CCT December Magazine

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Forex Price Manipulation

Transcript of CCT December Magazine

Page 1: CCT December Magazine

Market beating forex expertise and news

WWW.COMPLETECURRENCYTRADER.COM | December 2013

Forex Price Manipulation

Are the major banks colluding to manipulate price against their clients?

Page 2: CCT December Magazine

COMPLETE CURRENCY TRADER MAGAZINE | December 2013 1

Attitude: Practice Makes Permanent

We all know practice is supposed to make perfect, but is that really what we should be aiming for? Should practice really be about forming habits and making our skills become permanent?

Trading Psychology: Cognitive Dissonance

When our beliefs and expectations clash with the reality we experience when trading, our minds are faced with a decision that will make or break our trading forever. What choice will you make?

Inside-Out: The Interbank FX Price Fixing Scandal

Price manipulation, interbank collusion, front running, and price spikes. The banks are under investigation and top traders have been suspended. Is this the next scandal to hit the financial community?

Analysis: The Mechanics of the Trend

Why is the trend your friend, and how do you know you can trust it and have confidence in it? We examine the behind the scenes mechanics that create trends and keep them running.

Profile: Bill Lipschutz

The Sultan of Currencies. The stay at home trader ranked in the top 5 best forex speculators on the planet.

December is here and the festivities are about to start. The team at Complete Currency Trader wish you a very Merry Christmas.

As always, we’ve got a varied selection of articles for you this month that we hope will give you a wide range of topics to delve in to before you end the year.

Our trader psychology spread investigates one of the most prevalent issues affecting traders, yet one which is almost never discussed. This is the perhaps the most inherent obstacle in front of each of us and an aspect we must all face up to if we wish to finally succeed.

We of course also have our usual feature profiling a top currency trader, and this month we look at Bill Lipschutz.

Our main feature and the topic of our front cover, is the recent and ongoing scandal regarding price manipulation on a massive scale and collusion between the top banks to fix prices in the FX market. We investigate what the alleged offences are, and more importantly what the consequences are for retail traders like you.

It’s another packed edition of our magazine and we sincerely hope you find it an informative and educational read.

CONTENTS

Trading reality, not the fantasy.

From the Editor

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Forget about perfection! Practice is all about permanence. Successful traders who survive over the long term, have developed good skills and habits that help them perform and profit in the market, under all conditions, day after day and year after year. The term “successful” can only be applied to traders who have longevity - a track record of success. Any fool can have a winning trade, or a winning week, or even a winning month. There is absolutely no skill involved in any short term results. If you took 1000 chimpanzees, and let each of them randomly take 10 trades, statistically one of them would have 10 wins, one of them would have 10 losses, and the others would be somewhere on a sliding scale in between.

Can we say the chimp with 10 wins was a good trader, and the one with 10 losses a bad trader? Of course not! Both chimps were clueless and without skill. The wins & losses were merely the result of short term mathematical probabilities like that of a coin flip, and statistically at least one chimp was going to get 100% winners – not from skill but from chance (luck). Over the long term however, it’s a very different story. Bad traders cannot survive for long on luck. As time goes on, random results such as a coin flip or those trades executed by bad or inexperienced traders, would fall back to the mean (the half-way point). Any trader who performs better than the mean and the accepted standard deviation either side of it, is clearly demonstrating a real skill and talent. Traders who have consistently generated profits from the markets over decades, have certainly performed beyond the mean. Statistically they’ve proven they have genuine skill rather than luck. How have they achieved this? How did they acquire such high level skills?

Practice! Practice! Practice! As Aristotle said: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit”. Successful traders achieve success by repeatedly doing the same thing over and over again. They have an edge, they have a system, and they repeatedly execute that system day after day, month after month, year after year. They practice the same action until it becomes a habit, and that habit becomes permanent. There is research made popular by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, which supports the 10,000 hour rule. This “rule” claims that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. And so this may be considered the secret to success. It is not innate talent, and it is not above average intelligence. It is in fact merely the determined pursuit of practice. Practice of a specific task until that task becomes a permanent skill. This is good news, as anyone with the commitment to practice, can ultimately achieve success!

