Andrew Mitchem and Marc Walton: Top 5 Forex Mistakes & How to Avoid Them

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#594: Andrew Mitchem and Marc Walton: Top 5 Forex Mistakes & How to Avoid Them

In this video: 00:12 – Andrew and Marc discuss their backgrounds and how they started trading. 08:18 – Become a better trader and have a check list. 15:00 – Trading Gold and Silver. 20:53 – Trading Bots and brokers widening spreads. 29:30 – Riding a bike is like learning to trade. 34:00 – Marc’s average day and setting up the new trading week. 39:15 – Trading keeps you mentally active. 44:50 – How can you monetise your knowledge. 50:33 – Trading and living where we want to.

Andrew Mitchem: Alrighty! Hi, everybody! Andrew Mitchem here at The Forex Trading Coach. I’m really excited today to be joined by Marc Walton from Forex Mentor Pro. Good day, Marc! Nice to see you.

Marc Walton: Good day. How are you.

Andrew and Marc discuss their backgrounds and how they started trading.

Andrew Mitchem: Very very well thank you. I thought Marc, we’d just, spend half an hour. So I just have a bit of a chat two people been trading. Sounds like similar amount of time, some backgrounds. And, just give people a bit of a insight of what we’ve done over the years and, and, the pros and cons of what we’ve done and how we’re trading today and the changes we’ve seen.

Marc Walton: Yeah. I was just saying just saying your path is very similar to mine. We neither of us came from finance. I actually failed math. So level three times.

Andrew Mitchem: Right?

Marc Walton: It’s ironic. I also have something called dyspraxia, which I never realized until, like, one of my kids had it. But the only way really affects me is I’m not very. I’m kind of number blind, which is bizarre considering what we do for a living. Yeah, yeah. But yeah. But then again, it’s to me it’s all about pattern recognition.

Marc Walton: And so I think the main thing is for folks not to get too stressed with, the math side of things, as long as you can control the risk and, and work a simple calculator for it to get the risk right, then maths is not important. I was saying to you earlier, I left the UK. When I left the UK early 2000.

Marc Walton: Went to live on a little island off the coast of Africa, the Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, which was which is a beautiful place to live. And, I went to sing and play guitar in a band for five years and, thought I’d semi-retired at 40. And then you realize when you retire, you spend more money than you ever did, because.

Marc Walton: Right. Well, kids in school did now and then, you’ve got so much free time. So I started looking at trying to make money online. Stumbled on forex, which 20 years ago there was hardly any of it. We we have the other extreme nowadays, as we know with, with YouTube, where there’s millions of people stood next to their mates, Ferrari or whatever in Dubai and, and pitching this and the other and they said that, I mean, I paid $4,000, I think, for a course, 20 years ago and, struggled like everybody else.

Marc Walton: And, and I did a webinar with the other day with my mentor, Rich, who’s a psychologist, and I have the list here of things that went wrong in my trading. And when he put this slide up for the benefit of people in the webinar, it was like, oh crikey, it’s me again. So I’ll just read a few.

Marc Walton: It’s yeah, I see this. They repeat the same errors over and over again over trading. I’ve tried to pull the trigger over a leveraging retrench, revenge trading, afraid to lose money. Room by emotions, cook win is short. Let loose his run not disciplined. Jump from system to system. And there’s many more. And, I did all of them and, I, I know from your background with farming and things, you probably. I’m guessing, did the same thing. Is that your reason for getting involved? Andrew Mitchem: Yeah. Trading. So, I got into trading, actually, as a result of having a young child at the time and going through divorce, it was. It was forced on me. So I was dairy farming and, which I was when my family had been dairy farming through England moved to New Zealand, you know, it was nearly 30 years ago.

Andrew Mitchem: I had the dream. Well, I eventually did some work, you know, different companies actually bought a farm and it kind of all then imploded. It all went wrong. And and it was like, what do I do now?

Marc Walton: Yeah.

Andrew Mitchem: And I was looking after my son. Not full time, but fairly close at times. And yeah, I can’t go and be a rep for a company. I can’t go and work on another farm. What do I do that allows me to work from home and look after him? And I’m like yourself. Back in those days, it was unheard of to from a bloke from home by yourself.

Andrew Mitchem: It was unheard of to do anything on the internet, pretty much because it was dial up. Still, you know, one gigabyte a month was like this May. Well, I remember when I went to ten and everybody was blown away. I got a dial up space. But and so I stumbled and I paid 5,000 NZD and went up to Auckland and did a weekend course up there.

Andrew Mitchem: And although when I look at it, it wasn’t great, I can’t knock it because it got me into trading and it gave me the the buzz of this whole new world that I didn’t know existed.

Marc Walton: Yeah, yeah. Well, for me it was a necessity as well because I say we we semi-retired or sort of semi-retired and we were just burning through money. I budgeted that, let’s say we were going to spend 25, 30 grand a year. I think the first year we’re there, we went through 50 and it was okay, need to do something about this.

Marc Walton: And it was born out of necessity. It’s very similar to you because if if I hadn’t been able to get forex to work, I would have ended up having to go back to the UK with my tail between my legs. Because the only, the only work in, Spain, Canary Islands for a foreigner would be in a bar.

Marc Walton: Yes. And, my wife said if you ever buy a music bar, I will shoot you. So, so thankfully, I didn’t do that and I got into forex. And the other thing is, I employed people all my life until that point, and I really didn’t want to go through the hassle of employing people over again, which is great. This is why this is so good.

Andrew Mitchem: That’s right. So when you started in like what? Kind of like, how long did it take you to. I’m guessing you did like me. You people, ideas, systems, e-books, robots, backtesting, everything under the sun. And then suddenly something clicked to make it go from losing money to working the.

