Interview noteThis page restates a public interview in new words. Dollar results, win rates, and payouts are claims made by the speaker or the host. They are not this desk's record, and they are not a result to expect.
Tobias, describes a forex process that starts with the macro picture and uses the chart only to time it. The host frames him as someone who spent 15 years learning why the social-media version of trading keeps people broke. Tobias's own account of the start is concrete. He began with his father. A demo month worked, they deposited 5,000 euros, and he blew it in one or two weeks. His father put in another 1,000. They sat together, lost more accounts, deposited more, ran out, and his father borrowed from co-workers and took a loan. In three years the two of them lost well over 100,000 euros. Tobias puts his own share above 56,000 and his father's above 50,000. There were no prop firms then. The money was theirs. They copied strategies they had never backtested. After those three years his father stopped. Tobias went looking for institutional teachers, people who would explain what actually moves a market rather than another candle pattern. He backtested the idea he had, tweaked it, saw that it had worked, and calls that the breakthrough. Asked whether he made the losses back, he says yes. He has been living off the trading for 10 years, and he is clear that an income from speculation is not easy, because the market is never known.
Three scores, then the pair
Before any chart he splits the currencies: euro, dollar, pound, Australian dollar, and the rest. The first layer is the country's fundamentals. Manufacturing and services PMIs, and a PMI above 50 means the economy is more likely growing. Consumer confidence, because spending follows it. Retail sales and whether companies are making gains. GDP growth, up or down. He will score it. Manufacturing PMI up and above 50 is a plus one. Consumer confidence down might be a minus one or a minus two. The second layer is the central bank, scored the same way. A bank that wants to raise rates is, in his view, a currency that will most likely rise, because higher rates attract money. A bank that wants to cut is a currency that will most likely fall. Forex is economies against each other, and he does not think a chart looks forward into an economy. The third layer is the risk environment. If current sentiment supports the currency, plus one. If it does not, minus one. Then he looks at what the currency is actually doing.
That last check is how he decides a headline is finished. In the first weeks and months of a fresh war, the currency reacts hard. Later the same kind of bad headline arrives and the currency does not move. He reads that as priced in, and the currency is then trading the other two layers. If data prints and the currency ignores it, that data is not important for this market, and he will not take the trade off it. If the currency is clearly performing to the data, the news matters.
Which series to watch is not a fixed list. He looks at what the banks are looking at. JP Morgan, ING, MUFG, and the other large banks publish research he says is free and mostly ignored. His concrete pointer is to search ING FX Daily and read which currencies they have as bullish or bearish and which data they cite. Context changes, so the list has to change with the news. A free headline feed he names is Financial Juice. He uses paid data as well. He also reads the commitment of traders report for hedge funds, and retail positioning from large brokers. The names he gives for those client reports are ING and OANDA. His use of the retail number is the fade. Most retail traders lose, so he wants the other side. The live example is NZD/CAD the week before the interview. He had been long. About 90 percent of retail was short, and the pair was rising. Banks were bullish the New Zealand dollar after a hawkish RBNZ meeting, which he describes as the bank saying it wants to raise rates. Institutions were building longs. The Canadian dollar was weak. Strong versus weak, or weak versus strong, is the only pairing he wants. He does not look for a long in a currency he has already scored as weak.
The chart is the entry, and only the entry
On the day he shows a currency-strength board, the past seven days, and an economic calendar. The swing he had just taken was another NZD/CAD long. New Zealand's manufacturing PMI was falling, which he would score as a minus one, and it was still above 50, so not a disaster. Services PMI was rising. Consumer confidence was rising. Annual GDP growth was rising. The first layer still supported the currency. The last central bank meeting, which he places on 27 May at about 5:00 a.m., said they wanted to raise rates further, and the New Zealand dollar went up hard. Canada was the weak side. That is why the chart he opens is NZD/CAD, and why the trades the week before were longs.
