well. So I think it’s important that you get that backing of a decent broker behind the scenes.

How to find us and how to join us at The Forex Trading Coach

Etienne Crete
There of people can reach out to you, they want to learn from you or kind of ask you questions after this. This podcast.

Andrew Mitchem
Yeah, sure. So my website’s the TheForexTradingCoach.com, and, we’ve been running for 16 years this year, so, very prior to that and, you know, probably one of the longest companies out there, and we’ve got clients right around the world and, and one of the things that we do is we specifically like to focus on that low risk, but high reward, high risk trades, because that, to me is one of those keys and the secrets to getting through a prop firm.

Etienne Crete
Definitely for the thing below the in the decision will give can take you out there to there. Hopefully they can learn from you. See what you’re doing. You put a log yourself on on YouTube and on your podcast as well. And I appreciate you for what you’re doing there for me. So thank you, Andrew. Appreciate. And hopefully people can, connect with you and, Yeah. Talk to yo soon.

Andrew Mitchem
Brilliant! Thanks for your time again. Appreciate it.

Episode Title: #596: How to Pass Prop Firm Challenges with Andrew Mitchem & Etienne Crete

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Join Me as I Trade in 30 Minutes a Day While Exploring the US

Podcast:

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#595: Join Me as I Trade in 30 Minutes a Day While Exploring the US

In this video:
00:30 – I’m heading to the US
00:59 – Trading and travelling – Join me.
02:05 – Catching up with Paul Tillman.  
02:20 – 20-30 minutes chart time each day.
03:05 – Trading and enjoying life.
03:23 – Get onto my 17 minutes masterclass.
03:37 – Have a chat with us.
03:45 – Blueberry Markets as a Forex Broker.

Would you like to be able to travel and trade at the same time, and make money while you’re on holiday? If that’s something you’d be interested in, listen up. I’ve got a great podcast and video for you. Let’s get into it right now.

Hey there, Traders! It’s Andrew Mitchem here at the Forex Trading Coach video on podcast number 595.

I’m heading to the US

Just a few months ago, my wife celebrated her 50th birthday. And so, to celebrate that we are off in a short time to the US and we’re going to be traveling around the US looking to have a great time. Lots of experiences. Meet some great people. While we’re there though, I’m going to be trading while some traveling while some on holiday. I’m going to be trading exactly the same as I do at home here in my home office in New Zealand.

Trading and travelling – Join me.

And during that time I’m going to be taking some videos, maybe doing some live feeds and showing you the trades that we’re taking and the results of those trades. So if you’d like to follow along while I’m doing that, then I’d love to share that journey and experience with you.

We’re flying in and out of Houston, and so being in Texas, I have to go and experience, some Texan barbecue. I’ve been there before, but this time it’s with my wife. It’s going to be, just the two of us traveling around having a great time. So I’m big into my barbecue. Want to see how they do it correctly and the right way of doing it in Texas.

And as you may know, I’m now heavily into my music with, guitar playing and that starting to sing. So Memphis and Nashville, we’ve got to go there and experience what those, two great places have to offer. After all, we’re going there for my wife’s birthday, and she’s into horses. So we’re going up to Kentucky to, have a look around a few horse studs, and she farms up that way.

Catching up with Paul Tillman.  

And then we’re back to North Carolina to catch up with Paul, who works with me and his family. And, we’re going to do some traveling with him, and then we’ll make our way back down via New Orleans and back to Houston. So that’s going to be our trip.

20-30 minutes chart time each day.

And as mentioned, I’m going to be trading exactly the same. You’ll be taking trades exactly the same. And probably 20-30 minutes max chart time of day. Enjoy the rest of the day. Trade travel. Make money whilst on holiday. And so the beauty of that is with the laptop of course. Take my phone for a hotspot. That’s all I need. So I’ve done it before. And you may have in the past seen when I’ve done similar things.

Traveling around Europe and the UK and India and America in the past. And so we’ve done this many times and it just shows how you can quite easily trade and travel well. If you’re not traveling. That doesn’t matter.

Trading and enjoying life.

It shows how you can trade and carry on with normal things in life, whether it be work or family or hobbies, whatever it is, and just fitting around your trading around what you do.

So follow along. That journey was over there in the US enjoying some, Northern hemisphere sunshine. And if you’d like to find out how we trade right.

Get onto my 17 minutes masterclass.

Now, you can, click on the link here to attend my masterclass. It’s on demand. Just click on it and it’s about 20 minutes long. This watch it and follow along and enjoy it.

Have a chat with us.

If you’d like to come on board and join our trading community. All you need to do is click on the link and book a call to see where the right fit for each other.

Blueberry Markets as a Forex Broker.

And if you’re out there looking for a very, very good broker with lots of different time frame charts, lots of markets, very fast withdrawal times, and the best customer service you’ll find. Click on the link to experience the fantastic Blueberry markets as a forex broker.

So that’s it for now. And, look forward to talking to you this time next week. Bye for now.

Episode Title: #595: Join Me as I Trade in 30 Minutes a Day While Exploring the US

Find out more about Blueberry Markets – Click Here

Find out more about my Online Video Forex Course

Click Here to Attend my Free Masterclass

Book a Call with Andrew or one of his team now

Click Here to Watch Prop Firm Masterclass

Click Here to Access the 30 Minute Trader Page

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Andrew Mitchem and Marc Walton: Top 5 Forex Mistakes & How to Avoid Them

Podcast:

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Find out more about Blueberry Markets – Click Here

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#594: Andrew Mitchem and Marc Walton: Top 5 Forex Mistakes & How to Avoid Them

In this video:
00:12 – Andrew and Marc discuss their backgrounds and how they started trading.
08:18 – Become a better trader and have a check list.
15:00 – Trading Gold and Silver.  
20:53 – Trading Bots and brokers widening spreads.
29:30 – Riding a bike is like learning to trade.
34:00 – Marc’s average day and setting up the new trading week.
39:15 – Trading keeps you mentally active.
44:50 – How can you monetise your knowledge.
50:33 – Trading and living where we want to.

Andrew Mitchem:
Alrighty! Hi, everybody! Andrew Mitchem here at The Forex Trading Coach. I’m really excited today to be joined by Marc Walton from Forex Mentor Pro. Good day, Marc! Nice to see you.

Marc Walton:
Good day. How are you.

Andrew and Marc discuss their backgrounds and how they started trading.