Marc Walton: The course that I bought actually wasn’t bad at all. It was. It’s very similar to what I do now. In many ways. It was all about support and resistance and it it was huge. It was using a lot of EMA’s and I only use a few now, but in general it was support and resistance. The issue I had was it looked too easy.

Andrew Mitchem: But You know, I’m a smart fellow. This is not difficult. I can do this. I actually believe most people can do this. But the problem that screwed me up was my head. And, I say I went through all the issues I’ve just mentioned revenge trading, etc., etc. but the biggest thing for me was that I would go through a period of time where I would win and then I could lose it all.

Marc Walton: And you know, the last time I got to the point of quitting was I went five months consistently making money 3 to 5% a month on a big account. This is okay. Slow and steady wins the race. And I lost most of the five months profits in a week. So for me, the periods between meltdown got bigger. But the same result was that I took I took a few months off, to basically let it all settle in my brain.

Marc Walton: And thankfully I found the retired trader to teach me because if I hadn’t, I would have been. I don’t think I would have ever made it. And then, for me, discipline has always been an issue. And I think when you come the background I had before I got I’d left the UK, I had frozen food company and so I had to cry, loss, cry a lot of stuff.

Marc Walton: And you come under lots of rules. But we also supplied the Prison service with food, so we were highly regulated. And then when it got to trading, suddenly I’ve got the cash. There we go, you know.

Andrew Mitchem: Do what you like.

Marc Walton: Yeah. And it’s ironic because within a year of meeting Rich and him ironing out the issues and half the issue with the psychology is making yourself self aware. And then the other the other part is the discipline. And, he introduced me to a fund in the, in the US. It wouldn’t be allowed nowadays, but I was training remotely from Lanzarote for a fund in New York.

Marc Walton: And they basically give you a book, This thick of rules. And if you break the rules, you’re out. Right. So before you take a trade, every time you thinking, you go through the checklist, you make sure everything you’ve got, everything is spot on. And I say to people nowadays, always use a checklist. Yes, I tell folks to look for five reasons.

Become a better trader and have a check list.

Marc Walton: If you don’t have five reasons to compromise, walk away. And so having a checklist and having somebody looking over your shoulder made me a better trader. And I worked for them for three years. Then in 2008, I started doing it for myself and doing it for my own clients. And the bad habits started creeping back in. Right.

Marc Walton: Which is when I started posting on Twitter in the early days, Twitter in the early days wasn’t the war zone it is now. And, people were genuinely helping each other. And I was just saying, oh, you know, I’m going to shorten your account today here for these reasons. And people ask me to teach them as well.

Marc Walton: Okay. And that was good because otherwise, because I’d got to the point where I was only placing a few trades a day, and now I’m placing maybe one of the day. I had a lot of free time on my hands. I have free time on my hands. I’m dangerous. And even today, last year, about six months ago, we had, quite a lot of new folks in, in Mentor Pro and they wanted to trade more actively.

Marc Walton: So I traded, they traded for a week. And at the end of the week I had brought that. Well, I think I took eight trades. And at three of them I shouldn’t have taken because they broke my rules. And I got up twice in the middle of the night because of news. And by the end of the week, I think I’d lost half a percent.

Marc Walton: And I had spent 20 hours in from the screens and got and all the old things come flooding back. So I think the other thing people need to be aware of is you’ve got to be every day. You’ve got to be able to stick to the rules, because otherwise you’d be screwed. And success is as harmful as it is.

Marc Walton: Not knowing what you’re doing is, you know.

Andrew Mitchem: That’s a really interesting point because, as you know, I fly a helicopter privately and the checklist is needed. And yes, you’re right, and you have to go through a checklist. It doesn’t matter how, even if you’re like a pro doing it daily, that still goes through a checklist. Yeah. Is that one time you don’t go through that checklist and you miss something like, you know, obviously trading can damage you. Flying can do a bigger damage.

Andrew Mitchem: But similar thing, you know, you’re either going to yeah. You know, you’re going to over cook an engine when you start or you should have checked something that you didn’t. Yeah. Preflight in flight, whatever it might be. So yeah. Like, I’m I’m with you. The checklist is so important, and it’s. I find that really an interesting story.

Andrew Mitchem: How you, with all your experience and still drift back? Oh, yeah. I mean, against those rules, if you had them set out.

Marc Walton: Yeah, and I will again, I said earlier, you’ve got to be able to introspectively look at yourself and see what you’re doing. And my, my, my mentor, I’ve said it with me. You know, if you don’t fail at least seven out of ten in health and psychology and in general, failing when you get don’t. Right. And that’s when you’re day trading.

Marc Walton: So, I don’t do that every day, but and in truth, I don’t keep a journal every day, but if you’re new until you’ve been doing this for years, you need to keep a journal is. We would both agree, I’m sure.

Andrew Mitchem: Absolutely. So you mentioned new people. So someone new, they’ve you know, like you said, they’ve been kind of conned into the YouTube and Bryson Lamborghini stuff. What would your suggestions be for someone new looking at trading about? Where do they start? What kind of things should they look for or avoid? What forms? Maybe any like technical should be fundamental.

Andrew Mitchem: What should they look for?

Marc Walton: I traded, I say I traded stocks in the 90s. In those days we worked off new sheets and you had to ring the broker. So it wasn’t like we know now, and I used to think technical analysis was tosh. It just it was nonsense. And then when I, when I learned to trade from this DVD series.

Marc Walton: So now, crikey, this works, this one, this fib level works and this works and this will actually. And so that that was good for me. And then I traded really for the fund until 2008, 2009. Just technically, yes. And then when the financial crash came along and suddenly it was the what the heck moment I started to pay attention to fundamentals.

