Jonathan’s Trader Interview

Tell us about your background

I’m a 30-year-old Israeli-French-Uruguayan living in London, have been for the past 9 years. Initially came here for 6 months to save a bit of money and go travelling, but ended up staying since, doing my degree, and getting married.

What motivated you to become a funded trader?

Prior to starting the Alphachain course, I found myself furloughed and subsequently fired from my job as a physical commodity trader in a big London Trading firm.

If this happened a year before the pandemic, I could have probably found a new job within a couple of months, but as it were, I couldn’t even get myself an interview.

After a few months of sitting at home waiting for someone to return my calls, I decided to learn a trait or skill that can net me a salary that is “Pandemic-Proof”.

After a bit of research, Alphachain’s name popped up and I decided to follow through on a Prop Trading course.

Why did you apply to Alphachain?

I liked the idea of having a community of traders banded together behind the Academy, and the reviews online were positive.

There was also the fact that Alphachain would guarantee a funded account to all students that pass the trading course, I found that quite reassuring towards the quality of the course.

What has been your best performing day? 

It’s hard to say, I am still in the early stages of my funded account. But my personal best performance was on my Binance account, where I performed a series of entries and exits on a very volatile BTCUSD graph, in the course of 6 hours I managed to almost double my share of Bitcoins.

What have been your strengths while managing a funded account?

I couldn’t really say, it is really early days and to talk about strengths at this point is more of a day-dream than an acknowledgement of worth.

I would say this though, I feel I have immersed myself quite well into the Crypto-sphere, I am increasingly confident of my trades when working with the major Crypto coins and can see myself specializing in that field down the line.

What has been your worst performing day and why? 

My worst day started with a 4-day swing trade on crypto grazing my TP overnight before plummeting down into my SL netting me a massive loss to kick-off the day, you could say that the subsequent trades showed my exasperation and basically reversed a few days of good decision-making, leaving me in the red for the week…

What has been your weakness while managing a funded account?

There are a few blatant ones, the one that sticks out the most is the belief that one can take shortcuts towards his success, big swing trades that are more aligned with gambling than thoughtful decision-making.

Time and time again, I make these big plays that rarely net a positive outcome…

What challenges have you faced? 

Despite having a degree in Economics, I admit that in the beginning of the course, I had zero knowledge about FX trading.

Being a competitive person by nature, I was hearing the other students in the course talking about years of trading leading up to the course and their already formed strategies meanwhile I’m still trying to figure out the most basic terms in the lectures, it was hard to drown out the insecurities and self-doubt and power through.

When do you feel stressed and why?

When it comes to stress, recently, I have noticed that I struggle sleeping in nights where I have trades left running from the previous trading day/s.
I’ll have to fight the urge sometimes to get up and check that my SL hasn’t been hit overnight…

I’d say the underlying stress I feel, is to become a profitable trader and raise a sufficiently large account that will allow me to trade as my primary source of income.

Which benefit have you enjoyed the most at Alphachain and why? 

The main benefit was the syllabus.

It was a comprehensive list of everything I ought to know to start trading. I went through that list and kept coming back to it whenever I found myself in a roadblock or a moment of uncertainty.

The mentoring sessions were also great, took me a while to take advantage of them, but once I did, it literally cleared up most of the holes in my strategies.

What areas are you looking to improve? 

There is still so much to learn, I keep reading and backtesting new strategies every week.

My next move will be to implement trading bots into my trading to automate it, so I started learning Python.

Where do you see yourself in a year’s time? 

I honestly don’t know, I am hoping I’ll be trading a much larger funded account, renting an AirBNB by the beach in Spain or Greece!