ASIA INTERVIEW How do major events around the world affect the work you do? Samuel Law: Oh yeah. Risk management for a broker is very important. In fact, Tradesto is one of the first few brokers. Who has implemented the lowering of leverage on pound related products one month ahead of Brexit referendum? Now, we gave out these notices to all of our clients and partners because the community providers and banks were cautioning us and everyone in the industry to look out for volatility. This is because of the lessons learned during Lehman Brothers. Especially so, not so the Swiss National Bank decision to unpack itself from Europe within seconds, all liquidity just went off, went off the ECN. It affects a lot of brokers at a time. That serves as a lesson to all of us especially myself in risk management that we view these events as potential black swan events. In fact, we did pretty well. We even guide our white labels to follow suits, the same mechanisms that put in place, so that it would protect our clients not to overexpose themselves during that high volatility. So, you've learned to expect the unexpected and be ready for it if you can? Samuel Law: Yes, we try to anticipate. This is not easy; you know? This is hard to find black swans now days. It just pops out. It could be catastrophic. You would never know when is the next black swan event. I know that you provide ECN trading. Can you tell me why you think there is an advantage to this form of trading? What are the advantages of it indeed?
Samuel Law: ECN trading is a popular way today for traders to get access to execution. The infrastructure evolves into higher speed broadband. Everybody is looking for reduced latency execution. So, ECN would help us, help traders access the market in a very continuous pattern. It allows traders to access the deeper pool for liquidity. That's the number one benefit because we pool all of these banks together, and we have much more liquidity to pool from institutions. You see continuity and traders would be able to take advantage of news trading. They could implement some of the higher volatilitytrading patterns. So ECN would enable all of that where previously they couldn't do that. What other kind of trading services do you provide? Samuel Law: We try to fulfill what the clients want. We try to anticipate what clients want in the future. Now, for instance, we did look at several products such s CFDs. These are common products, which clients have. We do look at some other products like options for the future. It's getting more popular. Not wider options, more of a forex options product, which are still sourcing out. Good ones and even money management products to gain access to portfolio management. By working hand in hand with good partners so that this line of products which we attempt to bring to the market that clients feedback to us. I think Tradesto do bring in a lot of new clients to these. Now, presumably, for those clients and traders, training is important. How important do you see the start of training and ongoing training for traders themselves?
Samuel Law: Oh it is extremely important. I mean, education and training for traders who aspire to be professional traders or to be better in trading is very important. You cannot discount the fact. Well, I know that there are too many gurus out there who claim to be the best in their own right. As a trader myself, I have been trading for a good 18 years now, we're still learning. Market changes all the time with new trends, new volatility, and new system. We need to learn all that and along the way improve ourselves. So, I would always say a trader is like a soccer player. If you want to be a Cristiano Ronaldo or if you want to be a Messi, then you need to really work hard and look at your strength and weakness and try to improve on your stats. Right? As a trader, that is very important. That is why Tradesto, we strive to work with good academies. We try not to look at individuals, but we look at academies like recently we worked with one academy, Rubiks Academy from Singapore. We worked with a few others while based in Thailand and Malaysia. We find that people are hungry to learn, but just do not know where to look for, and they are afraid to pay crazy money for some holy grail where there is no such thing as a holy grail. You know? You see, the life of a trader is like, I like to put it in a way where it's like you have a checkered box. You have a black day. You have a white day. You have a winning day. You have a losing day. It's how you manage your winnings and how you manage your losses. At the same time, this requires a lot of skills and control of emotion and stuff like that. Definitely, to succeed, you would need mentors.
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