In this episode of Truth About FX, Walter gives some insider information on how can YOU become a hedge fund trader – there’s two ways: one involves some drinks and the other a laptop. And is this really a job for everyone or just a specific type of trader? Walter shares his personal experience and you get a clue or two on the best accounts to give you a boost. And what is the biggest barrier most traders encounter before becoming a “successful” hedge fund trader.
Download (Duration: 07:32 / 17.2 MB)
In This Episode:
01:15 – network with people
03:18 – eyes on your stuff
04:10 – stay away
05:02 – continuum of freedom
07:01 – pay first
Tweetables:
Network with people [Click To Tweet].
Make friends [Click To Tweet].
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Announcer: Sometimes, forex trading is a wild and wooly place to be. That’s why Hugh is here, to post your questions to Walter, the naked forex guy. Hugh’s got questions and Walter’s got the answers. Here at the Truth About FX Podcast.
Hugh: Hi, Walter. In your experience, what is the great way to get hired at a hedge fund?
Walter: This is interesting. So, there’s two sort of ways around it. Probably more than that, three maybe. My experience actually was that I was hired by a hedge fund before I ever should have been.
A guy that ran a fund in New York, he had hired me. And so, what did happen is they were looking for traders and I was friends with some of the traders that he had worked with. They said to him, “You should talk to Walter.” So, that was kind of just through people you know.
That is one way. It’s to network with people obviously in trading. That is a great way to find because it’s a very small, little world, actually. It doesn’t seem like but it is pretty a small, little world. So that’s one way. Just make friends and things like that.
And then if you’ll look at it from another point of view, “Okay, I don’t have any friends in the industry, Walter. What do I do?” There’s a couple of things you can do. One is you can go, “Hey, look how good I am.” Look-at-me sort of route.
The way that you do that is you post your account. You’ll hook up your account to one of those account reporting things like Myfxbook or whatever. I think Myfxbook has some weird problems where it stops working after awhile or something on a live account.
Hugh: Yeah, I noticed that.
Walter: So, you might go to Signal Start or any other one that you could find. I think FX Blue is another one. We’ll put them in the show notes for the people that are interested. We’ll link some of those up.
You’ve had that experience with Myfxbook shutting down too or basically not fitting through the data?
Hugh: Yeah. At first, it was just like it wouldn’t record the last trade and now it doesn’t record any trades. So, I don’t know what’s going on.
Walter: It’s a weird thing. So I will just go with FX Blue or Signal Start or something like that. Signal Start has the advantage of… You can find some subscribers too. You can actually get paid if you want for people to essentially sign up for your trades and have them auto trade on their account as well.
But, that’s probably not the main reason why you do it. You do it just to have your track record up there and collect. Get some eyes on your trading. And then, the other thing that I’ve learned is that Linkedin is actually a really good spot. People don’t realize this.
If you go in LinkedIn and you post a link to your FX Blue or Signal Start accounts, you’ll be surprised at how many people that will start sending you stuff like that. So, that is probably the best way as a private trader whose making money to get eyes on your stuff.
I would just link it up to some of those signals/reporting account thing like Signal Start and FX Blue. Then two, go on Linkedin and try to connect with people in there. Try to go to to conferences as well. I know I don’t go to conferences but that would be what I would do if you’re looking to get noticed.
Also, there are money shows. You could go to what’s called “money shows” where you‘ll find people that run funds, who are trying to collect new accounts. So, going there to show people how they make money and why people with money should give them their money. Those people are already there so you can go there and talk to some of the funds that are there. So, that’s another way to do it.
I would probably stay away from those programs in the internet where you… In theory, it’s supposed to be like you pay for education or something like that and then they eventually fund you. You pay to be connected up to a demo account or whatever. They teach you how to trade or something. They’ll say, “Here is your demo account.”
After you trade the demo, you trade a live account and after you traded it up, well then they’ll start to give you more and more payouts on your trading. There’s that idea out there and there’s a lot of those out there but what I would say is this: If you are paying them any money then, you are not trading their money. You are trading your money.
That is one thing to keep in mind and some of those actually are quite good and you can do it but it may not fit with your style of trading. That is another thing to keep in mind. The way I look at it is there is a continuum of freedom that you have as a trader. You’ll always have the most freedom if you trade for yourself.
As soon as you start trading other people’s money or trading for an organization, your freedom gets restricted. So they are going to say things like, “You must take x number of trades.” That’s what they told me when I started doing that.
I actually wasn’t a very good trader when they hired me but then I started getting okay and then they started telling me that I wasn’t trading enough. That was because they were basically making money per trades so they wanted traders that would trade a lot.
And didn’t necessarily want traders that would make a whole lot of money but they want traders who would trade a lot because they were getting paid basically per transaction and that was kind of their model.
So, that wasn’t a good fit for me but you might find, for example, you’re a D1 chart trader. You might find that there’s a group out there that’s going to, they like your record. They like your style and everything and they want you to trade for them but then they’ll say, “You have to close your positions out on Friday”. You can’t hold a position over the weekend. Things like that and you can work around that.
If you’re a D1 chart trader, you might close out your position at the end of the week and then just re-establish it when the market opens and get on Sunday, which is Monday here in Asia.
You could do that. That’s one way to do it but just keep in mind there are a lot of different restrictions that these guys are going to put on you. So you’re always going to have the most amount of freedom on your own.
As you start either to trade money for other people or trade for other organizations, they’re going to start to put their rules and regulations on you so that will affect you. Just keep that in mind. And also, it affects you psychologically knowing that you are trading money for other people.
So, it’s a tricky thing. That’s what I would do if I were you. I would definitely get your name out there. Go in Linkedin and get on the reporting sites. And basically from there, build up a track record. Try and meet people. Probably stay away from any sort of organizations that’s saying, “You can trade money but you have to pay us first”. That’s what I would recommend.
Hugh: Alright, cool. A lot great tips. Thanks, Walter.
Walter: Thanks.
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