Interview With a Trading Legend - Mercenary Trader

Interview With a Trading Legend
Page 7 of 38
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Part II: Mental Milestones
In Part I of this Mercenary Vault series, we introduced you to Peter Brandt — a 30-year veteran trader
with 41.6% annual compound returns.
Part I covered Peter’s entry into the Chicago futures markets in the 1970s… his experiences as a
“customer’s man” and early commodity hedger… “going bust in little bits” and finding his feet as a
chartist… and the currency trade that really put him in business as a trader.
In Part II we cover (among other things) mental milestones… teaching opportunities… win/loss ratios
and drawdown realizations… position size and leverage considerations… and Peter’s ideal trading
conditions as a chartist.
JACK SPARROW: So around the time of your breakout trade in the currency markets, what steps
were you taking to become a trader? What were some mental milestones on your journey?
PETER BRANDT: Trading based on charts made sense to me, but just saying this does not start to
explain the amount of work that was ahead of me. I just started systematically figuring out the charts –
by this I do not mean the simple recognition of patterns, but rather the practical challenges of trading
in real time. It’s fine to be a chartist, but what does it mean to be a chart trader. Analyzing charts and
trading the charts are two entirely different challenges. Do I trade one-week patterns? Two-week
patterns? Reversal patterns or continuation patterns? Where do I place protective stops? How do I
enter a trade? Working through the process just took time. In fact, this process continues to this day.
You just keep working through the mechanics of how you conduct the process of trading. What’s your
game plan? How do you get in, how do you get out? Then obviously you go through periods when the
market spanks you and you’re wrong four or five times in a row. And you start questioning whether you
need to change something.
So you go through that process enough that you begin to figure things out over time. Then, just about
the time you think you have it figured out, your adopted approach gets challenged by the markets. But
that challenging by the markets is good. Enough challenges force you to say “I don’t care, it’s just part
of the process.” The continual challenges brought forth by trading also forces a trader to refine, refine
and refine his or her approach.
JACK SPARROW: Were there any particular realizations that stood out in the very early years?
PETER BRANDT: For me, one of the biggest things was realizing I was not going to be right 80% of
the time, or even 50% of the time. I would be right about 35% of the time – but that was over an
extended period of time. And this figure became real predictable throughout the 80s. If someone had
told me, “This year, you’re going to be right 35% of the time,” I could have guessed within plus or
minus 10 or 15 percent what my return was likely to be. If someone had told me, “This year you’re
going to be right 40% of the time,” I had a pretty good feel of what that meant.
That figure of 35% was and still is true over an extended number of trades, where N as the number of
trading events was a large figure. Percentages tend to work out over an extended number of Ns. But
over a shorter-term number of Ns it can really change. I began realizing that over 10 or 20 or even 30
trading events, the win/loss ratio deviated considerably from the norm – with a win/loss ratio that could
go as low as 10 or 15%.
At that time I went to the statistics department at Northwestern University, just down the street from
our home in Evanston, sat down with a professor and said: “Figure out for me what the odds could be
of being wiped out betting different amounts of my capital on every trade. If I’m right 35% of the time
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