Andrew Mitchem:
Very very well thank you. I thought Marc, we’d just, spend half an hour. So I just have a bit of a chat two people been trading. Sounds like similar amount of time, some backgrounds. And, just give people a bit of a insight of what we’ve done over the years and, and, the pros and cons of what we’ve done and how we’re trading today and the changes we’ve seen.

Marc Walton:
Yeah. I was just saying just saying your path is very similar to mine. We neither of us came from finance. I actually failed math. So level three times.

Andrew Mitchem:
Right?

Marc Walton:
It’s ironic. I also have something called dyspraxia, which I never realized until, like, one of my kids had it. But the only way really affects me is I’m not very. I’m kind of number blind, which is bizarre considering what we do for a living. Yeah, yeah. But yeah. But then again, it’s to me it’s all about pattern recognition.

Marc Walton:
And so I think the main thing is for folks not to get too stressed with, the math side of things, as long as you can control the risk and, and work a simple calculator for it to get the risk right, then maths is not important. I was saying to you earlier, I left the UK. When I left the UK early 2000.

Marc Walton:
Went to live on a little island off the coast of Africa, the Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, which was which is a beautiful place to live. And, I went to sing and play guitar in a band for five years and, thought I’d semi-retired at 40. And then you realize when you retire, you spend more money than you ever did, because.

Marc Walton:
Right. Well, kids in school did now and then, you’ve got so much free time. So I started looking at trying to make money online. Stumbled on forex, which 20 years ago there was hardly any of it. We we have the other extreme nowadays, as we know with, with YouTube, where there’s millions of people stood next to their mates, Ferrari or whatever in Dubai and, and pitching this and the other and they said that, I mean, I paid $4,000, I think, for a course, 20 years ago and, struggled like everybody else.

Marc Walton:
And, and I did a webinar with the other day with my mentor, Rich, who’s a psychologist, and I have the list here of things that went wrong in my trading. And when he put this slide up for the benefit of people in the webinar, it was like, oh crikey, it’s me again. So I’ll just read a few.

Marc Walton:
It’s yeah, I see this. They repeat the same errors over and over again over trading. I’ve tried to pull the trigger over a leveraging retrench, revenge trading, afraid to lose money. Room by emotions, cook win is short. Let loose his run not disciplined. Jump from system to system. And there’s many more. And, I did all of them and, I, I know from your background with farming and things, you probably. I’m guessing, did the same thing. Is that your reason for getting involved?
Andrew Mitchem:
Yeah. Trading. So, I got into trading, actually, as a result of having a young child at the time and going through divorce, it was. It was forced on me. So I was dairy farming and, which I was when my family had been dairy farming through England moved to New Zealand, you know, it was nearly 30 years ago.

Andrew Mitchem:
I had the dream. Well, I eventually did some work, you know, different companies actually bought a farm and it kind of all then imploded. It all went wrong. And and it was like, what do I do now?

Marc Walton:
Yeah.

Andrew Mitchem:
And I was looking after my son. Not full time, but fairly close at times. And yeah, I can’t go and be a rep for a company. I can’t go and work on another farm. What do I do that allows me to work from home and look after him? And I’m like yourself. Back in those days, it was unheard of to from a bloke from home by yourself.

Andrew Mitchem:
It was unheard of to do anything on the internet, pretty much because it was dial up. Still, you know, one gigabyte a month was like this May. Well, I remember when I went to ten and everybody was blown away. I got a dial up space. But and so I stumbled and I paid 5,000 NZD and went up to Auckland and did a weekend course up there.

Andrew Mitchem:
And although when I look at it, it wasn’t great, I can’t knock it because it got me into trading and it gave me the the buzz of this whole new world that I didn’t know existed.

Marc Walton:
Yeah, yeah. Well, for me it was a necessity as well because I say we we semi-retired or sort of semi-retired and we were just burning through money. I budgeted that, let’s say we were going to spend 25, 30 grand a year. I think the first year we’re there, we went through 50 and it was okay, need to do something about this.

Marc Walton:
And it was born out of necessity. It’s very similar to you because if if I hadn’t been able to get forex to work, I would have ended up having to go back to the UK with my tail between my legs. Because the only, the only work in, Spain, Canary Islands for a foreigner would be in a bar.

Marc Walton:
Yes. And, my wife said if you ever buy a music bar, I will shoot you. So, so thankfully, I didn’t do that and I got into forex. And the other thing is, I employed people all my life until that point, and I really didn’t want to go through the hassle of employing people over again, which is great. This is why this is so good.

Andrew Mitchem:
That’s right. So when you started in like what? Kind of like, how long did it take you to. I’m guessing you did like me. You people, ideas, systems, e-books, robots, backtesting, everything under the sun. And then suddenly something clicked to make it go from losing money to working the.

Marc Walton:
The course that I bought actually wasn’t bad at all. It was. It’s very similar to what I do now. In many ways. It was all about support and resistance and it it was huge. It was using a lot of EMA’s and I only use a few now, but in general it was support and resistance. The issue I had was it looked too easy.

Andrew Mitchem:
But You know, I’m a smart fellow. This is not difficult. I can do this. I actually believe most people can do this. But the problem that screwed me up was my head. And, I say I went through all the issues I’ve just mentioned revenge trading, etc., etc. but the biggest thing for me was that I would go through a period of time where I would win and then I could lose it all.

Marc Walton:
And you know, the last time I got to the point of quitting was I went five months consistently making money 3 to 5% a month on a big account. This is okay. Slow and steady wins the race. And I lost most of the five months profits in a week. So for me, the periods between meltdown got bigger. But the same result was that I took I took a few months off, to basically let it all settle in my brain.

Marc Walton:
And thankfully I found the retired trader to teach me because if I hadn’t, I would have been. I don’t think I would have ever made it. And then, for me, discipline has always been an issue. And I think when you come the background I had before I got I’d left the UK, I had frozen food company and so I had to cry, loss, cry a lot of stuff.

Marc Walton:
And you come under lots of rules. But we also supplied the Prison service with food, so we were highly regulated. And then when it got to trading, suddenly I’ve got the cash. There we go, you know.

Andrew Mitchem:
Do what you like.

Marc Walton:
Yeah. And it’s ironic because within a year of meeting Rich and him ironing out the issues and half the issue with the psychology is making yourself self aware. And then the other the other part is the discipline. And, he introduced me to a fund in the, in the US. It wouldn’t be allowed nowadays, but I was training remotely from Lanzarote for a fund in New York.

