Part 1: Geopolitical Factors

The energy crisis, the war in Ukraine

You know what we’re going to say, right: be careful what effect the news is having on your mindset. 

Whether the news is good or bad, there are always opportunities to take a profit when trading. It`s not to be taken at face value and the smart money will already have priced geopolitical developments into the charts because they tend to know about it before retail traders do.

So for example, Grigory Margolin, Tradeguider’s Chief Technology Officer, hasn’t changed his trading strategy as a result of the energy crisis. And looking at the charts for oil and gas futures, he comments: 

‘We can clearly see that starting from the beginning of 2022 natural gas futures prices were rising until August 2022 but they have been coming down since then. And if we are talking about crude oil futures, starting from March 2022 we can see the decline in price.’

Tradeguider CEO Gavin Holmes notes something similar: at the time of writing, petrol prices had fallen in the UK.

‘Don’t go down what I call the rat hole,’ he says.

‘Talking about news, the political situation and conjecture – that is the trader`s worst enemy. Do I believe it when everyone is saying energy stocks are going up? I see high volume, narrow spread, massive moves up and I trade what I see in the chart. But no one believes you because they are conditioned.’

We gave the Tradeguider team’s take on how to trade in tumultuous times in our last blog which you can read here. And if you want to see us trade live, check out Gavin’s weekly webinars via Tradeguider’s YouTube page and Dr Aram Kiani trading live in the Live Trading Room.

 

Part 2: Tradeguider`s News

a - The Live Trading Room launched

Retail trading can be a solitary business so the community that has grown out of the Live Trading Room is welcome.

When you are trading by yourself you don’t always have that determination to carry on,’ says room host Dr Aram Kiani, ‘Some days you say "I don’t wanna do it." Being part of a group helps people stay determined to carry on.’

 

The Live Trading Room feed

 

Sometimes attendees bring their trade ideas to the group and Aram and the other attendees debate it and make a decision together.

The Room started in February. While Aram doesn’t keep track of numbers he says there are about 60-70 regularly in the room at the moment with that due to rise significantly next year. Some subscribers access the archives rather than listening in real time.

One attendee who has recently joined gets up at 4 in the morning his time to be there. He says he was losing all the time before but now he has joined the room he hasn’t lost a trade, hearing Aram’s voice in his head reminding him to stick to the rules.

In 2023 other professionals will join the Live Trading Room to share information or show the trades they take. Also, some sessions will be focused on a particular asset class like stocks so that people can see how other elements of Tradeguider’s technology works in action.

 

b - Partnering with NinjaTrader for educational workshops

While Tradeguider’s Chart Center, Smart Center and Smart Center Pro works with a wide variety of trading platforms, this year brought a first for Tradeguider in the form of joint educational sessions with software and brokerage services provider NinjaTrader.

The first one featured NinjaTrader`s Tom Schneider and Tradeguider`s Gavin Holmes having a conversation about the Wyckoff VSA methodology. It was positively received so NinjaTrader invited us to do a follow-up presentation in September. This included a more detailed account of how Wyckoff VSA could enhance the trading process.

This second one had over 23K views in 3 months and led to the latest event being hosted in the last week of December. Click here to view the archive.

Based on the feedback we have received from these 3 events, we’re looking to do an in-person event in the USA in 2023. Watch this space for more details on that.

 

c - Our Masters Event – breaking new ground

Also a first for Tradeguider this year was running live trading events where we invested a portion of delegates’ fees to our trading account and shared whatever profits we made with them.

For every US$2000 attendance fee paid, we took $1000 and put it into our account. Following an initial briefing session we had 3 live trading sessions where we used advanced Wyckoff VSA techniques and traded live in the markets to find trade setups across stocks, futures, and FOREX. This included sharing techniques that we use in our asset management activity for the first time.

At the end of the last session profits made were then shared out equally between the course delegates. The trading team made a 25% return on their initial capital so every delegate got $250 back.

We’re looking at hosting another one in the US in the first quarter.

 

d - In-person again: London Investors Show