"Telling it as it is ..."

When I first heard about Trader Speak I thought, here we go again, yet another “ Make ten zillion dollars by tonight with no draw down – all at $599 – guaranteed or your money back!!”, but I have to say I was wrong, very wrong. Trader Speak is a collection of interviews with traders, some of which are household names, others of which you will never have heard, but each one of them has something real to offer – their own story to tell.

I have listened several times to the tapes and as a result have dramatically improved my trading results. Even though I have traded for years, I feel that Trader Speak has filled in yet another piece of the jigsaw. In adopting the mindset of seriously good traders and doing your homework, at worst your results will improve. Trader Speak allow you to adopt that mindset. When you decide to really grasp the moment as top traders have done and to commit to success then doors open and ideas flow which otherwise wouldn’t. Trading is a zero sum game and only the best-prepared traders will win. The mind set has to be right; the commitment has to be there.

Take Mike Battle, he freely admits in the interview that during his early years he was getting ‘No short-term positive feedback from his trading results whatsoever to suggest he should be trading ”. Did Mike pack it in?  No - he took his systems apart rebuilt them - and now Mike manages millions. He can run up a  $100,000 account 300% in a year.

The interviews are brilliantly executed in that Levy’s style is nonchalant. Sometimes you almost wonder whether he is still with the thread and then just at the right moment he gently leads the interviewee into another area or gets them to clarify an explanation. He interviews legends that perhaps most of us cannot associate ourselves with and he interviews the likes of you and me. First we get Pete Steidlmayer who tells us why the US dollar will always be the most sort after currency in the world: I later checked my charts and realised that at the time the interview was made everyone was bearish the dollar but it had actually bottomed and then we get a magician of a trader Shaun Downey who still lives in Catford, London and drives his motor bike to work, but trades 35 markets simultaneously and  Claire who says ‘We just look for 20 points on the DAX. If you try to force the market to give 25 points you won’t get it; take what you can reasonably get”. 

Trader Speak is about traders who are ordinary people - people who trade for a living. They tell funny anecdotes and they tell how they trade. Each one of them has a message. Listen to that message and learn from what they are saying.

Paul Morton 
April 23, 2004.