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Hi,
My name’s William and I’m a trader from the North of England. I currently trade a longer-term mechanical rule-based D1 Swing strategy that I’ve built which I spend my time running as a long-short portfolio of positions diversified across select markets, I day-trade two mechanical rule-based edges that I’ve identified and statistically proven the regular occurrence of via my Price Reversion and Session Momentum strategies, and I also swing-trade currency markets and indexes using a mechanical rule-based strategy I built around the occurrence of a specific Higher-Timeframe Bias Bar.
My beginning in trading came after I saw a documentary on TV about a trader who ‘made millions from his bedroom’. The guy was early twenties and had the cars and the clothes and I thought, if he can do it, so can I. I think anyone who saw that documentary at least gave trading a go, and most likely emptied their account finding out how difficult trading really is, but, fortunately that didn’t happen to me. I got lucky.
I began trading during the early-emergence of cryptocurrencies and thus, some of my first trades were long positions on markets like Ethereum and Bitcoin at a time when all those markets did overall was crawl upwards pretty much daily, along with the usual retail-go-to’s like EURUSD, the S&P500, the DAX, bluechip stocks like Apple, Google, etc.
As far as the vast amount of my first handful of trades were concerned, being within a strong bull market at the time, mixed in with a healthy dose of beginner’s luck, from the off I turned £500 into just under £6,000 in my first few weeks and I thought I’d mastered trading…
I had no plan, no strategy and no edge.
In fact I didn’t even know what an ‘edge’ was.
It was pure luck. I soon found out the hard way…
The thing is, money like the above can be made in a short space of time – I’m testament to that, I physically made it – and it can be kept, but without a strategy and the right guidance, it’ll disappear just as easily as it came.
After a few weeks and months of beginners luck, I suffered a huge loss and found myself down £750 on the DAX, trading ridiculous size and without a plan. The trade went against me and of course, I held the loss. I thought it would turn back around but, it never did. It just crawled against me. Eventually I snapped and exited. The loss hit me hard. I stopped trading for a week or two and realised if I wanted to trade, I had to learn to trade properly.
At that point I withdrew all but £2,500 from my account, scaled my risk right back and my trading education – In fact, my trading career – began there and then.
What You Don’t Know Will Cost You A Fortune.
– Simon Zutchi.
In regards to building a trading career, the above quote could not be any truer and it begs a question that every new trader should ask themselves;
How much will remaining uneducated cost you in the months and years to come if you continue to lose money?
My answer was “many thousands of pounds” and it was then that I knew exactly what I had to do: Invest in my education immediately.
Using some of the profits I’d made I did just that by attending various one day training courses and weekend seminars, enrolling in online courses including a trading and portfolio management course, price action and statistics training and a volume weighted average price study along with hundreds and hundreds of hours of online research and an ever-expanding library of books.
Genuinely, seeking education was the single best trading decision I ever made. It changed everything for me. Being able to both work with and trade alongside successful traders saved me weeks and months of suffering the usual problems; Jumping from strategy to strategy, never having any belief or confidence in an approach to the markets, wrongly sizing positions, reacting with emotion instead of logic, and so on.
But, I’m now happy to say I’ve been running my trading business full-time from home for coming up on three years, so the pain, the struggle and the money spent on education paid off.
I’m proof that with the right guidance, education and strategies to implement,
trading as a full-time endeavour is possible.
The above quote couldn’t be truer in regards to trading;
“If you are not willing to learn, no-one can help you“.
Don’t get me wrong, you can learn to trade from the ground up, but it’s going to take months if not years of your time scouring the internet day after day, reading book after book, listening to podcast after podcast, not to mention the amount of money you’ll inevitably lose to the markets…
It’s the price that the markets charge to the uneducated.
Whereas, by learning a proven approach from the off, and with the right guidance, you can save all of the time and all of the money wasted and skip right through to profitability.
“If you are determined to learn, no-one can stop you“.
If I could rewind the clock,
And give one piece of advice to myself back when I was starting out,
It’d be this;
Find a trader who’s where you want to be, i.e. profitable and trading full-time, learn their strategy/s, replicate their approach and simply trade this alongside them with their guidance.
It’s for this reason, along with my want to build community, that I now do exactly that, sharing my strategies and making an effort to share the knowledge that has led me to profitability via my YouTube channel and my free newsletter, along with mentoring traders who are lacking edge, a proven strategy, or who are still making the same old mistakes;
Exiting early, getting in too late, missing trades, lacking the belief in their strategy that’s required to trade the approach successfully and with consistency, etc.
If the above sounds like you, I can help.
[The story of my education and the strategies that I now trade successfully, full-time from home, continues over at the My Strategies page].
I’m an incredibly driven person, I like to think I’m down-to-earth and approachable, I take fulfilment in helping others and of course, I’m immensely passionate about trading.
I’m also obsessed with statistics, probabilities, building data spreadsheets and doing anything and everything I can to improve my trading [And I can do the same for you if needed].
But, how exactly did I begin sharing my strategies with others?
Back when I first began trading full-time, it was a dream come true.
No boss to answer to, no commute to and from work, cups of tea on-tap at home, and control over my earning power with absolutely no cap on my income; The ability to compound my account-balance year after year.
But at a stage, something I never saw coming occurred and set in;
Loneliness. I had shut myself off from friends and family and become so focused each day that, through finding myself having so much more free time yet nothing to do with it – After all, all of my friends were at work whilst I was sat at home – That I began networking with other traders online to stay occupied.
This led to me slowly opening up social media channels in the hope of eliminating the boredom and loneliness, to talk trading with others, to share what I was doing and so on.
And one day, a follower – My now good friend Wissam – Dropped me a message; “Will, if I send over £150 for your time, would you mind putting a Word document together for me. Explaining how you’re doing ‘x’, why you’re trading ‘y’ market, how you built the rules for ‘z’ strategy etc?”.
Of course, I gladly accepted. I didn’t accept for the money. £150 is a small amount that he simply offered as a gesture, for my time. I accepted purely to help a friend who was struggling with a skill I’d mastered.
And after doing this for him, a lightbulb went off in my head. I realised, there are people out there who are struggling with a skill that I’ve been able to gain, who need my help. That was the start of my sharing my knowledge with others.
From there, that very Word document grew into a short e-book as the people I shared it with provided feedback. Then, it evolved into a short video-course I hosted inside Dropbox. And eventually, this expanded, becoming the extended program that I share with struggling traders today, complete with the strategies that I trade, plus much more.
You can find the program here if you would like it.
There are so many fakes and fraudsters in this industry, it drives me insane;
I feel it’s important to be honest and transparent with anyone who spends their time visiting this site, so I’ll – try to – regularly update the My Trades page with my trades and trade record/s.
You can also follow me online in places like YouTube and Facebook where I share screenshots of my open positions, again as I close them and offer updates on how my day and/or week has been going, like I did recently;
- Will.
