INTERVIEW
Price Has Plenty To Say
Huzefa Hamid began trading in 2000 with UK & US equities and equity options. He gravitated toward technical trading, building his own trading rules and systems. In 2012, Huzefa was appointed senior analyst at DailyForex.com. His published articles present technical trading strategies and market analysis. Besides trading, Huzefa enjoys mentoring traders of all levels, communicating his ideas, and developing a shared learning environment. As TheForexRoom’s original founder and a dedicated administrator, he is interested in providing the best possible user experience for members to help them develop successful trading careers.
Stocks & Commodities Editor Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan spoke with Huzefa Hamid on April 11, 2013, via Skype.
Huzefa, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got interested in the financial markets.
I was 16 years old, in high school, living in England, and I had just got my first Internet connection. It was an AOL dial-up connection. Every day when I would connect to the Internet, one of the welcome pages showed the stocks that moved the most that day on the London Stock Exchange. I would watch the prices go up and down. It was just raw numbers at the time. There were companies such as Marks & Spencer on the British exchange, and I thought, “Wow, all I have to do is buy this in the morning and sell it in the evening and I would’ve made a lot of money.” It was a simplistic and naive view of how the markets operated, but that is what initially got me interested in the markets.
You’ve only got three decisions to make: what price to enter at, what price to exit at for a loss, and what price to exit at for a profit.After that I started to pay attention to the markets in the newspapers and started reading the financial pages. We have a fabulous weekly journal called Investors Chronicle in the UK and I would purchase that. With only my savings from the first few part-time jobs I had while I was at school, I opened my first brokerage account. One of my first trades was Manchester United. My trading started because of a personal interest in the equity markets. Back then, in the ‘90s, the markets were really booming, and the brokers in the industry became deregulated.
Were you working for a trading firm?
No, I wasn’t with a trading firm. I studied business at university and I was working for, initially, Deloitte, and then a few other financial services firms. I was in pensions and actuarial-related roles, and it didn’t have anything to do with the financial markets. It was completely divorced from trading. My trading has always been a personal interest.
Interesting. What attracted you to the forex market?
I traded equities for a bit and experienced success with them. Forex was becoming a big thing. It was becoming the “flavor of the month” industry and was accessible to retail traders. Prior to that, I think in the ’90s or so, it was strictly for high–net worth individuals with half a million dollars or more in their accounts, and you had to go through a Tier 1 bank and be vetted. But that changed, and you had brokers such as FXCM advertising great spreads, 24-hour access, liquidity, and all the other great stuff. I found that to be interesting. I had friends who were trading forex actively. One friend traded forex full time and bought his house in cash. Seeing a handful of people being successful at it plus the aggressive marketing by forex firms offering good forex spreads was difficult to ignore. That’s what initially got me into forex and I became fascinated with it.
When did you start trading for yourself?
It’s been approximately 11 or 12 years now.
Tell us about how you trade. Do you use technical analysis?
Yes, I’m a purely technical trader. I am 100% into technical analysis.