Marc Walton:
And they basically give you a book, This thick of rules. And if you break the rules, you’re out. Right. So before you take a trade, every time you thinking, you go through the checklist, you make sure everything you’ve got, everything is spot on. And I say to people nowadays, always use a checklist. Yes, I tell folks to look for five reasons.

Become a better trader and have a check list.

Marc Walton:
If you don’t have five reasons to compromise, walk away. And so having a checklist and having somebody looking over your shoulder made me a better trader. And I worked for them for three years. Then in 2008, I started doing it for myself and doing it for my own clients. And the bad habits started creeping back in. Right.

Marc Walton:
Which is when I started posting on Twitter in the early days, Twitter in the early days wasn’t the war zone it is now. And, people were genuinely helping each other. And I was just saying, oh, you know, I’m going to shorten your account today here for these reasons. And people ask me to teach them as well.

Marc Walton:
Okay. And that was good because otherwise, because I’d got to the point where I was only placing a few trades a day, and now I’m placing maybe one of the day. I had a lot of free time on my hands. I have free time on my hands. I’m dangerous. And even today, last year, about six months ago, we had, quite a lot of new folks in, in Mentor Pro and they wanted to trade more actively.

Marc Walton:
So I traded, they traded for a week. And at the end of the week I had brought that. Well, I think I took eight trades. And at three of them I shouldn’t have taken because they broke my rules. And I got up twice in the middle of the night because of news. And by the end of the week, I think I’d lost half a percent.

Marc Walton:
And I had spent 20 hours in from the screens and got and all the old things come flooding back. So I think the other thing people need to be aware of is you’ve got to be every day. You’ve got to be able to stick to the rules, because otherwise you’d be screwed. And success is as harmful as it is.

Marc Walton:
Not knowing what you’re doing is, you know.

Andrew Mitchem:
That’s a really interesting point because, as you know, I fly a helicopter privately and the checklist is needed. And yes, you’re right, and you have to go through a checklist. It doesn’t matter how, even if you’re like a pro doing it daily, that still goes through a checklist. Yeah. Is that one time you don’t go through that checklist and you miss something like, you know, obviously trading can damage you. Flying can do a bigger damage.

Andrew Mitchem:
But similar thing, you know, you’re either going to yeah. You know, you’re going to over cook an engine when you start or you should have checked something that you didn’t. Yeah. Preflight in flight, whatever it might be. So yeah. Like, I’m I’m with you. The checklist is so important, and it’s. I find that really an interesting story.

Andrew Mitchem:
How you, with all your experience and still drift back? Oh, yeah. I mean, against those rules, if you had them set out.

Marc Walton:
Yeah, and I will again, I said earlier, you’ve got to be able to introspectively look at yourself and see what you’re doing. And my, my, my mentor, I’ve said it with me. You know, if you don’t fail at least seven out of ten in health and psychology and in general, failing when you get don’t. Right. And that’s when you’re day trading.

Marc Walton:
So, I don’t do that every day, but and in truth, I don’t keep a journal every day, but if you’re new until you’ve been doing this for years, you need to keep a journal is. We would both agree, I’m sure.

Andrew Mitchem:
Absolutely. So you mentioned new people. So someone new, they’ve you know, like you said, they’ve been kind of conned into the YouTube and Bryson Lamborghini stuff. What would your suggestions be for someone new looking at trading about? Where do they start? What kind of things should they look for or avoid? What forms? Maybe any like technical should be fundamental.

Andrew Mitchem:
What should they look for?

Marc Walton:
I traded, I say I traded stocks in the 90s. In those days we worked off new sheets and you had to ring the broker. So it wasn’t like we know now, and I used to think technical analysis was tosh. It just it was nonsense. And then when I, when I learned to trade from this DVD series.

Marc Walton:
So now, crikey, this works, this one, this fib level works and this works and this will actually. And so that that was good for me. And then I traded really for the fund until 2008, 2009. Just technically, yes. And then when the financial crash came along and suddenly it was the what the heck moment I started to pay attention to fundamentals.

Marc Walton:
So nowadays I am 70% technical when it comes to trading forex and I am 30% filter it with fundamental rules. And so I have a bias fundamentally. So I kind of say to people, look, if you’re trading the New Zealand dollar, for example, what do you know about New Zealand. And they will go, I think they’ve got cows.

Marc Walton:
Yeah. Okay. Well it’s actually a good clue. But what do they do and who do they sell it to. And, and one of the big concerns obviously in your neck of the woods is the Chinese. If the Chinese move into Taiwan, your economy and Australia’s economy is going to be in the deep doo doo. So I use a mixture of both when when it comes to crypto and when it comes to stocks, I’m 70% fundamental and 30% technical because the the crypto I unlike you, I don’t trade crypto.

Marc Walton:
Although having talked about that a little earlier, I’m going to have a look at it now. But I basically bought and hold right. But I bought crypto that they had to be faster, smarter, cheaper, revolutionizing the sector. And being used. And and did really well because I got in 2019, I started to understand crypto. February 2020 I bought my first Bitcoin at eight grand.

Marc Walton:
Crashed to 4000 the following month with Covid, but then recovered. By I mean, by the following January it was up at 50 odd. So it was a really good time to be in. Yes. What I did as well with that is I’d learned the lesson when I traded stocks in the 90s. It was it was very similar to what’s going on in crypto now.

Marc Walton:
In 1995 96. They when they when it started to boom, everything went top. It was easy and I was naive at the time. I didn’t I didn’t take my profit. I didn’t get out in time and lost again. Lost a lot of it with crypto this time. What I said to folks is, look, if it goes from eight grand to 20, take the stake out.

Marc Walton:
If it goes up to 30, take some profit out. And then we started to buy more on the dips. So when the crash came in the April, the 21, I still hung on to everything I had was bought and paid for and I’d made a profit. And so trying to to kind of use the same skillset I am nowadays, I’m involved in crypto.

Trading Gold and Silver

Marc Walton:
I started buying gold in 2022 because it was obvious after all the the money printing from Covid that there was going to be an inflation issue. Yes. So I caught that at the right time and that’s fundamentals. And then I use the technicals to get in and and same with silver. So I have more silver than gold.

Marc Walton:
And that’s technically because in 2012 silver was up at $49.

Andrew Mitchem:
That’s brilliant!