The technical work is the one-hour chart, and it is supply and demand in the plain sense. A level that rejected, then broke, is likely to act as resistance on the way back. He is not stacking patterns. The direction already came from the fundamentals. Price rejects, breaks, returns, a bullish candle forms, and he enters. He does not use a limit. He wants to see the zone respected and momentum building before he is in. The stop is a volatility problem more than a line problem. Currencies have an average daily range, and he thinks most stops are too tight to let the market breathe. ATR is the measure. On this trade the stop needed to be at least 29 pips, so it sits below the zone and at least that far away. A trade from the prior week went to the target in one or two days. Many do not go directly, which is why the room exists.
The target is a fixed two to one. Markets, for him, alternate between phases, and the expansion after a range on this New Zealand dollar move was on the order of 60 pips. A fixed target lets him get out and enter again, which is what he says he did: one long, the gain, then another long. He told the host he would send the MT5 executions so the fills could be shown rather than described. The two-to-one is his preference, and he also says he likes to aim for at least two or three times risk, because a 33 percent win rate can still make money at that payoff. At one-to-one and a 50 percent win rate, winners the same size as losers, he expects no money.
He draws the central-bank meeting as a vertical line to show when the zones started meaning something. Before it, the picture was unclear, the zones did not really work, and volatility was dead. After the hawkish meeting the catalyst was there, pullbacks could be bought, and the zones held. Without a catalyst the market does nothing. Setups are probabilities. He does not need an exotic pattern once the fundamental direction and the catalyst are both present. Technical analysis, in his words, can be clean in the right environment and empty in the wrong one.
Where the same read travels, and what he wants tested first
He thinks the framework helps on gold, which he also trades and treats as a second safe-haven currency. Crude oil, in the months of the US-Iran headlines he cites, went through the roof and reacts hard to war news and to OPEC. The S&P and the Nasdaq are the same kind of problem once the instrument is defined. The S&P is the average price of 500 companies, and those prices need a macro environment in which the companies make gains. Gold, oil, the S&P, and currencies are linked to the economy. There is no holy grail. Analysis can be right and the timing wrong, and the stop is part of the game. The job is the analysis and the risk together: more money on the wins than on the losses.
What he thinks most traders miss is a statistical advantage, which he says can exist even in a coin flip and which they never establish. They try a strategy three, four, five times, lose, and switch. Everyone eventually has something they want to see before they enter. His advice is to backtest that thing before it is traded. Ten years of it working is a reason to assume it may work, not a certainty. Trading is speculation. He thinks most people are not built for it, because they want to be right and they will not accept a loss inside a game that requires losses. He is not against ICT, SMC, or any other named style. Any of them can work if the test says so. Copying a video and hoping is the failure. Educators who sell trading as quick money, with the cars and the watches, attract the wrong people. Money in trading, for him, requires an edge, the work, and capital. Nobody makes it from zero.
The two things that changed his own trading, once the logic was in place, were the backtest and the size of the risk. Losing weeks still happen. Five or six losses in a row that also showed up in a profitable historical test are easier to sit through. On the first 5,000 euros he was attached to the money. Risking an amount he is not attached to, his examples are $50 or $100 a trade, makes three or four losses less likely to become anger. Trust in a tested strategy, and risk small enough that the loss is not personal, are the two layers he names.
For someone who is not profitable, or who wants the next six months to be better, the first fix he offers is the test. Put the current rules through a backtest, in TradingView or MultiCharts or whatever will actually run them. He mentions ChatGPT or Claude as a way to help specify the test, not as a substitute for the result. If that exact framework was profitable over ten years, keep it, and stop hopping. If it was not, and there is no idea how to make one that is, then look at the fundamentals, the currencies, and the bank research. His own confidence sits where those agree: the banks support the idea, the data support the idea, and the position is against the retail crowd. The backtest is what makes a speculative income survivable over a long run. He has been doing that run for a decade, and he still describes it as not knowing what the market will do.