Episode 4 Transcript: Trade While You Travel

For you listeners out there who prefer to read this past episode, or who want to follow along as you listen, we offer transcripts of all our podcasts. Enjoy this transcript of the fourth episode: The Day Trading Authority Podcast’s Episode 4 – Trade While You Travel:

podcast@netpicks.com
podcast@netpicks.com

Mark Soberman: All right. Welcome to the NetPicks Day Trading Authority podcast. This is Mark Soberman and I really appreciate you guys joining us today. I am a bit under the weather so I have no idea how my typical golden radio voice is gonna sound in this sickly condition, but the good news is I’m always joined by my partner Brian short who definitely has a voice made for a podcast. Brian, are you with me?

Brian short: Hi. I’m with you today Mark and if I remember right, the very first episode we did, I was the one that was not feeling well and it was very evident in my voice. I don’t know. I think you might be trying to draw up some excuses here. You’ve been playing hookey for trading or what. I mean, you don’t have to do that if you don’t really want to.

Mark Soberman: Well, you know, you sound so amazing when, you know, you brought your sickly self to the last few podcasts so I did get a little bit envious, a little bit jealous, and I just was like, “You know, what? I’m going that road. I’m gonna sell that crap too.” And, you know, hopefully these people will listen anyway, but, you know, I do apologize. Hopefully, this sounds okay and you guys can kind of hear what we’re trying to say. Contrary to what, you know, upon his accusations, I actually have been trading. You know, trading is a lot of those things. It’s kind of hard to have an excuse not to trade even when you’re sick, you know, how much effort does it take to sit at your, you know, your chair, and push a key or push your mouse button.

Now as for thinking clearly, that’s a whole another story, but the actual function of trading is not too difficult even when you’re sick. I don’t know if I’ll recommend it, but it’s really something that you can do. So as always, we definitely appreciate everybody joining us today.

There have been other podcasts but this is the first day trading authority podcast you’ve had a chance to listen to. Well, you’ve missed out, so you need to go back, and you need to go ahead, and listen to some of our prior — do you call them issues? I don’t know what you call them, prior podcasts? And you can do that through iTunes. That’s a great way to do it. In fact, you can subscribe in iTunes and whenever you download your favorite new music, well and behold, when we do one of these podcasts, it will magically appear on your iPhone or your iPod. Of course if you’re on Android or computer, then by all means you can go to our website at Netpicks.com which hopefully most of you know how it’s spelled with N-E-T-P-I-C-K-S.com/podcast, and no it’s not Netflix. That’s what my mom always likes to say. “Oh, you know, Marky works for Netflix.” It’s like, “No. It’s NetPicks.” So anyway, just to clarify that, so actually I probably have a lot more money if I did work for Netflix. Well, these days, things aren’t so cheaper for them either, but that’s a whole another story, and we don’t really talk too much about stocks here. We talk about day trading.

So what we’re gonna do a little bit is you see me and Brian try to talk a bit about some of our recent trading, any stories, things that we can cut of, you know, conveyed to you some recommendations, things that we’ve encountered, talk about what we kind of consider as a pertinent current event, and one of the things I want to talk about today a little bit was trading when traveling because that’s a question that we get a lot and it’s something that we have to also do quite a bit whether it’s for leisure or for professional and there’s definite things you can do to make that happen. When you’re a day trader, you’re kind of not gonna make money if you’re not in the markets, but how can you actually leave, you know, your cave once in awhile, it’s kind of important to do that.

Then we always have a popular section of the podcast that we call Tales from the Stupid, and that’s where — well usually Brian talks about dumb things he’s done in his trading over the last few weeks, and normally I’ll make something up because typically my section of this is the genius section. That’s usually what I have a lot to talk about and then Brian using — or I’d use when I run out of things to say in that section. I’ll let him — I’m sure encounter this in a moment, and then the last key piece — hold on, hold on, is we’re gonna have an interview of Chris from fxtradingreviews.com which I’m pretty excited about because Chris is gonna talk about forex, forex robots, the good stuff, the bad stuff, the hype, the fluff. you know, the crooks. So if you’re all interested in forex or day trading forex and this whole robot thing is up your alley, he’s gonna talk about it in a very frank, blunt and honest way. So Brian, do you have something to say?

