He Became World's #1 Scalper with This Tool

Today's guest has proven to be one of the best scalper or day trader in the world. We're not only talking about a trader who has built multi millionaire generational wealth through trading alone, but also has joined and ranked top trader four times out of four in the most famous trading competition in the world, the Robins World Cup Trading Championship.

The moment I had a level up in my trading career was when I introduced the order flow analysis to price action. I had the haha moment when I saw that in every my Vista pattern there was trapped buyers or trapped sellers. Now it's not only from my personal point of view, but I can check the amount of trapped buyers or trapped sellers. So I can just fine tune and I can get more precise entry a more deep narratives.

It's like smart money concepts or ICT concepts, but on steroids.

Basically. Yes, huge amount of steroids.

Fabio Valentin is one of the most skilled trader I know and by the way, my first ever mentor in trading. In this podcast we'll talk about how it is to trade the championships, how the trading industry is lying to you and what are his best tips to be a successful trader.

And a lot of people will say but previous data are not a guarantee of future results. But no data is a guarantee of future failure. I don't want to point my finger to, but it's part of the problem.

So you really don't want to miss this episode and stick to the very end of this video. How do you first find an edge in price action and then how did.

You improve it with orderflow. Yes. Okay, so my starting point was ladies.

And ladies, enjoy Fabio Valentini. So the the World cup training championships scalping is the 2024 last quarter is over. They finalized the audit of the performance.

Yes.

And you hit a peak of 218 and you place in the last day. And Dato Nazri Khan actually pushed a little bit in the last day.

He did the magic.

He did the magic. What happened there?

What happened is that the performance are not updated day to day or hour to hour. So I was sure that my performance was not going to be surpassed in one day because you know the last day of the year is really choppy, you know. But Mr. Naziri, come my friend, that is scalping the footprint like me, he was in Malaysia and I was in Dubai and we were both scalping to get this extra 3%. And the day after the finish of the challenge, the final audit show 223% for him and 218% for me. So I have to say that he deserved it. I'm happy with the second place, but, you know, it was a bit frustrating.

Right, because you had third place, second place, and then almost one place.

Because you don't know if you need to go the extra mile. Yeah. You don't know because you know only when the challenge is already finished. Yeah.

And this is one of the things that they should be, I think, improving in the Robins World cup training championship. This is one of the things that I would like to touch on today is how is the Robins cup both from being a contestant and, you know, all the psychological struggles that go with it. But also, how about the Robins Cup? Like, there's a bunch of criticisms that are starting to arise on the Robins cup based on, you know, the commission and the quality of the challenge itself.

What can you say? Let's talk about everything. Let's talk before about the pro and then about the cons. And starting from the things that I really like about the World cup is that it's pushing your brain to the limit because you are in front of the world. It's the most famous one. So even if maybe you are paying a little more commission that what a scalper should pay, even if it's a challenge. But we will go in that part later. Let's say that it's like being on a stage performing in front of the world. So you have, like, the funds and you have the haters. And every time you do plus 5%, everyone good. Fabio, I like your strategy. You're really best scalper in the world if you do minus seven the day later. I knew that you cannot hold this position overnight or that your strategy is losing edge for one day. I have one message of one person telling me, you did draw down yesterday. So the strategy is not working anymore. Wow. Because people have this misconception that if you close a losing day, then your edge is not enigma enough.

It's not. Is not the algo. You are not moving the market, you know? Yeah. So from the pros, it's pushing you to the limit. Your brain, your stress scalper, scalping, it's already full of stress. If you do this in your apartment without anyone around with your headphone, if you do this in front of the world and you have the pressure of the audience, it's 10 times worse. But it's something that now, for example, when I trade for myself, stay super relaxed because no one is judging me, I can do drawdown. And no one is saying, you lost 2% today. So this is the main pro of the World Trading cup that it's a public performance. So you get two kind of auditing. You get public performance auditing because people see while you are building the track record and then you have the final auditing. But I have to say connecting to this, that you cannot see total drawdown. And this is so important because it's not only about the total performance, but it's about the relationship between the maximum drawdown that you achieved and the performance that you had. This is the most important ratio that you can have for a trader. Another thing that for a scalper it's more heavy to sustain. Maybe for intraday traders or swing traders, it's okay. For me it's the commission, the commission are really high. And when you open, let's say 10, 15, 20 trades per day because you are pushing at the end of the day, maybe you are plus 0.7% at the end of the day you are 0 or minus 0.1. Why? Because the cumulative amount of commission that you get arrives all together at the end of the day. So you see immediately how much you are paying. You just continue to trade and you think you are profiting. So maybe you use this chunk of profit to build the position and if you lose, you have the losing position plus the commission. And it's really big to to deal with at the end of the day. Other than that, another pros of the World Trading cup is that you can check which names are there constantly. This is the most important part. I understood which trader were like gamblers, which trader were really good traders by checking their names on every quarter. If someone disappear before appear and then disappear. This is the main, let's say mark that you can have because you can just check that he burned the account. And then another thing that I think it's really important is letting people see also the portfolio in drawdown. Because if you can see people that maybe were plus 70% now are minus 30, you can understand that the concept of risk and reward are extremely connected. And nowadays people coming from the bot space, the signal service space, they don't understand that the volatility on return, it's extremely connected to the risk that you input portrayed. Yeah, this is the main stuff that people need to understand. And I give this as something that it's clear to everyone. But checking the message that I got while I was doing the challenge, I understood that it's not clear. It's not clear at all. And another thing is that my personal account performance and my World cup performance are different because the risk that I use in World cup is four to five times more than personal account. So if you want to have an average of the performance that I get in three months, you have to take this performance and divide by four, let's say five. This is around what I'm able to get with a low drawdown in the World Cup. My drawdown is not below 5%, below 10% with slippage, for example, during NFP, I reach, if I'm not wrong, 25%. So it's completely different approach to trading. And I seen other world champion that are starting to explain that this is not the real trading that you get in your personal life. Like also Patrick Neal was saying that the way you manage position, the way you input risk in the challenge is really different because you have to reach the performance and you are not putting as the first line the total drawdown that you get. Yeah.

