Although John works in the City, he's not what you'd call your classic City boy. He's in customer services at a delivery company in the Square Mile, and he's also "doing the knowledge" in order to become a London black cab driver. Mentored by two prominent trading gurus, Ashraf Laidi and James Chen, John recorded five profitable weeks out of six during the contest, and also came out as the absolute winner in three of those weeks. So, how did he do it?
"I didn't have very much of a trading background at all before this competition," John admitted to me shortly after his triumph. "That said, I've always kept an eye on the stock market, even when I was a kid, always looking at which shares were on the move on Teletext. I'd done a bit of paper-trading and also back-tested a few ideas. But the City Index Academy was my first experience of proper market action."
"I reckon my focus was one of the reasons I won the competition," says John. "I made the indices my thing - the Dow Jones, the FTSE 100 and the DAX 30. The other guys I was up against in the contest mainly did foreign exchange, but they seemed to be looking at loads of different currency pairs. As one of the judges said, 'they were looking at everything but also nothing'. The only week I didn't make money was where we were doing individual shares. The bottom line for me is that it pays to get to know a handful of markets backwards.
"The approach I used to win the contest involved pretty frequent trading. I was aiming to grab moves of 20 points a time. I might be in the market for a few minutes or a few hours. Occasionally, I'd keep my position open overnight. Although I did notch up one really big win of 66 points at £500-a-point, it was really lots of little small wins that kept me going. Generally I was aiming for 1 per cent profit on my account per trade. Unlike some of my rivals, though, I wasn't trading full-time - I was doing it alongside my day job.
"To pick my trading set-ups, I was mainly using technical analysis. I had a lot of useful guidance here from the mentors, James and Ashraf. The simplest things really do work best. I was relying mainly on trend, as well as support and resistance. I'd start by looking at the big trend on the monthly and weekly charts, then drill down to the daily and intraday charts: four hours, one hour, 15 minutes. It was mainly the 15-minute chart I used for making my actual entries and exits.
"Overall, I estimate that I did slightly more long trades than short trades. I'd wait to see what happened in each market at the open each day. The DAX kicks off at 7am, so I'd see what would happen, whether it formed a gap up or down. Once it then settled down, I'd buy or sell depending on whether my initial suspicion was borne out.
"Aside from sticking to the same markets and simple techniques, the other thing I really learnt the value of was risk management. I started out going for a two-to-one reward-risk ratio. So, I'd be seeking 20 pips of profit and put my stop 10 pips away. As the contest went on, I shifted to one-for-one, which ended up working well. You've got to be a bit of a robot, cutting losses as soon as possible, not letting emotions interfere. I always feel better once I've closed out a losing position for a contained loss.
As to the future, John is planning to adapt his trading approach from that which he used in the competition. "I'll definitely still be trading, but not in and out all the time, like during the competition. I envisage doing longer-term positions, which will fit better with my life. Once I get my black-cab driver's badge, I'll be trading from my iPad when I'm out and about. I'll hang on to positions for longer, not checking them so much, as I'll rely on my stop-losses to keep me safe."
You can watch exactly how John won the City Index Academy challenge in this six-part series: http://www.cityindex.co.uk/trading-academy/