Brian short: Well, you noticed for those listening how Mark just kept going and going and going there, not even giving me a chance to rebuttal. So I guess we’ll just have to compare —

Mark Soberman: So anyway —

Brian short: — stupid remarks today versus mine, so we’ll see.

Mark Soberman: Exactly. All right, yeah, we’ll have our usual competition in that area. So Brian, the first thing I did wanna cover a little bit is we always like to kind of start this off because we are actually amazingly real traders. We’re not just educators and we all just talk about trading, you know, that always kind of irritates some people who talk about trading, but I know fully well they actually don’t get involved in the markets because you know what, IT’S actually a lot easier to talk about trading hypothetically and like a professor than it is to actually get down and dirty. But the good news here is I trade every single day virtually and when I’m traveling — I’ll talk to you about it in a moment — how we trade on the road, but I think I mentioned before, and you know, it’s gonna change once a month or right now the markets that are most active in definitely are the metals which when I say metals, typically means gold, maybe silver, oil futures and this is mostly futures on the day trading side, the DAX futures, and the Russell, E-mini futures. That’s kind of where I’ve been for the most part and I know Brian when he talks about I’m sure will be something similar, maybe some differences overall.

So, we’re a day trader. I am a huge fan of futures trading. I am also trading on a daily basis, the forex but actually I mostly do swing trading in the forex at this point. I have gone through phases where I’ve done a lot of day trading in the forex, but I just get better results in the futures because I don’t have this fixed spreads. I don’t have to worry about the fact that there’s no centralized market. I don’t have to worry about my brokers freezing up when the markets are on the move which always seems to happen when you day trade.

So on forex, I’m a huge fan of swing trading. I’m not as solved lately on day trading, the forex, but if you are going to the euro-U.S. dollar and the euro-yen, are pretty good choices for trade trading forex, and maybe the pound-U.S. coming up after that. But when I swing trade in forex, gosh, I open up the whole world of markets. You know, I could do the pound, CAD, the euro-Aussie, the euro-CAD, the Aussie-yen — stuff I would never consider day trading. So that’s really why I like that.

The other thing I wanna mention, in my personal experience since the first of the year, it’s my DAX futures which if you don’t know what a DAX is, it’s the German stock market and there’s something called the DAX, D-A-X. You can also trade something — it trades on the Eurex by the way, Eurex.com. It’s, you know, it’s not the right market for small-time traders. For small accounts, it’s 25 euro dollars per point. It moves fast. You know, you don’t trade this market with five grand. You got to start with a little bigger account. But if I had to choose between the DAX and the Russell E-mini, which I normally trade the same time, these days I would definitely trade the DAX.

I mean, in my personal trading I’ve probably been winning about 75 percent of the time on the DAX which is really solid, gives you really nice return. And the Russell, I’ve been closer to that 60 percent, you know, 62 percent, so it could be temporary, maybe something is gonna change, but that’s what I’ve been seeing. And then if you were to pin me down on gold versus silver, I would probably say if you maybe pick one, I personally would pick gold. I like the slippage better and the movement in my opinion has kind of returned after a bit of a lull. So, you know, that’s kind of what I’ve been involved in. You know, Brian kind of, you know, maybe the same thing. You know, let the people know kind of, you know, where the action is at for you.

Brian short: Yeah, very similar story, and Mark, you know, you and I trade together in the mornings which is surely beneficial to have a partner. We get on — go to meeting and, you know, bantering back and forth. So I trade a lot of the same markets that Mark does. My specific focus —

Mark Soberman: Well, let’s just say I’m getting — let’s just say, we’re not sharing like bagel halves or anything. Okay we are —

Brian short: We’re not doing together —

Mark Soberman: — trading together, but we’re not together. We’re physically in different locations, exactly.

Brian short: Exactly.

Mark Soberman: Exactly. He’s no harm, in Texas. All right, so I just want to, you know, clarify for the events.