Which is what you would normally do in trading.

Yes.

You would put drawdown first and not performance. That's what every investor and trader is trying to achieve ultimately in the professional space at least. But for retailers, I think the gain is a much more organized, a triggering number than you know, the draw. They don't care about the drawdown.

Yes. To connect to what you are seeing now, my fetish is knowing the drawdown of Larry Williams. It's not the performance, it's not 11,000% is how much risk you have to input to get this performance. Because if you did, for example, pyramiding on position using only the profit you get to get this performance and he managed to add down below 10% is a genius. Because I know how much is hard to do this every day. You have to get a little chunk of profit risk. Only this chunk of profit to get more performance. And if you lose this trade or district, you go back to zero. So you start to trade again for the day. This is the only way to keep drawdown low and get a really big performance. Yeah. The other way is that risking all the account in one trade. But the downside of this is that yes, you can be first, but it's one time getting every quarter to be in the ranking, it's not easy.

Yeah, that's, that's also one of the criticism I've seen around Larry Williams because he's like, he has a lot of fans. He's, he, he came down to legend for that 11,000% performance because in one year, it's really astounding. But the thing is.

It just happened that year like he wasn't able to replicate it anymore. Then he built a huge educational business around that. Also I'm seeing a lot of trade. Even ICT himself boasts of being students of Larry Williams. But I'm actually ignorant on has he ever audited a private track record instead?

I don't think so. I tried to search for it and I actually studied also the content of Larry Williams and I find an edge in them because it's really good use, seasonality, commitment of traders that are all strategies that I also use for my swing trading. But I didn't find anything else. The performance that he did in the Robins and the performance that Michelle Williams did, if I'm not wrong. Yeah, it was like 1000%. So he demonstrated that he can replicate this kind of performance. But like from my personal point of view, and I'm saying this, that is my personal opinion, I prefer to see traders like Patrick Neal that are constantly there for five years in a row always participating and maybe you will not get a one shot crazy performance but you are constantly profitable. Showing this to the world. Yes.

And I like I've talked with Patrick, he's also increasing the risk in the last like weeks or month of the competition. But the difference between Patrick Neal and the reason why we chose him both as a mentor for us and as a mentor in world class Edge is because he's also showing the track records and he's not a systematic trader, he's a discretional, he's a manual trader. So everything he's doing is manual. If you are an algorithmic trader, it's much easier for you to kind of cheat and be up in the leaderboards because I don't know, you can have five running systems and the only one which will be displayed in the leaderboards is going to be the one who's more profitable. But if you're a discretionary trader, that cannot happen. You can manage one account.

This is another thing that I wanted to point out about the criticism. I think it's good if you want to try different models but you cannot participate at the same time with five different strategy because maybe you burn four of them and you are in the leaderboard. But the point is that at least for the single name they should restrict the participation to one maximum. That you can do is like trying to put in the market another model. But they should say it's this person is trying to put another model. If he's a systematic trader. I think it's okay. But it should be seen by people that is entering in the challenge with three, three different model. Yes, because Maybe one it's more high risk, one is medium and one you are using to show that you are constant. The other one you are using to show that you are getting crazy performance with really low drawdown. But if you are like showing only the best one and hiding the four losing system. Yes, this is something that is really shady.

Yeah. And I was checking the last leaderboards of the 2025 and there's people even in the fifth place which are only 1% in profit. So I imagine the lower part that like what happens below the number five, you cannot see that's also another very big. You know, it doesn't make.

The competition as transparent as it would need to be.

And I think that this is connected to the performance that you see at the last page of the brokerage. Like 95% are below that five place. And I wanted to see the drawdown of these people because this is so important to for transparency and to let also people understand that when you are in a challenge, the probability that before getting to the top rank you are in the lower part maybe minus 20%, minus 15% it's really big because you are input a lot of risk on the market.

Why do you think they're hosting the competition in such a way and they're not changing it even though people are asking for it?

