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Advisor Bios
Andrea Unger
Andrea Unger loves juggling numbers, except when the numbers are used to identify human beings.
Unger spent nine years as a middle manager for a major corporation in Italy. He enjoyed putting his mechanical engineering degree (University of Milan) to use in the workplace, but he didn’t enjoy the harsh realities of mid-level management.
"I had 30 people working under me, and I saw how people can be treated like numbers," Andrea says. "The maneuvers I saw in business were sad because you were dealing with people, and people have stories and families and lives. Top management would come in with directions to reduce here, to move people there. This is normal to meet the objectives of a company, I understand that it must be like that. But it's not what I like."
Andrea decided to move in a new direction in 2001, and set his sights on a trading career. He sought advice from famed Italian trader Domenico Foti, and soon became a top protégée. The two have become close friends as well, and now collaborate daily on trading ideas and system development.
"I am much happier now, because as a trader I am paid depending on my skills," says Unger, who trades from Maltignano in the Marche region of central Italy. "The better I am, the more I gain. I am alone against the market and I am free to manage my own time."
Unger has established himself as one of Europe’s best traders. He won the futures- trading title in 2005 Top Trader Cup competition, sponsored by LombardReport.com, and one year later published "Money Management: Methods and Applications," the first Italian-language book on money management for traders. (Andrea normally uses the fixed-fractional method in his personal trading but also develops combinations of methods to suit certain strategies.
Unger fulfilled a dream by winning the 2008 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading, which he captured with a 672% net return. Proving it was no fluke, he recorded a 115% return in 2009 to become the first back-to-back winner of the competition in nearly 20 years, and then posted a 240% return in the 2010 World Cup Championship of Futures & Forex Trading to pull off an unprecedented World Cup three-peat.
And he was back at the top of the pack two years later, winning the 2012 Q4 futures competition with an 82.8% net return.
"Participation in the World Cup was a way to measure my techniques in the most important contest in the world -- and become the first Italian trader to win the championship," he says.
Andrea is a full-time trader who appreciates the complexities of the markets. "There is no easy money out there," he says. "Markets require discipline and application to be understood. I try to develop methods that apply to the markets. I never try to apply the market to my ideas."
The profile above includes statements of opinion. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. World Cup Championship (WCC) accounts do not necessarily represent all the trading accounts controlled by a given competitor. Accounts trading in the WCC may be subject may be subject to commission rates different from those following the AutoTrade program. WCC competitors may control accounts that produce results substantially different than the results achieved in their WCC accounts.
Andrea Unger
Brent Carlile
While working toward his Agricultural Economics degree at South Dakota State University in 1977, Craig Haugaard decided to divert his student loan money before paying his tuition one semester.He bought a contract of oat futures, pocketed a quick $300, then settled up with SDSU billing.
“It was magic,” Haugaard says. “At that stage of my life I didn’t think through the consequences of my actions very well. If it had gone the other way I suppose I would have had to go hat in hand to my folks and tell them that if they wanted me in college they were going to have to pony up some cash.”
Investing in agricultural futures at age 20 was more than a shot in the dark for Haugaard. His father owned a futures brokerage firm, where Craig hung out and developed a passion for charting in high school. As a teenager, Craig rented a small farm where he maintained a flock of 225 sheep and half a dozen steers. It was also the home base for a commercial crop spraying business he developed.
Futures trading has remained in Craig’s bloodstream ever since. He is the Grain Marketing Manager at a large grain cooperative that has elevators in 15 locations, two of which house shuttle loaders capable of loading up to 110 rail cars at a time. The coop has basis traders, a hedge desk, grain accountants, grain originators, and keeps more than 30 trucks moving on a normal day.
Haugaard manages it all while writing a daily commodity comments column covering corn, soybeans and wheat futures for the coop. He also conducts about 20 marketing seminars a year for farmers looking for new strategies.
Craig uses technical indicators (moving averages, stochastic and MACD) within a seasonal trend context to help him enter and exit trades, but fundamentals – which he lives and breathes at his day job – dominate his trading. “I am heavily involved in that world and so can’t help but have my view on a given market colored by the underlying fundamentals,” he says.