Brian short: All right, very good. So again, my favorites are futures again, like Mark, specifically trading gold and silver. We start that around 8:00 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, and trade for a couple of hours on those markets. Like Mark mentioned, if I have to leave towards one of the metals or the other, I think gold is probably for that newer trader, maybe a market that you might want to consider. Silver has — it’s a great market to trade, but it doesn’t have the same liquidity. There aren’t as many contracts on each side, so you got to be a little careful there. Slippage becomes an issue and you got to have that built into your trade plan. So just some things to be aware up there. And then also trade the Russell. Big fan of the Russell and we trade that for an hour and a half in the morning, part of the markets and have had some really, really good success with that market.

Now volatility finally has kind of woken up just yesterday and our good friend, Fed Chairman Bernanke, you know, spewed his speak to the markets yesterday and both the silver market and the gold markets were just crazy. In fact, on the call yesterday, I was just like, I was bursting out with what was going on here because the markets were just flying and it was a good time to participate in some of those moves. So activity has definitely picked up and it’s a good time if you have a strategy that gives you an edge to engage the markets because, you know, that activity is picking up again. So Mark, those are a few of the things I do in my everyday trading.

Mark Soberman: Yeah, one little tip that I’ll give because you talked about like the market has gone a little crazy after news which has been what we’ve been seeing or something like that. Two minutes is kind of like the golden number I found in day trading if you can — when your charts go nuts, you’ll know. You can wait about two full minutes and then reassess. That’s the time typically when you can get in. Actually you get some really nice additional trades, be very careful when that news announcement comes out. Those first two minutes, it’s very hard to execute. It almost goes too quickly. I don’t care what trading system you’re using. I can’t even think fast enough to keep up with all the bars, so just a little suggestion as we — if we see the volatility pick up and stay may just be a little, you know, aberration for a day or two, but that’s really served us very well in the past. You know, I’m not starting right out of the straight hour like, you know, when Brian mentioned here, it started 10 Eastern, it’s actually more like 10:02, you know, if we’re doing the markets there. We’re just trying to weigh those things on a little bit.

So, yeah, great that’s all good information, so, you know, something that comes up a lot is, you know, you guys day trade and, you know, I like to travel or I travel for work, you know, how can I trade when I travel. So I’ve got some little tips for you. This will not be some long winded topic, but this is something that I’ve been doing for probably as long as a lot of people have, you know, this one we started NetPicks back in 1996. I mean it was dial-up modem. So that’s literally how you access the internet if you are even on the internet and actually originally, we did everything via fax, so you can only imagine how things were back in the early days.

So going — things are now, is amazing, you know, so whenever I think to complain for a moment about technology or something going down, I remind myself of what it was like back in 1998 and I’m like, “Okay, yeah.” We’re really lucky to be living, you know, and here we are at least when it comes to these things, but I prefer swing trading to day trading. If I’m gonna travel, it’s definitely more challenging to maintain your day trading on the road. I do think it is possible. The thing that’s worked for me has been when I travel with, let’s say a laptop or an iPad and we’ll talk about that in a moment. I do much better when I don’t try to stuff my laptop and of course can’t even do this on like an iPad or a tablet with let’s say Trade Station and My Broker and my, you know, all those kind of things. I much prefer to just count on my internet connection through — to go MyPC or LogMeIn or to zoom in something called that I’ve never used but a lot of people swear by, it’s called SplashTop, splashtop.com. And most of these are for Android, you know, for iPhone, iPad or whatever, and you can access your home computer whether to Mac or Windows-based. It doesn’t matter.

I personally find — rely on the power of the system in your home or office and not, you know, use your local for trading too many things go wrong. Of course, you are counting on your internet staying constant with your iPad or your notebook, but I personally have had much better success in doing that and try to replicate everything on my laptop. So for me, go to MyPC, LogMeIn or Splashtop would be what I would highly recommend. And then you have to have of course a way to get to the home trading computer or your office trading computer, and of course, you know, you can use an iPad. The problem with an iPad is even when it has mouse control, it’s very hard to day trade without a mouse. You know, the touch screen is slightly being — it just doesn’t cut it. You can be fine in swing trading, but I think if you’re gonna day trade, you really have to have a laptop.

