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.
Patrick Niel is introduced as a multiple-time world trading champion who ranked among the best five years in a row. The video title is cut off at "Patrick Ni," and the host says Niel. What he does on the chart is discretionary, slow, and built around one structure. He calls himself a real counter-trader. He likes doing the opposite of what normal people do. On his own portfolio he says he never risks more than 1 percent, so that whatever arrives does not crash him. The host's line, which Patrick does not argue with, is that the risk rule keeps him in the game and the strategy is the weapon, and that the strategy is simpler than a championship suggests.
One structure, then the profile
Hard work, for him, is doing the same thing all year, with an edge, and staying calm. The end of the year is when it shows. He also says hard work in the wrong direction is common. His first year was learning ten things and trading sometimes this and sometimes that, with no good results, because there was no direction. In his office five or six traders each trade differently, and he thinks those ways work. He is not claiming one family of method. Asked whether order flow or market structure can work if it is ruled, tested, and traded, he says perhaps not everything, and that there are many ways.
He is fully discretionary. He has to feel the market a little, and he still needs rules and a system. The model he sits down with is one he calls PBD, taken from traders around Thomas, also called Tom in the same conversation, who teaches it in an online academy the two of them are involved with. The host does not know the acronym. Patrick defines the letters he uses. P is a big impulse up, then a range. B is an impulse down, then a range. He looks for that sequence at a good zone, and then he trades. He does not trade the impulse itself. He trades after it. The range is where he waits to see whether price goes on or comes back, and a good range can be traded as ping-pong until it leaves. What happened in the days before the impulse is part of the read. The caption also says PVD and PPD. He never defines a D. The working picture is the impulse and the range that follows it.
On the DAX, over the prior days, he marks a large impulse, a range that lasts some days, a failed breakout that comes back into the range, and that range as his play area. He will look for a long if it returns toward a level he wants, and inside the range he looks for a short. Another impulse, which he attributes to Trump and which he does not like as a way to trade, because he calls Trump the biggest indicator at the moment, still left an impulse and a range he could use. At the time of the interview there was nothing. He was waiting for an old zone above, a short there, or a long at the level below.
The weekly market profile, volume-based, supplies value-area highs and lows, and he searches trades at those prices. The style of the profile tells him whether big players are in, whether it is moving fast, where it wants to go, and where it will speed up or slow down. Between two areas, in the example, "all are in freedom" and there is nothing to do. A move down into the next area goes faster, and the profile makes that visible quickly. It is not exact and it is not a grail. It shows where everyone is satisfied and where they are not, in seconds or minutes, which is how he decides the moment is worth a trade. If the impulse and the range sit on the same level as the profile, and he points at a spot that lines up with the value-area high, the location is better. Whether he takes the signal is then years of experience. The chart he actually trades is the 15-minute. When a trade is coming and he is at the screens, he looks at the footprint and the order flow. Not every time. He is often away, he says he is sometimes too lazy, and he is not as good at the order book as he would need to be for it to be the whole method. The footprint makes the entry more exact when he uses it.
Holds are not scalps. Normally about a day in the middle, and a range of about four hours to three days. He thinks a scalper can make more. A friend does about a hundred trades a day and, he says, last had a losing day three years ago. A hundred trades makes a positive day easier. Patrick might have five trades, or three, and all five can be losses. That is normal. People scalp because the gain shows up faster. He calls it complicated.
The stop has to exist before the size does
On an impulse like the ones he drew, the gain target is normally under the impulse. Most of the time price goes back to the beginning. The stop has several legal places: over the zone, in the middle, or somewhere behind the move where it makes sense, including where the volume sat in the last candles. It is not the same every time. It has to be chosen at the start, because without a stop there is no way to know how large the position should be, how many points are at risk, or whether the risk fits. Sometimes the entry looks right and he still skips it. That is experience. Something in the market feels wrong, he does not know exactly what, and he misses the trade.
On swings, his best results come when he does not manage the trade and leaves the original plan alone. If he is at the screens he will manage. In the example of a short toward a target, once price has traveled far he does not want to go back into a loss, and he thinks he would have been out earlier than the original target. Managing is not always the better choice.
