Hi everyone!

I'm very happy to be a part of this growing community. I found out about Steemit in July, and now I am excited to start contributing and helping to grow the network.

I recently started trading full-time, and want to start helping others who are interested to learn more about how to do this successfully. The aim of my page is to provide tips on how to learn and grow your trading skills, as well as share interesting trade set ups.

In this post, I want to introduce myself and tell the story of how I got into trading.

I trained as a Chemical Engineer in the UK and Singapore and was lucky to travel to many places before, during and after my studies. Despite having an interest for some time, it was when I was working an office job in London that I placed my first trade.

My first trade

I was observing the movements of the markets when I saw a pattern. Every morning, around 8am UK time, the Russian ruble would start falling against the USD and continue for most of the day. After a while I decided to try to get onboard this trend. I didn't know the first thing about trading, but by simply selling the ruble every morning, I was making money every day! I remember one day where in the time I had taken on the tube (subway) to get to work, I had made hundreds of pounds.
From that moment I was hooked.

This massive fall in the value of the ruble was due to the sanctions placed upon Russia. After many travels, I have developed an interest in geopolitics and this was also the basis of my second memorable trade.

Chinese umbrellas

Later that year, I had just returned from a trip to visit some friends in HK, where I visited the "umbrella movement" protests.

The people of HK were protesting against China not allowing them the right to select their own head of government. They filled the normally busy streets of Central with tents and stayed there for weeks. However, from my understanding of China, I believed that no serious change would be made, and eventually the protestors would give up.

I first visited China in 2010 and have since spent a lot of time there and learnt Mandarin. Here's a picture of me spending Christmas with clients in China during my work as an engineer:

Back to the trading! The HK dollar is "pegged" to the USD at a set rate. This means that the rate can fluctuate, but generally returns back to that rate due to central bank intervention. The unrest in HK had caused a drop in the rate of the HKD, away from the peg, but I believed that this was temporary and therefore entered trades which would profit when the rate returned to its peg. This happened, and my trades were profitable again.

Every trader remembers their first and their worst trades...

HOWEVER, I didn't know the first thing about what I was doing, especially about risk management. But I did recognise the potential freedom that trading had to offer me in many ways. Since then, I have been studying and practising to improve my skills. I have found that trading is really quite simple... but incredibly difficult. For those of you still reading... I would like to share one more story before I go, about a great learning experience where I also lost a lot of money.

Back in 2014, after reading many "goldbug" articles, I was convinced that gold was undervalued and couldn't drop much further. However, I was still an amateur and didn't understand one of the most famous market sayings: "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". In short, I was unable to accept that I was wrong, and kept adding more and more money to cover my losing position until I finally gave up. It took a long time to make back those losses. But they taught me many important lessons that I will not easily forget.

Interestingly, it does now look like gold bottomed in December 2015 and has now begun a new bull market. I shared a detailed trade set up related to this in a post here yesterday.

How do I trade?

I am now here to share more of the lessons I have learnt on this journey and to help others learn and develop as traders. I will be sharing more posts on tips for getting started with trading, including managing your risk and recommendations/reviews of books relevant to trading.

If you are interested in trading or learning how to trade, please follow my page. Let me know any area you would like me to cover in the comments below!

note: all pictures in this post are my own