So a laptop with one of those applications can work very well. Just kind of bear in mind a few things. I personally like the MacBook Air, but I tie it directly back into my Windows computer back at my home office, so I just like because of the size, the durability, the fact that it always works. It comes up quickly, but you have to have a stable internet connection.

So a lot of people count on their hotel having like a great Wi-Fi or a great internet and sometimes it’s good, but you’re sharing that with dozens or hundreds of people and it can definitely have problems, so I always recommend it if you’re gonna trade from the road, just make sure that you have a hotspot. You know, get one of those Verizon Wi-Fi’s. Get one from AT&T or whomever, have it beamed on external. A lot of times, you get 4G these days which is awesome. You can even with your Android phone or your iPhone, you could turn those typically into a hotspot and that could work well as, you know, as well. I kind of like to have a separate one and kind of keep the phone separate. I always worry about battery and that sort of thing. You cannot go wrong with, you know, a separate external modem, but I realize it’s an additional expense, but you know, 50 bucks a month, if you travel a lot it’s definitely well worth it. And there’s other cards available out there as well and you might be listening and, you know, you’re up and elsewhere and they have different options available to you, but to me, a laptop, go to MyPC, LogMeIn, Splashtop, a good modem can actually — can definitely do it. I’d probably steer you towards swing trading, but you know, if you’re gonna be gone for awhile and you can day trade, you know, it’s definitely possible. Just to kind of realize it’s not gonna be nowhere, you know, near replicating the environment when in your home or office, so be careful, you know, overall. So, I don’t know, Brian anything to add to that?

Brian short: That’s all really, really good information Mark, and I reiterate what you said already. The only thing I’ll add is that if you are away and you’re on vacation, take a vacation. Don’t feel like you have to trade. I know that it’s a temptation, but take a break from it. The worst thing you could do is try to trade remotely especially during active inter-day trading, and what if you have a bad day? They happen. Right? It’s gonna ruin the rest of your day on your vacation.

So my point there is, you know, take a break away. We did a break away from whatever our jobs are whether it’s trading or any other job that you might be involved in. So just, you know, take that time away. Take a break and the markets will be there when you get back.

Mark Soberman: Yeah, it’s a good point and I for a number of years, I would travel and I would wake up early ahead of the family and I would, you know, go out to the, you know, little kitchen area or the desk or wherever we where, fire up the laptop, and I would trade, and, you know, obviously if things went well, you know, I mean for uplifting day, but you know, when it didn’t, you would obsess over a little bit and, you know, and it’s possible you make an extra mistake, you would have made it home, and like Brian mentioned, you don’t wanna come if, you know, ruin the application because the ideas to come back from that fresh and rejuvenated. So, you know, it’s kind of hard when you’re day trading. We’re all a little crazy. You’re gonna think about it on vacation, but, you know, certainly at some point you got to just shut it down, and turn it off and move away. You know, if you can at least for a period of time.

So anyway, that’s kind of our recommendations, you know, on trading when traveling. It’s one of — maybe the downsides to being a day trader, you only make money when you’re in the markets and active. You may just need to realize that when you’re figuring out your profits, you can’t multiply it by 52. You know, if you’re like, ‘Hey, I average this per week because nobody can maintain those 52 weeks in a year, and, you know, things are gonna come up along the way. All right. So now let’s go ahead and move on to a section that we call Tales From the Stupid.

All right, so you kind of heard the little audio there and this is a section that we do call, Tales from the Stupid” For those of you from there with that TV show, “Tales from the Crypt” from a number of years back. It’s kind of where we got this from. It’s our own personal trading nightmares, the things that we’ve done over the last, you know, since the last podcast that, you know, really was just kind of stupid, and we kind of wanna pass that along to you, not our stupidness, but actually hoping the things that we’ve done, we can kind of share our experiences with you, because trading is all about experience. You can’t really learn in the book. You got to learn it through experience. And so for me, the one that stands out the most is being premature ,right? There’s never anything good about being premature, but what I’m referring to here is stopping too early in a trade series. And what I mean by this is, you know, we mentioned earlier how we may be trading, you know, the metals, and then we’re trading some crude, and then we move into the DAX or the Russell, and, you know, we’re having a good day.