The profile above includes statements of opinion. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.
Brent Carlile
Jan Smolen
Jan has had a lifelong interest in all types of numbers. With a Ph.D. in economics and finance, he’s been studying risk, forecast, price and politics for years. Even before receiving his Ph.D., Jan’s professional career had him concentrating on the development of price and demand forecasting models for various companies in the Slovak Republic. His thesis on developing forecasting models in the electricity sector went on to be chosen as one of his University’s best theses, gaining ample media attention. Today, Jan is a university professor, teaching economics and finance-related subjects as well as occasionally acting as a consultant on fields relating to pricing, price and demand forecasting, and efficiency optimization for companies in the energy sector. When he’s not lecturing or consulting, Jan spends his time trading and researching the markets.
It was in 2009, when he decided to make the first of his futures trades solely based on fundamentals, and to his surprise, he managed to make some profit without knowing too much about trading. His strategy “is a work in progress,” he says. Jan has continued to study the markets over the years, and although he is never finished tweaking his trading method, he has learned to utilize his many skills, interests, and knowledge when trading and aims to make his trading decisions based on as much information as possible.
“Many people have developed many good systems but refuse to accept other market perspectives,” he says. “ I try to improve my trading every day. To make a profit in trading, you have to work very hard, be humble, and respect the market.”
Beginning as strictly a fundamental trader, Jan says that he understands the fundamental market the best. However, he acknowledges that there are many other crucial factors to consider when making a trade. Jan incorporates technical, volume analysis, and his own indicators into his trading techniques.
“Every area is assessed separately,” he says. “When they all point in the same direction, the trade is opened, and it generally remains opened as long as risk and reward is in the trade’s favor.”
Jan elected to test his trading talents when he entered the 2018 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading. He has since participated in several annual and quarterly Future and Forex Trading Championships, trading a long list of markets.
The profile above includes statements of opinion. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. World Cup Championship (WCC) accounts do not necessarily represent all the trading accounts controlled by a given competitor. Accounts trading in the WCC may be subject may be subject to commission rates different from those following the AutoTrade™ trading service. WCC competitors may control accounts that produce results substantially different than the results achieved in their WCC accounts.
Jan Smolen
Jürg Diemand
“It has always intrigued me how prices are discovered in free markets by voluntary exchanges without any central planner,” Jurg says. “Trading has especially been attractive as a way to increase my personal freedom and financial independence.”Today Jurg Diemand is a part-time trader and a Tech Lead in Machine Learning at a large Silicon Valley company. He began trading in 2005, and says he doesn’t actually remember much about his first trade, but believes he decided to buy some Gold after reading a book about currency debasement and inflation.
With a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Zurich, Jurg looked to learn a lot from market mentors such as Pendo Loefgren, Co-founder and CIO of Arnova Capital AG, and from diving into various trading books and academic papers to broaden his market knowledge.
Jurg names some of his favorite trading books to be “Algorithmic Trading” and “Machine Trading,” both by Ernest P. Chan, and “Advances in Financial Machine Learning,” by Marcos Lopez de Prado.
After years of studying and practice, Jurg’s trading now focuses on the use of technical, data-driven strategies.
“They employ machine learning to find tradable patterns in historical data,” he says. “Once developed and ready for live trading, these strategies are completely automated and systematic, i.e. free from human intervention. Quantitative strategies like the ones I use, target regular, persistent patterns, which should lead to consistently positive returns when averaged over several months,” Jurg says.
“Applying machine learning to financial data is quite challenging due to the small signal and the overwhelming noise,” Jurg says. “It took quite some time and learning from many mistakes before the results started to make sense. Statistics and Machine Learning can lead to great outcomes in trading, when applied with sufficient thought and care.”
The profile above includes statements of opinion. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. World Cup Championship (WCC) accounts do not necessarily represent all the trading accounts controlled by a given competitor. Accounts trading in the WCC may be subject may be subject to commission rates different from those following the AutoTrade™ trading service. WCC competitors may control accounts that produce results substantially different than the results achieved in their WCC accounts.