Marc Walton: So nowadays I am 70% technical when it comes to trading forex and I am 30% filter it with fundamental rules. And so I have a bias fundamentally. So I kind of say to people, look, if you’re trading the New Zealand dollar, for example, what do you know about New Zealand. And they will go, I think they’ve got cows.

Marc Walton: Yeah. Okay. Well it’s actually a good clue. But what do they do and who do they sell it to. And, and one of the big concerns obviously in your neck of the woods is the Chinese. If the Chinese move into Taiwan, your economy and Australia’s economy is going to be in the deep doo doo. So I use a mixture of both when when it comes to crypto and when it comes to stocks, I’m 70% fundamental and 30% technical because the the crypto I unlike you, I don’t trade crypto.

Marc Walton: Although having talked about that a little earlier, I’m going to have a look at it now. But I basically bought and hold right. But I bought crypto that they had to be faster, smarter, cheaper, revolutionizing the sector. And being used. And and did really well because I got in 2019, I started to understand crypto. February 2020 I bought my first Bitcoin at eight grand.

Marc Walton: Crashed to 4000 the following month with Covid, but then recovered. By I mean, by the following January it was up at 50 odd. So it was a really good time to be in. Yes. What I did as well with that is I’d learned the lesson when I traded stocks in the 90s. It was it was very similar to what’s going on in crypto now.

Marc Walton: In 1995 96. They when they when it started to boom, everything went top. It was easy and I was naive at the time. I didn’t I didn’t take my profit. I didn’t get out in time and lost again. Lost a lot of it with crypto this time. What I said to folks is, look, if it goes from eight grand to 20, take the stake out.

Marc Walton: If it goes up to 30, take some profit out. And then we started to buy more on the dips. So when the crash came in the April, the 21, I still hung on to everything I had was bought and paid for and I’d made a profit. And so trying to to kind of use the same skillset I am nowadays, I’m involved in crypto.

Trading Gold and Silver

Marc Walton: I started buying gold in 2022 because it was obvious after all the the money printing from Covid that there was going to be an inflation issue. Yes. So I caught that at the right time and that’s fundamentals. And then I use the technicals to get in and and same with silver. So I have more silver than gold.

Marc Walton: And that’s technically because in 2012 silver was up at $49.

Andrew Mitchem: That’s brilliant!

Marc Walton: But yeah technically it’s got the room. So I think the more you know about how the financial world works, how everything’s into interrelated. Yes, I look I look every day at the Dec Seed I look at the U.S. stock markets, I look at gold, I look at crypto, I look at forex. I’m trying to work on the day. I’m database where the big money’s going. Yeah. And and if it’s not in forex, that’s fine. I’ll leave it. I’ll go off. And if this is where the money is, this is where I will go for the day. And I don’t spend a lot of time with that.

Andrew Mitchem: No. That’s brilliant. Thank you. That’s fascinating what you said about silver. I had conversations with people back then when it just almost reached 50, didn’t it? Didn’t quite get to 50, but it was very close. And when it started, you know, pulling back and I said to people, well, you know, it was $20, let’s say I said, well, for crypto, I’m sorry for silver to go from 20 to 40.

Andrew Mitchem: Obviously it doubles. We are. It’s not needing a new high. Yeah. This is like I’m talking physical silver. Yeah, yeah. Whereas gold at the time was whatever it was, you know, 2000 and whatever the figure was for it to double was a massive move. And to make a brand new high by quite some margin. And so I was thought from a, you know, with silver, with its electrical capacity, its medical ability, you know, in every electric we have, but most of it’s thrown away because it costs more to extract it than it does to.

Andrew Mitchem: Yeah, yeah, it’s a so I looked at all those things and I thought physical sale was definitely the way to go. Yeah. I found really interesting that you went and said that exact same reason.

Marc Walton: Yeah, yeah. And nowadays with, solar panels, electric cars, there’s a new car. I can’t remember which manufacturer. There’s one of the Japanese manufacturers supposedly bringing a new electric car out that will do 900. I’m not sure if it’s kilometers or miles range on a smaller battery.

Andrew Mitchem: Right.

Marc Walton: So they reckon that they reckon that behalf about of silver in each engine.

Andrew Mitchem: Yeah. You know, so.

Marc Walton: The thing is gold is a is a the safe, the ultimate safe haven, as we know, where the silver is being used. And they say technically it should. So I was buying silver at $16 and $18, and I was buy. It’s like buying gold again at 1800. Yeah, but like you say, gold technically four times rejected around 2000.

Marc Walton: It was just typical double top, double top, double double top. But what pushed it through was the situation in the Middle East. So again, the fundamental side of it well this time could be different. So I say and I think as well as we get older to, to be able to go into different markets and use the same skills that keeps you mentally alert.

Marc Walton: I, I’m studying I’m studying options at the moment. And because of course, the, the issue when you buy a physical asset, whether it be a stock, or you buy a forex trade, the problem is always is the stops. Whereas if we could use an option creatively I’m kind of thinking about that. So always, always trying to think of new ways of doing things.

Marc Walton: Otherwise you would just about them.

Andrew Mitchem: And I think that was one of the nice things that we, we chatted about before we started this is that, you know, when I look at your website, Forex Mentor Pro. Me, The Forex Trading Coach, but we’ve both diverted into other, other markets. Yes, as they become available to us. Still, I still love the forex market, but like you say that at times it’s been a little bit boring in the last few years it hasn’t been quite as good as it was if you go back years ago.

Andrew Mitchem: I mean, I remember the early days when I started and getting up in the middle of the night here to trade the non-farm payrolls. You know, the general employment now is not there. Yeah. Well, in the early days, for me it was just magic because it used to jump 3 or 400 pips within, you know, like a few seconds, you know, and you put a straddle trade in and whichever the buy stop or the sell stop got filled, you frantically went and deleted the other one and and pressed exit on the other one.

