At the time the entry fee was R$1,200, it lasted one week, and there were 538 participants in total. The winner earned the right to join a prop trading firm, receiving R$300,000 in capital to trade and keeping 50% of the profits. During the championship you could trade any stock on the Brazilian exchange, and whoever made the biggest profit in the period won. It was one of my best professional and learning experiences, because the owner of the firm at the time came from a career as head of the trading desk at Banco Safra in New York. His guidance on reading the market greatly improved my view and decision-making process, and it also shaped my desire to have my own trading desk.

Article: https://www.infomoney.com.br/mercados/quebrei-duas-vezes-mas-aprendi-a-licao-diz-campeao-do-torneio-de-traders/

While I was there, I got to know SMB Capital in New York and fell in love with the serious prop trading model, which is completely different from today's models that only profit from people's failure.

Editor's note: According to InfoMoney's report of July 29, 2014, this was the monthly traders tournament of prop firm Auctus Capital, held over three days (July 16 to 18, 2014) on the Meivox simulator in partnership with InfoMoney. Thiago made 57 trades and finished with R$14,324 in profit, against R$12,842 for second place.

Operationally, almost everything changed! From there I started to have a more flexible view of the market, analyzing the factors that really matter and make price move. That bias of hunting for chart patterns and completely subjective things, which are spread to the retail public as the correct way to trade, totally disappeared from my view and market reading. It was like getting out of a bubble of irrelevant knowledge and starting to see and trade the market more professionally.

As I said, that's where the desire came from to have my own trading desk and train my own traders the way I believe is right for working in the financial market.

The article stayed on the front page of InfoMoney, the biggest financial portal in Brazil, for a week. A year after the win, I was invited by the broker Rico (now part of the XP group) to join its education team, and the following year I moved to Clear (also part of the XP group). That's how I became better known in Brazil, by spreading the importance of risk management (back then people only taught how to make trades) and promoting a view detached from patterns, figures, and chart shapes. Basically, I tried to get people out of this very harmful knowledge bubble and give them more longevity in the financial market, especially in day trading. But since I'm not very active on social media, I didn't make good use of the showcase the brokers provided.

First, I'd change the duration. One week or one month of competition is a random condition to evaluate someone and call them a champion. Most people are just lucky during that period. From three months on, we start to better gauge who is actually better, because the trader goes through various adverse and favorable market phases, ranging and trending, and only then can you evaluate how they deal with adversity, which is part of everyone's daily trading.

I'd also change the criterion of evaluating only the financial result. Whoever makes the most money doesn't necessarily trade best. Someone who trades poorly can land a random good trade and just manage that advantage. So I'd add what I call the Operational Quality Index, a balance between win rate and risk. It generates a qualitative number that shows whether it's just luck or real competence and aptitude for trading. I use it a lot to evaluate the people I follow and potential talents to trade with me.

Finally, championships need risk rules per trade, per day, per week, and per month. In other words, they should truly simulate a real environment. Because it's simulated, a trader can put all the capital into one trade, lose 40% during the championship, then get lucky with the market moving in their favor and end up near the top or even win. A risk lock makes the trader think twice, since if they hit their daily stop, they can't keep trying.

A good model is championships with real money, which brings more seriousness and commitment from participants, where the winners take the full amount of the entry fees.

I didn't change the model. I just stopped trading with Vantage and, for the CFD market, adopted BlackBull as my broker (two months after becoming a client, I was invited to become a BDM). The Friends & Family fund is still active, but it's for a very segmented audience, with a minimum of $200k USD and a limited number of members, so it's more private. The PAMM fund at BlackBull is open and more active in my daily work (we make an average of 5,000 trades per year), in both day trading and margin trading.

I made this change for better market conditions, execution, and stability at the time. Vantage's costs and spreads were extremely impractical and ate up a lot of the profit, so I looked for a safe harbor both for my own trading and for the clients who allocate funds. The change was surprisingly good: we got better results and more control, and I was able to further develop my MT5 Backoffice SaaS and manage both the PAMM and the traders' sub-accounts in a unified way, in real time.

I even wrote an article illustrating the gain from this broker change, if you're interested. It shows very well what was happening and where we are now: https://treidou.substack.com/p/spread-o-custo-que-voce-nao-ve

Editor's note: Thiago Brito works as a Business Development Manager at BlackBull Markets. His comments on brokers reflect his personal experience and professional affiliation. This interview is not sponsored by any broker mentioned.

Never putting myself in an uncomfortable situation I can't manage, where I become hostage to the market. This usually comes from over-leveraging a position in the personal hope that a single trade will change your life. And if it works, it becomes a vicious cycle and a harmful habit, until it goes wrong and you lose everything, as happens to most people.

What I do is swap leverage on a single trade for dozens of trades. This increases the probability of return and dilutes the risk, something only the CFD market provides. For example, right now I'm managing 487 trades across 53 different positions, in both day trading and swing trading. I increase my reach instead of concentrating on a single asset and a single moment that may or may not be favorable.

Editor's note: CFDs are complex leveraged instruments, and most retail accounts lose money trading them. The approach described here reflects the personal experience of a professional manager and is not a recommendation.