This is the same reason why prop firms show profit certificate and not percentage of losing traders losing the challenge. It's because if it's marketing, there's a conflict of interest. I don't know if there is conflict of interest, but people nowadays especially they want pleasure, they don't want pain, they don't want to know. Okay, I'm starting in an industry where 90% of traders lose. And I have to start with the motivation that I will be in the top, that I will study more than 90%, that I will improve my system more, that I will optimize. I want to do this. No, perfect. It's not the industry for you. But if you enter in the industry, watching a pink Bugatti saying that is easy. That you can make a lot of money only showing the profit, not understanding the risk, not understanding how much it's important the sides of the account to understand how much connected profit you can make. Not understanding for every payout of a prop firm, how many people are losing money in the prop firm. Not understanding for every trader that is constantly in the peak of the leaderboard of the rabbins, how many traders are burning the account. This connection is not good for marketing. Yeah, it's anti Marketing, it's transparency is not good. We saw this with our company. The more we are going to the transparency, the more people are like it's so difficult. Yes. They are like afraid of this. But it's the only way to make this finance field better.

Yes.

And of course is not sugar coating the pill to buy the course. But that's the reality and I think worth reading up will see less amount of subscription for fear if there was the lower part of the leaderboards. Because think about this also a mentor, if he have the risk to be seen at minus 70%.

Will he enter? Will he risk his.

Position and trust and branding? I don't think so. Yeah. So I think it's something that is strategic. I understand the point is to show that you can achieve performance but I think having ratio like Sortino ratio, sharp ratio, profit factor will be really good challenge. There is the necessity to create this kind of challenge. Getting a minimum sample size that you cannot get the lucky trade you cannot enter for example with 10 algorithm system. And it's too easy like this. Yes, it's too easy. So I still think that the best way is getting like a 1000 execution track record personal in the brokerage that are regulated for example by SEC and bring this track record to PwC or any other big firm like Deloitte and do the auditing. Kpmg. Yeah, and do the auditing. The point is that when you reach this level you directly go to edge found. So you are not interested in showing this to audience but this is something. I think this is the next level of the industry. I saw Bern doing this with Alfred Capital if I'm not wrong. But I'm on the side of big four for this because the private auditing is yes, it's of course trusted, but it's not. It doesn't hold the same level of authority of one company that is so huge is auditing like huge companies. So I think this is the next level for the. Not only for the forex industry, for the trading industry, for the training industry. So futures needs this. Yeah, of course.

I mean CFDs are not even taken care of by the big four like they don't even care care about CFDs. And the point is I think that retail traders are not informed enough to understand if a track record is valid or not. And there needs to be a lot of education done on this side of things. And that's I think our mission overall. But the point is there's a very big market, a big chunk of the trading retail wanting to learn how to trade market is newbies. They don't know about trading. That's why they're trying to learn. And there's a big chunk which. Which have already been disilluded, you know. And now they know the and. But I don't know which part is bigger. What do you think? Which. Which part do you think has more sales volume?

Let's say the disilluted one. Yeah, right. Yes. Because if you think about how many ways you have to to get in touch with the trading industry, like the call center that is calling you, invest in Amazon, you will get rich really fast. The trading bot. The trading bot. It's a huge industry. Huge. I saw the marketplace of Metatrader and I was astonished by the amount of sales they do for bots that are costing maybe ten thousand dollar each and are like Martingale system, but people buy them. So it's a huge market. Also they bought then the signal service. How much big is the signal service? All the shady brokerage, offshore unregulated system. It's I think the disillusioned one. It's way bigger than the new traders that approach from a correct point of view the. The industry. So I think what the industry needs, it's a cleanup like a big bang starting again from zero. And I don't want to point my finger to my forex book, but my forex book is part of the problem because it's giving the.

Sensation of audit performance. But there are a lot of pitfall about platform like this. For example white label brokerage, you cannot control it. You can get similar name. Maybe it's not IC markets, it's ICM Arkets and it seems like the same. And you get the performance with 1000% with 0.01 percentage. And then there is the guru pointing you out because you are in the future markets but are not able to get this performance. What can you say? Just try to educate people that this is not real. You cannot get this performance without drawdown. And also then they do this and then they attach the business, they connect the business of selling bot that is achieving this performance. So then the client lose money. But it's part of the game now. So there every three months new bots, new trading system comes out. And then if you're not satisfied with the bot, we have the signal service. It's really hard to rewire the mind of the people to what is actual trading. Also because the real traders are usually not in the YouTube channel or Instagram because they see tons of that. They say no, it's too much work to educate people like this. I will just leave this as it is and they will just trade in the shadow.

Yeah.

This is what we usually see from traders and the one that is really pushing the industry. It's you now in the international industry. And burn.

Yeah.

Like the one that I see also Iman. Iman is doing a huge work on this also. Tom Oga is trying to let people understand how much difficult and how much personality work you need to do to reach this kind of level. But it's like six or seven people against 10,000 because this industry is giving something to put on the plate to a lot of scammers.

Yeah. And the point, the problem is those scammers are powerful scammers. Like they have billions of dollars. They are broker with headquartered like God knows where in the Caribbean islands. Yes, it's a mafia.

It's a mafia. But it's not only this because the broker is only a small part of the business without a face.

Yes.

They have no frontman. Not they have frontman, but they are. What we saw is that.

The kind of money these people are making by selling the dream. It's 100 times bigger than people that try really to educate on the industry. Yeah. Because if you think about what's easier to believe as with dream or some reality that it's like hard to digest that it's giving you now I need to to stay study two years and no, I want the bot.

