Alessio Rastani
AR: People think they can learn about the
[financial] markets by reading about it or watching videos. They misunderstand the necessary coaching involved. It is a different thing reading about trading in a book and actually trading professionally. True professional traders treat it as a full-time job. It’s like if you want to play golf. You can read a book about golf and that is great. But when you go to play on the golf course the next day and are faced with Tiger Woods, you would have no chance beating him.
ZM: What is your official job description? “It is a different thing reading about trading in a book and actually trading professionally. True professional traders treat it as a full-time job.” AR:
I guess I call myself a full-time independent trader. This is different from an institutional trader. Alternately, I may refer to myself as a full-time day trader.
ZM:
How do you tie in what you do as a full-time day trader and your education seminars?
The next day Soros actually went short of the Euro. He realised he was wrong and then promptly closed his position. And that is exactly what a good trader always does. It is not about an ego issue or being right, it’s simply about going with the market. If the market says you are wrong, don’t quibble — get out fast and re-assess. The market is always right. Also a good trader has to be aware that the market might change the next day. Anyone can look like a genius with hindsight. Seriously, if you go back to last September, there is no way you could predict the world was on the brink of a global recession, not in my opinion anyway. I also call myself the “closet bear” — I prefer shorting rather than buying. I personally prefer a market if it is in freefall — one that is going down than going up. Most people think trading is about making a prediction and following a strategy. This is part of it but the main issue is all about risk control. Even the good traders out there get it right only 50 per cent of the time and so you have to know when to hit the brakes.
ZM:
Shorting will never be understood by the financial media.
AR:
I gave a definition and example of what shorting is in simple terms in a seminar. And I remember that people still came back to me at the end of the seminar and didn’t know what shorting was. That really surprised me.
ZM: Let’s talk about your BBC appearance last
year...
AR:
I never wanted to be a celebrity. People have since said to me, ‘Alessio, why don’t you go on that TV programme, “I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here?” That’s not for me! I have always loved to trade, it is something I always wanted to do. I have been asked to go on a lot of TV shows out there, approached for documentaries etc and some I have done, but it doesn’t really interest me.
AR: No trader can always be right and the pro’s
know that it is actually not about being right. With regards to the BBC interview [last year], they asked my opinion of what I was doing in the market. Again, my response was not about being right or wrong as a trader; unfortunately the public don’t get this. Soros actually very famously went on Bloomberg a while ago and he made a prediction on the Euro. He said the Euro was going to collapse over the next six months.
I like teaching people what I do. I’ve worked in this industry for a long time — since 2007, and there are other companies out there that purport to teach people to trade. But unfortunately I think a lot of people out there are being misled and are being taught wrongly on the whole trading side. They have been taught simply rubbish from a book or been charged £2000 or £5000 for a seminar — that is unfortunately the reality. The trading industry is making big bucks out of this.
November 2012
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