Do you want to be a professional trader?

An inconvenient, forex truth

You’ve been there, struggling and suffering for a while. You have experienced the pain that the markets can unleash on you. You have left positions on the red for longer than your sanity could possible hold. You have opened positions that moved to the green, but you did not take any profits and you let that position slowly die and possibly causing huge loses. Now here you are ,possibly as a breakeven trader, still suffering and trying. You have researched hundreds of indicators, if not thousands. You thought you have all sorted out with your RSI , stochastics and TDI. Yet you have switched between strategies more than you have changed your underpants in your whole life. Spent too many hours looking at the screen, wondering what the hell you are still missing.

And the incovenient truth is that you want the glitz and the glamour, and the caviar, but you are not willing to eat the shit. And this is the shit: How are you expecting to make any good money on a field where you dont know virtually anything about it. Nor the substance that you are trading, nor what moves it. How are you actually expecting to beat guys that breath and eat economics?. You know literally nothing about volatility and liquidity, about interbanking flows , about puts and calls, market microestructure and price delivery mechanisms both on OTC markets and CME , what is GDP , how is calculated and why is critical. CPI, NMI, GDP to debt ratios, UST, repo markets, shadow banking, carry diferentials, how and why commodities alter certain currencies. EM vs G10 currencies, pegged vs unpegged. Balances of Payments…. When you hear “greeks” you are thinking about the Iliad or Athens. You know nothing about business and credit cycles. Valuation anchors, return to the mean, standard deviations, fair values. I could go on and on and on. Does this make you uncomfortable? It should.

You have dozens of the best students that the world can produce, coming out of the London School of Economics, or from IT degrees in Harvard and MIT, all moving into freaking huge financial institutions, building complex system, doing incredible research . Funded to an extreme you can not imagine. Working in partnership with the IMF and Central Banks all aroundthe world. PhD’s dedicating their lifes to such complex systems and situations……. and yet here you are, insolent and ignorant piece of s***, you that have been trying to make your “RSI” or “stochastic” work for 2 months, trying to beat this multi billion-trillionaire infrastrucure. Do you start to realize where the f*** do you stand? Do you really believe even for a freaking second that you can beat them on their game? Using RSI or Ichimoku? EAT.THIS.SHIT.

And its not that technicals are not necesary. They are. But believe me, I (and most pro’s that I’ve ever engaged with) spent less than 1/5 of the time actually managing trades and looking at price charts. If I’m not scalping , my day starts with me reading around 12 to 15 research papers coming from the main financial institutions, glued to my Reuters terminal reading more reports, looking at polls, updating my macroeconomic models with the latest data, performing calculations related to options…… only then, with a fundamental trading idea, I will move to evaluate technicals to see if the timing is good.

I want to learn, how shall I procede?

You want to build a lasting and enjoyable relationship with the market? EAT THE SHIT, and do all that is under your control to actually be able to open The Financial Times and understand what they are talking about. It will take you years, and for the education, hundreds of dollars. But this is how it goes if you want to get real. This is career, not a hobby. This is simply the way to be consistent. EAT THE SHIT.

I compiled some resources to get you started:

ACATIS Konferenz 2016, Mr. Koo, Surviving in the Intellectually Bankrupt Monetary Policy Environment – A great video coming from Nomura, to understand the actual shitty situation in the Eurozone.

Online Courses – Look for IMF on EDX. Also, a fenomenal course on Banking and Money in Coursera.

Books –

Macroeconomics, Gregory Mankiw – Start here to graps the basic concepts

Financial Times Guide to the Financial Markets

Financial Times Guide to Banking

Applied Financial Macroeconomics and Investment Strategy: A Practitioner’s Guide to Tactical Asset Allocation

The Holy Grail of Macroeconomics: Lessons from Japan’s Great Recession

The Escape from Balance Sheet Recession and the QE Trap: A Hazardous Road for the World Economy

The Other Half of Macroeconomics and the Fate of Globalization (English Edition)

The new lombard street – how the fed became the dealer of last resort

Foreign Exchange , Amy Middleton

The Role of Currency in Institutional Portfolios, Momtchil Pojarliev and Richard M. Levich

Currency Overlay: A Practical Guide, Second Edition, Hai Xin

The Handbook of Corporate Financial Risk (2nd edition)

Trade Stocks and Commodities with the Insiders: Secrets of the COT Report (Wiley Trading)

How I Made One Million Dollars Last Year Trading Commodities

Market Liquidity: Theory, Evidence, and Policy (English Edition)

Trading And Exchanges: Market Microstructure For Practitioners

The Microstructure Approach to Exchange Rates

The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

Big Debt Crises

Payments Systems in the U.S. – Third Edition: A Guide for the Payments Professional

The Volatility Machine: Emerging Economics and the Threat of Financial Collapse (English Edition)

Stabilizing an Unstable Economy