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.
Hendrik is 19. A little over a year before this session he was washing dishes in an Irish bar in The Hague, and the host says that in the month before the interview he earned over $30,000 in payouts and gains. The caption also calls him Henrik and Henry. He has been invited onto the desk the host calls Germany's team, Trade the Traders. He translates the month into the work it replaced: two years of seven-day weeks at sixteen hours, and he says he has only been at that intensity for about the last eight months. He set other things aside and lost what he had to get there. The strategy under the story is a volume profile drawn every morning, a stop small enough to carry real size, and a willingness to be wrong several times so that one trade can finish the day. Nothing in it is advice.
One percent, then the computer is off
He does not believe in a single click that changed him. The line he uses is that the person you want to be is six months of hard effort away. There are shortcuts. Nothing replaces working on the right things with the right people, and he includes luck in that. Two ingredients, for most people. Someone who has already made the mistakes, a friend or a mentor, because a rule against the error that ends a career is worth more than discovering it. And the humiliation of actually doing the thing. He can be told not to. He does not fully believe it until the market brutalizes him once. A daily loss limit is the example. He held it every day for a year or a year and a half. The one time he went through it was catastrophic. Worse, in his view, is breaking the rule and having it work. That is a positive result attached to a negative habit, and it continues until it closes the account.
The rule came from both places. The people at Trade the Traders, and specifically Carsten, whom the caption also calls Karsten, the swing trader and the longer-term macro voice on that desk. Carsten took him on, showed him the basics, and gave him the number. One percent is the risk for the day. The aim is 2 to 3 percent. Past 1 percent, something has clouded the judgment, the trade can look perfect, and it is irrelevant. The computer goes off.
Before any order, he wants the larger bias. He quotes the idea that the market can stay illogical longer than a trader can stay liquid, and he attributes it to Warren Buffett. Fighting a large bull or bear move might produce one or two small trades. It will not produce the position that runs for days, a week, or months. The trend is how a small winner becomes a large one. After a sharp Nasdaq correction he spent the first week looking only for shorts. When it found a bottom he called a long, and if the evidence said the move was the longer one, he wanted to keep it. Identifying that direction is two looks. Price, or the volume profile: higher highs and higher lows, a range, or a decline, whatever precedent the market has already set. And the geopolitical state, which means about an hour a day of news until the picture is familiar enough that maintaining it is less work. A Sunday on which Iran and the United States, in his words, shook hands was visible in advance as a positive Monday. The Nasdaq that day made something like 3 percent. The session to look for was longs, left to run, with a real chance of a 3, 4, or 5 percent day. That read is experience, not a mechanical rule. He draws a hypothesis from the news. A headline about Thailand and Cambodia preparing for a war, last summer, becomes a question of who sells them weapons. He names Northrop Grumman and Saab, and then which chart looks more attractive.
The news he will trade is the long kind, days and weeks and months, where the conclusion is one-sided. A war involving Iran heating up is, for him, positive, with no second reading. CPI, and government prints that require an interpretation, are a coin flip. He trades for a living and he still gets out. If he can see the event coming, he closes. The exception is a position already far enough in gain that a violent print cannot do more than a normal adverse move. He does not recommend it. The week before, a Nasdaq contract was on through CPI, the number was bullish, and it worked. Playing the event itself is still something he walks away from.
Seventy percent of yesterday, drawn before the open
The platform is Sierra Chart. He also likes ATS. The first act, every morning, for more than two years, on every market he trades, is the volume profile. If he skips it he does not feel ready. It tells him where he even wants to look. He calls each distribution a mountain. In German, a Volumenberg. Green profiles are outside the cash session. The others are the cash session. On the Nasdaq that is about 3:30 Central European Time to 10:00, when the American session is the volume. Green, after 10:00 until about 3:30 in the afternoon, is Asia and London. He looks at those for extra information and he does not draw them. The cash profile is the work.
The market repeats because it is people, and people repeat. On yesterday's cash profile he marks the value-area high and the value-area low. Inside them, 70 percent of that day's volume traded. That is where the market was stable and where a hedge fund or a pension can put size on without the price running away, which is the participant he cares about. Decisions have already been made at those boundaries. In the profile on screen, price came to the high twice and was shoved back, and it came to the low and refused lower prices. He draws both. If price returns, the market has to accept higher prices or lower ones, and he watches which. Volume drying at the high, people selling, is a decent chance of a reversal down. The same at the low, with buyers present, is a chance of a reversal up. Volume expanding as price leaves, sellers engaged, is a decent chance of a break and another cycle. A break of structure through the value-area high or low, accepted, is likely to continue. These are observation, not a probability model. He was taught the zones by Carsten. Tom and Patrick, he says, have done this for decades, each in their own way.
