We would like to introduce Rhett who recently completed our In-house Intermediate Program, and is also on his way to becoming a full-time trader!

Below you will find out more about his journey.

Introduction

I’m Rhett Gover originally from South Africa. I was once an engineer, then an IT Consultant. I’m married to my lovely wife Mandy who is the most amazing person in the whole world, and have a son named Daniel. We’ve lived in Brisbane since 2008 and love this city!

Brief background about your trading

I have been trading, or at least very interested in trading, for the best part of 30 years. From watching my dad typing 2 years’ worth of daily prices from the newspaper into his Sinclair ZX81 computer (a very old computer!), and talking about moving average crossovers. I was old enough (barely) to see gold hit $850 in 1980 and was a gold bull for the next 30 years. It took 28 years to get back above $850.

Last year, after a few retrenchments and the realisation that a future in manufacturing systems was not going where I wanted to be, I started reading, researching and looking for a means to pay the rent and spend time with family while doing the things I like doing. As an engineer  I like analysing, building, testing then watching in awe as a system works perfectly.

One evening after deciding on a broker for my forex journey and sitting in on a webcast, I got talking to Trade View Investments. Rob and Eddie were making sense to me. I realised that to be a decent trader I need to work with other traders, and learn from them how to do it properly. These are real people, trading for themselves, and sharing their experience.

What have you learnt at Trade View?

One of the things that really tweaked my interest in trading forex was the system building aspect.

I’ve been an amateur coder since the ZX81 days. Throughout my engineering career, I loved building control systems, and even as a consultant- I’ve never been shy of getting thick into the systems. I love the idea of building systems, trying to break them, and then letting them make money while I play golf (or build more systems). My graphs below show two systems I’ve built recently- one named “CDSH” and the other “EngulfBot”. 

EngulfBot is also looking good. This shows the results of backtesting a few months, then running forward (red) for a month to see how it would perform on new data. I built the first version of this in the In-house Systems Building Workshop.

The In-house Systems Building Workshop workshop taught me a few important things:

• How to build robust, profitable and uncomplicated systems
• How to manage risk and still get awesome returns
• How to build a trading plan that will work for me

This intermediate course was worth every penny and more. I can’t wait to do more, and more after that, and more after that.

Please share some of your successes and failures while learning to trade

Not many successes, and too many failures. I made a killing on Qantas in 2011, and got smashed by Qantas in 2012. I then made some decent money with mutual funds back in the early 90’s, and lost some with BHP in the last few years.

My biggest failure, was trying to do too much too fast.  When I opened my FOREX trading account I tried to turn it into a full time job immediately. Over-trading and bad risk management led to a lot of hard won lessons:

• Don’t put pressure on yourself to trade
• A trade size cannot be too small, it can easily be too large
• When in doubt, wait for the next signal
• You cannot take too long to learn properly

Conclusion

What are your future Goals?

As I mentioned earlier I love playing golf, and want to spend more time there. 

I want to build, test, test some more, try to break, and then run good solid systems that pay for me to play golf.

My consulting career is slow right now so this is a learning phase while I try to learn as much as I possibly can. For the next few years I expect to be placing very few live trades but very many demo trades, building many systems and learning all the while.