So yeah, they have a competitive advantage.

They have a huge amount of money to take down your channel. They to go to war against you. They have on their back huge brokerage firm that are doing market making and other than that there are also partnership with platforms that are selling this bot. So it's a connection that it's not really easy to destroy.

Yeah. The first one who I saw who was trying to bring light to all this was Anton Creel in his. Probably was his most famous seminar.

Yes.

And, and I like the thing he did where you know to, to make some sort of difference in this. He chose not to get commissions out of losing clients. But we did, it's the same thing we did. So, so there are some sparks of light in the industry. But the point is like also the trading industry, like finance is purely based on egoism. Like it's just about getting yourself richer. There's not like you're not even bringing anything new to the world. You're not you know, providing value but you know, it's, it's, it's just pure.

A Purely egotistical activity, let's say so. So, so it's intrinsic in the, in the trading space.

I want to see, to say something about this. I've been in this industry from the beginning of the forex industry, from the beginning. I start with binary option and everything. And I saw how this market develop and how the billions are printed with all this system. And now I think the market is changing. The market reached the point where people are just pissed off about throwing off money to a martingale bot or to a signal service and they are ready for something more real. Yeah, and maybe the industry will lose 80% of the people, but the 20% that will keep in this field will get a taste of what's trading for real. How can you live out of trading for real? How can you pay your bills? What's the inconsistency of money that you can get every month? Why you need to have side business or you, you need to plan your life below your possibility so that when you have swings in your monthly performance, you can pay for the bills, you can absorb drawdown, you can like stay three months without earning. Because there is a huge topic on how much is hard to live only out of trading. Yeah, because I've done this for a small part of my life without business, without anything. And you need to plan your life 10 times below your possibility because it will arrive the amount that you need to pay bills, you need to pay for something that was not planned. Like you have a disease and you need to go to the doctor and therapy is expensive and you need to account this in your trading account. And considering also the fact that you will not go easily into compound interest. So it's just not smart. And people don't want to talk about this because if they talk about this. Ah, yeah, that's true.

And I think also the like trading is very stressful by itself. So the only way you can actually make a living only out of trading is that you've already mastered it. Like you have to be experienced to make a living. You can't make experience while living out of trading.

It's like a doctor trying to do some kind of surgery, but still learning. Wait, maybe I can cut here. Maybe you correct me with your throat slice in the meantime is the same. So what I want to say, even if you take the second road, I want to live only out of trading. You need capital, you need money, real money. And you need time. You need, you have two years, three years where you can just sit at home, study, take your time and Then start to trade with capital, yes or no? If no, because people still think that they can live out of trading with €1,000. I made one reel, you remember in Italy, the reel that I made and 90% of the comments are like, if you cannot live out of trading with €1,000, you are not good enough. Okay, so let's say my expense that I have monthly in United Arab Emirates, $25,000 per month is costing my lifestyle, my apartment and everything. Okay. So I need to make 2,500 per month, every month to keep only pay for my expenses without considering food, lifestyle and any extra. So it's just impossible. This the, the narrative that is being perpetuated. Can I say perpetrated perpetrated in the young mind is that just need some kind of experience, a good signal service or like.

Bots and you can flip. I. I want to point this out because I know the reply that I will have in the video, but one time I did from €2,000 to €100,000 or to €50,000 one time. If you need to base your life on a lucky flip of the coin, you cannot. You need to have proper risk management because if you can get this performance is not easy to replicate them. Also Larry Williams did 11,000%. How many people are able to do this and how many times he did this? I think he tried to replicate this, but it was not successful. So it's just cherry picking the best performance. Yeah, just putting these two survivorship bias. Yeah, I can do this every year. It's not like this.

Definitely. So also for.

For.

For the people who are watching us, I think my audience right now is very diverse. So you have people who has been in trading for a while, people who are new to trading. So especially for those who are new to trading or even those one who have been losing money for a while and just want to reset. How would you start from zero in building trading as your career?

Mm. So nowadays there are prop firm but we have to put a huge disclaimer on the prop firm. It's not a clean industry. It's a new industry now. Regulatory authorities starting to make sure that people that really make performance are being paid. Some prop firm are also buying brokerage to have other kind of regulation. It's a field that is developing. Okay. So I will do two things to start. The first one is starting to build my personal account with a really low risk. The second one is getting a prop firm to have a bigger account to pour money in my personal account. But before starting this procedure, you need at least six months of study. And before starting even the demo account, you need to getting an understanding on how to build an edge. What's an edge, why you need an edge to survive in this market and how you can measure the kind of edge that you have. Because if you don't know what's an edge and you just try to be profitable, getting from YouTube the strategy with exponential moving average with MACD divergence and trying to make money, I can guarantee you you will fail. Maybe you can survive one month, but you will fail in the long term. You need an edge and you need data analysis on what you are actually doing. It's the same procedure that I would advise to someone starting a business. Exactly the same procedure. You cannot just go downtown and getting a license for the restaurant. You don't know about who will be your supplier. You don't have the people that are experienced in the field. You have no data analysis on how much budget you need to run the business per month. You don't know if the bank will give you a loan to sustain. If there is another. You don't know anything. The business in trading is just the same. There are a lot of connecting points with business. This is the reason we are before everything business owners and then we are also traders. Because it's the same blueprint. Is the fucking same blueprint that you need to use. This is the advice that I can give to people that are starting and if they don't know how to build an edge from scratch, how can I summarize the concept of edge is something some repetitive task or procedure of analysis that is giving you a statistical advantage over other market participants. And the only way you have to test this is to get one year, two years of data and check and backtest the samples. Then you need a time where you just check this trading strategy in live market condition. But with virtual money. And I know, ah, it's boring. I want to have a faster road. Sometimes the fastest road is the slowest road. It's the procedure based road. And then after that you can start your career. You can just start with your personal account. You start with prop firm. You can get auditing on your future performance and bring this auditing to actual hedge fund or private investors. So you can, you have three ways to build capital. But just don't try to get rich with €500 in Seychelles or like Vanuatu brokerage firm because your favorite guru told you that you can make 50,000%. Because now you will blame me because you are starting in the comments of this video. But after one year you will watch this video again. You will see Fabios was right. I had exactly the same Dunning Kruger learning curve.