Jürg Diemand
Larry Williams
"In a business known for one-hit wonders, Larry Williams has endured, passing the test of time... If there is one person who embodies the mind and the spirit of the individual trader during the entire 40 years existence of futures it probably would be Larry Williams." -- Futures Magazine, November 2012Larry Williams began following the markets in 1962. His interest was sparked by the Kennedy market crash, when President Kennedy forced a roll back in steel prices. The crash was front page news everywhere. People lost millions but Larry was more taken by the fact that if you had been "short" the market, you could have made millions.
Once Larry began to understand that he could make money trading the markets, whether the market was going up or down, he was smitten. Williams graduated from the University of Oregon in 1964 with a bachelors in Journalism – a background that has led him to publish a dozen popular books.
By 1965 Larry was actively trading the markets and began writing a newsletter. It wasn't long before Larry began producing ground breaking market research. In 1966 he developed his famous timing tool, Williams %R. This tool still is published daily in many major financial papers and is a standard indicator provided on trading web sites from MSN's Money Central to Yahoo!
In 1970 his first investment book, “The Secret of Selecting Stocks,” was published. Larry followed that with the first book ever on the seasonality of stocks and futures, “Sure Thing Commodity Trading: How Seasonal Factors Influence Commodity Prices.”
His 1973 ”How I Made One Million Dollars… Last Year… Trading Commodities” is one of the best-selling commodities books of all time.
Williams stunned the trading world by running a $10,000 account to $1,147,607 for an astounding 11,376% net return in the 1987 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading®.
Larry's long list of best-selling books includes 1982's “How to Prosper in the Coming Good Years,” which accurately forecasted the largest bull market and surge in economic growth in American history. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including Futures Magazine's first Doctor of Futures Award, the Omega Research Lifetime Achievement Award and Traders International 2005 Trader of the Year. The mayor of San Diego declared October 6, 2002 as Larry Williams Day in honor of its local celebrity.
Over the past 40 years, Larry has lectured at premier investment conferences throughout the world.
The profile above includes statements of opinion. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.
Larry Williams
Marek Chrastina
Marek Chrastina received his master’s degree in Business Economics and Management from the Faculty of Economics at University of Matej Bel in Slovakia.He began his trading career several years later, but it was when he was just 11 years old that he first started to learn about the stock market from his parents.
“I guess this was the seed to my future career,” Marek says. “I do not remember my first trade. But, I did not start in a common way, as many traders do, with charts and understanding technical or fundamental analysis - I started from a totally different side as portfolio and risk manager.”
Today Marek resides in the mountains of Slovakia where he spends most of his time trading and managing his businesses, which also include a recruiting/headhunting and consulting company. When Marek’s not working, he enjoys traveling and being in nature.
“I am trading directional low frequency algorithmic portfolios, which consist of systems that trade different markets and market sectors, Marek says. “My portfolios consist of different types of systems. Some are trend following, intraday and swing breakouts. Some are mean reversion contrarians.”
Marek has developed hundreds of fixed algos, which are still all in use. Once they’re developed, he does not change them in any way, he says. He is continuously, however, developing new ones and improving the process.”
“I am not sure if this is the biggest lesson I’ve learned in my trading career, but to “manage the risk and diversify” is an important lesson I’ve kept with me from the beginning. I am always mastering my portfolio and risk management skills.”
The profile above includes statements of opinion. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. World Cup Championship (WCC) accounts do not necessarily represent all the trading accounts controlled by a given competitor. Accounts trading in the WCC may be subject may be subject to commission rates different from those following the AutoTrade™ trading service. WCC competitors may control accounts that produce results substantially different than the results achieved in their WCC accounts.
Marek Chrastina
Paige Williams
“The ‘spark’ started out as a twinkle,” she says.Paige Williams’s interest in the markets was sparked at a very young age. Thanks to her father, renowned trader, Larry Williams, Paige was exposed to the trading world, though in small doses, since before she could even speak.
“As a kid, once I finished my homework I answered phones at my dad's office, sent faxes, and looked at his charts,” Paige says. “The older I got, he would teach me market lingo and pass along articles to pique my interest. Now that I have a family of my own and Larry is threatening to retire, I knew I wanted to gather as much information from him as I could. And what better way to learn than to do?”
