Editorial Contributor
Zak Mir Interviews Paul Rodriguez of Think Trading
Paul Rodriguez is one of the UK’s most qualified trading educators running courses at the City University Business School in the 1990s which were widely attended by City professionals. He also worked as a technical analyst and trader for Natwest during the 90s and in 1999 set up Thinktrading.com to teach a broader range of people. Working in partnership with the Investors’ Chronicle in the early 2000s he was a regular guest on Bloomberg TV, CNBC and Reuters Financial TV. He is currently working actively with OSTC.com who are recruiting traders and expanding globally.
ZM:
Paul, I know you from over a decade ago when you were involved with Think Trading. What was the idea behind that, and how is that going now?
PR:
Think Trading was set up in 1999 following the work I was doing with City University, lecturing there and running a 10 week evening course in Technical Analysis. The course was attended by a lot of City professionals, as well as a lot of private investors interested in trading their own money via the Internet ahead of what turned out to be the ‘Dotcom Bubble’. This I could see building and so I set up Think Trading primarily to try and educate anyone interested in getting into the financial markets, but who did not know where to start. The idea was also to introduce people to technical analysis as a trading tool as opposed to the more typical economics and fundamental analysis.
30 | www.financial-spread-betting.com | May 2013
ZM:
But this is all a long time ago. Technical Analysis was not exactly the pillar of the financial markets that it is now — if indeed it is now! It was still classed as being in the horoscopes / tea leaves division at that time, do you not agree?
PR:
Interestingly, back then it was actually outside the UK, in places like India where there was a far greater acceptance of the subject than here at home. Although in the U.S. it had already achieved acceptance, in the UK it was very much the poor cousin to economics / fundamental analysis. I think that this state of affairs continued until the Financial Crisis of 2007-2008 when there was such a massive failure of conventional economics and analysis to see the crisis coming. It is typical of a bull market that economics is generally relied upon because you can’t see its flaws at the time. It is only when the markets fall that people scramble for alternative explanations and analysis.