Welcome traders, to my very first podcast and blog post.
To save yourself time coming back here every week, or reading the full transcript below, here’s what you want to do:
- Pick up your smartphone
- Turn it on and find the Podcast App
- Search for “Metatrader Mentors” and subscribe to it
- Listen at home, while you exercise, trade, travel or drive
And, here’s the first show if you just prefer to listen online…
Recommended book
The Secret Code Of Success by Noah St John
Full transcript
Hey traders!
I’m Cam Hawkins, and welcome to the very first episode of MetaTrader Mentors and to kick this revolution off, today I’m going to give you a teaser of the MetaTrader Mentors Podcast format.
And at the same time I hope this will give you an insight into who I am, my history with trading and why I’ve decided to do this podcast.
The way I plan to do this by answering the very same questions I’ll be asking successful traders in future episodes. And at the end of my interview I’ll run you through the plans I have for this Podcast and your, yes “Your” involvement.
So, without further ado, I’d like to introduce my first guest, your’s truly Cam Hawkins.
I hail from Wellington, New Zealand and have been trading mainly currencies since 2007, however I’ve dabbled in options and CFD’s . I’ve had plenty of experience with trading robots and you may know of me from my days running ForexReviewsRated.com and CamForex.com where I reviewed MetaTrader Expert Advisors (for newbies EA’s or Expert Advisors are MetaTrader lingo for trading robots) and had gained a reputation as one of the few trustworthy Forex reviewers on the internet.
In 2013/14 I took an 18 month break from trading. After I withdrew all the funds from my live accounts, when all was said and done I came out about break even, if not a little bit up. But given it was a 5 year investment the money would have been better off in the bank.
However, boy did I learn a lot along the way (of which I’ll share some of the stories with you today). Back in September 2014 I decided to give it another crack, but this time with a different mentality and renewed vigor to have another serious stab at making trading a solid source of income.
Now let’s head into the interview. And remember, this is the same interview I’ll be giving to successful traders from all over the globe. Hopefully, this wets your appetite.
Here’s goes:
This is your chance to share more about you personally, and give the listeners more detail about your trading. What you’re trading, how you’re trading it and the kind of results you see…Over to you.
Thanks Cam, Well I’m 39 years old, and live with my beautiful wife Zoe and our 2 girls. Outside of trading I’m love my football (soccer for those in the states) both playing as well as watching. I’m a mad Chelsea fan, and I’ll always try and get to a game at the bridge when I’m back in London visiting Zoe’s family. Back here in NZ I hold down a full time job so this is something I’m doing on the side, simply because trading interests me and has been my other significant hobby for the past 8 years.
I’ll be completely straight with you, and let you know that I’m not what I’d consider a successful trader in any way shape or form. Well not at the moment anyway. In the past I’ve tried it all, manual systems, automated trading software, signal services, currencies, commodities and indices. 1 minute charts to 1 day charts, grid, martingale, trend, breakout, scalping and high frequency trading systems – about the only thing I haven’t tried are Fundamentals. So, when you distill everything down what I have come away with is a very good understanding of all the facets and disciplines of trading, but where I’ve failed is having the discipline myself to stay focused until I find success. Like the acronym goes, FOCUS – Follow One Course Until Success. I’m hoping the successful traders I meet and interview on this journey will provide me, and you, with the insights we need to become successful.
For those listening for the first time (that’s all of you), we’re about to enter a round I like to call “The Fundamental Round”. This is where I’ll be asking Cam to tell us stories that will help you understand what makes him a successful trader.
So, think back now and tell us what first attracted you to trading and talk us through that very first trade you took?
Well, it all started during a round of golf with a couple of guys from an ad agency I worked with at the time. We’d just finished the round and I asked them about an old colleague of theirs I knew, Dan. About 6 months ago Dan had told me he was leaving Ogilvy to become an investor.
To my surprise the guys told me he’d already made over $500,000 trading Emini’s and was expecting to hit the $1 million mark within 12 months. Now, if anything was going to grab my attention this was it!
I’d never known anyone who‘d had so much success in such a short period of time and I was super keen to find out how he did it. It was a few weeks later that I managed to track Dan down and he sent me some links to the courses he had taken and seminars he’d attended. He recommended I pay for the courses myself, otherwise I wouldn’t commit. So I did, and after studying the videos, booklet and charts for 3 months I was feeling confident about this complete strategy that used Bollinger Bands, moving averages, trend lines, S&R levels on multiple time frames.
I finally took my first Options trade on the Australian Stock Market.
With Options the minimum you could trade was $1000, which was a hefty amount for me to lose at the time as I was supporting a family of 4. Looking back now I see all the mistakes I made, I was too eager to buy at the wrong price and too eager to sell when it went in the wrong direction. Everything I had learnt about trading psychology went out the window as soon as I placed that trade.
Fear and greed took over immediately and for the next 8 hours I was a mess. Net result: $250 loss minus $50 fees, $700 left in equity. Lesson learned, start off with money you can “happily” lose, and I stress the “happily” here. This should be real “play money” and not something you’re emotionally attached to.
Next question Cam, let’s go back to a dark time in your trading career, a point where you hit rock bottom, a trade that kept you awake for a week, an account that you blew in a matter of days or even minutes. Tell us that story.
OK, I was trading a Forex robot called Robominer at the time which was based on a grid system. This robot worked on the Euro Swiss Franc, a currency pair that had traded within a set range for years. You needed some cash behind you to trade this robot as it would open up several sell trades above the midpoint of the range and buy trades below the midpoint. Each had about 25 pip Take Profit from memory with a 25 pip gap between each trade.
