The company was called Market Makers Group Amsterdam. I was to be trained to make prices in options, trade my own book and take on risk on behalf of the company. Options were still a very new product at this stage so I knew this was a big opportunity for me. I studied hard and was very determined but I did not find it easy to make money.

The market started to boom again though and I was the offered another job after a couple of years. However my company were keen to keep me and the result was that I was sent to the London Financial Futures Exchange to trade options there. I knew this was an even bigger opportunity as this is where the real action happened.

I thought LIFFE traders were the true masters of the universe.

I would see them walking around the City in their jackets and they were even louder and more confident. Walking on to the LIFFE floor for the first time made the LTOM floor look like a library.

The buzz just hit you smack in the face. The colour was blinding and the noise was deafening. It was like I had been plugged in to the wall. It was the most exciting place I could imagine but it was incredibly intimidating.

The LTOM was pretty sedate compared to LIFFE where traders were really aggressive, fighting to be heard and seen as they battled for a share of every trade. As well as screaming as loud as possible, they used lightening quick hand signals in the pit to communicate and trade. My first step was to learn the hand signals and I thought I was never going to get it.

Eventually I did and was sent in to the pits to train, first as a broker and then as a market maker to take on risk on my own account. This was the second most nerve wracking experience of my life.

It was an intense physical and mental battle every day.

You lived on your wits all day and the trader who could do the maths the quickest did the most trades. You could not sit down until you left the pit after the market closed but for me it was the most exciting job I could imagine and if you got it right the rewards were huge. For me I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time and the exchange just took off, volumes grew and opportunities to make money were enormous.

I was soon offered a job at another market making firm owned by a very successful American trader, one of the first to establish his business in London. He hired the big shots.

I was not one of the big shots, but I knew this was a chance I could not refuse.

Roger Carlsson would give you enough finance to take on the market if you really needed it and if he thought you were good enough. Once or twice in the years to follow I would put this to the test!

The week the pound sterling left the Exchange Rate Mechanism was one of those times I will never forget. These were the most exciting years of my career.

Eventually the floor closed and derivatives trading went electronic.

After a short break I was moved to Gibraltar to trade options ‘on screen’ in 2000. Markets were still very volatile and I traded through a crash and 9/11.

Eventually I decided to stop trading options because it was so intense. You could never take a break as you always had a position to monitor. I had been on so many holidays where I had had to suddenly dash to the airport and get back to the trading floor to deal with a crisis…usually a big loss! I thought I would trade futures as you could liquidate your positions in seconds. I thought it would be an easy transition – how different could it be? It was very tough indeed, requiring a different set of skills. I was no longer spreading and hedging, trading gamma or theta.

I needed more patience, discipline and better risk and money management skills.

Trading on my gut feeling was just not working. I had to re-think. I had gained an interest in technical trading or studying price charts to define trading opportunities for quite a few years. I had read a lot of books but I had never really put it all together and been able to structure a strategy from this approach.

After losing some of my own money I took a long break and began to study.

I set up a business and began writing daily reports for traders.

Obviously at first they were not very good but the discipline of having to study the markets before the open each day and deliver something that made some sense and could help a trader meant I was very focused on developing this skill. I was offered a job at a private brokerage company to provide my analysis and advise their clients on market direction.

These were big clients; traders from Deutchse Bank, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, RBS, Societe Generale and many others. These guys do not mess about. If you have something useful to say they will listen. If you do not they just do not have time for you and they make that clear. Eventually they started to follow me and ask for my opinion on trading levels and market direction.

I predicted some big moves that traders were not expecting and they played out exactly as I had predicted they would, hitting targets and bouncing from support levels.

My work got better and better as the months and years went by. The longer you do something the better you get at it. Or as the saying goes ‘the harder I work the luckier I get’. I left the brokerage company in 2012 and established my own business, DayTradeIdeas.couk.

My clients from the brokerage company stuck with me and they are all still my clients today but the list has grown. I was the only provider of Technical Analysis to Marex Spektron & Schneider Trading, two of the leading direct market access providers to independent professional traders. I provided my analysis to them and Tower Trading Group for over 6 years. Other brokerage companies now also subscribe to our analysis on behalf of their clients as this adds value to the service they provide.

The usual question I am asked is how many indicators and oscillators do I use. Do I follow wave patterns or what is my secret. There is no big secret. I have watched financial markets move every single day that they have opened since 1987 when I was 19.

This is not my job but it is my addiction. It has to be or I could not get up at 5am every morning for 50 out of every 52 weeks of the year and deliver analysis on up to 30 markets before they open in Europe. I have never failed to deliver on time in 15 years.

What I can tell you is that I use a minimum of indicators.

Too many just serve to confuse and the slow stochastic is the only one I really keep an eye on. What I do not do is base a trade solely on this indicator but throw it in to the mix. I look at several different time periods that I find work for the markets that I follow and I scan for chart patterns with support and resistance levels that have worked in the past.

I use trend lines and I use Fibonacci levels. My charts are littered with them and I like to spot areas of confluence where they over lap.

I keep an eye on moving averages, in particular the 100 & 200 day and week. I start with longer term charts to gain a picture of that trend and work in to shorter time frames.

You have to be aware of what the big banks and funds are looking at as they are the guys who trade the biggest size and can change trends. They don’t bother looking at anything shorter than daily charts, they do not trade hour by hour.

Once you establish the bigger trend and any important trading areas from this time perspective we can move to daily and shorter time frames.

We all know the saying ‘the trend is your friend’ but which trend?

Each time period can have it’s own trend which all contradict each other.

The key is to be aware of the bigger trends but to focus on the time period in which you trade. If you hold position intraday for a maximum of 3-5 hours and are flat by the end of the day then watch 4 hour, one hour and perhaps 30 min charts. But be aware of what is going on, on the daily and weekly charts.

Once you have established the trend you wish to follow you know the direction you want to go. You then have to time your entry and the shorter time frames are often better for this purpose.

Look for areas of support & resistance that have worked well recently, where the market has paused or changed direction.

I like to use Fibonacci retracements and extensions to see if they overlap with these areas to give me more confidence.

The more indicators that line up and confirm what you are seeing, the more other traders are seeing the same thing and may be acting in the markets at these levels. If different time frames are all telling you something different it is probably time to wait till they line up.

If the weekly, daily and shorter term charts all look positive then your risk is diminished.

If the slow stochastic is indicating a move higher across the majority of the time frames you follow for example, it is probably a low risk trade to buy on a pull back to support.

If a previous day’s low coincides with a Fibonacci support level or moving average then this is probably where you want to try to enter in the direction of the trend.

Sit and wait for the market to reach your entry level. Do not chase it or get in before the level is reached. Trading is all about risk verses reward. If you do not minimize risk by waiting for low risk trading opportunities then you are increasing your potential loss. Decide on your max risk per trade and ensure this fits with the parameters of the trade opportunity you have spotted.

If you can, try to make up to twice as much as you risk. You will make money in the long term, even if you have only 40-50% winning trades. 

Don’t forget to place a stop just below where the market broke down last time. Once the trade starts to move in the right direction be ready to start to move your stop loss to continually minimize losses.

If you need a daily trading plan to help you understand daily market movements, we now cover about 20 markets across FX, Commodity Futures, Stock Index Futures & Fixed Income Futures.