You may know Annie Duke as the World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions winner in 2004. But you don't make more than $4.2 million in lifetime earnings on the professional poker circuit without knowing how to make decisions and manage risk. 

For Annie, that's been a lifetime passion — and one that she is pursuing more than ever now that she is retired from professional poker. 

In this interview with Topstep's Eddie Horn, Annie details why our decision-making is flawed and how we can change the way we approach problems to reach better decisions. Annie takes complex topics like "resulting" and "hindsight bias" and breaks it into easy-to-understand pieces that will improve your trading. 

Each year, the CME Group hosts a trading challenge for college and university students worldwide. More than 500 teams compete worldwide to see who can trade the CME’s futures products the best. Our latest TopstepFX funded trader, Kelvin C. of Malaysia who is studying to get his MBA, was on the team that finished third in the 2018 Trading Challenge.

He also took eighth place in the Saxo Trade Challenge, where he put his forex trading skills to the test in a competition organized by Saxo Bank.

But while that success can help you build confidence, Kelvin says that it did not come easy — and it has not stopped him from weathering setbacks in his trading. Here’s what he learned on his journey to becoming a TopstepFX funded trader with $300,000 in live forex buying power.

This is our second piece in a three-part series on the 2008 Financial Crisis. For the first piece, please see “10 Years Later: 4 Universal Trading Lessons from the Great Recession.”

Under normal conditions, the stock market goes up and down. So corrections (aka losses) happen from time-to-time. They’re expected and not much of a challenge for our economy to navigate.

But 2008 was different. That year, markets were not operating normally. Because the economy was not operating normally. Here’s a breakdown at some of the moves in equities, commodities and currencies.

You think that trading legends don't make the same mistakes that you do? You'd be wrong. This year, Bill Gross cost his investors more than $150 million in losses — 8% of his $2 billion portfolio — because he made a very common trading error. 

Here's what it is. 

To trade well, you have to be focused on learning. Every experienced trader will tell you that — whether they are going through the Trading Combine, have earned a Funded Account, or are one of the greatest traders of our era.

So, it wasn’t completely surprising that Daniel H. in Arizona, a TopstepFX funded forex trader, stressed how learning played such a critical role in his development. “You’re going to go through learning pains,” Daniel says. "But I have made progress because I focused on learning and overcoming my weaknesses." 

Daniel, who has traded for four years, is now trading in a Funded Account with $500,000 in forex buying power. Here’s where Daniel has focused his learning.

What do you see when you look at a price chart? Tim P. in the United Kingdom, TopstepFX’s latest funded trader, says that he sees human emotions. At first, he wondered at the ticker symbols as the crossed his television screen. But as he learned more, he was drawn to the psychology of trading.

“The financial side doesn’t really interest me as much as the prospecting,” says Tim. “You can track human emotions on a chart.”

So what does this student of human nature have to say about trading? Here are a few of his insights after almost 11 years as a trader.

You asked. We listened. Over the past eight years at TopstepTrader, so many traders have asked us to take the risk out of trading forex like we've done for futures. 

And for good reason. Studies out of a French regulator show that retail forex traders lost on average €10,900 between 2009 and 2012. That's more than $12,000. Or ¥1.4 million. 

So over the past eight months, we've been quietly testing our Forex Trading Combine®, securing user feedback and funding traders. Traders like Nikhil in Illinois, who made more than $4,000 in forex profits trading with TopstepFX. And Fez in England who withdrew more than £2,000 — and in the process became the first trader funded by both TopstepTrader and TopstepFX. (BTW, his futures trading is going well ... he made $1,147 in profits on Monday!)

Here are highlights of the Forex Trading Combine, but check it out for yourself. 

Whether it actually takes 10,000 hours to learn a skill is up for debate, but the old adage: “practice makes perfect” remains true, especially for new futures traders. But for some traders tempted by the prospect of making a profit, jumping right into the trading without practicing first makes more sense. How can you really figure things out without having some skin in the game, right? Wrong.

That's why Senior Performance Coach John Hoagland even goes so far as to say that simulated trading is the key to trading success. Hoag should know. He has more than 30 years of experience in the futures industry, working his way up from being a runner to a broker at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Board of Trade. At TopstepTrader, Hoag works with many traders (new and experienced alike), some of whom mistakenly believe that they’ll do better once they trade with real cash. 

Here’s why they're wrong.

“The EU is in an existential crisis. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.” - George Soros, May 29, 2018

Populism and anti-EU sentiment. Trade wars. Brexit looming. The global fundamentals underlying every major currency pair is on shifting sand — all the while interest rates are normalizing.

But in this environment, the U.S. Dollar caught a bid. Since highs above 1.25, the pair shed 6%, briefly breaking below a long-term trend line that supported price during the 2017 rally (red line). Right now, the pair is consolidating between the August/September 2017 high near 1.21 and the October low, at 1.1550 (black lines).

While I tend to believe the EUR/USD bounce appears temporary, with expectations that the market will head down towards 1.13, I think it’s always important to look at the opposite case.

For the U.S. Dollar bulls out there, here are the three biggest risks to continued Dollar strength.

It's safe to say that Fez M. from Northampton, England's trading is going really well right now. He just became the first trader funded by TopstepFX in forex and TopstepTrader in futures after passing the TopstepTrader Trading Combine® yesterday. Plus, in a month of trading  a live TopstepFX Funded Account™, Fez has racked up profits, even making $2,700 in withdrawals. 

We recently sat down with Fez, a former techno DJ, to talk about his journey trading, what got him into markets and what advice he would have for others. Here’s what he said.