Marc Walton:
But yeah technically it’s got the room. So I think the more you know about how the financial world works, how everything’s into interrelated. Yes, I look I look every day at the Dec Seed I look at the U.S. stock markets, I look at gold, I look at crypto, I look at forex. I’m trying to work on the day. I’m database where the big money’s going. Yeah. And and if it’s not in forex, that’s fine. I’ll leave it. I’ll go off. And if this is where the money is, this is where I will go for the day. And I don’t spend a lot of time with that.

Andrew Mitchem:
No. That’s brilliant. Thank you. That’s fascinating what you said about silver. I had conversations with people back then when it just almost reached 50, didn’t it? Didn’t quite get to 50, but it was very close. And when it started, you know, pulling back and I said to people, well, you know, it was $20, let’s say I said, well, for crypto, I’m sorry for silver to go from 20 to 40.

Andrew Mitchem:
Obviously it doubles. We are. It’s not needing a new high. Yeah. This is like I’m talking physical silver. Yeah, yeah. Whereas gold at the time was whatever it was, you know, 2000 and whatever the figure was for it to double was a massive move. And to make a brand new high by quite some margin. And so I was thought from a, you know, with silver, with its electrical capacity, its medical ability, you know, in every electric we have, but most of it’s thrown away because it costs more to extract it than it does to.

Andrew Mitchem:
Yeah, yeah, it’s a so I looked at all those things and I thought physical sale was definitely the way to go. Yeah. I found really interesting that you went and said that exact same reason.

Marc Walton:
Yeah, yeah. And nowadays with, solar panels, electric cars, there’s a new car. I can’t remember which manufacturer. There’s one of the Japanese manufacturers supposedly bringing a new electric car out that will do 900. I’m not sure if it’s kilometers or miles range on a smaller battery.

Andrew Mitchem:
Right.

Marc Walton:
So they reckon that they reckon that behalf about of silver in each engine.

Andrew Mitchem:
Yeah. You know, so.

Marc Walton:
The thing is gold is a is a the safe, the ultimate safe haven, as we know, where the silver is being used. And they say technically it should. So I was buying silver at $16 and $18, and I was buy. It’s like buying gold again at 1800. Yeah, but like you say, gold technically four times rejected around 2000.

Marc Walton:
It was just typical double top, double top, double double top. But what pushed it through was the situation in the Middle East. So again, the fundamental side of it well this time could be different. So I say and I think as well as we get older to, to be able to go into different markets and use the same skills that keeps you mentally alert.

Marc Walton:
I, I’m studying I’m studying options at the moment. And because of course, the, the issue when you buy a physical asset, whether it be a stock, or you buy a forex trade, the problem is always is the stops. Whereas if we could use an option creatively I’m kind of thinking about that. So always, always trying to think of new ways of doing things.

Marc Walton:
Otherwise you would just about them.

Andrew Mitchem:
And I think that was one of the nice things that we, we chatted about before we started this is that, you know, when I look at your website, Forex Mentor Pro. Me, The Forex Trading Coach, but we’ve both diverted into other, other markets. Yes, as they become available to us. Still, I still love the forex market, but like you say that at times it’s been a little bit boring in the last few years it hasn’t been quite as good as it was if you go back years ago.

Andrew Mitchem:
I mean, I remember the early days when I started and getting up in the middle of the night here to trade the non-farm payrolls. You know, the general employment now is not there. Yeah. Well, in the early days, for me it was just magic because it used to jump 3 or 400 pips within, you know, like a few seconds, you know, and you put a straddle trade in and whichever the buy stop or the sell stop got filled, you frantically went and deleted the other one and and pressed exit on the other one.

Andrew Mitchem:
And you go, oh, it’s made 10%. Not having a clue what you did, but you could do those things back then. Yeah. Whereas, you know, I personally then realized that trading, fundamentals wasn’t for me after, they know, lined up on all those things.

Marc Walton:
Well, it’s like London, wasn’t it? We’ve all had the London breakout. Yeah, that really was the classic time where it was 2014-15 is when it stopped working. But we were looking at the pound was doing 150 pips daily range. Yeah. In the Asian session it would go to sleep. So you just had one cancels. The little does at London.

Andrew Mitchem:
Which one broke at first you went with it.

Marc Walton:
Yeah. And you could literally make a week’s money in in an hour a day. That was the the classic time. But of course for those joining us now there’s, there are still opportunities. Yes. Hundreds. Yeah I never use robots. The thing to me with robot, if you if you’ve got manual intervention. Yes. But otherwise a robot is programed to if we’re in an uptrend, it’s programed to buy and it’s not able to see, well, hang on a minute.

Marc Walton:
There are lots of clues here that this is maybe going to change with today. With that, aren’t we? We just had a bit of a big pullback in stocks. Dollar index can’t decide whether the dollar is going to go up or down. Where an a robot will just keep doing what it’s told. So I, I’ve never had any success with them.

Trading Bots and brokers widening spreads.

Marc Walton:
And then the only robot to my knowledge that that did well in historically was FAP turbo.

Andrew Mitchem:
Oh, really got into that one too.

Marc Walton:
Yeah, it was a terrible name. FAP turbo. And, I spoke to the guy that created it, what this thing was doing in the Asian session. They set it up so that it would just take a pip, from a slight movement that went on. And then they I talked to the guy who created it, and he was telling me that they sold too many of them.

Marc Walton:
They sold 50,000. And so the brokers were getting stung every day, reverse engineered it. So when this move happened, suddenly the brokers widened the spread.

Andrew Mitchem:
Yeah.

Marc Walton:
And I had that issue because the other thing I had years ago was I had a gap trading strategy. The market opened and I say I had it, I, it was a Swedish guy I work with called Gosta forget his surname now. They created this EA and it was brilliant. What it would do is it would scan all the pairs at the market open, and it would scan the gaps visibly.

Marc Walton:
The spread. And so and then it would calculate, it would place up to six trades after 90s. So it sounds a bit technical, but basically this thing was a surefire winner. And we were making a lot of money. We were we were only allowing, clients to put an extra 50 grand in total in each week because we were hitting the liquidity levels.

Marc Walton:
Anyway, the brokers killed it because they reverse engineered what we did, and then they just played with the spreads and that killed it throughout. So and so that’s actually another interesting thing for folks. Don’t convince yourself if you found something that you think is revolutionary and you’ve found the Holy Grail, and we’ve all found it at times is try it on a on a live account and try it on a reasonable sized live account.

Marc Walton:
Because years ago I, the guy came to me and he was making 400% a month with this EA wanted me to sign an NDA before he would let me see it and explain. And I just said, who is it with an IT name? The broker, an English broker. And I said, what size account? Thousand dollar account.