Attitude: Practice Makes Permanent

A festive cartoon for December

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Cognitive dissonance is a psychological term used to describe the discomfort a person feels when they simultaneously have two conflicting beliefs (cognitions). The theory states that humans like to hold all their beliefs and experiences in harmony and avoid disharmony (dissonance). An extreme example would be when a person believes the world will end on a certain date, but is then presented with the conflicting reality of the world still being here the day after. Reality doesn’t match their beliefs and so they naturally experience emotional discomfort.

When we experience this conflict and discomfort, our minds will immediately try to re-establish harmony by altering our beliefs and attitudes and by justifying our actions and behaviour. Ultimately we all want our expectations to meet reality so as to give us a sense of control. We all experience cognitive dissonance on an almost daily basis. In everyday life it can be fairly harmless and even amusing when you recognize it in yourself, but for traders it can be disastrous.

To lay the foundations of how this manifests itself, here are a few every day examples: Sandra is on a diet to lose weight. She knows fast food burgers are unhealthy and fattening (belief) but she eats one anyway (reality). Her actions conflict with her beliefs so she justifies the action by saying she will do more exercise to burn off the excess calories, or that she only had a small breakfast anyway so it all balances out, or that she’s been so good at sticking to the diet to date that she deserves a treat. Michael just bought a new car but paid more than he should have. He knows he can’t really afford this (belief) but he bought it anyway (reality). To re-establish mental harmony, he justifies his action by telling himself this car is less likely to break down than a cheaper one and will save him money in the long run. Does that kind of behaviour sound familiar? You can no doubt think of many other situations where people display this kind of thought process and you may even be able to see it in yourself from now on. Understandably this is a complex topic with many angles to explore, but for ease of application to the trader mind set it is worth remembering it in basic terms of: when reality doesn’t meet expectations.

Trading Psychology: Cognitive Dissonance “When reality contradicts our beliefs and expectations, traders face the ultimate psychological challenge”

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How does this apply to traders? The overwhelming majority of aspiring amateur traders come in to this profession with grossly unrealistic expectations. To list but a few: Trading can be learned quickly. Returns are large, fast & regular. Short cut to wealth and riches. Steady reliable results every day. Can quickly quit my job & work from home. Anyone who has ever attempted trading has quickly experienced first-hand that none of the above are true. This instantly creates a conflict between what you believed and what you experienced, and so your mind quickly attempts to erase the discomfort and restore harmony. The sensible and logical thing to do would be to admit and accept that your original beliefs were wrong, and then re-align your beliefs to accurately reflect reality. However, admitting you were wrong, or that you made a mistake, is in itself an emotionally painful thing to do. No one likes to admit they were wrong, so the easier and faster solution is to simply try to rationalize and justify your initial belief. To basically make excuses for own mistake in order to make you feel better about it. It doesn’t matter that your belief was wrong and continues to be wrong, so long as you feel ok about it. Needless to say, this is entirely irrational and can be hugely destructive for traders. A typical situation would be the belief that trading can be mastered quickly, we can earn X amount per day, every day, and quit our job within a month or two. When reality conflicts with that belief or expectation, the trader will make excuses to justify why they were correct, by telling themselves something along the lines of “I just haven’t found the right system yet”. Rather than accept they were wrong in their original belief and then take actions to adjust their behaviour to match reality which would ultimately lead to success, they prefer to make excuses that justify their beliefs. The above situation is what leads so many traders to constantly jump from one system to another.

One of the really destructive traits in this situation is the fact that as a result of the cognitive dissonance, the original false belief actually becomes even more reinforced…….the exact opposite of what would be most beneficial. To regain the emotional harmony of a situation like this, something has to change. We either change our beliefs or we reduce the importance of one of the conflicting issues. What most people do is keep their existing belief (rather than admit a mistake), introduce new beliefs to justify the first one (make excuses), and then reduce the importance of the reality (pay no attention to the evidence in front of them). The net result is they continue even more passionately down the wrong path. It is perhaps easy to summarise the unrealistic beliefs and expectations of traders with this: They expect to make large returns quickly. When reality shows them that expectation is false, they ignore the evidence and look for anything that will help to prove their belief is correct. It is common to see traders jump from one system to another every couple of months. They add indicators, they add rules, they change chart time frames, they try different techniques, study different theories, follow different mentors, trade different instruments, alter their money management, change risk profiles, buy different tools, etc, etc, etc. They may even find a profitable system but dismiss it because it doesn’t give them the large returns they believe they can make. These people will spend the rest of their life in a futile search to find something that reality is telling them doesn’t exist. The evidence is clear, not only from their own personal first-hand experience, but also from the documented experience of every other trader who has gone before them. And yet they ignore the evidence. They ignore reality. Their beliefs and reality have clashed and caused emotional discomfort. To admit they were wrong would cause even more discomfort, so they simply ignore reality, find excuses to