Paige is a graduate of University of California, Davis, and Columbia University in New York. Today, she works as an Executive Assistant at a tech startup, while her three-year-old makes sure to keep her on her toes. In-between it all, Paige studies the E-minis, and understandably names her father as her greatest mentor along the way.
“Since I had the privilege of having Larry as my father, it wasn't one book or one seminar that taught me about trading,” she says. “It was afternoons in his office as a kid, watching him analyze charts at home, and recently while helping to produce Larry TV.”
Paige recently made her first official trade (aside from simulated) when she entered the 2019 Fourth Quarter Equity Index and Interest Rate Futures Trading Championship.
“I remember being nervous about whether my research would prove worthwhile and if I had indeed mastered certain vocabulary,” she says.
Paige’s World Cup Advisor program, Day Trader, continues to follow her Championship account, where she concentrates on trading one market at a time. When she feels she has a good understanding of how that particular market operates, on to the next!
Paige’s goal is to ‘hit’ a good average, though a ‘home run’ is always welcome, she says. “Slow and steady wins the race, but a jet pack every now and then can help.”
The profile above includes statements of opinion. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. World Cup Championship (WCC) accounts do not necessarily represent all the trading accounts controlled by a given competitor. Accounts trading in the WCC may be subject may be subject to commission rates different from those following the AutoTrade™ trading service. WCC competitors may control accounts that produce results substantially different than the results achieved in their WCC accounts.
Paige Williams
Petra Ilona Zacek
After spending more than 15 years as Managing Director on the trading floors of some of the largest investment banks in the world, Petra retired and moved with her pro-athlete husband to always-sunny Arizona and started trading her own money in 2014.Petra studied with Larry Williams for three years and gained a deeper knowledge of futures and equity markets. In May 2017 she attended "The Trading Masterclass" organized by multiple former World Cup Champions Michael Cook, Andrea Unger, Kevin Davey and Tim Rea, which served to make her learning curve even steeper.
Today, Petra trades her Eclipse program on WorldCupAdvisor.com, where she focuses primarily on commodity futures spreads in highly liquid markets. The strategy includes rigorously back-tested models that Petra developed herself, always seeking the best possible combination of decorrelated profits. Whilst a smooth and steep equity curve is paramount in trading, she does not shy away from one-off special situations trades when she identifies unique opportunities evolving in the markets.
Zacek is obsessed with improving her trading skill set every single day.
“My whole life is a work-in-progress,” she says. “A day with no learning is a day wasted. Including my trading.”
Zacek frequently listens to Podcasts such as Better System Trader, Option Alpha and Trend Following Radio in order to generate fresh ideas and perspectives. She also collaborates on research projects with several high-level traders around the world.
She holds a PhD degree in Economics with a focus on International Finance from the ultra-prestigious Russian Academy of Sciences and speaks seven languages. In her spare time, she serves on the executive board of several non-profit organizations such as United Way.
Her most frequently traded futures contracts include CL, ES, GC, HG, HO, LE, NG, NK, RB, ZB, ZS, VX, major currency futures and occasionally others. She says the biggest lesson she’s learned along the way is “Patience, humbleness and to respect the markets.”
The profile above includes statements of opinion. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. World Cup Championship (WCC) accounts do not necessarily represent all the trading accounts controlled by a given competitor. Accounts trading in the WCC may be subject may be subject to commission rates different from those following the AutoTrade™ trading service. WCC competitors may control accounts that produce results substantially different than the results achieved in their WCC accounts.
Petra Ilona Zacek
Ryan Alderson
In the two consecutive years Ryan has participated in the World Cup Championship of Futures Trading, he has placed 5th, and then 2nd, achieving a net return of 183.1% in his 2nd place finish. He says, “As a discretionary position trader I adhere to a disciplined mental framework that combines qualitative and quantitative factors. The broad process is that I first strive to subjectively understand the underlying psychological and behavior dynamics of the market I’m analyzing, looking for impending trend reversals. Then I use a point-and-figure charting variant to pinpoint the trend change. I’ll generally hold positions for a few weeks.”Ryan’s interest in trading began in early adolescence. While watching the evening network news with his parents, his curiosity was piqued by the daily financial segment. The images of the bustling floor of the New York Stock Exchange, the flurry of paper, and the clanging of the closing bell prompted questions to his dad. After his dad explained the gist of how the stock market worked, Ryan thought the concept of trading was neatest thing in the world, leading to a lifelong journey in the financial markets.
