Taras Sviatun
🇺🇦Ukraine
Co-founded Trading Volume Terminal — and finished top-5 at Robbins' two-year Global Cup with 15+ years across CME, NYSE, MICEX, and Forex.
Taras Sviatun is one of the rare Russian-speaking traders whose Robbins WCTC credential comes from the multi-year Global Cup format rather than a single-year futures division. The 2022-2023 Global Cup audit closed at +55.7%, putting him fourth overall in a field whose multi-year discipline rewards consistency over single-cycle blow-ups. The career arc behind the placement is fifteen-plus years across the major futures and equity venues — CME index and rate futures, NYSE equities, MICEX (Moscow Exchange) during the Russian retail-trading boom, and Forex on the side — broader than most modern WCTC podium finishers, who tend to specialise in one division.
The business he co-founded — Trading Volume Terminal, branded as TVT — is the public surface that survived the championship. The "Trade Like a Pro" course is his teaching practice; the YouTube channel @volumetradertvt, the Instagram @taras_sviatun_trader, the Telegram @tvtexpert, and the tvt.expert site sit on top of it. The public-voice line from the Top 5 Traders interview — "I wouldn't recommend trading to anyone — it's a very hard and serious path. If someone decides to do it anyway, the main thing is: survive at any cost" — is the kind of framing that distinguishes practitioners from creators in the Russian-language retail-trading scene.
Interview
Looking back, what moment in your life — not necessarily related to trading — shaped you as a person capable of enduring fifteen years in professional markets?
Freedom was the idea that kept me going. In the conditions where I grew up, there was a constant dependence on connections. I wanted out of that.
CME, NYSE, MICEX, Forex across fifteen-plus years. Which of these markets gave you the deepest understanding of how liquidity works — and why?
CME — that's a real market. A well-established market-making institution, low costs, and high liquidity draw the world's main supply and demand there. Everything else is a reflection of it.
Robbins Global Cup 2022-2023 closed at +55.7% and fourth place in a format that tests not one good year but two consecutive. What was the closest moment in those two years to everything going wrong?
It was actually one trading year — June 1, 2022 to May 31, 2023. Toward the end things were already going sideways: I had stopped taking system trades and was trying to force a better result. The only reason I held my place was that the year turned out to be difficult for all participants, not just me.
You said in the Top 5 Traders interview: "I wouldn't recommend trading to anyone — it's a very hard path, and if you decide to do it anyway, the main thing is: survive at any cost." What exactly did you mean by survive?
Not to lose your mind when things don't go to plan — and to endure those periods calmly, without blowing up everything you built.
Trading Volume Terminal emerged as a business layered on top of your trading career. What did working with clients and the course change about your understanding of your own method?
The course and the client work forced me to articulate things I had always done intuitively. That process refined my decision-making framework to a level I couldn't have reached just by trading alone.
