My Visit to Robin Ho’s Futures Trading Course Preview
Last week, I was at a course preview conducted by Robin Ho, one of Philip Capital’s top traders and remisier.
At the start of the session, Robin clarified that the title top trader does not mean being the most profitable trader. Rather, it meant the trader who chalked up the most volume of trades, somewhere in the region of $200 – $300 million every month.
The first half of the session had Robin telling us about his history and trading record. He used to work as a Naval officer commanding a warship. Even when he was holding a day job, he was already actively trading. So much so that the brokerage firm even sent him a letter and gift acknowledging him as one of their top clients.
When he finished his military career, he then became a full time remisier and trader.
He started a blog posting his daily trades, profits and losses, and managed to turn $100k into $2million during the 2007 to 2009 period by correctly calling the top and bottom.
Throughout his session, Robin repeatedly tried to impress upon us that the difference between him and other trainers out there was that he was a real trader with a solid track record. Anyone can teach trading, but are they actually trading in the markets on a regular basis?
He flashed a screenshot of his records, which showed both daily profits and losses. If you look at the numbers carefully, you will realize that the losses are usually small, while the profits had small and big wins. This was what differentiated profitable traders from others – the ability to cut losses quickly and not hang on to losses.
He doesn’t like to trade on the breakout, as the majority of breakouts tend to fail. Rather, he will see the opposite trade as a good probability trade once he sees signs of the breakout failing.
Robin stands apart from the crowd in that he doesn’t believe in using technical signals like RSI signals or stochastics to setup his trades as the indicators are lagging. He will plan his trades based on price and volume analysis.
Somewhere towards the middle of the session, we did experience an awkward moment as someone interrupted Robin and asked when he was going to start teaching about futures, as that was what he had came to learn about.
The timing happened to be right because the next slide happened to be on futures. But the question did caught Robin out and he took a while to compose himself before talking about the advantages of futures and also SIMSCI, which I had wrote about previously.
However, that one (or two) slides turned out to be all there was on futures, and the gentlemen who asked that question left the session early disappointed.
On hindsight, I guess Robin probably shouldn’t have called his preview session “Futures Trading Course”. 🙂
In the last few slides, Robin covered the essentials of trading. Things like:
[important]- Trading is all about probability.
- Never ever work against the trend.
- There is no holy grail and secret formula to help you reap big profits in trading.
- Many traders make huge profits during a bull run, but lose everything and more when the market corrects.
He also mentioned that he was watching the price of oil carefully, as it might spike up if the Middle East situation escalates.
At the end of the session, my friend and I decided to give him a nickname as it was very catchy – Robin Hood. 😉