12. Can You Help Our Clients?

Forex Brokers are interesting bunch aren’t they? To most people they are probably the enemy but really they should be your friend and most people think of them as the enemy because most people blame their losing trades on their Forex Broker. If you have a bad broker, well yes you have a bad broker but there are so many out there now to chose from that you really should get yourself a reasonably good broker.

Most people end up blaming the broker for their losing trades because they think that the broker has widen the spreads, they’ve hunted the stop loss out, they’ve traded against them or whatever it might be but you’ll probably find that with most brokers today they are a reasonable bunch. Yes they’re in business to make money like everybody is but really you should be thinking of your broker if you’ve done your due diligence and you trust your broker enough to place your money with, you should really be thinking of your broker as your friend and not your enemy.

I ended up a number of years ago when The Forex Trading Coach started working with the broker called Latitude FX in Auckland. Now I had an account with them for a short while and they offered the MT4 (Meta Trader 4) Platform and they were based here in New Zealand which at that time had I suppose a bit of a safe feel about it but what I really like about them is I got to meet some of their staff at a few trade shows. The great thing with Latitude was some of their staff were also owners of the company and I got to meet them and develop a relationship with them and I realized there was something that slightly different with the broker at that time and it was something that are really liked. One, they seemed to care about their clients. Now a lot of people can just say,

“Look we really care about our clients or we really give good service, or we really offer tight spreads.”

You see that all over the place from brokers telling you “How they really care.”

I had a feeling by meeting the owners of this company that they really did genuinely care about their clients.

As an example I ended up meeting up my software programmer through the broker and they realized that I was setting up The Forex Trading Coach and was trading well myself they realized that there was a programmer who lived close by me and Latitude ended up putting the two of us in touch. Now the programmer ended up being my programmer for all the software through The Forex Trading Coach and continues to be my programmer through to today. He is a fantastic guy and over the years I developed a fantastic relationship with my programmer.

I found it was really pleasing and important for me to find someone who understood Forex number one but also the MT4 Platform. There are a lot of people who think they are programmers and there are a lot of people who think they understand Forex. Very few understand both and that’s what my programmer does. He’s an incredibly intellectual person, just an absolute amazing mind who understands Forex probably like almost no one else that I know. He understands Meta Trader 4 and programming like no one else I know. So we have developed a great relationship over the years and we had, especially in the early days we had in person chats where he would come to my office or I would go to his house and we had huge amounts of lengthy phone calls, email correspondents and we were just bouncing ideas off each other and I think if you can find someone like that within your trading life it’s really important. It could be your husband or your wife or a family member or you’re a friend and I think that developing that relationship with someone just to talk about Forex it’s really important and it is quite under estimated.

It’s one thing that I find with The Forex Trading Coach as a company now I’ve developed such a big group of traders, like-minded people and Forex enthusiasts that it just makes a really great buzz when we had our live webinars because we’ve got people online from all over the world, different parts; different times of the day and night all there wanting to learn at the same time and it’s created a really good community. So whether you have hundreds of people as that Forex community or whether you just have one or two people, it is quiet important to have that relationship with some who understands what you’re doing because otherwise I think Forex can be quiet a lonely business. For most people you are probably set at home on a computer and you’re watching charts bounce up and down and this average cross over that average and you spend a better time on forums. I think it can be quiet dangerous in that it becomes quite a lonely business. By having someone to bounce ideas off and to talk to can be a really good thing for your trading.

So back to the broker Latitude FX. I had my account with them for a while and they had introduced me to the programmer and they saw the results that I was achieving on my own private accounts with them. Over time they got to find out little bit more about myself and my dreams and beliefs as a trader and a coach by helping other people through The Forex Trading Coach. Our relationship developed over some time with me traveling to Auckland to have meetings with their management team and their staff in general. We developed the relationship and I ended up realizing that yes I did want to do some work with them. They offered my services to help their clients and they wanted me to work with them but I also needed to make sure that this was the right thing for me to do and The Forex Trading Coach as a company to do.

After building up a relationship with Latitude FX, I did genuinely believe that they had a really genuine interest and concern for their client’s well being and profitability. The problem with a lot of brokers is all they want is new clients. To this day I get inundated on a daily basis by emails from brokers all around the world, some days maybe one or two some days five or more emails per day from brokers wanting me to become an IB, an Introducing Broker for them. What that means is they want to use my name and reputation to help build their database and to bring clients to them. Now to all of them I say “No”. To every single one I say no unless I’ve had or do have an account and trade actively with that broker first. To this day I’ve only recommended four brokers ever and all four those I have had live accounts with through them and I still do – apart from with Latitude as they no longer in business. However, back then Latitude were definitely a company who I shared a moral ground with in that we had the same beliefs in wanting to trade and wanting to help our clients genuinely.

