I read somewhere that when Michael Jordan was making an advert that required him to miss the basketball hoop a number of times; he just couldn’t do it, he couldn’t not get the ball in the hoop. I have for a long time thought that it would make an interesting futures trading exercise to try very hard to lose as much as possible. I imagine that when we try to lose as much as possible it won’t be as easy as we imagine.

The problem with this exercise, if I was to give it to a group of workshop delegates, is that they would quickly realise that the easiest and surest way to lose money in the Futures Markets is to repeatedly buy the offer and sell the spread. That way they would be constantly losing the spread and their losses would rack up quickly. This, I thought, would defeat the object of the exercise, until I realised what a great insight this is. If paying the spread is the best way to lose money trading futures, surely not paying the spread is essential to making money. More on How To Lose Money

During my first year as a local (independent trader) on the floor of LIFFE, I bought and sold 8804 FTSE futures contracts, about 40 contracts per day on average. The result was a loss of £61,620 or -£267 per trading day. I was profitable on 55% of days with an average gain of £1009, my average loosing day was -£1780. My biggest one day gain was £7730 and my biggest loss -£12,426

As you can probably imagine, this was a difficult time for me. I was trying to work out how to make money consistently. It was the consistency that seemed so hard to find. As you can see I was having a regular experience of making money, what was killing me were my losses. It seemed that every time I got ahead by £5-6000 over a period of a week or two, I would lose it all and a few thousand more in the space of a couple of days. More on What I learnt losing £60,000 my first year as a full-time trader

• Are you fed up with getting whipsawed by the seemingly unpredictable market?
• Are you tired of making money, only to give it all back (and then some)?
• Are you ready to learn how to read this market and really make some money?

I have been a full-time professional trader since 1992. I started out as a local (independent floor trader) on LIFFE, the London Futures exchange.

When I first started out on the floor I was in a sea of confusion. Everything I did seemed to be wrong, the more certain I was that the market was about to move the more likely it was to be going nowhere. More on How to Spot Turning Points in the Futures Market