He read as many trading and investing books he could get his hands on, usually from the public library. Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser and The Business Channel (KWHY Channel 22), a forerunner of CNBC, were among his television favorites. As his knowledge about the financial markets increased, he eventually settled on futures markets as his preferred trading domain.
He jokingly says he made his first trade in the physical cash market, when he bought a tiny silver bar at a local coin shop with money earned from his paper route. He still owns that silver bar as a personal keepsake.
At age eighteen after he graduated from high school, he opened a futures account with his dad’s help, trading it during his college years. At the time, pre-internet days, charts were hard to obtain, so he subscribed to a weekly hardcopy charting service and updated the charts by hand. He says, “I was still learning the trading game, struggling to keep the account afloat. The discipline of updating the charts by hand probably helped develop my intuition about price movement. And I definitely got my money’s worth out of my electric pencil sharpener!”
In less than four years, Ryan graduated from the University of California, San Diego, with a degree in philosophy, after which he worked a brief stint at a small futures brokerage firm, which included passing the Series 3 licensing exam. A more conventional career path followed, and he earned an MBA, attending part-time, from the California State University, Fullerton, which lead to his current position as a senior data analyst at a public agency.
Regarding his education as applied to trading, the philosophy degree introduced him to different ways of thinking about, and perceiving, reality. The metal flexibility helps him envision different market scenarios. The MBA provided him the quantitative tools to support his analysis with statistics.
Besides trading, his interests include reading books about psychology and decision-making, working out with kettlebells, and game nights with friends and family.
As for the future, Ryan isn’t settling for 2nd place in the World Cup. He wants to be number one. For struggling traders who aspire to be winning traders themselves, his advice is this: “You don’t need complicated algorithms or programming expertise if you develop a practical understanding of crowd psychology and behavior. Market movements are driven by people, not numbers. However, you do need a trading method and a refined thought process to succeed at this incredibly challenging activity.”
The profile above includes statements of opinion. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. World Cup Championship (WCC) accounts do not necessarily represent all the trading accounts controlled by a given competitor. Accounts trading in the WCC may be subject may be subject to commission rates different from those following the AutoTrade™ trading service. WCC competitors may control accounts that produce results substantially different than the results achieved in their WCC accounts.
Ryan Alderson
Sebastian Baumgaertel
Affectionately called ‘The Trader Dentist’ by fellow Word Cup Advisor Michael Cook, Sebastian Baumgaertel is indeed an orthodontic specialist and Clinical Associate Professor at his Alma Mater, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Aside from teeth, however, Sebastian’s greatest passion is trading.
At just 16 years old, he bought his first stock. But, it wasn’t until ten years later that Sebastian discovered the futures markets when a friend told him about Larry Williams, who he notes as “one of the world’s best traders”.
Sebastian purchased and read all of Larry’s books and “immediately was hooked by Larry’s logical approach to the markets,” Sebastian says. He goes on to name “Long Term Secrets to Short Term Trading,” as the book that truly sparked his curiosity.
Over the years, Sebastian became a student of Larry’s. “It is fair to say that almost everything I’ve learned about trading, I’ve learned from Larry,” he says. “But only when I took his concepts and adapted them to my personality did I start having real trading success. I had to grind it out until I was profitable.”
Sebastian took his biomedical research background to the markets to develop trading strategies that potentially result in high probability trades with limited drawdown. As a result, he says, he’s “been profitable for years, and using a very conservative trading approach has allowed me to finish 5th in the 2019 World Cup Championship of Futures Trading®.”
Sebastian utilizes a combination of both technicals and fundamentals - Fundamentals to find his target zones and technicals to enter and exit trades.
“Small and steady is my mantra,” he says.
For Sebastian’s World Cup Advisor Leader-Follower program, he will continue to trade with this very same approach that delivered an impressive 97.1% return from January 1st to December 31st, 2019.