Yes, yeah, definitely. About backtesting and data analysis, I think a lot of people in the space are very disingenuous about it and they don't believe it's needed. What's your position on that? Because you know the common opinion is you only learn by making trades. No backtesting is useless.

Completely disagree with this. Every strategy that I put in live market, I want to be sure that in the previous data have an actual edge. And a lot of people will say, but previous data are not a guarantee of future results. But no data is a guarantee of future failure. So you need to have results before and then you need the phase of.

Out of sample checking of data so you see if the edge is robust, if you can hold the drawdown and if it's reflecting your backtest, then you're going live. It's three phases. People think it's useless because they jump from backtesting to live market condition. There are two phases. Before risking your own money, you need a virtual live trading account. So my position is completely the opposite of people that say backtesting is useless. Data analysis useless because it's also the way you can find actual edges. If you don't have data, if you don't know if your edge is working and you just try to figure out in live market condition how the strategy is working, it's a disaster. Also with my edge, my NASDAQ edge, my main trading strategy, my main trading strategy start from a huge amount of data analysis, data analysis. After that I put my discretionary analysis, minorities on something that it's already working on. Some statistical analysis that I already know it's working. I know how I identify bias, I know how to read volumes. Then there is a small part that is my personal understanding of the market and creation of connecting the dots of all the data that I have and pressing the buy or sell button. But this is the final step. This is the fine tuning of the engine that you build. This is the last step. This is discretionary analysis supporting that analysis. Maybe there are people, I have one good friend that I want to mention, Nico Boska. He don't do that analysis. It just is just in tune with gold from 10 years, maybe 12 years. And you just use the live market reading of what gold is doing. But this is kind of neural network that he built with his brain watching something over and over and getting the trial and error process it's not what I make. I put this question or analysis, but not this way. So I don't want to say it's impossible. I want to say it's hard to replicate.

Yeah, it's hard to replicate for most people I think because I think a lot of successful traders, you included, are using that part of discretion in their trading. Yes, but it's not something that everyone can achieve or everyone wants to go through. Like it's a very painful and long process and you just see the end but you don't see what it's required to get there. So I completely agree with that and I think backtesting has like. And then it's not just about, you know, you just backtest and you go live in the markets. Like as you said, it's both. You have to do both.

So. But I want to point out something now me and Andrea are following a private education because we continue to study every month spending hundreds of thousands of euros to improve our edge. And one topic of today was the fact that the back testing when you see the actual data is saving you from putting in live markets strategy that are not working. So especially if you work with option or if you include for example some kind of statistical analysis of breakout of opening session or initial balance of Nasdaq or you just want to make some data analysis on the volatility of New York session. It's data that you can get from the past and there is a huge amount of percentage possibility, a huge amount of. A huge probability, a huge probability that this data will continue to repeat themselves in the future. So it's something that you need to do from my point of view and I will not feel safe to risk my own money with something that is not tested. Just put myself in front of the chart and say okay, open one trade. I need the model, I need the trading model. And on that trading model I can put my experience to improve the performance. But starting from a naked chart without understanding anything, just trying to get YouTube strategies, I think it's maybe someone is able to do this. But from the traders in the World Trading cup that are good friend of mine, we talk, we, we refine our edge. I had the talk with Natrikan, with Patrick Neal, with Jan Small and with Burn that is the top FTMO record holder. They all have a process. Yeah. There is no one that is just going in front of chart and say let's say what I can do today.

This is really hard for beginner to, to do.

Yeah. And you found your on, you know Shifting on another topic, we've.

You found an edge in price action in order flow. And you know, especially if concerning the day trading part without getting too much into the detail of the strategy itself. Why like how did your edge develop through time?

How did you first find an edge in price action and then how did.

