INTERVIEW
Know Your Competition
Trade Smart With Anne-Marie Baiynd
Anne-Marie Baiynd, who is author of The Trading Book and president and Ceo of TheTradingBook.com, focuses her successful trading system around the use of the Fibonacci and pattern recognition sequences in the market. Her rigorous trading systems combine the use of Bollinger Bands, the moving average convergence/divergence (Macd), and moving averages to create a simple yet highly effective model, with greater than 78% accuracy, even in volatile markets.
Baiynd has been a neuroscience researcher, corporate speaker, as well as trainer, VP of sales, and Ceo of a recruiting firm. She was introduced to technical trading in 2005, and began trading full time soon after. Currently, she divides her time between actively trading and mentoring individual traders. She advises proprietary traders, assists in individual and group behavioral reengineering, and runs a blog for day and swing traders through TheTradingBook.com.
Baiynd’s book, The Trading Book, is on a solution to cementing the path to technical trading success. She has a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics, and her master’s degree work includes statistics, biostatistics, and behavioral studies. She teaches her trading system online for TradeSmart University in the Tick By Tick program. She can be reached at annemarietrades@thetradingbook.com.
S&C Editor Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan and Staff Writer Bruce Faber interviewed Anne-Marie Baiynd on October 5, 2011.
Anne-Marie, how did you get interested in trading?
I went to a Success magazine convention and while I was there I started talking to a guy about technical trading. I had been working in recruiting for close to 14 years, and I was burned out. I was fortunate enough to be in a financial state where I could afford to make a change, and that is how I was introduced to the markets. I liked the concept of technical trading because it is very mechanical and if you keep yourself focused — and by that I mean you’ve got to keep your mind on lockdown — and work within a rigid set of rules, you know you are going to be okay. The market is still going to slap you around a bit, but overall you are going to do okay.
When I began trading I had a very tough time because I knew nothing about the markets. I made the mistake of beginning to trade with real money instead of paper trading. So after about 18 months of dismal failure I said to myself, “Hey, you are just going to have to figure this out, or you are going to be out of the game!” So I stopped live trading and began to paper trade, and started teaching myself about market rhythms.
The only folks I learned anything from, really, were Brian Shannon and Peter Reznicek. From Shannon I learned about multiple time frames, and from Reznicek I learned about market internals, such as tick, breadth ratios, advancers and decliners, that sort of thing. Everything else I picked up on my own.
I try to tell people: “Look at the market as a piece of art. Try to understand the emotion there. What is making people move?” My background in academics is mathematical, so I have a strong understanding of pattern recognition. Because I am self-taught, I see all these candlestick formations, and I’ll say, “Oh yeah, that’s a reversal.” Except it has a specific name, which I don’t know. My students end up telling me, “No, that is a breakaway gap.” I still have trouble with some of the names. I just look at the formations and say, “Okay, that looks familiar.”
I’ve been trading almost seven years, and the time has flown by. I really love it. If you don’t love this business, it can beat you up so badly that you never want to go back. I meet a lot of retail traders who were in my shoes, in that they knew absolutely nothing about trading but really wanted to learn.