Andrew Mitchem: And you go, oh, it’s made 10%. Not having a clue what you did, but you could do those things back then. Yeah. Whereas, you know, I personally then realized that trading, fundamentals wasn’t for me after, they know, lined up on all those things.

Marc Walton: Well, it’s like London, wasn’t it? We’ve all had the London breakout. Yeah, that really was the classic time where it was 2014-15 is when it stopped working. But we were looking at the pound was doing 150 pips daily range. Yeah. In the Asian session it would go to sleep. So you just had one cancels. The little does at London.

Andrew Mitchem: Which one broke at first you went with it.

Marc Walton: Yeah. And you could literally make a week’s money in in an hour a day. That was the the classic time. But of course for those joining us now there’s, there are still opportunities. Yes. Hundreds. Yeah I never use robots. The thing to me with robot, if you if you’ve got manual intervention. Yes. But otherwise a robot is programed to if we’re in an uptrend, it’s programed to buy and it’s not able to see, well, hang on a minute.

Marc Walton: There are lots of clues here that this is maybe going to change with today. With that, aren’t we? We just had a bit of a big pullback in stocks. Dollar index can’t decide whether the dollar is going to go up or down. Where an a robot will just keep doing what it’s told. So I, I’ve never had any success with them.

Trading Bots and brokers widening spreads.

Marc Walton: And then the only robot to my knowledge that that did well in historically was FAP turbo.

Andrew Mitchem: Oh, really got into that one too.

Marc Walton: Yeah, it was a terrible name. FAP turbo. And, I spoke to the guy that created it, what this thing was doing in the Asian session. They set it up so that it would just take a pip, from a slight movement that went on. And then they I talked to the guy who created it, and he was telling me that they sold too many of them.

Marc Walton: They sold 50,000. And so the brokers were getting stung every day, reverse engineered it. So when this move happened, suddenly the brokers widened the spread.

Andrew Mitchem: Yeah.

Marc Walton: And I had that issue because the other thing I had years ago was I had a gap trading strategy. The market opened and I say I had it, I, it was a Swedish guy I work with called Gosta forget his surname now. They created this EA and it was brilliant. What it would do is it would scan all the pairs at the market open, and it would scan the gaps visibly.

Marc Walton: The spread. And so and then it would calculate, it would place up to six trades after 90s. So it sounds a bit technical, but basically this thing was a surefire winner. And we were making a lot of money. We were we were only allowing, clients to put an extra 50 grand in total in each week because we were hitting the liquidity levels.

Marc Walton: Anyway, the brokers killed it because they reverse engineered what we did, and then they just played with the spreads and that killed it throughout. So and so that’s actually another interesting thing for folks. Don’t convince yourself if you found something that you think is revolutionary and you’ve found the Holy Grail, and we’ve all found it at times is try it on a on a live account and try it on a reasonable sized live account.

Marc Walton: Because years ago I, the guy came to me and he was making 400% a month with this EA wanted me to sign an NDA before he would let me see it and explain. And I just said, who is it with an IT name? The broker, an English broker. And I said, what size account? Thousand dollar account.

Marc Walton: Let’s stick it, stick it on a 50 and then come back. Never came back. Because the bloke, the brokers a lot of the brokers will play with you if you if you stick your head above the parapet. In my experience, I mean, if you find a decent broker, we have decent a couple of decent brokers.

Marc Walton: Now, I know you were saying you’ve worked with the same one for years. If you find a decent one, stick with them.

Andrew Mitchem: Absolutely. That’s a good case. Yeah. So someone listening to this, that’s been trading for a number of years and they’re just, you know, getting frustrated, blaming everybody but themselves. You know, it’s the market’s fast. The dogs fault. Any suggestions from your experience and what they could look at doing.

Marc Walton: The solution for me was to, to stop being so tight and pay somebody to teach me. I mean, I wasted two and a half years trying to do it myself. And as we get older, you realize the time is far more important than the money. Yeah. And the money that I lost was greater than what I paid.

Marc Walton: If you if you want to do it yourself, then you have to have rules and structure. I mean, I say to people, look, the first thing you should do is have a business life plan. What are you trying to achieve and how are you going to get there and set yourself some measurable goals. And if and then, then you need to trade in rules.

Marc Walton: But from the life plan point of view, you want to be within three months. I want to be reasonably consistent, probably, and most importantly, controlling the drawdown. I want within six months to get on a funded account at these these funded accounts. Now, this is another thing. When these first came out, they were just a Ponzi. I, I was approached by a firm 3 or 4 years ago, and they were supplying some of the real big companies and they sold it to me.

Marc Walton: It’s look, it’s 30 grand to cost for me. And you make your money back in two months. Everybody loses. It’s a great it’s a great business model. It’s okay. Yeah, well, I have a bit of an issue with that. Not for me. Not for me, thank you very much. And so the way that these things were set up were deliberately to trip people up.

Marc Walton: There’s so many rules and regulations that hardly anybody got through. But the biggest earning company at that time was it, which was bringing in 140 grand a month in revenue. And the rules were so tricky. They’ve got to make 10% in a month. Very small drawdown, minimum number of trades. You can’t trade on a Tuesday without your your shirt like rolled up a it was all designed and then the few that got through of course they were getting paid this 80% commission out of this huge amount of money come in in the front end.

Marc Walton: Yes. But then about a year or so ago, I say they started to clean their act up. And also I could see the educational benefit for it because now you’ve got the same rules as I had in 2005 working for a fund if you break the rules. Yeah. Out. Yeah. So I would suggest to anybody who’s learning now how to do it is forget the boys on on YouTube.