You improve it with order flow? Yes. Okay. So my starting point was price action. Of course I started to understanding how the market moves. What does it mean a failed auction from price starting to understand the balance. The auction market theory you can understand from the price the concept of balance, the concept of profit release or imbalance market, the concept of accumulation distribution. And I built my strategy out of it. And I was seeking repetitive pattern. The my visto that it's a pattern that I really made a lot of money out of it. And after two years and half, three years of trading this pattern, I just was watching a video, I still remember the moment about order flow. And I was checking on NASDAQ that you can see how the volume develop in futures market and to see who is pushing the price if there are more buyers or sell or if the buyers are more aggressive than sellers or if you are more probably in accumulation or distribution phase because you can add the cumulative volume delta and understand the balance of the forces in the market. And something that I still use nowadays. And I had the haha moment when I saw that in every my vista pattern there was trapped buyers or trapped sellers. That is some pattern that now it's not only from my personal point of view, but I can.

Take this pattern and check and to give the amount of traffic buyers or traffic sellers. So I can just fine tune the precision of the level, refine it and I can get more precise entry a more deep narratives. So.

My best moment in the my.

The moment I had a level up in my trading career was when I introduced the order flow analysis to price action. And from the starting I always only traded nasdaq. So I implement the order flow in my NASDAQ moment model. So as you can see was building a profitable model with statistical analysis refining this model. If you can get more information, let's say for example also option flow. Okay. And getting small amount of edges that merge themselves. And you have a trading model. This was my procedure on how I got inside order flow. And now I participated in the last cap in quarterly cap and only traded order flow analysis with footprint. And I had a really good performance. Yeah, we can say you had a small, small drawdown. And the main advantage that I can see from order Flow is that I can keep my stop loss really tight sometimes. For example, we had a live session the other day and in the live session there were a lot of people that were asking why Fabio, you have a narrative in the market that NASDAQ will break the high and it will ever follow up. And I explained to them that from price action is not clear because you are just ranging. But if you get a deeper understanding of cumulative volume delta and how the buyers are pushing the price higher and are able to accept higher price, you can see that there is high probability. Also with big trades, one indicator that I use that is showing me the big position in the market and I use them as breakout level. So break and test and I develop the narrative and I explained to them that I can just put my stop loss below the big trades because I have a statistical analysis on this, that if the price is accumulating, it will not break. So I have a wall that is protecting my stop loss. I don't need to put my stop loss below the consolidation range. So from 1 to 4 risk to reward, it gets to 1 to 10, 1 to 15. And this is a model that I can see that is being used by a lot of order flow trader like Omara Shiraf, Carmine Rosato. I see the same pattern in successful order flow trader. They trying to keep their stop loss really low. Using order flow to refine the entry point and the stop loss point.

Yes.

Also Enrico Stuckie, by the way, is the is the king. Eric Ostuki cannot be mentioned in this room without making a prayer before.

Nice. And regarding your style, your initial, initial style, it could be, let's say confined in the realm of smart money concepts. Where did you learn? Like how did you get into those kind of concepts?

Yes.

And what do you think about those concepts? Because there's probably the biggest bubble right now in YouTube and Instagram, which is ICT. So can we get deep into this part?

So let's say that no retail trader is using a smart money strategy. Because to use a smart money strategy, you need to have smart money capabilities and amount of capital and HFT and GAM understanding. And no one of us is using institutional strategy. We are just trading the price as retails because we can enter and exit from the market really fast. We don't have problem in putting our position. We don't need to put billions inside single position. So I will start that. There is a huge misconception about smart money industry that is like the stop loss hunting and market maker that are seeking you, you, Andrew, chasing Your stop loss. And this is something that I have to be really honest about. I was believing when I didn't have a good understanding of order flow when I was just watching naked charts trading the statistical edge of one pattern. You don't understand what is happening behind. Okay. So I just saw that this pattern was working and I got some education on how this pattern is developing. And I was thinking okay, someone is coming to get me so I need to wait the liquidation before then I can enter because otherwise when I put buy they will see me. There was a moment that I also convinced myself that it was if I was not putting my stop plus I was a ghost in the market then I understood that I was on a CFD broker.

So let's go on the serious stuff. Let's keep on hold the the funny stories about. About smart money. My education about this topic about how the market moves in price action was mainly of Chris Laurie. That is the one that created all this concept.

Yeah, people don't know a lot about.

People don't know the story but. But Chris Laurie is the real deal in smart money analysis.

Yeah, he's the first one who came up with it.

I downloaded his commitment of traders report and there is a level of detail of statistical analysis doing in commitment of traders report that you can just take this and trade out of this if you do swing trading. So out of this I was really surprised by the amount of level of data that is analyzing. And they went inside his price action understanding. There are still some YouTube videos of him explaining how the market develops and how the interact. The interaction between market participants is creating the market. And this was the first moment where I saw the video and I told myself now I have a real understanding of why this pattern works. How these market participants are interacting out of that I deep I dig down. How can I say deepened. I deepened my understanding of smart money. And I went directly to ICT Michael Addison and there was a moment in my life where I was really thinking that he was a good trader. Like I was really sure that the way he called that the market was trustworthy till the moment he started to say that the concept comes from God that is being searched by the most the CIA. CIA. The Mossad is after him and he cannot talk. And sometimes he burned the account live just to don't show off too much and or when he joined the Robbins Cup. But I was. I'm actually still waiting maybe, maybe like a Pokemon, you know, like a Pokemon.

And so from that moment I start to say maybe the concept he Created are valid and this is my belief.

I think created or let's say remodeled.

Remodeled. Maybe the concept he remodel are valid but my.

