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Interview with Nial Fuller
** Trading Mindset ** Q. Equally, profits and losses can have a significant psychological impact on traders. How do you deal with them? I am immune to “extreme rush feelings”, I train myself to become fearless and to think positively. I awake each day and meditate for 5 minutes. This is a business that can mess with your head, unless your mind is equipped for the roller coaster. If I lost 10 trades in a row tomorrow, I would not be concerned, because it is part of the business and I am at peace with the natural outcomes of trading. Q. Isabelle, 36 is a mother of two children and stays at home with them during the day. Her husband works full time and his salary meets all their financial obligations comfortably. Isabelle arranges an appointment with you to discuss trading – she has never traded before but knows you can help her get started with some initial guidance. What will be the 3 most important things you tell her in the appointment? Decide how much of your start up capital you are prepared to lose, if you can’t afford to lose , don’t play! If you come to me with $10000 to trade the Dow futures and can only afford to lose $1000, I will tell you to keep saving and wait until you have more money. Serious problems arise when capital is mismanaged, in my opinion, this is the greatest reason people fail. They play markets that cost too much to trade and self destruct. Research methods that are relatively simple and trade in the direction of the trend in the time frame you are trading. For momentum trading, focus on an hourly chart and play major break outs, for regressive trading, follow the 8 and 21 day moving averages and Learn simple Fibonacci retracements to get set. Focus on risk reward setups, that is, if you get in, where will you get out? Don’t ever trade a setup that won’t return at least 1.5 times what you are risking. E.g., If a key support level on a chart exists at 20,000, and you buy the market at 20100, your stop needs to be below 20,000. Assuming your stop is 200 points your upside target must not have any major resistance in the way of a targeted move which is at least 300 points. Never enter trades without a good risk reward. Q. Jack, 58 is a very successful business owner who wants to start trading as he slowly moves into retirement and away from work. He has arranged a similar appointment to Isabelle – would your advice to him be identical to Isabelle’s or different? Yes the same, but with one exception, only use speculative money for short term trading. Retirement is a common stage of life to consider trading, when starting out, start small and diversify, and decide weather you want to be a short or long term minded trader. Longer term traders may apply a wider stop loss buffer, so they capture the slower, yet larger swings in a market. Q. Is trading as difficult as many people appear to make it seem? Not at all, just keep your cool and don’t risk more than $X per trade. Q. What are the 5 most important character traits of successful traders? Please feel free to briefly explain them.
Q. Trading can be a very solitary existence – especially in the early days when you are learning, and often feel as though you have no idea what you are doing. Do you find trading a lonely experience? Does this sit well with you? If not, how do you deal with the loneliness? In the beginning I was alone in a private office , trading and learning from my own home on the Gold Coast. Lacking company and like minded friends, I went on the web, and searched many websites and forums. I found what I was looking for when I made contact with traders who started trading websites and advertised trading training. I now work out of an office in Melbourne’s CBD where everyone is involved with the market. It keeps me sane. Q. What would be or has been your most significant weakness in trading? Have you learned to overcome it or do you continue to work on it? I often cut my profits short, but this is just a function of my trading setups which employ solid risk reward. I will learn to adapt what I do now to be more profitable over time, but for now, it’s something I don’t change because it’s makes money. Q. Assuming you are now consistently profitable, do you still have times when you experience self doubt over your ability to trade? If yes, how does this make you feel and how do you overcome it? No. Q. Ideally, we would like to be emotionless when we trade – we would certainly make more sound trading decisions more often. How do you control your emotions when assessing potential trading opportunities or open positions? Do you get very emotional at times? I used to get emotional, but you grow out of it, it goes from being fun to being a normal business function. I learned with the aid of meditation each morning and began viewing what I do as a business transaction. These 2 mind sets work for me Q. If you experience a large profitable trade, do you reward yourself in any way? I give 1 % of all my profits to charity which isn’t much but its rewarding, and if I have a big week, I go out and have a big weekend, that might mean a party, a night out, fishing, or a spin on my Jet Ski. Q. In your entire trading career, what are the biggest lessons you’ve learnt and how did you learn them? Don’t think about the money, think about the chart, stick with the short term trend and be aware of the key levels to act on the chart. It might be as simple as fading the market at the 15 day simple moving average or a buying a major support point. Trading is a game of probability – the aim is to make money over a large number of trades, not to win 100% of the time and certainly not to make as much money as possible from each and every trade. Pardon the cliché’, Slow and steady does win the race. Q. To finish off, if you were to start trading all over again now, what would you do differently to what you did originally? I wouldn’t change anything, what I have experienced and learned makes me the trader I am today. All negative experiences become positive experiences in the future , if you learn from your mistakes and your successes.
After Leaving University to persue a career as a Private trader in 2002, Nial Fuller has actively participated in most futures and currency markets, profiting by implementing simple techniques to exploit short term market movements. He has had a strong interest in the nuances of financial markets from an early age, working his way up to now be trading for a Proprietary futures fund and composing short term trading analysis for one of Australia’s largest trading newsletters. Nial’s approach is primarily following trends on all time frames, working off key price levels and understanding market dynamics. "Whenever there is a break out in the trend, there is potential for intense profit potential" Return to the Index of Interviews ...
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