Marc Walton:
Let’s stick it, stick it on a 50 and then come back. Never came back. Because the bloke, the brokers a lot of the brokers will play with you if you if you stick your head above the parapet. In my experience, I mean, if you find a decent broker, we have decent a couple of decent brokers.

Marc Walton:
Now, I know you were saying you’ve worked with the same one for years. If you find a decent one, stick with them.

Andrew Mitchem:
Absolutely. That’s a good case. Yeah. So someone listening to this, that’s been trading for a number of years and they’re just, you know, getting frustrated, blaming everybody but themselves. You know, it’s the market’s fast. The dogs fault. Any suggestions from your experience and what they could look at doing.

Marc Walton:
The solution for me was to, to stop being so tight and pay somebody to teach me. I mean, I wasted two and a half years trying to do it myself. And as we get older, you realize the time is far more important than the money. Yeah. And the money that I lost was greater than what I paid.

Marc Walton:
If you if you want to do it yourself, then you have to have rules and structure. I mean, I say to people, look, the first thing you should do is have a business life plan. What are you trying to achieve and how are you going to get there and set yourself some measurable goals. And if and then, then you need to trade in rules.

Marc Walton:
But from the life plan point of view, you want to be within three months. I want to be reasonably consistent, probably, and most importantly, controlling the drawdown. I want within six months to get on a funded account at these these funded accounts. Now, this is another thing. When these first came out, they were just a Ponzi. I, I was approached by a firm 3 or 4 years ago, and they were supplying some of the real big companies and they sold it to me.

Marc Walton:
It’s look, it’s 30 grand to cost for me. And you make your money back in two months. Everybody loses. It’s a great it’s a great business model. It’s okay. Yeah, well, I have a bit of an issue with that. Not for me. Not for me, thank you very much. And so the way that these things were set up were deliberately to trip people up.

Marc Walton:
There’s so many rules and regulations that hardly anybody got through. But the biggest earning company at that time was it, which was bringing in 140 grand a month in revenue. And the rules were so tricky. They’ve got to make 10% in a month. Very small drawdown, minimum number of trades. You can’t trade on a Tuesday without your your shirt like rolled up a it was all designed and then the few that got through of course they were getting paid this 80% commission out of this huge amount of money come in in the front end.

Marc Walton:
Yes. But then about a year or so ago, I say they started to clean their act up. And also I could see the educational benefit for it because now you’ve got the same rules as I had in 2005 working for a fund if you break the rules. Yeah. Out. Yeah. So I would suggest to anybody who’s learning now how to do it is forget the boys on on YouTube.

Marc Walton:
You know, if something’s too good to be true. It is. Believe me, we’ve both been there and done that and spent the money and got the badge. Learn to do it. Old school. You’ve got to be realistic in your expectations. You should focus on trying to do it on a bigger account. So if you can make 3 to 5% a month on $1,000, it’s just everybody gets bored.

Marc Walton:
And then they they ramp up the risk and then they lose it all. But if you could do that on a 100,000 account now it starts to get interesting. If you can do it on a seven figure account, you can make a lot of money for not doing the right. You’re not doing any more work. That’s right. And for me that was the solution.

Marc Walton:
But with these funded accounts, if you can pay education, it it’s a great tool because it gives you the discipline. And ultimately for me and most of the people I’ve taught over the years, it’s the lack of discipline that kills them. I said before, I think, I think anybody can do this. I mean, in theory, in principle it’s not that hard, but it’s this is this that screws up.

Andrew Mitchem:
Well. You’ve picked on one of the two things I’ve always pointed to people. And I said, one’s up here, hit the other than here. It’s your head and heart, isn’t it? You’ve got to control those two because, yeah, it’s real money. It’s great when you profit. It’s horrible when you lose. Yeah. And then the self-doubt starts. All the silliness starts.

Andrew Mitchem:
If you look.

Marc Walton:
Yeah. I wrote an article years ago saying when boring is great, you get to the boring. If you get to the boring level and you don’t get high when you win and you get low and you lose, you know you’re on your way. Good training is boring. Yeah. And for me, that that’s the the place to be. I don’t get excited with it.

Marc Walton:
Crypto did get exciting because it was making so much money in such a short space, but this time, because I’ve been through it with the bitcoin boom. This time I took the stake and took the profit, and that’s the way I do it now. So yeah. But it is all about structure, discipline, rules and and and I mean, your website similar to ours is that we don’t pitch.

Marc Walton:
You’re going to get rich quick. And I don’t know what you find, but most of the people come to us are on the way out the door. They’ve tried everything.

Andrew Mitchem:
They’re frustrated. Yeah, yeah.

Marc Walton:
Yeah. And they kind of realize that. All the best. Yes. This bloke or this bloke actually sounded the legit. Yeah. And so again, the thing is, if you’re going to go to a, an educator or a course or whatever, then dig deep, you know, get googling, look for reviews, you know, you’ll always find the occasional bad one because so it’s like with brokers.

Marc Walton:
Brokers is the typical one. Brokers pay people to write bad reviews for other brokers, so you never know who’s the right, who’s a good broker until you actually put your money with them. And this the same with mentoring and know you’ll get people occasionally that they’ve lost and they’ve lost because of their own shortcomings. But then blame the guy that the paid the money to correct.

Marc Walton:
So again, you know, we are all responsible for our own actions and dates. Do the research, do this properly. And I say, you know, this is a profession. Yes, it is a profession. You’re not from a financial background. They say, I couldn’t even pass basic maths at school. But managed to make a decent living out of this, because and again, I think it’s safe for me, it’s just repeatable patterns.

Riding a bike is like learning to trade.

Andrew Mitchem:
Patterns are correct. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Looking at, I use the, description on, some webinars for people. I said, do you remember when you’re a kid and you jumped on a bicycle for the first time and there was stuff going on everywhere, and it was all complicated. And they, you know, when you get older, you can just do it.

Andrew Mitchem:
I said, training’s a little bit like that. But also, you know, you, me coming from England originally would have learned the green. Was it the green cross code? I think the, you know, how do you remember that. Yeah. And it was look left right and left again. And I say to people do that on your charts because so many people, they want this moving average in this day.

Andrew Mitchem:
And something else I said, you’re cluttering your charts with stark rubbish. Yeah. Look at the charts. Look at the right hand side. Look at what the prices. Yeah. There’s so many people, they start buying it, like you said, with silver, you know, they’ll buy it like 49, 90. And it’s like well it’s going to hit it isn’t it.