justify their initial belief, and find harmony again by convincing themselves they were right but just haven’t found the solution yet. Best to keep looking! You find this same behaviour in doomsday cults. They believe the world will end on a certain date, and when that date passes without their prophecy coming true, rather than the members of the group admit they were taken in by a con and that they made a mistake in their judgement, you normally find they are even more fervent in their belief. Their commitment to the cult is even stronger and they find all sorts of excuses to justify their initial belief (God was just testing us, he’s given us a second chance, he’s given us the responsibility to save even more people by recruiting them to our group). Anything rather than face the embarrassment and discomfort of admitting they were wrong. Traders have a stark choice to make. We will all at some point face the discomfort of cognitive dissonance when our beliefs are proven wrong by reality. We can either restore our emotional harmony by ignoring the evidence of reality, and make excuses as to why our belief is right. Or we can accept that our beliefs were wrong and then realign them and change our actions and behaviour to work in parallel with reality. The former is the easy and most comfortable option, but of course it is also the option that leads to guaranteed and prolonged failure. The latter is the harder and less comfortable option, but of course if the option that will ultimately lead to success as a trader. The question all traders need to ask themselves, and answer honestly, is; What is more important to me? Being right, or being successful?

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Throughout November, regulators in the UK, Switzerland, and USA launched investigations in to 15 major banks including Barclays, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan for alleged price manipulation in the forex market. At least 12 top bank traders have been suspended pending further inquiries, which is staggering when you consider that the $2 trillion a day Spot FX segment of the market is controlled by a group of fewer than 100 traders at a handful of the largest banks. Spot foreign exchange trading desks, even at the largest banks, are now typically staffed by only 8-10 traders, most of whom have previously worked with their counterparts at other banks. Despite the enormous size of the market by volume, the group of traders managing it is incredibly small and close knit. This makes it a market where price fixing and collusion

could realistically happen, and that is exactly the allegation that regulators are currently looking at. The issue focuses primarily on the WM/Reuters 4pm fix rate (London time). This is as close as we can get to a daily closing price in the 24 hour FX market. What is the WM/Reuters Fix price? The fix is a benchmark exchange rate published for each currency pair. This is a massively important rate. They have been adopted by major stock market indices, the Financial Times and investment clients as a standard for the valuation of global portfolios. They are the foundation upon which numerous banks and investment houses base the values of many of their indices and funds. Benchmark providers such as FTSE Group and MSCI Inc base daily valuations of indexes spanning different

currencies on the 4 p.m. WM/Reuters rates. Index funds, which track global indexes such as the MSCI World Index, also trade at the rates to reduce tracking error. They even determine what many pension funds and money managers pay for their foreign exchange. In other words, investments and funds all over the globe are valued according to the exchange rates set at the 4pm fix. It’s also the rate that banks guarantee to their clients. It’s calculated by taking the average price between the bid and ask prices during a 1 minute period at the top of the hour. If for example the price ranged from 100 – 110 during the minute at 4pm, the fix rate would be set at 105 and this is the price the banks give to their clients such as pension funds and other institutional investors.

Inside-Out: The Interbank FX Price Fixing Scandal We take a look at what currency price manipulation by the major banks could mean for Forex traders

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Now this may seem like an alien notion to the average retail trader who is used to seeing prices change on a tick by tick basis on their trading platform where they can trade at the exact rate displayed on their screen at any given second throughout the day. But most Spot forex participants are not speculatively trading in this manner. Most participants are not looking at charts, and do not have instant access to prices and execution. Most spot market participants are international businesses and institutions, and they submit their orders via brokers to the trading desks at the major banks. Those bank traders guarantee their client a set price – the WM/Reuters fix rate. This is much the same as when you exchange vacation money at your local bank. They tell you a set price and that price is good for a specified period of time regardless of any minor real time fluctuations in the market that you would be used to seeing as day trader. So while you’re trading the constantly changing prices in the market, the majority of people are using the WM/Reuters fixed price.