Marc Walton: You know, if something’s too good to be true. It is. Believe me, we’ve both been there and done that and spent the money and got the badge. Learn to do it. Old school. You’ve got to be realistic in your expectations. You should focus on trying to do it on a bigger account. So if you can make 3 to 5% a month on $1,000, it’s just everybody gets bored.

Marc Walton: And then they they ramp up the risk and then they lose it all. But if you could do that on a 100,000 account now it starts to get interesting. If you can do it on a seven figure account, you can make a lot of money for not doing the right. You’re not doing any more work. That’s right. And for me that was the solution.

Marc Walton: But with these funded accounts, if you can pay education, it it’s a great tool because it gives you the discipline. And ultimately for me and most of the people I’ve taught over the years, it’s the lack of discipline that kills them. I said before, I think, I think anybody can do this. I mean, in theory, in principle it’s not that hard, but it’s this is this that screws up.

Andrew Mitchem: Well. You’ve picked on one of the two things I’ve always pointed to people. And I said, one’s up here, hit the other than here. It’s your head and heart, isn’t it? You’ve got to control those two because, yeah, it’s real money. It’s great when you profit. It’s horrible when you lose. Yeah. And then the self-doubt starts. All the silliness starts.

Andrew Mitchem: If you look.

Marc Walton: Yeah. I wrote an article years ago saying when boring is great, you get to the boring. If you get to the boring level and you don’t get high when you win and you get low and you lose, you know you’re on your way. Good training is boring. Yeah. And for me, that that’s the the place to be. I don’t get excited with it.

Marc Walton: Crypto did get exciting because it was making so much money in such a short space, but this time, because I’ve been through it with the bitcoin boom. This time I took the stake and took the profit, and that’s the way I do it now. So yeah. But it is all about structure, discipline, rules and and and I mean, your website similar to ours is that we don’t pitch.

Marc Walton: You’re going to get rich quick. And I don’t know what you find, but most of the people come to us are on the way out the door. They’ve tried everything.

Andrew Mitchem: They’re frustrated. Yeah, yeah.

Marc Walton: Yeah. And they kind of realize that. All the best. Yes. This bloke or this bloke actually sounded the legit. Yeah. And so again, the thing is, if you’re going to go to a, an educator or a course or whatever, then dig deep, you know, get googling, look for reviews, you know, you’ll always find the occasional bad one because so it’s like with brokers.

Marc Walton: Brokers is the typical one. Brokers pay people to write bad reviews for other brokers, so you never know who’s the right, who’s a good broker until you actually put your money with them. And this the same with mentoring and know you’ll get people occasionally that they’ve lost and they’ve lost because of their own shortcomings. But then blame the guy that the paid the money to correct.

Marc Walton: So again, you know, we are all responsible for our own actions and dates. Do the research, do this properly. And I say, you know, this is a profession. Yes, it is a profession. You’re not from a financial background. They say, I couldn’t even pass basic maths at school. But managed to make a decent living out of this, because and again, I think it’s safe for me, it’s just repeatable patterns.

Riding a bike is like learning to trade.

Andrew Mitchem: Patterns are correct. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Looking at, I use the, description on, some webinars for people. I said, do you remember when you’re a kid and you jumped on a bicycle for the first time and there was stuff going on everywhere, and it was all complicated. And they, you know, when you get older, you can just do it.

Andrew Mitchem: I said, training’s a little bit like that. But also, you know, you, me coming from England originally would have learned the green. Was it the green cross code? I think the, you know, how do you remember that. Yeah. And it was look left right and left again. And I say to people do that on your charts because so many people, they want this moving average in this day.

Andrew Mitchem: And something else I said, you’re cluttering your charts with stark rubbish. Yeah. Look at the charts. Look at the right hand side. Look at what the prices. Yeah. There’s so many people, they start buying it, like you said, with silver, you know, they’ll buy it like 49, 90. And it’s like well it’s going to hit it isn’t it.

Andrew Mitchem: Look. Yeah. Look back on the other side. Oh last time it bounced there. Guess what it’s likely to do again. Look left and look right. And people don’t do that. I find so often.

Marc Walton: I think that the thing I mean the market is down help. But the thing is that when you look after the event, it looks so easy. And that’s what’s so frustrating about this. And so people, people tend to concentrate on this bit. And the main thing is look left, left. Let’s see what happened before. And then the other thing is people don’t realize what’s going on.

Marc Walton: If gold was coming up to 2000 for the third or fourth time, well, think of what’s going on. The people who bought it at a 20 1800s. And again, twitchy because they’re thinking looking left. Last time it got up here, it dropped. And then the next time, well, now it’s done it two times for crying out loud. Just think probability.

Marc Walton: If it’s twice the likelihood it’s going to do it again is greater than not. So at least get your stake out. And if you’re confident it’s going to push through. And again it needs a catalyst to push through. And I say the last time when gold got through, we did get up to 2070 and rejected. But when he actually went through it was something it kicked off in the Middle East or Ukraine, I can’t remember it was one or the other and it went, but so it went for a fundamental reason.

Marc Walton: I think now personally, that I think gold will continue to go up. I think we’ll be profit taking it 3000. But I think that the financial mess that we were in, is, is going to implode at some point. But having said that, I felt that the last two years. But the other thing, something for people to take away from this is have a look at gold and silver mining stocks, because last year and gold and silver often are very poor investments.

Marc Walton: The the gold bubbles will be permanently by gold. By gold. You know, you don’t always make money in gold. Gold from 2009 to 2012 was great. The S&P took five years to recover after the crash. Gold recovered within a year and it went from seven or 800 to 19 something. Then for 2012 it went down well. The S&P is going up.