The profile above includes statements of opinion. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. World Cup Championship (WCC) accounts do not necessarily represent all the trading accounts controlled by a given competitor. Accounts trading in the WCC may be subject may be subject to commission rates different from those following the AutoTrade™ trading service. WCC competitors may control accounts that produce results substantially different than the results achieved in their WCC accounts.
Sebastian Baumgaertel
Sergey Shirko
Sergey Shirko received his degree in economics and was involved in the forex industry since 2003. He began his professional career as a salesman, and eventually chief forex dealer. He went on to work as a financial market analyst, and today he resides in Latvia, working as a risk manager and a fulltime trader, spending his days trading and researching the markets.Freedom is what Sergey says initially got him interested in trading.
“My trading isn’t fixed. I’m not a robot,” he says. “I like trading because of the freedom. I don’t have exact rules for entry - I regularly review and analyze to generate trading ideas, and this is my fundamental.”
Sergey says he learns more about the markets every day and strives to improve his process by adding or removing elements, testing which are the most effective.
“I constantly study the experience and ideas of other traders,” Sergey says. He names Larry Williams and Anton Kreil as being two of the most influential traders.
Sergey didn’t make his first trade until 2009, when he had already been in the forex business for several years.
“I had a good environment for fast progress,” he says. However, this didn’t help me reach my aim faster than others. Usually, it takes 5 to 7 years of daily practice and I was no exception.”
Sergey may not have had initial trading success, but he can look back on this time and recognize that it helped him find his personal trading style, he says.
Today Sergey uses philosophies such as inflation and deflation expectations, interest rate analysis and business cycles to analyze his trading methods. He looks at the open interest analysis of futures markets as well as market sentiment, cycles, seasonality, trade volume and price action for timing of entry.
“I would say that I can be a very aggressive trader if I feel the power, Sergey says. “Focus always gives a better result in any area of our life. Trading is no exception.”
The profile above includes statements of opinion. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. World Cup Championship (WCC) accounts do not necessarily represent all the trading accounts controlled by a given competitor. Accounts trading in the WCC may be subject may be subject to commission rates different from those following the AutoTrade™ trading service. WCC competitors may control accounts that produce results substantially different than the results achieved in their WCC accounts.
Sergey Shirko
Valerio Nicolardi
Valerio Nicolardi’s financial background consists of 21 years of daily commitment to the professional management of investment portfolios, he says. As a financial consultant for one of the most well-known Italian banks for 14 years, Valerio became a registered member of the Single National Register of Financial Advisors at the National Commission for Companies and the Stock Exchange (Commissione Nazionale per le Società e la Borsa or CONSOB). He later worked as the Chief Investment Officer and Chairman of the Board of Directors for Swiss fund management company, Cassia Finance SA, in Geneva, and today he acts as the Chief Investment Officer for Redshield Trading Center Italia - a position he has held since 2012.
“The Fractal Strategy was born as a response to mutual funds, asset management and ETF - my professional tools from 1998 to 2012,” Valerio says “During that 14-year period, I continuously acquired over 400 customers, with the aim of bringing each one to carry out their own financial projects over the next 10 to 15 years.”
“At the beginning, accepting the required timeline is not too difficult for the customer, but usually starting from the 5th year, it happens with a fairly steady frequency that life presents unplanned obstacles,” he says. “Loss or change in working conditions, separations, new prospects, marriages of children or simple intolerance to waiting are just some of the things that make long-term planning very difficult. After 10 years, the percentage becomes very high and in the absence of significant cumulative returns, a real problem. Inevitably, all of this translates into a high-risk of loss, because the financial markets follow much longer expansion and correction cycles over time.”
For years Valerio researched how to reduce the timing of exposure to the markets without increasing the risks.
“It is safe to say that a fair portion of the customers that I had acquired from 1998 to 2007 could not resist until 2013- the year of recovery for the markets from 13 years earlier,” Valerio says. “The Nasdaq succeeded in the recovery of prices from the year 2000 only at the end of 2016, sixteen years after lives, balances, dynamics and customer needs totally changed. This is where the need for the Fractal Strategy comes into play. To reduce time. My strategies had to work identically on both weekly and one-minute charts.”