Thought nowadays is just took order flow concept because if you see the names of the concept they are really similar.

He talks about fair value at the end.

Yeah. Fair value about. Fair value about imbalance, about algorithm. That is auction market theory is not Enigma and but out of that I see some value in what he created in the point of narrative, not in the point of concept. The point is that I was expecting. I was really hoping that you will took the challenge and get inside the World Trading Cup Robins and show to the world that the concept works and that it can really sustain a track record that is profitable. But unfortunately I had to say okay maybe some concepts are valid but I cannot trust him as a trader. And then I still enjoy sometimes watching his mindset series. I have to be honest, sometimes I put the mindset series because the mindset series is good. The technical series.

Yeah. I believe he's a. He's a really good marketer but also a really good speaker.

He's a really good speaker. Yeah. Yeah.

He's like when he talks he's. He knows how to talk otherwise he wouldn't have created a cult like following for sure.

What he did in marketing I think is what people really need to study. Yeah. If you want to get some value understand how we created the biggest trading channel. One of the biggest trading channel without ever showing proof. Yeah. It's crazy. Yes. Like.

And the fact that.

He pointed the finger at himself saying I will go in the world.

Yes.

It's not someone that was pushing him. It's just this year Larry Williams done.

Then the second year. Last year I had some personal problems let's say but this year Larry Williams.

Gone one more year.

One more year. After five years he thought maybe Larry Williams not gun and but yes is I think from the marketing perspective is really a gist genius. People don't understand because we also run an educational business and people don't understand how much is difficult to build this kind of audience only with raw content.

Yeah, definitely. And there's no fancy edits. There's no. There's nothing.

No love nice lifestyle also this is the reason you also got a big trust then I think people need to be able to separate the.

The person from the concepts.

Yes. This is something that. But other than that I still believe order flow is 100 times better. Yeah.

I mean it's like smart money concepts or ICT concepts but on Steroids?

Basically, yes. On huge amount of steroids.

Yeah. On trend and everything.

And Diana Ball and everything. Yeah.

And how did you, if we can get a slightly deeper into that, how did you.

Like, how did you kind of uncover what's behind the candles of smart money concepts?

I told you everything started with YouTube video. And if I can say, I think I can say was the first platform about order flow was market Delta that now they had the trademark of the footprint concept. They created the name Footprint so they had the train. Now nowadays I think the platform is not yet.

I think they sold it to cqg.

Exactly, exactly. They sold it. But at the time for me it was a cheat code. It was a cheat code. From the first moment I saw that I can see the volume behind the pattern that I was trading. It was for me.

Life changing moment because I understood that I can go deeper and more information. For me it's more money and Andrea knows it. Because also when. When you get some additional information and you can see, okay, maybe only from this I can understand with a 5% more or 10% more probability the bias of the day for me it's 30€000 more per month. So it's like, okay, we need to stack edges to build the model. And in that moment.

The most important leap of my career from monetary perspective because was helping me to get better trades. I will rate low stop loss. Andrea still remember the last three days of the world trading cap. There was NASDAQ pushing high really fast and they was like 1, 2, 3, done. 1, 2, 3, done. 1, 2, 3, done. And this was only possible because I was understanding the aggression there was in in order flow and they was trading the big trades protecting my stop loss. So I was joining the trend at the right moment. And this is something that from price I'm not able to do. Yeah, not because I'm not capable. I cannot do multi time frame analysis. Like someone is saying you don't need volume, you just. You just go on the lower time frame. Yes, you're watching smaller candle, you are watching big candle. Now you're watching smaller candle. So this is not an actual edge. Maybe you can fine tune and refine.

But.

But the actual edge is watching market participants that are pressing buy and sell on the regulated market. Now we need to point out also for transparency that you cannot see from the futures market the total amount of volume. You have just a statistical proxy of the total. But it's enough to build an edge. Yes, definitely it's enough to build an edge.

And it's a cool. It's a cool thing that we're now trying to get deeper into option. And it was the, I think the second biggest aha moment in my life as well that you know, from price action to order flow, you understand how this is what price moves. And then you go into option date and option flow and you say, ah, this is what moves.

Order flow. Yeah. It was the second time in my life I felt really stupid. The first one was after order flow, the second one was after option. If you want to understand how the price move, watch volume. If we want to understand why the volume input the market watch options. Yes. That's crazy. Crazy. The level of understanding of this rabbit hole. Every three years I feel like I can go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. That's crazy. Yeah.

Yes. Option. Option flow is like the whole market maker model in option flow and how they use dynamic gamma hedging and delta hedging, that is what's actually moving them to buy the underlying asset, which can be NASDAQ futures or the esg is crazy.

And after you know this stuff, when someone comes to you and say the market is moved by Enigma, you just can. Cannot believe. Even if you want. Even if you want sometimes like to get the fairy tale, you cannot believe because you know what is actually moving the market.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. And when I saw Cem Carson's interview in Words of Wisdom podcast crazy. That was.

That was music for my percentage of.

Volume, I think 13%. He moved 13% of zero DTES at some point. Fucking crazy.

Billions.

Billions. Billions.

Of course.

So we have some sort of inside joke where, you know, I have a wife, a beautiful human being. Wife. You also have a wife?