There is a really high temptation to prematurely stop because we booked a really good profit, but we really haven’t finished our trade plan. We’re like, well we stopped another trade to go on a Russell, another trade to go on a DAX. You know, we know the odds are on our favor that that trade will work, but it’s not guaranteed. So unfortunately, what happens is you start to look at your profit and you to start to like, “Hey, what happens if I lose the next two trade on each one? Holy crap. My profit could end up being lost and boy, that would kind of ruin my day.”

So I’ve noticed something that we haven’t even done recently. I haven’t even done is I’ve exited or stopped and then I’ve checked later in the day and like, “Oh man, I see those two trades would have worked if I would have just finished the plan.” So I think there’s a place for quitting early. I think Fridays are sometimes a good time when you’ve got a good game, maybe not to finish your full plan because, you know, it’s hard to go into the weekend with a loss especially when you’re up a lot and then you blew it in the last few trades. I have no problem with that because psychologically, that matters. I mean intellectually, it’s actually smarter to keep going. But I get the whole psychological thing. It’s like when you — you know, you hear financial people talk about paying off a house. They might be like, “Well, geez, your mortgage interest rate.” You can make more money in your investments but there’s something psychological by just having it done no matter how low the interest is. It’s the same thing, you know, with trading. So that’s something that I think, you know, is something that I’ve done that I got to get away from. Because the reverse is when it’s a bad day, we go to the distance. I mean we’re gonna keep going and going and going finishing the plan because we’re trying to recover. So you don’t wanna cut yourself short. Don’t be premature. Try to finish the plan, resist the urge to stop because you just wanna feel good about your profits. So Brian, that’s mine and how about for you?

Brian short: Yes, mine comes hot off the press from today’s trading session. Mark as you can attest, and I guess what I would say is focus, focus, focus. And that’s something that’s easier said than done. Your goal as a trader is to take what is on the chart and execute that in your trading account. And you just have to remain focused on the trade set ups and your trade plan a hundred percent of the time. If you simply move away from that focus for a split second, it can literally cost you profits. And so my story from today is this. I have traded thousands of times and placed thousands of trades through the interface that we use. And for whatever reason today, I didn’t have my domes set properly. And I went to place the trade and it went into the wrong price. I went to adjust that trade and in that adjustment, I ended up getting in twice the position size that I wanted to. Well, needless to say, it was a downhill spiral from there. And by the time I corrected that issue, it basically cost me the profit of one full winning trade which is pretty substantial.

And so point there that I want to make is you got to be diligent in maintaining that focus throughout the session. You know, one of the things we talk about here at NetPicks is trying to, you know, trade us a time frame for a certain period of time, a couple of hours, and that seems like a very small amount of time, but really, that’s a long time to sit there in front of your chart, staring at that chart and remaining diligent and focused. So I guess I would say, “Don’t let distractions get in the way.” And I’m talking about split-second distractions. That’s all it was for me. The market actually had picked up and I had to make a very quick decision and, you know, one straight click today cost me pretty big. And so again that’s my tale from the crypt or stupid, as we’d like to call it.

Mark Soberman: Well, the good part of the story was, you actually invented new profanity that actually I had never heard before. I actually had to Google some of the words that you use while that was happening, and I can tell you right now, some of those words don’t even exist. So, you know, if there’s any upside, there’s that. Yes.

Brian short: So there you go. New words were created.

Mark Soberman: So maybe that’s your genius for the day, but hopefully not. So, let’s kind of move into our next section, which is our genius because we already confessed our stupidity, so let’s off set this a little bit.

All right, so for me something that I do, we’re in the education business. We train traders. We work with traders. We develop systems. We’ve been doing this for 17 years now. The one thing that sometimes happens is we’ll go ahead and tweak or update or change a system, and without fail we’ll get some complaints from people because they’re like how can you change your system? That means it doesn’t work or it’s not effective if you’re changing it.

