Navigating Trading Challenges: Blake Morrow’s Interview
Key Takeaways:
Embrace Volatility: Morrow encourages traders to adopt strategies that consider turbulence in the market, like a U.S. presidential election, which would include tighter stop-losses and smaller positions.
Focus on Active Trading: He emphasizes the focus on active trading, considerable analytical skills, and to keep clear of passive investment strategies like ETFs.
Lifelong Learning: Morrow admits to the significance of continuous education and risk management, the trader needs to learn from his mistakes and adapt to market changes.
Trading Through the Tempest: An Interview with Forex Analytics CEO Blake Morrow
It’s a churning sea where waves of volatility unendingly batter traders from all sides. In this tumultuous trading environment, one has to pace the learning curve, moving from novice in technical skills to deep understanding of market forces, honing intuition to predict the next big move, and developing stamina to weather inevitable storms. Here, Blake Morrow, CEO and Co-founder of Forex Analytics, truly excels.
Morrow joins the latest Bullrush Live Stream to share his insights on the U.S. election, the future of trading, and his journey through decades of financial markets, from bull to bear. Explore the mind of a “veteran” trader who has survived numerous market headwinds.
The Turbulence of Election Season: Buckle Up
Morrow first and foremost addresses the immediate market landscape, saying bluntly, “I don’t give a sh** about any of the data this next week.” His straightforwardness speaks to his view that the market will be essentially fixated on the upcoming U.S. election, and thus, increasingly volatile.
“It could jolt the markets a little bit, but really everybody’s gonna be starting to position for the election now,” he predicts. Reflecting on the 2016 election, Morrow recalls the extreme fluctuations in the days leading up to and immediately following the event. Historical context would suggest that traders should be ready for a shock and keep those stop-loss orders tight.
“This election does not matter who wins; it’s going to be contested,” he warns. Long periods of uncertainty tend to incite risk aversion, such as yen strength or stock market weakness. “I’m just saying that this is going to be violent.”
Morrow emphasizes that as traders, they thrive on volatility. “And if you guys, what we are, we’re traders. I love volatility. I mean, we thrive off of it. So I’m excited for it, but at the same time, that means you pare down your position sizes, you widen your stops, you brace for that type of volatility, but there’s gonna be a lot of money to be made.”
A Changing Climate: From Passive Investing to Active Trading
The view of Morrow is that over the longer-term horizon, the market will trade in a range over the course of the next decade, and investors will be compelled to become much more discriminating and hence move away from passive strategies.
“We’ve not been stock pickers for 20 years. There are no stockbrokers-just wealth managers,” he says, critical of relying on broad-based ETFs. Morrow stresses that this won’t work anymore. Traders need to understand fundamental and technical analysis, including tools such as Fibonacci retracement levels, in order to estimate price reversals and levels of resistance and support.
Life in Markets: From Boiler Rooms to Forex Analytics
Morrow began his financial career in the 1990s as a day trader amidst what was then a high-pressured environment of “boiler rooms.” He said, “The sales pitches during those days were super hard push. It was post-9/11 that I entered the currency market, and that’s pretty much where Forex Analytics started.”
Forex Analytics provides full 24-hour analytics for a wide range of instruments: currencies, indices, and commodities. Also, Forex Analytics has an active chat room community at Forex Analytics where traders are in constant interaction and sharing experiences with others.
“We have traders who bring decades of experience from trading desks all over the world,” he also says about the expertise level in his team.
A Legacy of Trading Wisdom: Humility, Learning, and Risk Management
Aside from humility, Morrow still considers the most important thing in trading to be continuous education. He also shares personal anecdotes illustrating the lessons learned from mistakes, particularly the dangers of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). “You can have the right idea, wrong time,” he reminds listeners.
He summarizes one of the most salient things he has learned in a nutshell: “It’s okay to be wrong. It’s just not okay to stay wrong.” This kind of thinking will help a trader from any walk of life to move forward even in the face of adversity and take knowledge from any setback. “Hell, I’m right maybe 50% of the time when I’m hot streaking. So knowing that just alone, you know, if you’re wrong, just get out.”
Morrow talks more about self-awareness and risk management. “If you can realize that you made this mistake because you did this, this and this, the chances of you doing that again in the near future are much less.”
He also discusses the necessity for both fundamental and technical analysis. “I am always thinking five, seven steps ahead,” he reveals. “I always think of the macro point of view, or a fundamental point of view, and then I use my technical prowess to figure out where my best entry point will be.”
The Future of Trading: A New Era of Opportunity
As this interview concludes, Morrow is optimistic about the future of trading, but his advice is that it requires one to be adaptable and learn constantly. “I’m very bullish on trading. I’m very bearish on investing,” he says.
He calls on traders to embrace challenges, to look at volatility as an opportunity, not a threat. He concludes: “You’re going to have to be really selective about where you’re putting your money.” He emphasizes the need for enhancement in stock-picking skills and active trading strategies.
Morrow’s view provided a road map through the maze of today’s financial world and brought out the importance of humility, continuous learning, and strong risk management.
Practicing Your Trading Strategies and Skills with BullRush
Morrow’s insights are echoed in the gamified trading platform BullRush, where traders can test their trading skills and strategies without real financial risk. BullRush enables users to try trading ideas out, sharpen intuition, improve the risk management capability, trading skills, and do so in the trading competitions.
As the financial environment transforms, platforms such as BullRush can play a crucial role in helping traders build and improve trading skills for success. Morrow’s insights, along with the trading challenges offered by BullRush, highlight an important truth: trading is difficult and competitive, but full of opportunities. By committing to lifelong learning and trading skill enhancement, traders can effectively manage market volatility.