Yes, which is also mine. Beautiful market being. And it's nasdaq. Yes. Which joke from years. Yes, the name on the hat.

Yes, the name on the hat. And it was your choice also, you chose to. Why did you choose NASDAQ and why choosing one asset instead of a lot of them?

This is the biggest cheat code that you can ever get in trading.

Mastering one asset and the underlying mechanics that are moving this asset. So I started trading, having a watch list on the Forex market. I was trading EURUSDB USD. I was trading, for example, all the indices. I was trading commodities. It was getting the most amount of execution from multiple assets. Now is getting the least amount of execution on the asset where I know that I have a huge edge on it. So I just understood that the amount of money I can make in percentage is not related to the Numbers of assets I have in my watch list. And that the best thing I can do when where I when I don't have setup is just stay sitting, relax, doing something else. Because my edge is not presenting itself every day. For example, consolidation day. I have no edge with my trading model. So when I started trading only one asset, I experienced some kind of of psychological benefits in, in my trading session. The, the first thing is that you have one chart in front of you. Maybe you can have price action and order flow, but you have the focus on one asset so you can go really easier inside flow state. You can just be super productive, super analytical and something that is not easy where you have to switch out of 10 assets. So I just kept my trading model for long term for swing trading, the one for global macro with cod seasonality and everything with multiple assets. But in scalping I think and I want to advise you to have one trading asset and they want also to say that the best trader that I know in person, that I know that are doing crazy performance out of trading, they all trade one asset. And I think this is because you develop some kind of discretionary sensibility on the volatility of the asset on the best moment to trade. Because it's related to trading session. You understand when from the starting of the session what is not the date to trade. And it's not something that you can put in an algorithm because it's like the part of intuition and part of personal understanding that is made from 10 years of experience that you cannot code.

This is subjective probability.

This is the personal alpha, the extra mile. And this is something that if you want to trade for example order flow scalping, I really advise choose NASDAQ, choose S P500, choose every asset you prefer, but focus on that asset and try to understand the.

Statistical edge you have on that one. Because I noticed that for example if I get my trading model on gold, I don't have the same performance, not even similar. Why? Because the.

The behavior of NASDAQ in the opening session is completely different to gold. It's a commodity, it's different. And just the strategy that I use and the strategy Nico use are like opposite is trading usually main reversion. I'm using, I'm using trend following because I'm trading a trending asset, it will be completely different. It was I if I was trading for example ultra bond, I saw that my model lose money on ultra bond because it's not the, the trading behavior that is giving me edge. So this was the I I didn't choose myself. I just watched the performance. And before I was trading, in the first three months, I was trading S, P 500, Nasdaq and gold with order flow. Then I remove S&P 500 because it's correlated. And I say, what's the point of trading NASDAQ and S&P 500? Then it was, okay, I make money and they lose 50 of that money to trade gold. Makes no sense. I removed gold. And from that moment, the equity curve was crazy. So just master one asset, master one trading model. Understand what it's really moving the market and what is giving you edge. And this is the best advice I can give you.

And to, to, to end on a more like, say, psychological note. What's, what's the main struggles you have faced? And what do you think is the best way for people to approach a more discretionary approach to trading?

What, what I'm trying to do in this podcast is protect the people from the pitfall that I had in my career. And they arrived because I was in a rush to make money because I was not in a good economical condition at the starting point. So I had to take, I had to take bigger risk on my trading account. And if you take bigger risk, your risk of ruin raise your drawdown race. So from the psychological point of view, it's worse. You are just killing yourself and you are not aware of it. And the second point about psychology that really.

In the beginning of my career was difficult is that I had this necessity and this internal feeling of showing to my family and people around me that I was worthy of respect for my trading career. Because when you start, people don't understand that trading is a career. They take it as a joke. They call you gambler. They don't think that you are doing business. They think you are just playing. And maybe you have at the beginning, in the first six months, you have no straightforward or really steep equity curve. You just make up psychological error and you go down, you start from zero. So it's not constant money. Okay? So at the beginning, you have to just say, mom, dad, trust me or your friends, trust me, I know what I'm doing. And this is something that.

Bring you and me also at the moment in the situation to push on the gas because I have to show you that I can make money. And this was the worst error that I ever made and that I advise you to never ever also think about doing this. And in the actual moment, my psychology is really stable. Also in the World Trading Cup, I'm really, really relaxed. I'M just pissed off when Naziri can make this extra 3% in the last day. But hello to Naziri. He deserved it. And in nowadays it's only about having a maximum number of loss for for the day. And there is one setting from TradingView and also from the order flow platform where you don't show the money that you are making, you just show the tick that you are making because the process is the same. So my psychology is completely detached from my trading account. The only thing that I see is the floating number of tick in profit or loss and this is really helpful. So I advise you to do this. It's possible also in TradingView from the settings. So just take care about your mental health by separating the economical performance to your trading performance and don't punish yourself for losing money. Punish yourself for not respecting your plan. Definitely.

So thank you very much for all the tips. I think was an interview and we'll see you in your YouTube channel. Yes, videos are starting to come out finally and people can get get loads of value out of them.

So thank you, thank you, thank you Andrea and thank you to everyone for listening to this.