Andrew Mitchem:
Look. Yeah. Look back on the other side. Oh last time it bounced there. Guess what it’s likely to do again. Look left and look right. And people don’t do that. I find so often.

Marc Walton:
I think that the thing I mean the market is down help. But the thing is that when you look after the event, it looks so easy. And that’s what’s so frustrating about this. And so people, people tend to concentrate on this bit. And the main thing is look left, left. Let’s see what happened before. And then the other thing is people don’t realize what’s going on.

Marc Walton:
If gold was coming up to 2000 for the third or fourth time, well, think of what’s going on. The people who bought it at a 20 1800s. And again, twitchy because they’re thinking looking left. Last time it got up here, it dropped. And then the next time, well, now it’s done it two times for crying out loud. Just think probability.

Marc Walton:
If it’s twice the likelihood it’s going to do it again is greater than not. So at least get your stake out. And if you’re confident it’s going to push through. And again it needs a catalyst to push through. And I say the last time when gold got through, we did get up to 2070 and rejected. But when he actually went through it was something it kicked off in the Middle East or Ukraine, I can’t remember it was one or the other and it went, but so it went for a fundamental reason.

Marc Walton:
I think now personally, that I think gold will continue to go up. I think we’ll be profit taking it 3000. But I think that the financial mess that we were in, is, is going to implode at some point. But having said that, I felt that the last two years. But the other thing, something for people to take away from this is have a look at gold and silver mining stocks, because last year and gold and silver often are very poor investments.

Marc Walton:
The the gold bubbles will be permanently by gold. By gold. You know, you don’t always make money in gold. Gold from 2009 to 2012 was great. The S&P took five years to recover after the crash. Gold recovered within a year and it went from seven or 800 to 19 something. Then for 2012 it went down well. The S&P is going up.

Marc Walton:
And so from 2012 to 2018 it was a poor investment. Not only did it come down in value, you have to pay to store it and ensure it. So if you can catch it at the right time, it’s great. So we call gold and silver from 2022. Last year alone, I think gold was up 30%, silver was up 40%.

Marc Walton:
My best silver miner was up 260%. Wow. So the thinking is and this is because of fundamentals with me, that the stock at the time was x k I think it’s never silver. It came down to the Covid lows. And again I’ve got all the charts set up and all the stocks and everything for Covid lows after the crash.

Marc Walton:
This is where it stopped ultimately. But if gold and silver is going up and a mine is digging it out of the ground, and they’ve got all the infrastructure and all the equipment and all the men, then the value of what’s in the ground is discounted at the moment.

Marc Walton:
So have a look at mining stocks. But last year we, we, we caught a lot of stocks that more than doubled that were mining stocks. Right. So it’s something for you to have a look at. And yeah. It’s just a way of getting leverage without using leverage.

Andrew Mitchem:
Yeah. Great information. Perfect. So you’re looking into all these things. You’re still predominantly the euphoric side a technical trader. Let me yeah.

Marc’s average day and setting up the new trading week.

Andrew Mitchem:
What’s your average day look like now.

Marc Walton:
I don’t do much I mainly work on a weekend. So on a Sunday when the markets are closed. And again, I find this is the best time to study because nothing’s moving. So you’re not tempted to get involved?

Andrew Mitchem:
No emotion.

Marc Walton:
So there’s no emotion. It’s just purely a maths. Well, at maths comp pattern exercise I look at maybe 20 odd pairs and I am looking first on the weekly chart and I’m just looking, well hey, is it going up, down or sideways? Yeah. If it’s going up I want to buy it is going down. I want to sell in the full range trading.

Marc Walton:
We’ll look at it in a different way. And I’m looking for a sweet spot that will draw my eye. It might be an EMA. It might be a major point, a previous resistance, a trend line or whatever. And so that’s okay. That’s interesting. And then I will go down to the daily to look for multiple reasons. So I need five reasons for a trade.

Marc Walton:
So I’ve written them down because I would forget. So I have the 255 EMA and I have them on the chart on the daily. I also have the where, the weekly and the monthly. I want to know where the big levels are. Fibonacci trend lines, horizontal support, resistance, whole numbers, double tops, double bottoms, Mac D risk reward ratio.

Marc Walton:
Because if it doesn’t give me at least twice the risk, I don’t touch it. Candlestick patterns occasionally and correlation. And so it’s a very systematic approach. So now I will I will go and look at something and think, well it looked really interesting on the weekly but the risk rewards pull or whatever. And then I’ll go to the next one.

Marc Walton:
So that one I forget. And if I look at stuff on a weekly not interested, forget, forget, forget. And the goal is to find half a dozen a great trades if possible in a week, and an A-grade ticks all the boxes. And then the final thing is I go have a look at the news to see what could come out that could screw with it.

Marc Walton:
And like for me, the A2 days, usually Tuesday morning in the middle of the night. So if I see a good a good set of portfolios Sunday night, I will often wait until the big news comes out right?

Andrew Mitchem:
Yeah. So I started off and had their employment or their interest rate news on a Tuesday afternoon. Our time.

Marc Walton:
Yeah, yeah. So for us it’s the middle of the night. That’s right. And I might wait too long. Do that once. And then on the daily basis I spend about an hour. And I said early I look at the Dax, I look at S&P, I look at gold, silver. I look at stocks, I look crypto and a I’m trying to find what’s generally going on because ultimately, you know, where’s the big money going.

Marc Walton:
Yeah. And the big money prior to Covid it was a lot easier fundamentally because all it was this was interest rates inflation and growth. They every piece of red flag news relates to those three things. And at the time all the central banks were trying to get inflation up to 2%. Well, it did a good job there.

Marc Walton:
And then inflation, things got out of hand. And growth growth really is ridiculous because when you think about how much money was pumped into economies with Covid, you went to the UK this summer. I went to the UK this summer. Gone. I couldn’t believe the price of things.

Andrew Mitchem:
Gone through the roof. Hadn’t I absolutely.

Marc Walton:
Gone through there? And yet the government out of inflation is now at 3%. Rubbish. The reason why inflation is at 3% is all the government workers pay rises are linked to the inflation. And so a lot of the fundamental stuff’s gone out the window. But I have a bias at the minute. I have a bias negative and a negative NZD.

