Fixed Income Trader with ~2 Years Experience Looking for Investors

Opportunity Snapshot

Investment Opportunity

I am looking for an investment of $20,000 to $100,000. I primarily trade government bond futures, high frequency, typically 20-30 trades a day.

I am a young trader (26) with high ambitions and I have been trading profitably for approximately 2 years. I have traded in partnership with a large firm and later under my own account. I have statements and trade logs and direct contacts to verify my results. Additionally I have top academic results and I graduated in Computer Science from the University of Bath, a top 10 UK university.

Please see attached files (below) as a visual of my trading profits (I also have trading statements).

I am looking for an investment of $20,000 to $100,000. I primarily trade government bond futures, high frequency, typically 20-30 trades a day, mostly using a mean reverting approach. I also trade outright's but this only makes up ~5% of my trades. I also trade a smaller size on soybeans.

I have an account open to trade under my name, the clearing house I use has a good reputation and I have beaten them down on commissions in the past due to putting in high volume. The commission fee is almost exactly the same as the exchange fee and this means I can make about seven break-even trades and then make just one tick and still turn a profit, albeit a very small one!

When I started trading, I went through an intense training course and was one of the few to be backed with funds and the only one to get put on a separate team. I broke-even in my first month, it came to 12 euros net profit and then I profited for each month from there onwards.

More about my trading:

I do not trade over major news releases, throughout the day a lot of news gets released, every day I load up a schedule and look at the times of the releases that could affect the markets I trade. I will always be flat before a potential market moving news release and if I should see liquidity disappear I will close any positions I have, to me this is common sense, as I am not looking to capture big moves with the strategy I apply. I take a buy and a sell position on all my trades in two similar markets, therefore I do have a hedge on all my positions, sometimes I am not hedged as I don't like to apply such a rigid approach as I believe trading should be fluid and execution made on these small time frames should be in the moment and be given flexibility to help me capture the day as best I can. Being hedged of course reduces my market exposure, and so once hedged my focus is on working the bids and offers aggressively on both sides of my position to exit and gain a net tick or more from the two opposite positions.

I have stop limits in place, which I manually execute, I cannot have an automatic stop loss, unless I am trading an outright instrument and if I do that then I will have an automatic stop in place. I will purposely close trades for a loss or at a scratch/break-even as I rely on my instincts, analysis and quick conclusions to close a trade for a loss however small, if I believe it's no longer a trade I want to be in.

FYI, I look at charts and moving averages, but only for visual reference, as I prefer to use my own memory. I also like to look at the volume traded at each price level, I find it tells an important story, also the order book, to list a few.

Why do I need an investment?

After trading for over a year, I went abroad for a holiday in Hong Kong whilst I had 5000 GBP of profit which I could withdraw from my account.

Unfortunately I got sick whilst abroad, nothing serious or long term but I clumsily had no medical insurance. When I got back I found the agency that helped me to rent my flat, suddenly decided to take the entire contents of my flat and pretend they thought I had moved. I had to take a break from trading, finance my medical bills and so on.

10 months has passed by since I was trading, everything is good in my life and I have small savings of my own but I haven't saved the money to get back to what I once had in trading.

Competitive Advantage

I graduated from university debt free and with a small amount of savings as I played over 500,000 hands of poker and before I even traded I found I was mentally pretty sound at coping with the ups and downs that come with trading.

As a teenager I played Warcraft III, a strategy game, not to be confused with World of Warcraft, which naturally due to the time I spent playing, has given me an uncanny ability to press keys on the keyboard quickly. In trading I like to hot key a lot of my order placements and executions so that I am not reliant on moving a mouse cursor as opportunities can come and go quite fast. Although I don't feel myself competing on speed as I am not strictly arbitraging, as they have big main frame computers to capture these things. But I do apply an arbitrage type approach in trading futures.

Rationale for the deal

I am proposing a negotiable 70/30 profit split in my favour on a $20,000 investment and to maintain this profit split on my trading for a fixed year.

I am also proposing a negotiable 50/50 profit split on a $100,000 investment also for a fixed year.

I have savings for living expenses and I will maintain a part time Saturday job, which gives me an hourly rate equivalent to $32 an hour. Therefore I will look to take minimal draw-downs on the account, and will never draw so the account falls below the initial investment.

I already have a set up with the clearing house, which will keep any deposits I make in the currency I deposited in. This means I will not instantly lose equity on a currency exchange fee when doing an inter-bank transfer to the clearing house. My positions/trades will be denominated in USD, AUD and EUR and I will have a separate balance for each and then another balance if I was to deposit in GBP. I don't purposely try to hold a currency risk but I will look to neutralize it on request or keep to the words prior to starting trading from the investor on how it should be handled. Although I find my account is generally quite balanced across the three currencies without intervention.

Use of financing

I primarily trade the 10 year Australian bond, the 10 year US T-Note Bond and the 10 year German bond known as the bund. When I started trading I traded the 3, 5 and 10 year German bonds but I have since shifted my focus to these other bond markets as I prefer the way they move.

In terms of securing your investment with me, I personally have never received an investment before, except that of the firm I was trading along side, therefore I am open to suggestions, willing to sign contracts or to go through whatever steps to give my investor a peace of mind. I will be researching as best I can on this matter and so I will just state I am open to suggestions and after posting this I will have started to put the time in to researching the best way to do this and I will talk to others in the finance industry who may be able to offer some sensible suggestions.

Opportunity for the investor

I am sure you may have a lot more questions, so please email me, phone me or even skype me and we can talk in depth about this investment. I am truly passionate about trading, I read the news, observe the markets and think about trading as a whole, about fundamentals and read up on the latest on what companies are doing, even if I don't trade stocks or want to. I watch the ECB and FOMC meetings each month and take a keen interest in watching gold as I find it a fascinating commodity. Additionally I like to trade long hours (well over 10 hours a day) as to me it's so intellectually stimulating and enjoyable, it completes me as a person, what more can I say.

Please find a visual graph of my first year in trading when in partnership with a trading firm and the graph starts from day 1 and shows visually over 3000 trades. It shows my gross profit, and it was when I was trading the smallest possible size through to three times that. The other graph shows gross and net profit in my first month when trading under my own account.

I don't have a visual representation to show investors for every trade I made but please note I have other data and information (personal trading logs, trading statements and contact numbers for human reference of my existence at the trading firm) to validate my results and this will be given to potential investors on request!

For those that do not know, trading is not investing and the top experienced traders are making around 2% return on capital a day, this doesn't compile so nicely, due to it not being fully scale-able and traders typically do draw on their profits, but I would hope I could maintain a 1% return per day throughout the year.

I moved to Hong Kong just over a year ago, as I personally love Hong Kong, so just to note although I do visit the UK, it does make a face to face meet up in the UK a little hard, but possible if so desired.

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