Marc Walton: And so from 2012 to 2018 it was a poor investment. Not only did it come down in value, you have to pay to store it and ensure it. So if you can catch it at the right time, it’s great. So we call gold and silver from 2022. Last year alone, I think gold was up 30%, silver was up 40%.

Marc Walton: My best silver miner was up 260%. Wow. So the thinking is and this is because of fundamentals with me, that the stock at the time was x k I think it’s never silver. It came down to the Covid lows. And again I’ve got all the charts set up and all the stocks and everything for Covid lows after the crash.

Marc Walton: This is where it stopped ultimately. But if gold and silver is going up and a mine is digging it out of the ground, and they’ve got all the infrastructure and all the equipment and all the men, then the value of what’s in the ground is discounted at the moment.

Marc Walton: So have a look at mining stocks. But last year we, we, we caught a lot of stocks that more than doubled that were mining stocks. Right. So it’s something for you to have a look at. And yeah. It’s just a way of getting leverage without using leverage.

Andrew Mitchem: Yeah. Great information. Perfect. So you’re looking into all these things. You’re still predominantly the euphoric side a technical trader. Let me yeah.

Marc’s average day and setting up the new trading week.

Andrew Mitchem: What’s your average day look like now.

Marc Walton: I don’t do much I mainly work on a weekend. So on a Sunday when the markets are closed. And again, I find this is the best time to study because nothing’s moving. So you’re not tempted to get involved?

Andrew Mitchem: No emotion.

Marc Walton: So there’s no emotion. It’s just purely a maths. Well, at maths comp pattern exercise I look at maybe 20 odd pairs and I am looking first on the weekly chart and I’m just looking, well hey, is it going up, down or sideways? Yeah. If it’s going up I want to buy it is going down. I want to sell in the full range trading.

Marc Walton: We’ll look at it in a different way. And I’m looking for a sweet spot that will draw my eye. It might be an EMA. It might be a major point, a previous resistance, a trend line or whatever. And so that’s okay. That’s interesting. And then I will go down to the daily to look for multiple reasons. So I need five reasons for a trade.

Marc Walton: So I’ve written them down because I would forget. So I have the 255 EMA and I have them on the chart on the daily. I also have the where, the weekly and the monthly. I want to know where the big levels are. Fibonacci trend lines, horizontal support, resistance, whole numbers, double tops, double bottoms, Mac D risk reward ratio.

Marc Walton: Because if it doesn’t give me at least twice the risk, I don’t touch it. Candlestick patterns occasionally and correlation. And so it’s a very systematic approach. So now I will I will go and look at something and think, well it looked really interesting on the weekly but the risk rewards pull or whatever. And then I’ll go to the next one.

Marc Walton: So that one I forget. And if I look at stuff on a weekly not interested, forget, forget, forget. And the goal is to find half a dozen a great trades if possible in a week, and an A-grade ticks all the boxes. And then the final thing is I go have a look at the news to see what could come out that could screw with it.

Marc Walton: And like for me, the A2 days, usually Tuesday morning in the middle of the night. So if I see a good a good set of portfolios Sunday night, I will often wait until the big news comes out right?

Andrew Mitchem: Yeah. So I started off and had their employment or their interest rate news on a Tuesday afternoon. Our time.

Marc Walton: Yeah, yeah. So for us it’s the middle of the night. That’s right. And I might wait too long. Do that once. And then on the daily basis I spend about an hour. And I said early I look at the Dax, I look at S&P, I look at gold, silver. I look at stocks, I look crypto and a I’m trying to find what’s generally going on because ultimately, you know, where’s the big money going.

Marc Walton: Yeah. And the big money prior to Covid it was a lot easier fundamentally because all it was this was interest rates inflation and growth. They every piece of red flag news relates to those three things. And at the time all the central banks were trying to get inflation up to 2%. Well, it did a good job there.

Marc Walton: And then inflation, things got out of hand. And growth growth really is ridiculous because when you think about how much money was pumped into economies with Covid, you went to the UK this summer. I went to the UK this summer. Gone. I couldn’t believe the price of things.

Andrew Mitchem: Gone through the roof. Hadn’t I absolutely.

Marc Walton: Gone through there? And yet the government out of inflation is now at 3%. Rubbish. The reason why inflation is at 3% is all the government workers pay rises are linked to the inflation. And so a lot of the fundamental stuff’s gone out the window. But I have a bias at the minute. I have a bias negative and a negative NZD.

Marc Walton: Yeah, a euro and the pound. So I am just waiting. I actually called the pound yesterday from three weeks ago, but I caught it within a few pips.

Andrew Mitchem: Yes.

Marc Walton: And I don’t wait. So I will just wait. And and if ultimately I look at forex and it’s just chaotic and something else looks more interesting, I’ll go do that. I just want to make money. I just want to make money right here to not explode.

Andrew Mitchem: No, and that’s right. And that’s what, I think that, you know, we talked about earlier is that with the ability over the last handful of years for us both to be able to look at other markets, those metals, as indices, those commodities. I said to you, it I took your trade yesterday on aluminum. Yesterday I’ve taken a trade on the Hong Kong 50.

Andrew Mitchem: And when the sugar market opens in America in a few hours time, I’ll be doing the same, providing there’s no massive gap. If you’d have. We’d had this chat five years ago and you said, yeah, you could do Hong Kong 50 sugar now a million. I would have no idea. Yeah, but what they look like on a chart.

Marc Walton: It’s the same with same with crypto in 20-2021. Bitcoin. Bitcoin went up. Pull back up followed. But I did it five times. And it pulled back into a couple of EMAs and said levels in the trend line. It was easy. It really was easy. And the other thing I mean, as we’re getting older, my oldest client is 85 years old and he still a it’s still a shop as, as as ever.