And it kind of always drives me crazy because I’m like, “There’s no market that’s ever gonna stay static for us. If we’re stubborn and we don’t ever want to adjust or tweak or update our system, we’re not going to maintain our performance. I mean, it’s just one of those things that whatever we did a few years ago is not guaranteed to work in today’s environment, so I kind of consider if I’m gonna say, the genius is don’t be inflexible that way. Don’t be stubborn. Don’t feel it’s actually a positive that you never update and change your trading system. Because if you don’t, my guess is, you probably do not have good or consistent results. And I’m somebody who’s kind of obsessed in a way with always trying to fine-tune. I never rest on the laurels of what I’m doing because I don’t trade a hundred percent profitable. I have a definite cut of losing trades. Situations come up day to day. New things I’ve never seen. So I’m the kind of person who’s always looking to discover and explore, and I would say for a trader to be successful, you really have to be that way or you’re gonna have to work with whether it’s people like NetPicks like us or somebody else that’s gonna do that for you.

So if you’re not stubborn and you tweak and you test, it’s not a sign of weakness. It’s actually a sign of strength, but there is of course a limit where you can overdo that. You don’t wanna be testing and back testing every single day and changing all your parameters everyday, but there is a time and place to make moves and just not to feel like it’s a sign of weakness when you trade. So for me, Brian that’s, you know, what stands out, and it’s something I’ve been working on a lot in our current systems and it’s really been making a difference, so I’ll pass on to you.

Brian short: All right, thanks Mark. My genius is, well first of all, let me give you a little background. I come from the computer background. I own a computer consulting firm for many years, for 20 years. And one of the things we did in that capacity, in that business was contingency planning. And so that’s my genius for today. And one of the things that I always recommend traders have is the ability to manage their trades if something happens to their primary connection. So that happened to me today in a session. In fact Mark, you had stepped aside for a little bit, and I didn’t even tell you this. My internet went down for 60 seconds roughly, and I had to then switch my internet over. It’s a simple move of my CAT-5 cable to another internet provider and it was up within 20 seconds. And I think that’s important because the last thing you wanna do as a trader is lose control of your trade when you’re in it.

And so along with that, let me say two. We always recommend that you place OCO orders when you’re trading. Never be in the market without a target and a stop, because if you lose control like it happened to me today and you can’t reconnect very quickly. Then at least that trade cannot get any worse than those parameters that you set. And so — and then also I would recommend, you know, I’ve never had to do this, but having a broker on speed dial. Be ready in case we need to take that manual action to call your broker and affect your trade that you have that capability also. So that’s my genius for today. Contingency plan, make sure you have the ability to connect to the internet if your primary internet connection goes down.

Mark Soberman: You know, it’s almost like you should trade like a pit crew, like a NASCAR pit crew and consider actually timing yourself from the time that that internet goes down, you know, do you actually know the steps you have to take to bring up another internet whether it’s, you know, that external card that I was talking about — that’s a great thing about trading when traveling. If you have that card — that’s one of my main backups Brian’s got, you know, cable modem and it’s got DSL. I rely on two different cell Wi-Fi connections as well as of course, you know, cable modem so I feel I have backups, but I had something to think through. How long would it take me to get this thing up and running, and geez, my computer even connect with a wireless. What if doesn’t have a wireless card? It seems kind of dumb, but it’s amazing until it happens and you’re panicking.

You need to be able to do that, I would say, you know, 60 seconds, 90 seconds make that change because, you know, these markets are just not gonna wait for us. That’s for sure. They could care less. They’re just gonna take our money, you know, whether we’re having problems or not, and your broker is certainly, he’s not gonna go ahead and refund those losses because you had a technical problem, you know, including if they have a problem as well. So, definitely really have good points on that.

So Brian, this is kind of a portion of the podcast. We’re moving to our interview and over the last several podcast, we’ve been interviewing some authors, bestselling authors of various trading books which has been great, but we want to bring on a little different guest this time, and we have Chris from fxtradingreviews.com which is, fxtradingreviews.com, which is FX, trading, reviews with an “s” on the end, dot com. Uh, and Chris is really the publisher, the writer, the person behind this website. We have so many people who are interested in trading forex, maybe day trading or swing trading forex. You hear about all this robots. A lot of people maybe have used robots. We really want to bring Chris on and talk to him about what a lot of us have been, you know, hearing about talking about, et cetera, and kind of talking to us about, you know, the pros and the cons of this whole side of the business. So with that, Chris, are you with us?