So this developed into Latitude asking, “Hey Andrew would you be interested in coming to teach some of our clients how to trade profitably?” What I liked about that is that they weren’t interested in me sending out emails and having banners trying to get new clients on board for their broker, earning them what I call “Clicky Click fees” which really is just them making money every time a client takes a new trade. They weren’t interested in that. What they wanted me to do was to come and help teach their existing clients and that was quite an important difference there which is why I ended up agreeing to work with them. They wanted their existing clients to do well. The important thing there is they showed to me cared about their clients.

They had clients who would come on board with a live account but very few of them were actually making money. Most clients had what you would call almost a gambling mentality. So I ended up traveling up to Auckland and holding a few night time presentations in their offices to some of their selected clients. Initially they select the clients for me to talk to. We would have small groups of somewhere between about 20 and 40 people in the room and this was over a number of nights, spread over a number of weeks and then months. I also hired a room in the convention center of the Sky City in Auckland which is the main convention center in Auckland and we hired some rooms there and we other Latitude clients and the general public come in and listen to me talk and present about how I traded, along with giving them some helpful information and afterward if they were interested, I was offering them a weekend course.

The presentations were not just about selling people a course. It was about helping them if they wanted to join; if they wanted to come and listen to the information, gain some tips and valuable information and then go home and carrying a trading, I had no issues with that at all. However a number of these people did express an interest in learning how to trade the way that I trade and becoming the client of The Forex Trading Coach.

Initially all of these clients were taught over a weekend and in person in very small groups, somewhere between about three and six people at a time. It was important to keep the groups small because there were people from different technical backgrounds, different computer literacy backgrounds, people from different trading experience backgrounds, so I keep the groups very small deliberately and I ended up teaching the course in person to them over the course to the weekend and this worked extremely well and clients were finding that they were heading back home and then finding themselves almost with a new approach to their trading.

In some ways Latitude as a company ended up making less money from some of those clients because they weren’t taking those big high risk, almost gambling approach trades and they were now not over trading as many of them had done before. So as a brokerage, Latitude probably found that they were making less money from the people who I taught because the people who I taught now had a businesslike approach to their trading. They were taking more controlled trades along with making better decisions and having a better approach to their trading which make them actually trading less but again this was showing to me that Latitude did care about their clients because they continued to ask me to help their clients because what they’ve found out that if you help a client who has let’s say a $5,000 account, over time if that client is profitable, not only are they making money which is increasing their account size, they are also more likely to then go and add more money to that account. So all those suddenly they maybe trading a ten thousand or a twenty thousand or a thirty thousand dollar account or whatever it might be, which meant that longer term Latitude were making more because the position size taken by the client was actually bigger. It also meant of course that if you’re successful you can keep trading. It also means that if you’re successful you’re going to then talk about your trading to other people.

So from the broker’s point of view they were more than happy because they were having very happy, successful clients who were taking over time, bigger and bigger positions which meant more money for the broker. This is fine as they were in business to make money and they had a genuine interest there; they helped their clients and as a result they ended up making more money themselves.

From the client’s point of view they were probably struggling, many of them were gambling, they invested some money with myself and they ended up making more money because they had controlled emotions, they had a trading strategy and they were enjoying their trading.

From my point of view I was growing The Forex Trading Coach as a business. I was getting introduced to more and more people. I was now working with a reputable company like Latitude and it just meant that the business is growing.

I was enjoying my trading; I was loving the opportunity to meet fellow traders people, I was absolutely thrilled with results that people were achieving and so all three were very happy with the arrangement. Now this carried on for a quite a while until eventually it ended because Latitude sold out to a Macquarie Bank and the management staff whom I had such a great relationship with ended up moving on and I then ended up moving to different broker for my own personal trading and also The Forex Trading Coach then developed from being a private, small group teaching situation and private one on one clients to opening up to expand so that clients from other parts of the world could take advantage of the course.

"To become a Profitable Forex Trader doesn’t require you to sit in front of your computer all day and night. You can have a life and still trade well."

Andrew Mitchem

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12. Can You Help Our Clients?

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