Institutional Equivalent Education?

Strangely, I have been asked the following:
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Hi Ian,

Trust you are well. As always, thanks for taking the time to reply.

I have followed your instruction and was able to log in to the webinar. I used the link on post 82.

If i may, who is Ray? what is his full name? Any website? What does he teach?
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The person who asked this had only tested that he could access the recording (link and instructions in my post number 280 just above). It is a long recording with some chat from Kim Pingleton of CompassFx, then about 1hr of Ray de Medici and then 3 of Ray's longer term students (all of whom are still with Ray over 15 months after the date of that recording). The students are Nic L. a very young guy in South Africa (currently trading Bonds, Oil, Gold) , William an older guy in the USA (currently trading currencies in a set-and-sleep, wake up to a profit style) and me who is British (currently trading News events on Currencies, Equity Indices and Oil).

As I say in my section of the recording, Ray is somebody you as a retail trader should never have access to! Because of this and of him being very private, some ignorant people say he is not a real person - they are the people who would continually walk past a real $100 note lying on the pavement at the busiest time of day in the belief that it can't be real otherwise somebody else would have picked it up.

Ray is a Prop Desk trader and a Quant hired by some of the biggest Institutions in Europe. He is still doing that even whilst he is teaching us lucky few! He teaches how a retail trader can trade like an institution adapting the entry strategy and trade management so you don't need millions of USD in order to take the trades. He doesn't just teach trading a few specific markets or a few types of trade, he can and does trade pretty much everything where he can see an edge. Though he advises us to trade only 1 or 2 markets or 1 or 2 trade types at first.
You can't Google him and his only website is currently by invitation only (i.e. for his current students). If you want to become one of his students then you can email [email protected]

Today a Self Help Group member ( A*) who had been away from trading for a few months came back and asked how people are doing. Here is the conversation (edited to protect traders identities) that we had:
[16:11:41] Ian Foster: I am doing OK following a triple coronary bypass in late December. While I am almost always fatigued and can't focus for much more than 90 min at a time, I have adjusted my trading style to take (snatch) profits earlier and am doing Ok with my trading, making consistent small profits.
In order to facilitate that I trade only E/U, E/J, U/J, G/U (all low spread currency pairs for me). I also switched from trading S&P (CFD) to the Dax (CFD) - also lower spread. The only larger spread market I am still trading is USOil (CFD) but I only trade that for the Inventories reports.
[16:12:38] E* N*: glad you are feeling better and recovering Ian, also good to hear about your trading
[16:12:50] E* N*: glad you are off those damn CFD's
[16:12:54] E* N*: hate those things
[16:13:47] Ian Foster: E*, you misread it - I am still trading CFDs: just the DAX and USOIL instead of S&P, USOIL and GOLD !
[16:13:56] A*: dax CFD rocks
[16:13:56] E* N*: ah right LOL
[16:14:07] E* N*: well if you get big enough moves they are ok
[16:14:18] A*: only tradable thing on mt4 ‘spits’
[16:14:48] E* N*: you are obviously very disciplined to trade CFD's and still make money
[16:17:01] Ian Foster: Much of my DAX trading is based upon the S&P, TICK (NY) , Gold, UJ, BUNDs and FT100. I was always able to make money trading the Inventories using the USOIL CFD - even with crap volume and a 3 tick spread - LOL! I just used to piss that away on other less successful trades.
[16:17:33] E* N*: yep if I wanted to trade oil CFD inventory day is the only way I would do it lol, well good for you
[16:19:47 | Edited 16:20:12] Ian Foster: On the DAX I get a 1 point spread whereas on the S&P I have a $0.3 spread i.e. just over 1 tick. But the magnified movement on the DAX means I can snatch a profit and set SL to BE or BE+1 much quicker than I could on the S&P.
[16:20:10] E* N*: right
[16:20:19] A*: when i was trading dax cod on a morning, the way that moves out of the gates is awesome
[16:20:26] A*: CFD*
[16:21:52 | Edited 16:22:10] Ian Foster: I don't trade DAX until 8am UK time , when the spread reduces from 2 to 1 point. So mainly trade it at 8am and 9am and then around the US Open.
[16:23:23] A*: yes thats what i was doing
[16:23:43] A*: didn’t grasp it well enough to earn a living tho i had to go back to what i was doing
[16:24:35] Ian Foster: All my other trades tend to be 'News trades' i.e Economic/Political events or reports - today was ECB Press Conf and the US Durable Goods/Job Claims. Was tricky since both out at the same time !
[16:25:34] E* N*: wow you have guts doing news trades but I think you always did those
[16:26:14 | Edited 16:26:45] Ian Foster: Yes, they were the first thing that worked consistently for me - since late July 2014.
[16:28:27] Ian Foster: I used to trade only those with a big enough deviation for me to target at least a 1:1, but this year I have expended into ones only offering half the reward - basically scalping them.
[16:29:16] Ian Foster: That is why I must trade a low spread curreny pair !
[16:29:25] E* N*: yes I understand