Of course the bank traders are also trading the real prices just like you, and this gives them an opportunity to make profits. While they agree the fixed price with their client, they are free to execute the trade themselves ahead of the 4pm fix at a different (better) price and thus pocket the difference for themselves. This is a perfectly legitimate activity and effectively allows the bank to hedge their risk. It’s little more than an extension to the bid/ask spread that we are all used to.

The problem arises because the system is open to manipulation. Individual banks obviously know their own order books and thus can see what trades they have to execute that day for their clients. The difference between the 4pm fix rate and the price they executed their clients trades, determines how much profit the bank pockets. Remember that the 4pm fix rate is calculated from the average price over a 1 minute period. If there is sufficient change in price during that 1 minute, it can have a large impact on the profit margin gained from trades taken earlier in the hours or minutes running up to that time. The concern is that traders have been deliberately executing a large number of trades during that 1 minute benchmarking period in order to artificially raise the average price. These allegations have come to light after analysis identified a repeating pattern. There has been a recognized surge in trading activity in the minutes immediately prior to the 4pm fix, followed by a quick reversal back to what would have been the correct market price immediately afterwards. Price spikes! These spikes have been occurring with such regularity – from 31% to 50% of the time over the past two years – that they almost certainly cannot be attributed to normal trading activity. Hence the investigations. The issue here is not that individual banks were doing this in isolation. That activity is legitimate and indeed high risk to the bank to try and manipulate the market. The issue is that banks colluded with each other in a concerted and coordinated action. It is alleged that traders on the dealing desks of several banks were active in private interbank chat rooms and discussed and shared information about order flows so as to build up positions ahead of and during the 4pm fix. When they get this right, the bank traders make bigger profits, and some of their clients would be worse off. That’s the crux of the entire matter. It is now up to regulators to establish if any wrongdoing took place, and to determine

if this amounts to front running, pre-hedging, collusion, or price manipulation. What does it mean for day traders? Not really very much, and it certainly isn’t something to be worried about. Traders using retail brokers and executing transactions from real time price charts are not affected by this in the least. Traders employing a reactionary trend following strategy such as the Complete Currency Trading system are merely following the price anyway. So whether it is manipulated higher or lower is largely irrelevant to us. We go where the price goes. Retail speculators trading their own accounts at the time and price of their choosing (which is what we do) are not directly harmed by this manipulation. It’s everyone else in the world who suffers! That’s not to say this activity is to be condoned simply because we don’t lose out; we are only attempting to alleviate any fears retail traders may have about this issue. By and large this “scandal” is not a major concern for the average day trader. Of course for any trader who does have concerns about how this may affect their trading, please consider the following: Do not trade immediately around the 4pm fix. This is 4pm London time. Avoid less liquid pairs at that time. It is far easier for bank traders to manipulate the price of low liquidity, less actively traded pairs, than it is to manipulate active pairs. If this does turn out to be true, it has almost certainly already stopped, but if not, it will stop asap when the banks are fined in line with the record fines from the recent LIBOR price fixing scandal.

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No doubt you’ve heard the age old adage of the “Trend is your Friend”. Have you ever wondered why trend following strategies are so profitable and why trading with the trend is such an established and accepted method? The reason is simple. A trend is more likely to continue than to end. Once a move is underway, it is easier for it to keep going than it is for it to stop or reverse. We assign all sorts of phrases and terminology to this phenomenon, such as momentum for example, but what is the real reason? What’s actually going on behind the scenes that makes this situation with trends real? To answer this we first of all need to look at what moves prices in the first place. Once we understand why prices move,

we’ll be able to understand why trends develop. The forex market is the quintessential auction market. Think of a normal auction where you may be trying to buy a painting. The price starts low and gradually goes higher and higher as people bid more and more. The prices you see are the prices someone is “willing” to buy or sell at, and those prices change without any transaction or any buying and selling taking place. The prices we see on our charts are the BIDS and OFFERS. These prices are the liquidity and they are provided by the market makers; the banks. So for the prices to change (move), those bids and offers need to be altered, and this can happen in two ways.

