Greg Secker shares his trading life.

My interest in the markets started when I was working at Thomas Cook Financial Services as a trading technologist. I built one of the first real-time foreign exchange trading systems. This gave me exposure to some of the most amazing traders. It was mind blowing to watch these guys pull hundreds of thousands of pounds out of the market in 15 to 20 minutes. I wanted to do what they did.

Starting out, I made many mistakes: ignoring my stop losses, not sizing my trades correctly, trading too much, trading the news. I’ve made them all, and more. The important thing with trading is realising that you’ve made these mistakes and to refine what you are doing. This was where having mentors to point out my mistakes was critical. Sometimes you are so close to something that you don’t see the big picture.

I learned my biggest lesson from a trade that was a loss. It was when I was first trading under the guys at Thomas Cook. I’d picked up technical analysis pretty quickly and I was coming on in leaps and bounds. I’d identified a great pivot trade on the GBP/USD long and, probably because I was a little over-confident, I didn’t bother to check if there were any news items that day. Sure enough, my trade tanked within about 15 minutes of being placed. I was seriously scratching my head.

I asked one of the traders if they knew what had happened and he slapped me across the back of the head! The revised GDP figures were released about 10 minutes after I placed the trade, and they were well below expectation. At that time I learnt that you always need to be aware of your environment...

Excerpted from an article originally published in the Jan/Feb 2012 issue of YourTradingEdge magazine UK. All rights reserved. © Copyright 2012, Your Media Edge Pty Ltd.
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