My operation in late December seems to have been good for my trading.
I am a cautious person, so it is too early for me to tell if I have conquered my psych problems enough to turn my trading around, but I have had much fewer (and smaller) losing days since my operation.

I did no trades in January, traded only a few days in February and really only started to get back to my normal pattern in March.
I don't want to show my account or trade details in public, especially since I still make occasional trades that I am ashamed of - but nearly all of those are now winning trades!

I also don't want to hex myself by saying how long it has been since I had a losing day, but it was so long ago I have to look at my records to find it. But my last 2 losing days were both less than a 1% loss and in both those 2 weeks I made a weekly net profit.

People keep asking me how much profit I have been making since my trading turned around. I am not prepared to share the transaction log of my account, but just out of interest I did weekly account analysis of the last 8 weeks trading. So as not to complicate things I have not included my monthly spread rebate in any of the weeks.

w/c 6th March +2.8%
w/c 13th March +3.6%
W/c 20th March +2.5%
w/c 27th March +3%
w/c 3rd April +6.6%
w/c 10th April +4% Due to hospital appointments, visitors and a Bank Holiday I only traded 3 days this week
w/c 17th April +8% Due to a UK Bank Holiday I only traded 4 days this week
w/c 24th April +9.6%

For each week I re-base the account to the closing balance on the previous Friday. Thus those percentages are compounding. So to get another view if I calculate the % increase in my account since 1st January (and I made absolutely no trades in January and did a little trading for a total of 5 days in February) it comes to just over +45%

I people are going to say that this is a fake number - it isn't! However it does include my Spread Rebates received during that period i.e those for December 2016 and for February and March this year.

For most people, trading is a very lonely business. Many find they are misunderstood by their non-trading friends and relatives who seek to cure them of what they see as gambling.

I understand this and so I understand why I get occasional requests to phone or meet other traders in order to talk about trading.
However I have many more trader friends than non-traders and recently even my wife has accepted me investing and trading - her accepting the trading part has only taken her around 9 years LOL!
Every trading day (and often at weekends and Holidays) I get to talk online with some of the 235 members of my Self Help Group and also to exchange views with others in Ray's trade room. So trading is still psychologically tough, but it isn't lonely for me.

The other thing that many outside of Ray's students don't realise is that most Institutional traders and those retail traders taught by Ray don't talk about trading in the same way as ordinary retail traders. We mainly talk about Fundamentals, Political and Economic Risks, and determinants of Value - not about Indicators, indicator Settings and EAs. Thus there is really no benefit to a student of Ray in an exchange of views with an ordinary retail trader, since not only do we use a very different vocabulary (e.g. 'the belly of the curve') but we talk about different subjects too.

So unless you are an student of Ray don't waste your time asking about meeting up with me, since I am too busy either trading or spending time with my loved ones! Because in order to have a meaningful conversation I would have to teach you some things which would break the Non-Disclosure Agreement.

I have just seen and interesting thread here in Forex Factory. It is called 5 years and still no strategy

The first post is predictable from the title:
"So... I have 5 years of experience, I know price action, I know how to trade with trend, I know how to manage risk, etc., but I still don't have a strategy. Is this normal or it's a waste of time? I'm not looking for a holy grail, but for something really simple with 50% accuracy at 1:2 ratio. 3-5 trades per day during EU session and that's all. I tried to trade H1-H4 pullbacks, pivots, breakouts and many other strategies but without any success...

Should I continue my searches or it's time to leave it?"

Then there are several very good posts offering advice patrticularly that unless you love trading - don't trade because you can make money quicker by putting the same effort into something you do love doing.
But this one from North Trader is probably the most practical and probably most frustrating to the thread originator:

"I agree with Thx here. TA can only take you so far. To be truly successful you have to deeply understand why the price is moving as it is. What are the macro-economic drivers? What are the current news flows driving sentiment? What is the market positioning? Are the big players under- or over-exposed? What are bonds doing? Where is the dollar index?