First off all the bank, the liquidity provider, can simply change their bid or offer. Imagine they initially say they are willing to sell to us at 1.32400 (the offer) and then 30 seconds later they change their mind and say that they will actually be prepared to sell to us at 1.32450. In that case the price just jumped up 5 pips. There was no transaction; no one bought or sold. It was merely the market maker altering his bid price. The second way for price to move is for someone to consume the liquidity in the market. On our charts we only see the best bid and offer in the market, but in reality there is a whole depth of other bids and offers either side of the market for amounts that other banks and market makers are prepared to buy or sell to us at. See the image overleaf.

Analysis: The Mechanics of the Trend “When the market starts moving, it is more likely to continue in the same direction rather than reverse”

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If we assume that best offer at 1.33373 is for $1,000,000, if a trader comes in and buys $1,000,000 at that price, he has consumed all of the available liquidity at that price, so that offer is removed. When that is removed (consumed by the buy order) the next best offer in the market is the one above it at 1.33377. So in this example the price jumps up 0.4 pips. So in this second way for prices to move, the liquidity has been consumed by the demand for it from the buyer. Now that we know how prices change, we can establish why trends develop. Let’s suppose you and I are both speculators, and I want to buy 100,000 or 1 lot worth of EURUSD, and you want to sell 100,000 or 1 lot on the same pair. My market buy order consumes the liquidity in the OFFER price and your market sell order consumes the liquidity in the BID price. In that situation, if the liquidity was equal on both sides of the market, we would have caused the spread to widen. But which way the price really ends up moving is dependent on the differing amounts of liquidity on either side. Assume a bank is bidding 500,000 on the best BID on your side of the market (the side you sold on), and another bank is bidding 500,000 at the level below that and so on down. On the offer side (the side I buy from) the bank is only offering to sell 10,000 at the best offer, and another bank is offering 10,000 at the level above that and so on. Imagine you and I both come in with our market orders. You sell $100,000 and I buy the same amount, $100,000. Your sell is taken by the banks bid. But the bid is for 500,000 and your order was only for

100,000, so your trade has only taken or consumed 1/5th of the total amount available. There’s still 400,000 available at that level and so the price doesn’t actually move. So the high level of liquidity to the down side prevented the price changing even after you sold. However, my buy trade was 10 times bigger than the liquidity on offer. So when I submitted my order to buy 100,000, I bought the 10,000 on offer from the first bank, and then another 10,000 in the offer above it, and the next 10,000 above that and so on. My trade, which was exactly the same size as yours, caused the price to move up 10 levels because there wasn’t enough liquidity to absorb it. My trade consumed all the liquidity that was on offer at the first level and each higher level. So two equal size trades in both directions, yet the price didn’t move at all after yours because of the high amount of liquidity on your side, but it moved up 10 price levels after mine because of the reduced liquidity on the upside. So that’s where price will move. If two equal size trades are made in the market, the price will move in the direction of least liquidity. And this is how trends can develop. Dealers profit from the spread, so in order to make that profit, they have to buy and sell quickly before the price changes. They want to buy from you and turn around instantly and sell the exact same amount to me so they pocket the difference. Everything the dealer is geared up to do is buy and sell almost simultaneously so they can profit that spread. If they don’t manage to do that fast enough, they can caught out on the wrong side of a trade and end up suffering losses. As the price starts moving up as in the example we just gave you where they sold to me when there was limited liquidity on one side of the market, the dealer who traded with me is now on the wrong side of the market and suffering a loss. If another trader came in and also bought from this dealer, their loss could get bigger because they are again selling in to a fast moving rising market and could get caught out again. They try to reduce any further risk by reducing the amount they are offering to sell to anyone else after me. They sold to me, and to balance their books they need to buy the same quantity from someone

else at a better price. They certainly don’t want to keep selling in to a rising market because that would increase their loss. Their efforts now are on buying to cancel out their trade with me. So to limit the amount they may have to sell to anyone else, they reduce the volume of their offers. This in turn reduces the liquidity to the up side even more, and therefore prices are even more likely to continue moving up when any other traders come in to the market trying to buy. It’s a self-perpetuating force that feeds on itself and gathers more and more momentum. This is what causes momentum. This is precisely why intra-day trends happen. This is the behind the scenes mechanics of a trend. It is an imbalance between supply and demand. And supply and demand has nothing to do with buying and selling the way most amateurs think of it. An upward trend does not necessarily happen because there are more people trying to buy compared to people trying to sell (although that can of course happen). There could be a perfectly balanced number of traders split between buying and selling exactly like in the example we just gave you when you and I were trading the same amount. The trend occurs because there is less liquidity being supplied on one side of the market compared to the demand for it from market orders like ours. So there can be an equal number of buyers and sellers, people like you and I on both sides of the market, but the demand from me as the buyer is greater than the supply of liquidity being offered on my side of the market, whereas on your side you are asking for less than is available. That’s what causes a trend on my side, and when that happens, the price will keep going for longer and further in the same direction. That explains the mechanics behind a trend and demonstrates why trends happen and why they last.