Yes, but back then I didn't have much knowledge. It was 2011. I sold my winning positions, put everything into a single asset and, worse, leveraged the capital 3x. In two weeks I had tripled the capital, until one day the stock fell 60% (it was a bubble, a fraud discovered some time later). I didn't close the position because I was still in profit. The next day it fell another 55%, I went negative and owed the broker R$60k. I had to take out a loan and it took me a year to pay it off. With interest, the loss went from R$60k to almost R$100k, which I paid in 12 installments.

In my view, they've become extremely immature, instead of maturing over so many years. I think we lost the opportunity to transform Brazil's culture, and the blame is cultural and on the public itself. Not even 10% of the population has the habit of saving (given Brazil's economic situation, most don't even have the means), let alone investing. But these same people don't miss the chance to take a risk in day trading without any knowledge or aptitude. To make it worse, the brokers, which are the gateway, spread shallow knowledge about hunting for chart patterns. As a result, thousands trade at the same moment and on the same timeframe, since it's the same pattern everyone learns. And because we have few liquid assets, a large part of the public ends up trading at the same time. It can't work.

Desperate for a life change and extra income, those who turn to day trading end up with the opposite result: they lose their savings and spend money on courses that add nothing. On top of that, because of Brazil's constant political and economic instability, our market is one of the most difficult in the world. Price moves and trends change abruptly and very easily, unlike in developed markets.

Because the Brazilian market depends on foreign flows (after all, residents don't invest), we often say that whoever manages to make money trading the Brazilian market is ready to make money in any other market.

The factors below are what I did myself before coming to BlackBull. Because of the high costs and extremely fluctuating spreads of my old broker, I opened accounts with more than 30 brokers around the world, looking for those with the largest number of symbols, stable spreads, and a reliable structure. I compared the data from all of them and, after my filters, arrived at BlackBull. Three months later I was invited to join the team. In other words, this isn't an opinion just because I work with BlackBull today.

As a manager, I see that traders look for better trading alternatives, with hundreds more options than Brazil offers. In Brazil, even though we have around 500 listed companies, only about 40 stocks have liquidity, and in futures, for years we only had the dollar and IBOV index futures to trade. Outside Brazil we have access to a much wider range, much better liquidity, and much more solid market moves than the craziness of Brazil.

The drive to dollarize one's wealth is also a relevant factor, since the Brazilian real loses value rapidly year after year. Profiting in dollars brings a far better return than being exposed only to the domestic market.

https://treidou.substack.com/p/a-matematica-dos-cfds-por-que-o-mercado

Editor's note: As noted above, Thiago works at BlackBull Markets. Broker choice should always be based on your own research and the regulation that applies in your country.

The Backoffice I developed. Data APIs in the Brazilian market have always been very restricted or nonexistent for retail, leaving you hostage to very unstable platforms with little relevant information. I had to regularly export CSVs and import them into spreadsheets to have the control I consider necessary to manage investments, even in day trading.

Only when I moved to the CFD market and got access to the platform's API could I truly build an environment with all the information and control I need.

And since I trade many assets in day trading and swing trading, if I'd had the market alert I developed, I believe I'd also have had a bigger edge at the beginning. It sends a screenshot to Telegram of any asset with unusual movement, so I can monitor more than 2,000 assets and trade those that are actually attractive to the market, not just to my own view.

The power of the long term. What people who trust you with their capital mainly want to see is the prospect of positive cash flow in their wealth. Most are willing to accept risk and drawdowns, but not the explosive madness a manager can commit. People who want to become managers one day should first focus on growing the client's wealth, and the manager's profits will follow from that.

The problem I see is that most get dazzled by the available capital and try to speed up the process with a risk the investor isn't willing to take, chasing a return the investor never asked for. That's why it's common to see PAMM accounts blown up in a single day, as if it were an ordinary retail account.

You need to be transparent with your client, understand what they want, and deliver something within realistic expectations. If the investor has an unrealistic view, it's better not to have them as a client.

Every manager's dream is to grow their fund's AUM and have a loyal team capable of meeting its obligations. I've been developing projects for both fronts: a more interactive and dynamic environment where clients can virtually follow what happens behind the scenes of the PAMM, and a way to train new traders who can join the team with the same view of the market that I have.

A sample for you: treidou.com/animated. It simulates a day at a trading desk, and soon, instead of a simulation, I'll connect my fund so the public can see all events, closed positions, alerts, and performance reports in real time.

I was also recently invited to manage the PAMM fund of a new partner, and I'm very hopeful it can grow a lot given their global reach.

One thing I'd like to do is build a practical training program for people between 12 and 18, to instill an investment culture early in their lives, with something that actually gives them long-term returns, correctly applying day trading techniques (for partial leveraging of wealth) and margin trading (for capital accumulation). It's a program I'm thinking of launching during this period as an entrepreneur.

Editor's note: This is a future idea described by the interviewee. Leveraged trading products are generally not available to minors, and Trading Tournaments does not endorse trading activity by people under 18.

Trust your instinct and don't rush for a quick result and throw it all away. In demo championships, many competitors start with an explosive gain, but when they see others getting close, they feel the pressure and lose performance with the same intensity. In short championships, unfortunately, the best thing to do is risk 20% of capital per trade, but wait patiently for moments of directional volatility. Remember: you're the one who must adapt to the opportunities the