INTERVIEW
One Tick At A Time
Lan Turner has worked in the financial industry for more than 18 years and has taught his ideas on stocks, futures, and forex trading to clients, professional traders, and brokers from around the world. Turner is the CEO of Gecko Software (www.GeckoSoftware.com) and chief design architect of Track ’n Trade LIVE trading platforms and charting applications. Turner is also president of PitNews Press and editor-in-chief of PitNews Magazine. He is an author, publisher, and public speaker, having taught live trading seminars across the US and internationally. He has also presented at the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange education centers.
Stocks & Commodities Editor Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan spoke with Turner on June 5, 2013.
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself — your background, and how you got interested in trading.
It started in the late 1980s, back when the Internet was just getting started and becoming quite popular. I had a small company that imported modems, network cards, and hubs. It was a wholesale distributor of computer hardware. The Internet was really taking off at that time, and all the computers needed to have modems. So I was making quite a bit of money importing modems and selling them up and down the street to all the computer stores here in the Midwest.
The key to your success is getting out of the market with a profit.Since I made a chunk of money selling modems during the Internet boom, I needed to figure out a way to invest some of the money. So I started to invest in the stock market at the time the Internet boom was beginning. I made a huge haul on my very first trade.
Most traders will tell you that making a bunch of money on your first trade is a big mistake, because then you think you’re really good when really, you don’t know what you’re doing. That was classic for me, too. I made a whole bunch of money in the stock market and then turned around and quickly lost most of it and was right back where I started.
I decided that I better figure out how to do this if I was going to do it, so I started to study. And that’s when I started to look into different markets. I was introduced to the futures market by a friend of mine, and I started looking into and researching the futures market. When I discovered the futures market, I absolutely loved it.
Why was that?
It always seemed that when you trade stocks, you take a large investment and a long time to make a small profit. The futures market is the reverse of that — you take a small investment in a small amount of time for a large return. So for my personality type, that was perfect. I started to fall in love with it.
Back in 1998 when the Internet was first getting started, I was looking around at all the different software applications. I’ll tell you a funny story. On one of my first trades, I went short the live cattle market. I was doing quite well, making some money on it, and I called my broker and asked, “How much money have I made so far?” He looked at my account, and said, “Well, you’ve made $1,000.” I kind of hesitated.
He asked me what was wrong, because $1,000 is pretty good when you’ve only been in the trade for about five days. I responded by saying I thought I’d only made $100. He asked me, “Why would that upset you? You thought you made $100, but you’ve made $1,000.” Well, I was upset because I didn’t know where to put the decimal point! When I first started trading, it was difficult to tell how much money I was making in the trade; everything is different in the futures market than it is in the stock market. Crude oil trades in barrels, soybean trades in bushels, gold trades in ounces — everything has a different conversion.
So when I was trading live cattle, I ended up putting the decimal point in the wrong spot. I thought I had made $100, when in reality I had made $1,000. I thought I was risking $100 on my stop-loss on the other side, when in reality I was risking $1,000.