Chris: I am here. Thanks for having me.

Mark Soberman: Great. So Chris, what I wanted to do is sort of just ask you a few questions and, you know, what maybe the first thing is tell us a little bit about what FX Trading Reviews does and what’s the whole purpose of your website.

Chris: Great. Yeah, thank you. As you said, FX Trading Reviews is the site and really what we’re geared for is providing a platform to give an unbiased insight to various forex trading systems. As, you know, forex is a great product to trade, and you know, whenever there’s a great product and a great way to make money, unfortunately that also can lead to a variety of different scams and fake products out there. So what I try to do with this site is really provide an unbiased view where customers, our readers can get this feedback. Both my feedback as well as even users commenting on, you know, what are the legitimate systems? What are the platforms that are gonna provide results for them and if they’re gonna make an investment not only in buying the product but also their own money, then they really want to do that research and that’s really the platform we’re trying to provide.

Mark Soberman: Yeah. I think for me, one of the coolest thing about the website is who you run these live demo counts, and it even goes further, and you actually put your money into accounts and run these systems then you report back in real-time the trade results. I mean, for me that’s really cool. It’s not something that you guys try to do as much as you can.

Chris: Yeah, it really is and, you know, it’s really been something. It has been as you said, very popular with our customers because rather than, you know, just having somebody write and write and write about a product, and again you never know, you know, where their bias may be by actually running through live demos or even putting our own money into products the client is able to see for themselves exactly how those different platforms are performing. So we do have both, you know, packages that are running in demo and, you know, that just means, you know, it’s not our real money but it’s executing those trades. And then what we do is we really try to look closely at, you know, which of those robots from demo are worthy of putting our own money into. And that’s when we move it to our live money, and you can see we’ve got a variety that are trading our live money, and you know, the results are right there. You know, it’s pulling those in real time — so no fudging the results. They’re definitely real.

Mark Soberman: Yeah, I’m curious. You know, what do you as far as like when you test all these systems. I have a feeling that a lot of them don’t play out for the marketing. I mean, maybe just as a guest. Do you have any idea like how many — what percentage tend to have a chance to be successful which versus like how many tend to fail?

Chris: I would say your hunch is absolutely right. Unfortunately, as I alluded to my opening comments, this industry is ripe with scams, and you know, everyday, you know, I’m on a lot of mailing lists, and you know, targeted by a lot of these different new robots and forex products, and everyday we’ll see a new one come across our desk, and, you know, we do our best to investigate some and do our research, run them in demo. But the claims definitely outweigh the actual results, and, you know, that’s really something that we try to provide for our customers is, you know, really help steer them through the clutter and point them to the ones that are legitimate.

On a percentage basis, you know, I would have to say even if you were to just go to our site and look at our results, you know, less than half of the robots that we’re given been running in demo are seeing positive results, and that’s after we’ve already gone through and wiped away some other ones that aren’t even worthy of being in demo.

Mark Soberman: Yeah, that’s what I figured. So give to the people listening, maybe some tips on, you know, how they can on their own — I mean, obviously I kind of always think of FX Trading Reviews, it’s like the consumer reports of this business, but what are some things they can do? Red flags at UC, let’s say and the marketing, the hype, the fluff to look out for, or vice versa, you know, what are the things that legitimize and make you’re more of a believer at least upfront before you start testing?

Chris: I would say, you know, nowadays with great sites like Myfxbook that really allow you to track and see real-time results publicly, you know, that has definitely become a separator for me, the legitimate versus the not so legitimate robots. The guys that are actually able to, you know, stand behind their work, feel comfortable in showing you their results, you know — all of us know they’re gonna be draw downs and there’s gonna be periods where it’s not performing in a peak. And the guys that are really, you know, have that confidence to stand behind their work, they’re gonna put right on their sales page a link to something like Myfxbook where you yourself can track and see the results, and, you know, the ones that don’t show any results immediately, I’m gonna, you know, have a leery eye towards. But even the ones that may try to trick you, and, by that I mean it may look like it’s real account, but really they’re screenshots, and so you can’t drill in, and go actually view those reports. They’re just showing you a screenshot. You have no idea what that screenshot is really showing you.