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Bill Lipschutz started trading when he was studying as an architectural student. He had just $12,000 that he had received from an inheritance from his grandmother. Over a period of nearly 4 years he built that account up to a value of approximately $250,000. This was achieved in the stock market, and was done on a part time basis to fit around his school commitments. That is an impressive accomplishment by itself, but was only the start of his career. Clearly Lipschutz had a talent, and the hours he spent each day in the library studying financial markets had helped him develop a profitable strategy to stock investment. Unfortunately, 4 years of hard work, and an account growth of approximately 2000%, was not enough to qualify him as a seasoned trader. Over a 3 day period from Monday to Wednesday, his account was wiped out. He was in a short position and had a very bearish outlook for the market, and as it reversed on him, he first of all didn’t exit the position, and secondly he kept adding to his loss. This mistake cost him dearly, but exhibiting all the signs of a true professional, he put the incident down as the most valuable lesson he could learn and was determined to recover and move forward. From that point on he became very risk aware and determined to trade better (the loss of money never bothered him; it was the fundamental trading mistake which upset him).

Hooked on trading, Lipschutz went to work for Saloman Brothers after gaining his degree rather than pursue a career in architecture, and it was here that he was introduced to currency trading in the FX market. There was an element of good fortune here because Forex speculative trading was literally just opening up, and Lipschutz was in fact recruited to join the newly formed FX department at Saloman Brothers. This was literally the birth of Forex trading as you and I know it. Nevertheless he displayed real talent and was at one stage earning $300 million in profit for the bank and was considered in the top 5 of all currency traders. Over a 6 year period he rose to the position of managing director and global head of foreign exchange for the bank. And this is where it gets interesting. Lipschutz was a man who dominated the forex market. At the peak of his bank trading career it is estimated he controlled 80% of the open interest in the market. To say this is a man who was at the top of the industry and knew it inside out would be an understatement. Not only did he know how the market really worked, he basically made it work for many years. So how did he choose to trade it when he left Saloman Brother to set up his own fund? Did he set up a proprietary firm with hundreds of the most talented and educated traders? Has he got a high tech office solution situated next to the major financial centers? No. He trades a fund from home. He has 7 employees in total (his wife and some friends) and they all work from their own homes as well. It is this that helps make Bill Lipschutz so inspirational to many aspiring traders. There are few people on the planet who know forex as well as Lipschutz. He was there at the start and at one stage dominated it entirely.

This is a man who was nick named The Sultan of Currencies, and yet he has chosen to trade from home with minimal “bells and whistles”. Lipschutz has $650 million under management and a successful track record stretching back to 1991 when he first went it alone. On average he has made a return of 16% per year. A theme emerges that is common for all the traders we’ve examined in this profile section of the magazine. Lipshutz’s returns are staggeringly small compared to what most amateurs expect. Most new traders would scoff at 16% gain on their account per month, never mind per year. Furthermore Lipschutz has taken that 16% per annum return, and built a fund of $650 million by attracting investment from only 14 private investors, and is realistically estimated to pay himself several million dollars each year in salary. All of this from small consistent gains. Referring to this month’s article on cognitive dissonance, Lipschutz has clearly aligned his beliefs to match reality and has become wildly successful and rich as a result. Bill Lipschutz is a trader to learn from. He has made the same mistakes that all traders make, and done so on a grand scale to the tune of a $250,000 loss in a single trade. Yet he picked himself up, learned from his mistake, and has gone on to be one of the greatest currency market specialist traders in the world. And he now does all this from a home office. Currency trading speculatively is difficult, but Bill Lipschutz displays the vital characteristics that all successful traders have, and he sets the example of what new traders should follow.

Profile: Bill Lipschutz A titan Forex trader who has specialized in currencies since they first took off as a speculative market.

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