This week, we catch up with professional day trader Andrea Unger. Along with winning four of the five World Cup Championship of Futures Trading competitions held between 2008 and 2012, Unger is also the Founder and CEO of the Unger Academy – an education system set-up by Unger in 2015 to help aspiring day traders turn professional.
Day trading is a popular topic at the moment, especially with young investors. Unger’s expertise around the subject area means his opinion on its current state invaluable.
On the Podcast
Commonly, the concept of ‘day trading’ is associated with the opening and closing of market positions within a one-day market session. In Andrea Unger’s experience, however, day trading has evolved to exhibit many of the characteristics found in swing trading, whereby positions are often held for multiple days rather than only a few hours.
As a systematic (automated) trader who builds trading systems by writing programming codes with specific instructions to analyse past data trends, Unger goes on to give his extremely interesting view on how his approach helped him to win four World Cup Championship of Futures Trading titles. In competitions, he adopts a “turbo trading” strategy, whereby he adjusts certain instructions on his trading software to adopt an investment approach with extremely high levels of risk, something he does not recommend when trading with personal wealth.
Unger’s incredible success in trading competitions catapulted him to fame in the early 2010s. From this, he was able to set up the Unger Academy and teach his very own Unger Method, which helps students to develop and automate trading systems in a scientific manner.
The Unger Academy has enabled Andrea to fulfil his passion for education, share his expert knowledge on day trading and diversify his income streams, but, above all, his primary motivation is the satisfaction he gets from seeing aspiring traders use his methodologies to find their own path in day trading.
Helping inexperienced traders set expectations
During the coronavirus pandemic, the day trading community has observed a large influx of young, inexperienced traders. Some of these traders have been left disappointed with their results and Andrea believes this frustration stems from two main reasons. Firstly, people’s expectations when entering day trading are wrong. Outsiders think traders always live a lavish lifestyle, but expectations must be set to a more reasonable level. Secondly, there is a common misconception that day trading is something which can be mastered over the course of a couple of days, but in reality, the only way to achieve success in the field is to consistently work very hard for a long period of time.
Unger’s advice for new traders is to not get disheartened by the losses they suffer, but rather to try to learn from their mistakes and use them to improve in the future. Certainly, the current market condition provides day traders with great opportunities to make profits, but caution must always prevail.