Marc Walton: But he joined me 15 years ago on a lifetime member. So yes, financially made no money whatever. Yep. Yep.

Andrew Mitchem: I’ve I’ve got many of them from years ago. Yeah.

Marc Walton: Yeah. But I had a good chat with in recently from north of England and he said part of the reason he’s doing it was to keep mentally active.

Trading keeps you mentally active.

Marc Walton: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, that’s the same thing for me. This is a mental challenge. It’s I don’t get highs and lows, wins and losses. But I do enjoy the mental side of it.

Marc Walton: And I think as people are coming to retirement, so many people don’t have a big enough pension. So a they’ve got a financial need to make money. But the other thing is the need to do something.

Andrew Mitchem: To do something with it, you know? Mind.

Marc Walton: My my father works in a factory all his life. And the average life span 30, 40 years ago in the UK was 69. So people retired at 65. And they were then blessed that. Yeah, now the average age spans 82, 83. And you know, if you’ve got your marbles and you’re healthy, then that’s you make the most of it.

Andrew Mitchem: You don’t want to be 82, 83 or 70 2 or 62 and and just sit blubbing watching clips and which is what so many people do, unfortunately.

Marc Walton: Yeah. I don’t know about you, my average client. I don’t take many private clients nowadays because I’m trying to focus on all the things. But my average private client pre-COVID was 50 plus. Married kids have left home, gone to school, gone to university or left home, going to work, own business or middle management. Starting to panic about retirement.

Marc Walton: Yeah. And both in terms of finance because most people haven’t got enough pension. And then the other thing was to do something mentally keep them safe. Ironically, since Covid, I then got a lot of younger ones. Yeah. Who kind of said, hey, I don’t want to go work for this firm for the next 30, 40 years. But yeah, but prior to that, it was older people.

Marc Walton: And I say from a mental point of view and a monetary point of view, you can’t beat it. You know, I used to have 20 odd stuff working for my 20 odd subcontractors. I used to have hair and, stress to hell. And I would never employ anybody ever again. Yes, people now that work with me, I have people I’ve trained and they work with me, but they’re all self self-employed.

Marc Walton: Yes. And all to ultimately, if people don’t perform anymore, I have to say I’m sorry. You have to go. Yeah, but I have one guy who’s been with me for 15 years. So to be able to do something to to do it from home, to live wherever you want, to not have any, any staff. It’s the best business in the world.

Marc Walton: It really is. Yeah. If you can do it. So it’s a profession. Learn to do it properly and stick to the roots.

Andrew Mitchem: Well, I think one thing that I hope that people take from this is the amount of time it took us both. Yeah. Okay. It took me four years of going around in circles. And as I said at the time, my son at the time was very young. And you start getting those stats and people say, really? Should you go and get yourself a proper job?

Andrew Mitchem: And, you know, you got your son to look after and those mental I just feel for people that get there because we’ve been there. Yes. For sure. And also as you mentioned there, there’s more younger people. And of course, everybody thinks that the answers I and as we’ve said that, you know, even if you use some form of robot of I if you really want to go for it, but you still need that human common sense to understand how it works or create it yourself, it’s not good buying something because you don’t know when it’s going to start working.

Andrew Mitchem: But there’s so much to be said for that mental ability to go, I can do this. I can make three, five, 10% a month, and I can choose to go to a prop firm or whichever way you want. And I think that ability to do that and have that decision making is it keeps you an interest of what’s happening in the world as well.

Andrew Mitchem: Yeah, it’s otherwise it’s kind of lonely our business isn’t that. Yeah.

Marc Walton: Yeah, it definitely does.

Andrew Mitchem: Interesting. We all comment about why you started teaching and mine was the same. I won a signal, competition in 2006 or 7 or something when the early days of PayPal and subscriptions and somebody said to me, rather than me buying the signals, would you teach me how to trade? And that’s how it all started. Yeah. And I’m probably like yourself, I love the community aspect of helping like minded people who want to help themselves.

Andrew Mitchem: Yeah, the whole time you get someone that just goes, I want everything and I don’t want to do anything. That’s. Yeah, go somewhere else. Yeah. Let’s go to YouTube. Yeah.

Marc Walton: Well, I say to people, you know, it’s quite funny because people would book me for a call and they think they’re interviewing me, and I’m actually interviewing them because and I would say to people, look, I am not here to pull you along. I am here to lead you and you need to do the work. And ultimately, you have to accept the fact you just might not be any good at this.

Andrew Mitchem: Yeah, we’re all just too lazy for it. Potentially. Yeah.

Marc Walton: Well, yeah. Yeah, I’ve had it in the past with people that I’m the money over and then they don’t do the work and it’s like, what are you doing? You know, it’s almost as I well, I’ve ended the money over now. And it’s like now there’s a serious amount of work to do with it. So and if you’re not ready to do it, then go do something else.

Marc Walton: Right. It’s because it’s draining for us as a coach and it’s a waste of money for them. But the other thing, what I try to do with people, it’s is a lot. Look, a create multiple streams of income. Do not just rely on forex trading because there are periods of time when it’s really easy. There are other times when it’s really challenging.

Marc Walton: Yes. And the other thing you know, and I know if you get into a drawdown situation and it’s so depressing and stressful because every day you wake up in a negative trying to get back and as we know, anybody’s ever been in debt, it’s twice as hard to get back to zero as it is to get to 10,000 profit.n And so the stress and everything.

How can you monetise your knowledge.