He would not send a student to himself first. Thomas teaches the rules behind why the trade should be taken, and Patrick thinks learning the whole thing alone is very difficult. The mistake he would warn against is not understanding all the rules. He also says there is no single number-one mistake, and that the model is not that complicated. Better and worse ways to use it exist. Perfection is unnecessary. A few percent more or less on the year matters less than being profitable. Psychology matters because a trader who does not feel right stops using the rules and skips trades he should take. Patrick is calm and thinks that makes it easier. His students have real trouble with it. When the pressure is too much he closes the markets and leaves. If it is bad enough he goes out with his children, and the next day is a new start.
One percent, and the day oil went negative
He tries to be flat into large news. He does not interpret the calendar. That is too much work, and someone on the team does it for them. He prefers not to be in the market when the big decisions land. He also thinks a trader can ignore fundamentals and still succeed on technicals. The value-area high from two weeks earlier is the example. Price stopped on it even though the headline was an Iran peace story and Trump. The technical level worked. He still does not like being in when those decisions are coming.
The difference between the Robbins World Cup and his own money is the risk. His own money exists once, so he is serious with it. A competition, he says, needs at least 100 or 200 percent before anyone sees you, so the risk there is larger. On his own book the risk might be 0.2 percent. His win rate is 50 to 60 percent, and he sometimes takes 10 to 20 losses in a row. He does not want that drawdown on personal capital. In the competition the risk management allows two or three percent a trade, because the point is to run fast. He would not trade the competition size as if it were the big personal money.
The rule that saved him is the one percent cap on his own portfolio. He has broken it. Two or three times in his life, on hard days, and he lost each time. The trade that installed the rule was oil during COVID. He is an oil trader. In the war context he mentions, oil had been over 120. During COVID it was at 40, then 30, then 20. At 15 and 13 they bought a lot, because they thought the worst was seven or eight. Cars still need oil, and someone has to produce it. The same day it fell to eight and they bought more. They thought they were about to be rich. It fell to five and they closed with a very large loss. Oil then went to minus 42. Buyers were paid to take it. They had not known a negative price was possible. They thought the maximum risk was a return to zero, and zero would have been acceptable. Minus 40, on many contracts, would have crashed the accounts. Things happen on an exchange that you have not imagined, and the rule still applies on the day you think this time is different. He is glad he was there for it, because the lesson stuck. The host notes that oil is not supposed to trade below zero, and that this was the first time it had.
What a test is for, and what a beginner should ignore
Best days and worst days are not a different method. The worst ones start when he is not right internally, then two losses arrive, and one leads to the next. If he is nervous or not well, he cannot trade. A skilled trader who keeps destroying progress should write it down. A journal, a hard look at what is good and what is not, then more of the good and none of the bad. Only trade the good things.
He backtested heavily when he started, and he still tests a new idea. Without a test he is blind. Sometimes the test is the live market with a little money, because a paper test does not feel real and a small real loss does. What he wants from a backtest is not a spectacular result. He wants to know it still worked five years ago. Plenty of strategies work for some months and then collapse. Consistency is the thing he is looking at. He does not want a drawdown bigger than 10 percent. Bigger than 20 percent and the strategy is not for him. Twenty percent is the maximum he and the people around him say you can live with. The recovery arithmetic is the reason. A 20 percent drawdown needs 25 percent to get back to zero. A 50 percent drawdown needs 100 percent. He has been in a 20 percent drawdown in the world championship, and on the private account a long time ago. Recovery was trading the same way. Changing the method inside the drawdown is available only if you do not actually know the strategy, and then the hole gets bigger.
There is no holy grail, and he would trust almost nobody, because the market is full of people who say they know everything and are the best. Find a way, stay calm, and trade. Beginners, in his experience, think they must understand the entire exchange. That is how someone ends up lost in twenty or thirty strategies. What he wants instead is what he calls trader DNA. He is slow and he fades. A teammate is a very good scalper, and that pace is too much for Patrick. The fit is whatever you feel good doing. Progress, for someone new, is hard to see at first. Losses that are not so large, reviews, and a check that the rules were actually followed. It comes with time. His last image is a Tom Cruise interview he likes, the one where the work is described as learning to crawl, then walk, then jog, then run, then sprint, and only later the cliffs. Patrick's version is that he also started from zero, and the rule is not to quit, and to take the next step. Two months and some videos do not make the best trader in the world.