Price always moves for a reason, even if it's a short-term technical reason such as a stop run (aka false breakout). The reason in this case is that big players are seeking liquidity to fill their orders. Macro traders will be filling in the direction of the long-term trend (based on CB and economic factors such as interest rate differentials). They will use sentiment and stop runs to enter at a discount.

As a part time trader it is very difficult to keep track of all the reasons, especially the daily drivers. You could simply ignore sentiment and market positioning, and enter small positions in the long-term direction with wide stops. But doing this is perilous as sentiment and positioning are very important factors, and could result in price going against you by hundreds of pips (as in the case of USDJPY right now). Another solution is to subscribe to a service that keeps track of the drivers for you.

In short, successful trading boils down to:

1) Know the current price drivers and determine the best direction, or keep out if the direction is mixed / unclear.
2) Enter at a good discount. Stop runs are usually excellent places to enter. Be patient for the best entry.
3) Place stops where they are unlikely to be hit.
4) Trade small, so your account won't be affected much if you get it wrong and your stops are hit.
5) Don't expect big returns, unless you're lucky enough to catch a big move and you add to your position several times along the way.

Good luck!"

What many people don't understand is that trading small when you are learning/experimenting means trading really really small. So 0.25% or 0.5% maximum, not 2%.

Two things worth mentioning:

1. It appears that Ray is preparing to teach another full class (for new students) plus a 'catch-up Bootcamp' for previous students who have not been in his room much since he started covering more on 'Value' and 'reading other markets through the Bonds'. No dates or details yet but he has been talking about it in the room. If anybody is serious about trading and wants to know what it really is about (apart from quite a lot of work), then you should email Kim@CompassFX for when the details are clarified.

2. My account passed an important milestone this week. I ended the week with the account in profit by over 50% having only traded for March, April and 2 other weeks.
It has also been the 9th profitable week in succession with a profit of +5.7% and no losing days.
Whilst this is far below the standard of Ray, Eusebio and probably several of the other students, I am quite pleased with how it is going since I focused on 'news trades' and low spread markets and taking profits 'too soon'.

AT last a decent result trading the Crude Oil Inventories.
Regular readers will know that I used to typically do between +3% and +6% on the EIA Crude Inventories for most of 2015 and 2016.
But since my operation I have not been trading it so well and as a result have been more cautious, so this year a good result has been only +1%.

Today it all came together for the first time this year: I made +4.5% on the inventories release (even though I missed my 2nd re-entry by 2 ticks and then saw it go another 32 ticks with me on the sidelines.

I am now done for the day with a total of +5.6%

I hope Ray doesn't mind, but here is a screenshot of his (pre-Inventories) trade which he held into the release.
He notified current students of it by Twitter (but obviously only after he had entered, but before it squeezed above 46.50) about 2 hrs before the Inventories release:


Personally I didn't take it partly because I am too chicken to enter an Oil trade before Crude Inventories, partly because I try hard to only trade Oil on the 2 ( the API and the EIA) Crude Inventories; and partly because I was concentrating of preparing to trade the Dax at the New York Open.

Still I doubt if Ray's Risk Manager allowed him to trade enough size for him to make +4.5% - LOL!

Wow, what a week.
First a decent Crude Oil Inventories , and then Ray gave out some dynamite education and information on Wednesday for the NY open on Thursday.
He was pointing us to a shorting opportunity on the ES, but because of my situation I took it on the DAX making just over 5%, giving me a 15% profit on the week
since today I am attending a funeral when the most market action is likely.

Here is a composite tweet with chart:


Who else will teach and alert you about TOMO ?

And Here is the DAX showing the level of my first entry and my last exit. I took some partial profits on the way down since it was a whole 65 points on the DAX index:

Hi Ian, hope u are ok, with all the events in your life.... I wanted to show u something, I guess a lot of people know about Anton Kreil (ex Goldman), he tells some very very interesting things, and wise which make me wander:

I cannot see video..where i can find it?

Man I'm so so shocked about the disappearance of this clip, maybe he "offended" someone of the big players from the industry, and wasn't well appreciated especially from an "insider"... I don't know what to say I hope this guy and his organisation don't disappoint me.... I'm sorry for not recording/download the YT clip....