So the ones that show us real-time results are definitely the ones that I’m most in favor of and really have a lot of credibility to the products.

Mark Soberman: Yeah. You were showing me some of those sites where it was shocking almost where they’ll go ahead and take like Myfxbooks screenshots and it’s dummied up and it’s static, and it looks amazing. I mean, these people put so much time and effort, but it’s just time and effort into the fraud.

So I mean it’s a great point. Make sure you’re linking into a real live, you’re going off to a third party site that you can verify, and you know, that that’s really like — I guess another thing would be, you know, if you’re going and you do buy something, I’m sure you would typically recommend what they start in demo mode or, you know, jump right into live money or, you know, hush somebody, you know, start up a robot if they think that they, you know, at least check your site out, and want to start with something.

Chris: Yeah, any time frankly that, you know, you’re buying a new system, I would highly recommend running it in a demo period where you can really, you know, get used to the system, see the results, see the products that are being traded and get comfortable with those results, and we’ve even recommended, you know, as a conservative player to run it for 30 days. You know, it’s gonna be real money once you flip that switch, so make sure it gets those result that you wanna see, and that really points back to when you’re looking at the various robots. You know, make sure these guys have their money back guarantee because, yeah, the last thing you want is to buy something that you may have gotten lured in by a sleek sales page like you said with, you know, they’re putting a lot time and money into this because they want to take your money. But the last thing you want is, you know, you make that investment and you turn around, and the product doesn’t work and you’re stuck with that investment.

Mark Soberman: Yeah that’s a good point. I think the good news is always going to your site. I see that some do work most time, but at least, you know, it’s reassuring to know that there are some that work and at your site, I just want people to know since we kind of wrap up this interview here. You have a giveaway, right, if they go to FX Trading Reviews?

Chris: We do. Yeah, we put together a guideline last year, the end of last year that really we wanted to do a couple of things, accomplish a lot of things. One was publish a guide that’s really going to give you end-to-end tips. And this is for the basic, the beginner I would say forex trader that may not have a lot of experience in this market, and offer tips on how to get started, you know, ways, good ways to make money, but also even the experienced trader. There’s some great tips in here, and, you know, real deep insights. So the guy includes that, but one thing that we included and this is, well, is we did a real deep analysis across many other sites — of course, I’m biased. I believe FX Trading Reviews offers the best quality reviews, but there are also a number of different sites out there and we really wanted to see how are robots running at some of these other sites, so what we did is we did a deep analysis across a variety of different sites and try to see what robots were running at these sites to kind of measure popularity and then what results they were getting And that allowed us to create our own proprietary score to really rate these robots not on just our own demo but also looking across a multitude of sites. And that is included as part of that guide as well. So when you go to fxtradingreviews.com, you’ll immediately be offered a chance to receive and it’s free. You know, we don’t charge for this as well as any other content on the site.

Mark Soberman: Yeah, it’s really cool, it just costs us an email and it’s certainly well worth like you also said there’s so much great information on the site. So people should definitely do that if you have interests in forex or the whole robot EA world, FX Trading Reviews will be a great place to go. So Chris, I appreciate you joining us today and you had given us all this great information.

Chris: Very good. It was great to be here. Thank you.

Mark Soberman: Okay, great. That was an awesome interview with Chris at FX Trading Reviews. Take advantage of his offer there as well if you’re interested in forex. It’s been a really good podcast. I think we’ve covered a lot of cool information. If you’re interested in our next author interview, you can also go to netpicks.com/interview, all lower case, and you can sign up for that where we usually have one every month, every other month, and also you can just go to netpicks.com, N-E-T-P-I-C-K-S.com, and there’s always some great information there like we mentioned before. A lot of it is available too and free as well. Just put in your email and we’ve got some great tips for you. So Brian, I really appreciate it. Thanks for joining me in this podcast and we’ll shortly report to the next one.

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