Jaroslav Kohout
It is Sunday. My first day in the newly opened Axia Wroclaw trading office. I am here to learn and to become the best trader I can be. I have sacrificed a lot to get to the point I am in right now. I have left a software company I have helped to built. I have left my colleagues, friends, and my wife back home to come here to a foreign country and give it the best shot I have. To truly test my abilities and invest my savings, my time, and my energy into this journey. All in. I have dared to give myself a chance to truly succeed in this highly challenging but excellent game, the game of trading. A game that never stops changing. Away from home, far away from my comfort zone, little I knew, that I will test both my mental and physical limits way beyond what I thought is possible and experience both the most exciting but also most painful experience of my life. A real dichotomy of experience. On one hand, being mentally so stimulated that you can’t sleep at night by excitement but also on the other hand get myself to the lowest levels of my physical health I have ever been. But first things first.
The office is quiet, but we all know that when the markets will open in a couple of hours, the equity markets are going to get hammered. It is mid-March 2020 and the world is at the beginning of the unprecedented pandemic era. An era of a century. As we are getting closer to the opening, I have a unique spot that day. I can sit next to an Elite trader that has been waiting for this opportunity for the last 12 years and witnesss by my own eyes how a seven-figure trade is made in one go. In one great trade! This trader has visualized the trade numerous times while waiting for this unique opportunity. Having a chance to observe the craft of making this great trade in action really blew my mind and opened my eyes. And all of that is happening on my first trading day! By experiencing this unique trade opportunity first hand, I have realized, that all those years, I have played a totally different game, the game of a small retail trader. It also put me into a lot of doubt if I have enough balls to play this game. The first true dichotomy of experience has arrived. But hey, this is why I came here. This is it! To experience something I would never be able to from behind my home desk. As we have celebrated the best day ever for this Elite Axia trader, I knew this is the beginning of a truly eye-opening journey.
Throughout March and April we have all been trading the global futures markets and tried to harvest the fruits of volatility that COVID19 brought. We have seen and traded massive interventions that all Central Banks across the globe imposed in order to save their economies. First hand I was able to witness unprecedented measures being imposed by the leaders across the world and the impacts it had on financial markets. Sitting next to two super experienced traders helped a lot. Each of them had totally different styles so I was able to learn both about the technical but also fundamental aspects of trading. I have observed many new strategies in action that reminded me that there are truly 1000 ways how to skin a cat. From European open to US close across all asset classes Axia Futures has experienced the best trading month in the history of the firm and I was able to witness all of that. After long days and brutal trading hours came a weekend, when we had time to rest our tired brains and most importantly reconcile and synthesize the learning of the week into actionable trade ideas for the weeks to come. I was both super excited and also super-overwhelmed by the amount of information my brain had to process. Seeing and experiencing all of this so early in my professional journey, I was sure, I have picked the most exciting and also the most challenging game on Earth.
After nearly two months of trading, on one rainy Friday evening, as I was walking from the office, tired, beaten, and overwhelmed by what has happened that day, I have realized that my understanding of how I perceived my trading was completely wrong. How much wrong? So much that huge fear clouded my mind, nothing made sense anymore and as I was returning to my empty apartment I knew more sleepless nights are yet to come. But more on that in my next blog post.
Thanks for reading.
JK