I had another solid week (+9.2%), but hardly made anything (about +0.3%) on the EIA Crude Oil Inventories.
However, I want to show how easy it can be to make money on the Inventories report:

This is a screenshot of a Liquidity Heat Map from Sam who is another student of Ray and like me has been trading the Inventories for over 2 years. in this case the screenshot is taken just before the Inventories report using Bookmap (but any other Liquidity Heat Map such Jigsaw Auction Vista would do). Sam is in Holland, so on his charts the report is at 16:30



He placed an order to go long at 48.60 on the CL future around 5 min before the Inventories report. Now I don't have a futures chart , but the Oil CFD chart is very close to the Futures at times like that, so here is the report followed by a 5 min chart of what happened - note I am in the UK, so on my chart the report is at 15:30:



A little background : Like me, much of the market was expecting a very small draw or a small build for the Crude Oil figure despite the forecast. This is because the API inventories figures the previous day showed a build of 0.88 Million Barrels i.e +0.88M. So these actual figures were good for the Oil price, though not great.
I was set up for a sell of oil and by the time I had got a Buy trade ready I judged the price had moved too far and so just took a short of the prior day high (marked as a bright green horizontal line on the chart below) - which was probably where Sam exited his trade.

How did you make 9.2% in the week then?
Considering Samy's way of trading he is taking the risk going into a report that could go the wrong way..1) he has inside info 2) the big boys have inside info ?

Hi Juangecko,
Yes Sam is taking the risk that the report may be negative for the Oil price. Sam is a bigger trader than me and so can afford to trade the Crude Oil Futures, so by entering before the report it means he can also have his Stop Loss in the market beforehand (he isn't so big as to need to hide it) - thus virtually no risk of slippage on a spike! If I tried that on the Oil CFD I could get slipped anything up to 25 to 50 ticks or even more on a complete surprise!

1). Certainly Sam has a sort of 'inside info'. It is from his 100+ weeks experience of watching the action just pre-report that he is able to interpret the actions of the Liquidity Providers and those institutions who are willing to take a position in the last 5 to 10 minutes before the release. Which is when the liquidity dries up from the Algos and from those without good information, leaving only those who really want their orders to get filled still in the market.

2).Certainly there are some big boys who either A). Have some good information or B). Want to take a position at a particular price area and see the report as a good means to get that position on.

As to how I made +9.2%, it was just the same way that I made 15% last week and +4.2% the week before etc.
Just as I outlined in the Skype chat that I posted in post number 282.

I trade both the API and EIA crude Inventories;
I trade the Dax at the higher volume times (but when I can get a 1 Dax Index point spread on it) i.e in London time zone 8:00, 9:00, 14:30(or New York Open if different):
I trade Over and Under-Coooked News events for UK, EuroZone, Germany, France, USA, Canada using a suitable low spread currency pair (E/U, G/U, U/J, U/Cad), or if the news event is very Equities related I might trade it on the Dax.

I am trying to get a low percentage of losing trades, so I am consciously setting a Break-Even Stop Loss as soon as possible (hence the low spread markets) and also taking the bulk of my profit 'too early' i.e. at the first likely hesitation instead of holding out for what I think is the ultimate or even the penultimate target for that swing.

Thus I am taking many more trades and with smaller profits than before - trading news which has a less than 1:1 potential return etc. But in doing so I have been avoiding many of the losses I used to incur.

It is because of my new more restricted capacity to hold focus for periods of time that I am keeping my trades short. Before my bypass operation I might well have held my last Crude Inventories short trade for longer. As it was I had exited before 20 minutes. Had I held to the 30 min mark I would have made a lot more on the trade, but then I might well have held some for an extra 30 min and had to scratch it as price rebounded.

The good thing about trading at set 'higher Volume' times and News Trading is that I can plan my breaks between set of trades.
I don't have to wait for a trade that might come along at any old time - I know exactly when a potential trade is likely and so just need to be fully prepared and focused at those times.

For people who can't be bothered to read the earlier posts in the thread.
Here is my updated weekly profit percentages:

w/c 6th March +2.8%
w/c 13th March +3.6%
W/c 20th March +2.5%
w/c 27th March +3%
w/c 3rd April +6.6%
w/c 10th April +4% Due to hospital appointments, visitors and a Bank Holiday I only traded 3 days this week
w/c 17th April +8% Due to a UK Bank Holiday I only traded 4 days this week
w/c 24th April +9.6%
w/c 1st May +4.2%
w/c 8th May +15% Due to attending a funeral - I hardly traded at all on the Friday
w/c 15th May +9.2%

For each week I re-base the account to the closing balance on the previous Friday. Thus those percentages are compounding. The results don't not include my spread rebates that my Broker pays because they are done monthly.