At the start things were going well and I was making money. But within about 2 months things started getting out of control. I had $4000 (75% of the account) in about 50 sell trades with no stop loss, my swap had been going up steadily and was now costing me around $150 a day. Then it got worse. The price broke the top of something like the 20 year historical range as the GFC started playing havoc with the worlds stable economy.
I couldn’t sleep for about a week, every day I would wake up hoping to see the price turn, but every day it was worse than the day before. I had to make a decision and either bite the bullet or blow the account. Emotionally it was destroying me. The next day I decided that I had to exit everything and take the hit. Looking back it was the right thing to do because the price kept rising and rising. So if I stuck with it I would have walked away with nothing. As you can guess, I’m not that keen on grid strategies anymore.
Next question in the Fundamentals round. Can you talk us through a specific time when everything fell into place. Your big “ah-ha” moment. That point in time you started to become a successful trader – What did you do differently and Who did you learn from?
Unfortunately, I can’t answer this question as I haven’t yet had that “ah ha” moment, although I’ve thought I had it a couple of times, but they only ever lasted for a month or two at most.
For me, this question will be the one you, the listeners, will get most the value from.
OK, let’s keep going. Here’s the last question in this round. What’s been your proudest “moment” since you became a successful trader?
Once again, great question, but this is one for the pros too.
Now it’s time for the part of the show I like to call “The Technical round”. I’ll run through 13 quick fire questions to help you, the listeners, understand what it takes to become a successful trader.
Question 1. How long did it take you to go from trading newbie to consistently profitable trader?
8 years and counting.
What’s your mental approach to trading and what special techniques do you use to keep your emotions in check?
I don’t have one. But I need one and hope this show will give me some insights.
Do you have a success quote you can share our listeners, one that resonates with you?
I have a quote from William Churchill “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”. This quote, I feel, absolutely opitimises trading. To succeed in trading you have to fail and it’s how you deal with failure that will ultimately lead you to success.
What’s your recommended “must read” trading book?
I’m not going to recommend a trading book, but rather a book you should read before you start trading. And one that I’m currently working my way through at the moment. It’s called “The secret code of success” by Noah St John.
This book will help clear your subconscious mind of the things that are holding you back from success and instead replace them with everything you need to achieve success. And it works for everything, not just in trading.
What are your views on trading robots?
I’ve had varying degrees of success and failure with EA’s, they were my mainstay for the majority of my trading career, but after testing and trading around 100 EA’s I haven’t found any that work that are sold commercially.
So, last year I learnt how to build my own and since I’ve done that I have a new found respect for EA’s, and not just the fully automated trading variety, but EA’s that are used to assist manual systems as well.
To download one of the EA’s I’ve built over the past few months, for FREE, simply visit metatradermentors.com, enter your email address and I’ll send you the download link.
What internet resource do you always use?
I’m a great fan of FXblue.com to analyse my trading results. Previously known as MT4i.com, I prefer it to MyFXBook because it syncs your MT4 account via the investor password. When I’ve tried to sync accounts with MyFXBook in the past it’s always been a bit of a pain. So that’s why I prefer FXblue.com.
What’s your preferred trading strategy?
One that fits the time I have to trade in the day which is usually 1-2 hours in the New Zealand morning or evening.
If you could leave our listeners with one piece of advice what would it be and why?
Learn all you can about the markets first before you start trading. This will give you the ability to make judgement decisions on any trading products you might purchase, and how you can improve or tweak their performance once you start using them.
What’s the biggest mistake most retail traders make?
Although I’m not in the best position to answer this, my view would be “not taking the time to learn how the markets they trade work, i.e. What really moves the markets?”
If you’re not a MetaTrader fan, what’s your preferred trading platform?
I’ve never really used anything other than Metatrader 4.
Question 12. What’s your daily trading routine?
At the moment, I wake up at 5am NZT for the U.S. Open, check my phone to see what the trend is doing and 9 times out of 10 I’ll head to the PC to draw a trend line and run my trend trading EA. I’ll then carry on with my morning routine of stretching, afformations (not affirmations) and meditation checking the chart now and then to see what’s triggered.
And finally, what broker do you use?
I’ve used many in the past but I’m currently enjoying UK based, GKFX.
Now, this next question is something, you the listener, can take part in. The concept is simple: each episode I’ll ask my guest to help the MTM listeners build a profitable system. And we as a community can take that Nugget of advice and work out how or if we add it to our system.
To start things off I’ll be asking my first guest to help us select a market and time frame to focus on. From there I’ll be sharing the strategy as it stands with each subsequent quest who will have a chance to study it before the show so they can provide us their golden nugget in all it’s glory. So tune in to future episodes and join the community online to take part.
I’m calling the community that will work on this system the MTM Mastermind. The MTM Mastermind community will work together to create a profitable trading system or robot both they, and you, can trade.
And at the moment, the MTM Mastermind is completely free to join, so head to www.metatradermentors.com to secure your place today.
Ok, now for the very last question I will ask all my quests: So before we wrap up what’s the best way for traders to get hold of you?
For myself, the best way is through www.metatradermentors.com or on twitter at @mtmentors.
That’s it for the questions. Other cool things you’ll be able to follow along with are my live trading results and monthly updates on how I’m progressing, the strategies I’m using and the kind of success I’m having.
A big thank you, to you the listeners, for staying tuned on my very first episode.
Everything I’ve discussed here today along with any links can be found in the show notes. To find them, simply search for Cam in the search box on www.metatradermentors.com.
And while you’re there remember to pick up my completely free Trend Trading Robot. Simply jump on the site, add your email and we’ll send you the download link.
The 2nd episode is already waiting for you, so download it now if you haven’t already and listen to my first guest reveal their story.
Until then. Happy trading!
