Meta-Trader - Meet Oliver Velez

Welcome back Meta-Traders.

In this post, we meet Oliver Velez, the founder of http://www.ifundtraders.com/.   I have seen presentations by Mr Velez on several occasions at the Traders Expo in New York City.   He is a very powerful personality and very persuasive.  And his product is somewhat unique in the world of trading in that he offers you a path to enter the world of professional trading.

Nearly everyone who trades for a living has to learn from someone. Ideally, that person is sitting next to you on a trading desk.  You show up every day and learn the setups the twists and turns, the big events and basically learn by observation and by doing.

Another personality I profiled on this blog named Hubert Senters met his mentor somewhat by accident when he visited the farm as part of his training to be a veterinarian.  Once he saw the flashing numbers and tens of thousands of dollars being made and lost, he was instantly hooked.  And thus began his education as a trader.

There is another and more traditional path to the trading desk that goes like this.  Get accepted to and graduate from a top Ivy League University (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, etc).  Graduate with top honors then apply to and get accepted as a new hire to a top trading firm such as Goldman Sachs.  Once you pass all those hurdles, you earn a seat on the trading desk at Goldman Sachs.  Jim Cramer tells a very funny story that after graduating from Harvard Law,  he was hired by Goldman Sachs.  And after all that training and education, there we was on the trading desk and his first official duty was ... take orders and go out and bring in pizza for the trading desk!

So what options are available to the rest of us who have zero chance of every making it through the front doors at Goldman?  Oliver Velez provides such a path and it works like this:

• Pay iFundTraders a starting fee of approximately $7500 and go through his training program.  
• Next, you are paired with another trader who becomes your mentor with whom you trade in demo mode for some period of time.
• Once you graduate from demo mode, you are funded with a real money account of approximately $10,000.
• Once you pass a certain performance goal, you are funded with a larger amount of money. 
• After that, you climb a performance ladder where, if you are successful, you are funded with ever larger amounts of Oliver's money, and Oliver takes a cut of your profits after you earn your original $7500 back.

Following such a structure, Velez has a created a firm iFundTraders LLC where he has a network of traders around the globe that trade the firms money.  The best traders rise to the top and trade ever larger amounts of money up to some maximum of the firms 11 million in capital.  Those who don't rise to the top - which I assume are the vast majority - keep trying and keep showing up for each days trading.  He claims you will never be kicked out of the program and you get infinite retakes of his educational programs until you become successful.

To be clear, Velez is not a trader himself, he is a salesman.  And I have never met a more persuasive salesman.  He is also an excellent educator and if you have never heard him speak, head over to http://iFundTraders.com or http//www.moneyshow.com and listen to one of his presentations.  In one recent presentation, he talks about how his traders key off the first 5-minute bar of the day, and he indicates that 82% of the time, the market trends in the direction of the first 5-minute bar.   He also uses 8 period, 20 period and 200 period moving averages across several time frames.  There is a wealth of information available basically for free in nearly any of his 1-hour presentations.  If you haven't heard him speak, I highly recommend you check it out, its well worth an hour of your time.

But should you give any of your money to Oliver Velez?   I haven't done so and here's where you need to be careful.  I went to Google and searched for Oliver Velez and due to Google's wonderful auto-fill in feature, I found the 3rd and 4th most popular search terms were "Oliver Velez Refund" and "Oliver Velez Criminal".  Following the 3rd one, I came across http://olivervelezrefund.com/ which claims that Velez has been involved in at least one scam where his trading firm (and customer funds) essentially disappeared with no chance of refund.   Also following a link on the site, I found a place where you can download the PDFs behind Oliver's 2-day Equity Trading seminar that he charges $3495 to attend in person.  If nothing else, download and checkout the PDF's, there's a lot of good educational material in there.

Velez also does Forex Trading and has a program for Forex Traders.  He even has his own version of the Meta-Trader platform along with some automated alerting and stop calculations for which he charged $65 per month.  Perhaps I'll get to that in a future post.

Automated Forex Trading was mixed this week with some up and some down.  There's not much to say about it and I'll let the numbers speak for themselves.

That's all for now, enjoy your weekend.