Roney Albert "Frajola"
Roney Albert
🇧🇷Brazil
Forty-four years in markets — and one of the last operators who actually shouted bids on the BM&F open-outcry floor.
Roney Albert was already on the floor of the BM&F (now B3) when Brazilian futures trading still happened by shouting. Forty-four years later he's the rare current-day public trader-educator whose teaching credibility comes from a career that pre-dates electronic execution. Two long-running projects sit on top of that history: Economy Class, and Oficina do Trader — pedagogy-first brands oriented toward currencies, derivatives, and the broader fixed-income / variable-income mix that Brazilian retail traders actually have to navigate.
The public surface today is YouTube and podcast-heavy: the YouTube channel under his own name plus the Os Donos do Dólar podcast give him a long-form medium for the kind of order-flow, scalping, and pit-floor mechanics that don't carry well in short clips. The own-voice line that titles one of the Trader Talks Cortes — "O mercado me ensinou o que eu sei", "the market taught me what I know" — is also the line that best captures the brand: practitioner, not theorist.
For Copa BTG Trader 2025 he was not on the leaderboard. He was inside the BTG editorial cycle as a Trader Talks guest — episode #2 in the long-form podcast and episode #105 during the October 2025 final cycle — and his role on the broadcast cycle was the commentator / mentor side, not the competitor pool. The page on this site reflects that explicitly: he's a Copa orbit figure, not a Copa finalist.
Interview
Você estava no pregão da BM&F quando a era viva-voz começou a acabar. Qual foi o momento exato em que você percebeu que o pregão eletrônico era inevitável — e o que te fez migrar antes dos outros?
The exact moment was when I realized the price started moving faster on the screen than in the open outcry, and the banks and brokerages began to reduce staff on the trading floor — many moving to internal positions and others being laid off.
In open outcry trading, a good operator had presence, hearing, body language reading, flow savvy and nerves of steel, and he knew what he was doing and had great memory. You'd look at the pit and you could tell who was really buying, who was really selling or short, who was bluffing and who was in desperation — especially those holding positions against the market.
But when electronic trading started gaining speed, it became clear that world wasn't going to ask permission before it ended, like what happened in several countries.
Those who thought electronic trading was just a fad died professionally clinging to nostalgia and didn't professionalize themselves or retrain or anything; they stopped studying, got stuck in time.
I migrated to electronic earlier but I was forced to, and also because I was never in love with that format. I was in love with the market. And the market doesn't care about nostalgia. So I migrated to electronic. The electronic market changes the platform, changes the screen, changes the code, changes the way execution works, but it keeps asking the same question: can you read price, risk and flow or do you just know how to repeat old habits?
A lot of people confused experience with immunity. Experience helps, but attachment kills.
I understood early on that the operator who didn't learn screen, technology, speed and electronic execution would become a museum piece. In my case, even being in the B3 Museum carries symbolic weight: I lived that history, but I didn't get trapped in it.
Você disse no Trader Talks: "O mercado me ensinou o que eu sei." O mercado é famoso por ser um professor caro. Qual foi a lição que você queria ter aprendido mais barato?
The most expensive lesson was understanding that being right isn't enough. That the market is geopolitical calculations, macro and micro economics.
That's the hit every trader takes a while to accept. You can be right on your thesis, right on the fundamentals, right on the macro reading, right on the final direction — and still lose money if you're wrong on size, timing, or leverage.
