Michael Marcos is a well-known short-term trader who specializes in Forex and futures trading. His best-known record was starting at $30,000 as a futures trader at Commodities Corporation of America and rolling to $80 million 10 years later. During this period, the company only added 100,000 principal to him, and 30% of the rest of the year was withdrawn from his account every year.
At the same time, he has produced another top trader, Bruce Covana, a legend who went from being a taxi driver to a rich man. Bruce Covana's 2018 Forbes Global Rich List ranked 398 with a net worth of $5.2 billion.
Michael Marcos graduated from Johns Hopkins University and was supposed to pursue a Ph.D. in psychology as a professor. He met a man named John who claimed to be able to double Michael Marcos's money in two weeks and demanded that he pay $30 a week. Michael Marcos was very moved, so he took out the $1,000 he had saved and went to the exchange with John to make a transaction, and the result was that John actually did not understand anything, and the two people lost money in all 5 transactions. Later, Michael Marcos fired John, made 3 trades himself, and lost all of them. $1,000 was lost in 3 days.
Although his training was unfavorable, Michael Marcos thought it was only a matter of time before he learned to trade because he had been very successful in his studies. Sure enough, Michael Marcos read some wheat and soybean meal futures books, listened to some market news, and soon made $30,000 from the market, which made him very confident, planning to make more money in the market, and borrowed $20,000 from his mother, and put together $50,000 to put it all into the market. But the news in the market did not make him money, but instead made him lose $30,000 of his own and his mother's $12,000.
His failure in the futures market forced him to go out and look for a job, but Michael Marcos didn't want to continue his studies at all, and he only wanted to do futures trading, so he found a job as a commodity analyst at Renault Securities.
When working as an analyst, Michael Marcos still could not suppress his enthusiasm for trading, and although the analyst was forbidden to make transactions, he still secretly made transactions, but the situation was not good, and he kept losing money. Until he met the man who brought him success, Ed Secotta.
"Ed Secotta is a really talented trader with impressive success. When I first met Ed, who had just graduated from MIT, developed a computer program for testing and trading technical systems. I still don't understand how Ed knew so much about trading at such a young age. Michael Marcos said.
From Ed Secotta, Michael Marcos learned that a successful trader must have a trading system that guides his trading. At the same time, you must abide by your own investment guidelines, and you should stop the loss in time when it is timely. Ed Secotta's investment philosophy is to follow the trend, and Michael Marcos, in observing his trades, understands that it takes enough patience to follow the trend.
Michael Marcos finally got a glimpse into the nature of some trading and finally made a profit, from $700 to $64,000.
In August 1974, Michael Marcos joined commodities companies (cc) as traders, which gave him $30,000 as a trading fund, which he expanded to $80 million about 10 years later.
The company later added $100,000 to Michael Marcos' account. American Commodities was still growing, and the company had to take 30% of the tax from traders a year to cover costs, so Michael Marcos's average profit margin that year was at least 100%.
About positions
Michael Marcos believes that traders should not spend more than 5% of their deposits on their investments. Day traders generally trade with small amounts of money, profit is withdrawn, if the loss is not made up in a trading day, tomorrow start again. I have observed the trading situation of Wu Weimiao (the champion of the National Futures Competition), which is generally to do intraday trading with about 20,000 yuan of funds. Profit is withdrawn, and no more principal will be invested.
About the choice of investment products
Michael Marcos believes that if you can do a good job of trading one type of market, you can do a good job of trading all markets, because the principles of trading are the same. So he himself has been successful in both the commodity and foreign exchange markets.
About stop loss
Michael Marcos believes that if after opening a position for 5 minutes, the situation does not develop as you expected, then you should close the position. My opinion is that because it is intraday trading, the situation is changing rapidly, and I realize that I am wrong and must exit immediately, otherwise the loss will only be further expanded. If you do day trading, there will be many trading opportunities, do not worry about no chance to make up for the loss, the stop loss must be decisive, this is the most important aspect of day trading.
About watch time
When Michael Marcos was engaged in foreign exchange trading, because the foreign exchange market was a 24-hour market, he even slept at night and had to get up every 2 hours to observe the changes in the market, which led to the breakdown of his marriage. If you do short-term and intraday trading, it is essential to keep an eye on the market at all times, and it may be difficult to bear without considerable energy and physical strength.
I was going to write a series of articles to introduce several of the more mainstream trading ideas at present, and then you can choose the trading ideas that you can understand and agree with to create your own trading system. So I named this series of articles "Retail Investors From 0 to Establish Trading System Ideas", but after updating the first one, it was found that the effect was not very good. Maybe purely theoretical things are not of much interest to everyone, and if there are no specific examples, it is not easy to understand.
So I intend to change the approach, intending to explain the difference between various trading concepts by introducing the trading experience of some top traders at home and abroad.
Wait until these mainstream trading concepts have been introduced, and then update the specific methods of establishing a trading system, which will also be combined with examples.
If you are interested, you can follow.