Marc Walton: So I said to people, right, well, what’s your current skillset? What could you do? You know, if you came to me as a dairy farmer, well, how could you monetize your knowledge teaching or the dairy farmers? Or is there something that you’ve done in the power helicopter? Could you teach people to think of multiple streams of income, and then you’re not just reliant on one?

Marc Walton: And the point now, for me these days, I don’t just want to teach people how to trade forex, I want to teach them how all financial markets work if they want to go down that journey. But I also want to try to say to them, look, you know, I was fortunate. I was one of the few with a 40 year old with four kids and a good business that said, you know what?

Marc Walton: I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s depressing me. We’re off to go live on an island somewhere. Everybody that knew me would like to run in a book in be back in three months. It’ll be back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And to do that with four kids and all the commitment and that you’ve got is, is a big leap of faith.

Marc Walton: But I was fortunate we bought some houses for income, so we did plummet. But but so the point is, is this thinking about how can you monetize your current skills as well as doing this? Yes. I mean, ultimately, if you’re any good at this, you can teach other people to do that. If you like teaching, if you don’t like teaching and you don’t like people, then don’t do that.

Marc Walton: You know, you might prefer something that’s not involved, but but try to learn a skill or try to use this current skill that you’ve got to be able to monetize it. And even if you only earn a few hundred dollars from this a week and a few hundred from that and a few hundred from that, if that, to me, that’s that’s the thing.

Marc Walton: It’s a whole life thing now. All right. Is. Yeah. So that that would be my thing.

Andrew Mitchem: Now that’s awesome because I mean, you can one it’s taking the pressure off the knee to have to make money from trading and to when you get good at trading, you can use that additional income to add to your trading if you wish to. And yeah, compound it from there. Yeah. And and I mean I.

Marc Walton: Sorry I interrupted.

Andrew Mitchem: Oh no, no I was just gonna say I think an important thing for people of all levels, especially new people, is to forget the money to start with. Yes, it’s learning the how to do the trading, I think is really important. Because if you do the how to bit, the money will follow. But I sort of describe it like someone you get a painter to paint your wall.

Andrew Mitchem: Well, the finishing touch looks nice, but it’s all the work that they’ve done and the sanding and the prep and the sculpting and everything else behind the scenes that you don’t see that makes the finishing yes look good. And this is the same with learning how to trade.

Marc Walton: Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew Mitchem: Yeah. I’m just going to show you again how I got off.

Marc Walton: I forgot what I was going to say. Let’s save it for another time.

Andrew Mitchem: Nah. Fair enough. So, so, if someone’s like, wanting to contact you, how do they. Yeah. Have you. We’ve got process.

Marc Walton: We have a website forexmentorpro.com. I also have another one which is yourinvestingfuture.com, which is to do with, stocks and crypto and things. And, and again, thank you for inviting me. Not many folks normally you don’t normally get people who it but potentially, competitors talking to each other. But it’s good to have a chat with somebody that’s been down very similar route.

Marc Walton: Yes. The good news for people is that we’ve been there and done it. We’ve made all the mistakes that anybody can make and more. And we’ve also seen it with so many people as well as so I the main thing is try to avoid the bias on YouTube. Yeah. If it looks too good to be true, it is.

Marc Walton: And as I said earlier, this is a profession and you need to learn how to do this in a professional way. And if you don’t, I mean, I’ll, leave you with the story of, a guy I was I was doing a live training session, a webinar, and, I was telling him about a guy that came to me ten years ago, and he said he started off trading and he doubled his account.

Marc Walton: And so he then doubled his account again. So then he quit his job and doubled his account again and, started taking family money in to try it. And I knew what the punchline was going to be. He lost it all anyway. There was a guy in the room from Australia, and, he’d had financial issues. I found out I spoke to him afterwards and he wrote in the chat box.

Marc Walton: He’d gone from 0 or $1000 to 75,000 in 4 months. Real money. And again, I knew the punch. I said to him, I think you’ve typed in wrong. Did he mean 7500? He said, no, 75,000. So this guy was struggling financially. He was working 16 hours a day scalping forex, and he’d managed to go from 1000 to 70 5000 in 3 months.

Marc Walton: And he lost it all in the night. And he unlike the original guy I was talking about that just got lucky. They were on the biggest flukes, streak that anybody could ever be on. And so the point and I said this earlier, the overconfidence thinking that you’ve cracked it is is the most dangerous time because I spent two and a half years and I wanted to make $2,000 a week, was my target 20 years ago.

Marc Walton: And the first weekend I made it, I finally I was all weekend. I was on a high. I’ve tracked oh no, no oh yes yes. By the Wednesday I’d give given £1,500, but yeah.

Andrew Mitchem: So risk management.

Marc Walton: Yeah. Trading is this trading is boring.

Andrew Mitchem: And risk management.

Marc Walton: And discipline and structure and stick to the rules.

Trading and living where we want to.

Andrew Mitchem: Well that’s a good spot to leave it because, I think we’ve both had a great journey. Both of us. Yeah. And journey, but a really good one, which you wouldn’t change for all the world.

Marc Walton: No, no, no, it’s given me the chance to live in beautiful parts of the world. I guess in Portugal now, the choice have been able to do what you want to do is, is also, as we said, we’re both from the UK. We both seen the state of it. Now, I certainly would never I will I would never have gone back anyway.

Marc Walton: But you look at it now and it’s it’s very depressing. So yes, to be able to live in the sun and then.

Andrew Mitchem: Go to New Zealand or to not too bad place to live rather.

Marc Walton: Now they’re very nice, very nice. Anyway, pleasure to meet you.

Andrew Mitchem: So thank you, Marc. Lovely to, have you on here. And, yeah, I’ll put a link to your site and, and our site, and, people can contact either of us and, ask for the questions of nature. But thank you very much for being here. Really enjoyable. And thanks for your time.