Fractal geometry opened the doors to Valerio’s studies and the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot has since become who he calls his beacon and inspiration.
“A typical property of Mandelbrot fractals immediately caught my attention. Self-similarity. I had to be able to work on even smaller time frames, and if it is true that there is an invariance of scale in nature and on the markets, then we can reduce the time in which our strategy develops.”
“The music just has to play faster, that's all.”
Valerio says he would never have had the opportunity to fully understand the complicated theories of the mathematician if it wasn’t for but one of his first clients - a former Director of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology and the reports point-person for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on nuclear tests. “He is still one of the most influential physicists of the Italian scientific community,” Valerio says. “Thanks to our constant meetings, which have been ongoing for 17 years now, I have been able to understand the matter more in-depth.”
“On the abscissa axis of my screens, where time expresses its infinite greatness, my entire path is concentrated and the logic behind my twenty years of work, every analysis is dominated by time. The price level interests me to an extent, to say the least,” Valerio says.
Valerio’s "Fractal Strategy" system has been operating on the foreign exchange market for 11 years through an average of 150 trades per month, he says. The biggest lesson he’s learned along the way?
“The financial market responds to specific laws. The most important and fundamental laws are cleverly hidden in the best way that nature could invent, that is, right under our noses.”
The profile above includes statements of opinion. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.
Valerio Nicolardi
Yuwen Cao
Yuwen Cao starts her mornings making her trading plan for the day, and subsequently manages risk after her orders are filled.“For the rest of the day, I do research in quantitative trading strategies and study programming languages, like Python, to polish my skills,” she says.
Before Yuwen became a full-time trader four years ago, she was an acoustic engineer, but she credits her family for introducing her to the markets when she was young.
Growing up in China, Yuwen says learning about trading was rather customary, “Although asset management was not widely popular in China in my early adolescence”, Yuwen says, “People, including my family, tended to buy and sell stocks for themselves. Trading (futures) is not too different for me.”
Yuwen studied at the Beijing University of Chemical Technology and graduated with a Master’s Degree in Control Science and Engineering in 2010.
“One day, in late February 2012,” she says, “I received a message from my bank while I was commuting, saying that there was a business for trading gold and silver via their client portal. I thought it was a convenient way to get started trading.”
As simple as that, after setting up her trading account with the bank, Yuwen says she went long gold, then closed the position, and before midnight she had earned some money.
“I got up the next morning and gold prices had tumbled by around $100 an ounce, or around 5%, in a few hours,” Yuwen says. “I remember that day very clearly - It was February 29th, 2012. Fortunately, the collapse in gold prices didn't hurt me, but I learned the power of the markets that day.”
Yuwen recognized she had more learning to do.
She began to read classic trading books such as the "Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets" and "Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques".
“But I was genuinely confused by the knowledge and didn't know how to combine it with real trading,” Yuwen says. “I was later inspired by the book "Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading" by Larry Williams, and began to understand how to read market structure.”
A few years later, Yuwen attended Larry's online lessons, including Cracking the Money Code, Swing Trading and Trend Trading, and in 2018, she participated in Larry's seminar "The Art of Short Term Trading" in California.
“I believe learning is a matter of finding an approach that fits your personality,” Yuwen says.
She notes her favorite trading book to be "Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom" by Van Tharp. “It provides the elements of developing a trading system, with different styles of setups. Tharp is the one who always asks good questions, and I think everyone could find his/her own answer.”
Yuwen is typically a trend follower, who utilizes fundamentals to find potential trend reversals, with incorporating market structure, pattern recognition and trend indicators for the timing of trades, she says.
“Having a positive expectancy of trading strategy is necessary, but money management is the most important thing in trading,” Yuwen says. “The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that I have to follow a process that will be profitable at an acceptable risk to achieve goals.”
The profile above includes statements of opinion. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. World Cup Championship (WCC) accounts do not necessarily represent all the trading accounts controlled by a given competitor. Accounts trading in the WCC may be subject may be subject to commission rates different from those following the AutoTrade™ trading service. WCC competitors may control accounts that produce results substantially different than the results achieved in their WCC accounts.