Marc Walton:
Yeah, a euro and the pound. So I am just waiting. I actually called the pound yesterday from three weeks ago, but I caught it within a few pips.

Andrew Mitchem:
Yes.

Marc Walton:
And I don’t wait. So I will just wait. And and if ultimately I look at forex and it’s just chaotic and something else looks more interesting, I’ll go do that. I just want to make money. I just want to make money right here to not explode.

Andrew Mitchem:
No, and that’s right. And that’s what, I think that, you know, we talked about earlier is that with the ability over the last handful of years for us both to be able to look at other markets, those metals, as indices, those commodities. I said to you, it I took your trade yesterday on aluminum. Yesterday I’ve taken a trade on the Hong Kong 50.

Andrew Mitchem:
And when the sugar market opens in America in a few hours time, I’ll be doing the same, providing there’s no massive gap. If you’d have. We’d had this chat five years ago and you said, yeah, you could do Hong Kong 50 sugar now a million. I would have no idea. Yeah, but what they look like on a chart.

Marc Walton:
It’s the same with same with crypto in 20-2021. Bitcoin. Bitcoin went up. Pull back up followed. But I did it five times. And it pulled back into a couple of EMAs and said levels in the trend line. It was easy. It really was easy. And the other thing I mean, as we’re getting older, my oldest client is 85 years old and he still a it’s still a shop as, as as ever.

Marc Walton:
But he joined me 15 years ago on a lifetime member. So yes, financially made no money whatever. Yep. Yep.

Andrew Mitchem:
I’ve I’ve got many of them from years ago. Yeah.

Marc Walton:
Yeah. But I had a good chat with in recently from north of England and he said part of the reason he’s doing it was to keep mentally active.

Trading keeps you mentally active.

Marc Walton:
Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, that’s the same thing for me. This is a mental challenge. It’s I don’t get highs and lows, wins and losses. But I do enjoy the mental side of it.

Marc Walton:
And I think as people are coming to retirement, so many people don’t have a big enough pension. So a they’ve got a financial need to make money. But the other thing is the need to do something.

Andrew Mitchem:
To do something with it, you know? Mind.

Marc Walton:
My my father works in a factory all his life. And the average life span 30, 40 years ago in the UK was 69. So people retired at 65. And they were then blessed that. Yeah, now the average age spans 82, 83. And you know, if you’ve got your marbles and you’re healthy, then that’s you make the most of it.

Andrew Mitchem:
You don’t want to be 82, 83 or 70 2 or 62 and and just sit blubbing watching clips and which is what so many people do, unfortunately.

Marc Walton:
Yeah. I don’t know about you, my average client. I don’t take many private clients nowadays because I’m trying to focus on all the things. But my average private client pre-COVID was 50 plus. Married kids have left home, gone to school, gone to university or left home, going to work, own business or middle management. Starting to panic about retirement.

Marc Walton:
Yeah. And both in terms of finance because most people haven’t got enough pension. And then the other thing was to do something mentally keep them safe. Ironically, since Covid, I then got a lot of younger ones. Yeah. Who kind of said, hey, I don’t want to go work for this firm for the next 30, 40 years. But yeah, but prior to that, it was older people.

Marc Walton:
And I say from a mental point of view and a monetary point of view, you can’t beat it. You know, I used to have 20 odd stuff working for my 20 odd subcontractors. I used to have hair and, stress to hell. And I would never employ anybody ever again. Yes, people now that work with me, I have people I’ve trained and they work with me, but they’re all self self-employed.

Marc Walton:
Yes. And all to ultimately, if people don’t perform anymore, I have to say I’m sorry. You have to go. Yeah, but I have one guy who’s been with me for 15 years. So to be able to do something to to do it from home, to live wherever you want, to not have any, any staff. It’s the best business in the world.

Marc Walton:
It really is. Yeah. If you can do it. So it’s a profession. Learn to do it properly and stick to the roots.

Andrew Mitchem:
Well, I think one thing that I hope that people take from this is the amount of time it took us both. Yeah. Okay. It took me four years of going around in circles. And as I said at the time, my son at the time was very young. And you start getting those stats and people say, really? Should you go and get yourself a proper job?

Andrew Mitchem:
And, you know, you got your son to look after and those mental I just feel for people that get there because we’ve been there. Yes. For sure. And also as you mentioned there, there’s more younger people. And of course, everybody thinks that the answers I and as we’ve said that, you know, even if you use some form of robot of I if you really want to go for it, but you still need that human common sense to understand how it works or create it yourself, it’s not good buying something because you don’t know when it’s going to start working.

Andrew Mitchem:
But there’s so much to be said for that mental ability to go, I can do this. I can make three, five, 10% a month, and I can choose to go to a prop firm or whichever way you want. And I think that ability to do that and have that decision making is it keeps you an interest of what’s happening in the world as well.

Andrew Mitchem:
Yeah, it’s otherwise it’s kind of lonely our business isn’t that. Yeah.

Marc Walton:
Yeah, it definitely does.

Andrew Mitchem:
Interesting. We all comment about why you started teaching and mine was the same. I won a signal, competition in 2006 or 7 or something when the early days of PayPal and subscriptions and somebody said to me, rather than me buying the signals, would you teach me how to trade? And that’s how it all started. Yeah. And I’m probably like yourself, I love the community aspect of helping like minded people who want to help themselves.

Andrew Mitchem:
Yeah, the whole time you get someone that just goes, I want everything and I don’t want to do anything. That’s. Yeah, go somewhere else. Yeah. Let’s go to YouTube. Yeah.

Marc Walton:
Well, I say to people, you know, it’s quite funny because people would book me for a call and they think they’re interviewing me, and I’m actually interviewing them because and I would say to people, look, I am not here to pull you along. I am here to lead you and you need to do the work. And ultimately, you have to accept the fact you just might not be any good at this.

Andrew Mitchem:
Yeah, we’re all just too lazy for it. Potentially. Yeah.

Marc Walton:
Well, yeah. Yeah, I’ve had it in the past with people that I’m the money over and then they don’t do the work and it’s like, what are you doing? You know, it’s almost as I well, I’ve ended the money over now. And it’s like now there’s a serious amount of work to do with it. So and if you’re not ready to do it, then go do something else.

Marc Walton:
Right. It’s because it’s draining for us as a coach and it’s a waste of money for them. But the other thing, what I try to do with people, it’s is a lot. Look, a create multiple streams of income. Do not just rely on forex trading because there are periods of time when it’s really easy. There are other times when it’s really challenging.

