How I Became a Trader

Nick Radge has ridden many waves of the financial markets since placing his first trade in 1985. With 30 years of skin in the game, Nick Radge will share some of the crucial lessons that have allowed him to not only survive, but consistently profit along the way. In addition to 30 years of trading, Nick also runs a highly successful stock market advisory service, The Chartist. He’s also been featured on Michael Covel’s Trend Following podcast, was a regular on Sky Business News ‘Your Money Your Call’ and is the author of three books.

Can you take us back to where it all started in 1985 for you? How did you first discover the markets, and what was it that really appealed to you?

I was an average student in school. I didn’t go to university. I really had no idea what I wanted to do when I left school, and a friend of a friend worked at a big stock broking firm, and offered me a job as a clerk, pushing paper. I had no interest in the stock market or anything like that at the time. But it was a job in the city, so I went along, and quite enjoyed it.

One day I strolled through the private client area of that stock broking firm, and came across a gentleman who had some chart paper, and was drawing some red and blue lines on the charts. It intrigued me, so he showed me what he was doing. Basically it was a five and ten day moving average cross over strategy on the share price index futures. I could just see the trends right there in front of me. Back in 1985, it was a pretty strong bull market, so there were some nice trends showing up.

At the end of the day, I went down to the stationary shop, and bought my own chart paper, and red pen, blue pen, black pen. From that point I started plotting the markets. I don’t know what it was, but something just clicked, and it made sense. A few weeks later I went into the old wily office manager, and asked him if I could set up a trading account to trade futures, which was quite stupid in hindsight because back then the spy was $100 a tick, and I was only earning about $12,000 a year. So he kind of frowned a little bit, but he said okay, and that’s how I started trading.