Marc Walton:
Yes. And the other thing you know, and I know if you get into a drawdown situation and it’s so depressing and stressful because every day you wake up in a negative trying to get back and as we know, anybody’s ever been in debt, it’s twice as hard to get back to zero as it is to get to 10,000 profit.n And so the stress and everything.

How can you monetise your knowledge.

Marc Walton:
So I said to people, right, well, what’s your current skillset? What could you do? You know, if you came to me as a dairy farmer, well, how could you monetize your knowledge teaching or the dairy farmers? Or is there something that you’ve done in the power helicopter? Could you teach people to think of multiple streams of income, and then you’re not just reliant on one?

Marc Walton:
And the point now, for me these days, I don’t just want to teach people how to trade forex, I want to teach them how all financial markets work if they want to go down that journey. But I also want to try to say to them, look, you know, I was fortunate. I was one of the few with a 40 year old with four kids and a good business that said, you know what?

Marc Walton:
I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s depressing me. We’re off to go live on an island somewhere. Everybody that knew me would like to run in a book in be back in three months. It’ll be back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And to do that with four kids and all the commitment and that you’ve got is, is a big leap of faith.

Marc Walton:
But I was fortunate we bought some houses for income, so we did plummet. But but so the point is, is this thinking about how can you monetize your current skills as well as doing this? Yes. I mean, ultimately, if you’re any good at this, you can teach other people to do that. If you like teaching, if you don’t like teaching and you don’t like people, then don’t do that.

Marc Walton:
You know, you might prefer something that’s not involved, but but try to learn a skill or try to use this current skill that you’ve got to be able to monetize it. And even if you only earn a few hundred dollars from this a week and a few hundred from that and a few hundred from that, if that, to me, that’s that’s the thing.

Marc Walton:
It’s a whole life thing now. All right. Is. Yeah. So that that would be my thing.

Andrew Mitchem:
Now that’s awesome because I mean, you can one it’s taking the pressure off the knee to have to make money from trading and to when you get good at trading, you can use that additional income to add to your trading if you wish to. And yeah, compound it from there. Yeah. And and I mean I.

Marc Walton:
Sorry I interrupted.

Andrew Mitchem:
Oh no, no I was just gonna say I think an important thing for people of all levels, especially new people, is to forget the money to start with. Yes, it’s learning the how to do the trading, I think is really important. Because if you do the how to bit, the money will follow. But I sort of describe it like someone you get a painter to paint your wall.

Andrew Mitchem:
Well, the finishing touch looks nice, but it’s all the work that they’ve done and the sanding and the prep and the sculpting and everything else behind the scenes that you don’t see that makes the finishing yes look good. And this is the same with learning how to trade.

Marc Walton:
Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew Mitchem:
Yeah. I’m just going to show you again how I got off.

Marc Walton:
I forgot what I was going to say. Let’s save it for another time.

Andrew Mitchem:
Nah. Fair enough. So, so, if someone’s like, wanting to contact you, how do they. Yeah. Have you. We’ve got process.

Marc Walton:
We have a website forexmentorpro.com. I also have another one which is yourinvestingfuture.com, which is to do with, stocks and crypto and things. And, and again, thank you for inviting me. Not many folks normally you don’t normally get people who it but potentially, competitors talking to each other. But it’s good to have a chat with somebody that’s been down very similar route.

Marc Walton:
Yes. The good news for people is that we’ve been there and done it. We’ve made all the mistakes that anybody can make and more. And we’ve also seen it with so many people as well as so I the main thing is try to avoid the bias on YouTube. Yeah. If it looks too good to be true, it is.

Marc Walton:
And as I said earlier, this is a profession and you need to learn how to do this in a professional way. And if you don’t, I mean, I’ll, leave you with the story of, a guy I was I was doing a live training session, a webinar, and, I was telling him about a guy that came to me ten years ago, and he said he started off trading and he doubled his account.

Marc Walton:
And so he then doubled his account again. So then he quit his job and doubled his account again and, started taking family money in to try it. And I knew what the punchline was going to be. He lost it all anyway. There was a guy in the room from Australia, and, he’d had financial issues. I found out I spoke to him afterwards and he wrote in the chat box.

Marc Walton:
He’d gone from 0 or $1000 to 75,000 in 4 months. Real money. And again, I knew the punch. I said to him, I think you’ve typed in wrong. Did he mean 7500? He said, no, 75,000. So this guy was struggling financially. He was working 16 hours a day scalping forex, and he’d managed to go from 1000 to 70 5000 in 3 months.

Marc Walton:
And he lost it all in the night. And he unlike the original guy I was talking about that just got lucky. They were on the biggest flukes, streak that anybody could ever be on. And so the point and I said this earlier, the overconfidence thinking that you’ve cracked it is is the most dangerous time because I spent two and a half years and I wanted to make $2,000 a week, was my target 20 years ago.

Marc Walton:
And the first weekend I made it, I finally I was all weekend. I was on a high. I’ve tracked oh no, no oh yes yes. By the Wednesday I’d give given £1,500, but yeah.

Andrew Mitchem:
So risk management.

Marc Walton:
Yeah. Trading is this trading is boring.

Andrew Mitchem:
And risk management.

Marc Walton:
And discipline and structure and stick to the rules.

Trading and living where we want to.

Andrew Mitchem:
Well that’s a good spot to leave it because, I think we’ve both had a great journey. Both of us. Yeah. And journey, but a really good one, which you wouldn’t change for all the world.

Marc Walton:
No, no, no, it’s given me the chance to live in beautiful parts of the world. I guess in Portugal now, the choice have been able to do what you want to do is, is also, as we said, we’re both from the UK. We both seen the state of it. Now, I certainly would never I will I would never have gone back anyway.

Marc Walton:
But you look at it now and it’s it’s very depressing. So yes, to be able to live in the sun and then.

Andrew Mitchem:
Go to New Zealand or to not too bad place to live rather.

Marc Walton:
Now they’re very nice, very nice. Anyway, pleasure to meet you.

Andrew Mitchem:
So thank you, Marc. Lovely to, have you on here. And, yeah, I’ll put a link to your site and, and our site, and, people can contact either of us and, ask for the questions of nature. But thank you very much for being here. Really enjoyable. And thanks for your time.

Marc Walton:
Welcome. Thank you very much.

Episode Title: #594: Andrew Mitchem and Marc Walton: Top 5 Forex Mistakes & How to Avoid Them

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