The red line is the volume point of control, and he wants it exact, because price reacts at the specific level. It is the price with the most volume. He starts to say the most time as well, and corrects himself. Not necessarily the most time. The most buys and sells. A rejection at the value-area high that falls into the point of control is another place where yesterday's participants may still be adding or closing, so liquidity and a new decision show up there. The blue line is a single print. The market went through a price and did not come back inside the day. His illustration is a stock at 100 dollars that runs to 110 and then ranges. The gap between them was traveled quickly. Large participants did not get time to decide whether they were happy there, or to hide size behind someone else. On this profile the single print is long-side strength. The market sometimes repairs a single print. If it does, the aggressive buyers who were there have a high chance, in his reading, of still being there, and the bullish continuation is the likely next step. Those three objects are the profile. Low-volume single prints. High-volume points of control. The value area, which is the 70 percent.
He rates the routine an eight out of ten. He can function without it, and he does not think everyone needs it. He also takes trades that last ten or twenty seconds. The zones are what grow the account, because they are where he will hold. A short-term position with size, taken at a point where he is willing to stay if it goes, does not need to be closed just because it is working. The zone is the psychological backing. That is how a day becomes 20 percent instead of 2 or 3. Get the location, get the leverage, and let it run.
On the morning in front of them, Asia went up and came down and built some volume. The single print has been repaired. Buyers accumulated and price shot back above the value area. A retest of value is possible, and then another decision. Yesterday was strong. His sentiment for longer trades is entirely bullish. He copies the prices onto the execution chart by hand. The spoken digits are messy. He calls out 9,097, then a lower boundary he works through 37, 3,048, 25, and 38, and a point of control at 50, marked red. Later the book is trading around 30,950, so those callouts are the fragments he is reading off the screen, not a clean ladder of Nasdaq prices. What is clean is the sequence he then sees in the reactions. Through the point of control, a pullback, back up. Above the value area, a decision for lower prices, back down. The point of control acts as resistance, then buyers, then acceptance above value with higher lows and higher highs. That is the image for the day. He does not execute it on the 30-minute chart. He goes to the one-minute.
Three contracts, a two-hundred-dollar stop, and four places to hide it
The how is price action at the swings, plus the book. Candles can be time, or they can be movement. His example of the second kind is a candle every 40 moves up or down. The DOM is the price moving now. Level one, which he pays for, is where the market is. Level two, which costs more, is the resting limits. Around 30,950, the blue numbers below the price are people willing to buy there. Above the price, people willing to sell. A limit that gets filled is an aggressive order, someone who wants to be in now. A liquidity shelf can stop the market. He watches volume and speed into it. If price breaks and volume and speed increase, that is the breakout. If price reaches the shelf, slows, and volume falls, that is the counter. He wants to be able to argue both sides and then take the one that is more likely. A slow, low-volume approach is not a breakout he wants, and it is exactly the counter. The German for it, as he says it, is either or.
The stop is the part he credits the prop firm with forcing him to place properly. If the stop fits, the position is more likely to survive, and a tight stop is what lets him use size. On a $100,000 account he can risk 0.5 percent. He will not risk 0.5 percent, or $500, on one position. Slippage, or a stop a tick off, needs a buffer. The strategy is the leverage. About three Nasdaq contracts is a lot on that account, and $500 disappears quickly, so the stop has to be very tight. He finds the idea on the Nasdaq or the S&P. He only enters when that stop makes sense. He will say it more strongly than that. Even if he does not know where the trade is going, a stop that makes sense is enough to enter, because the chance it holds is high, and the size he can carry is the point. If the market makers are deciding at a level and the stop under that decision is tight, he wants the leverage.
Countertrading is the low-probability version. He starts to say he lost sixty-six trades and corrects it. Six positions in a row, last Thursday, each stop about $200. About $1,000 gone. The one that worked made $2,200, and he was done. The win rate is low and the win is large. Six losses in a row is one of the bad days. Often the first trade is the one that pays and the day is over. The other half is not closing a winner because it feels scary. If nothing has spoken against the position, it runs.
He usually does not have a price target on the prop account. The target is the daily goal. If he wants $3,000, which is the 3 percent on the $100,000 account, every trade's target is whatever is left to get there. It can be $1,000 or $2,000 instead. He has to believe the trade will get there, and he has to be aggressive with the stop, pulling it to every area that appears. If the market takes him out, he is out. One trade can be the day. Two or three losers and one winner is a successful session. Last Tuesday he had two funded accounts, both about $100,000. He sat down around 8:30, spent half an hour drawing, and at 9:00, the London open in Germany, the market went up and came back to the point of control. He took the counter and made $1,200. That account was finished. It came back to the point of control and he made another $1,200. The leverage is why one trade is enough, and it is dangerous. It works, for him, because the stops are tiny next to the winners. The largest winner he can remember on the account was about $5,800, five Nasdaq contracts, stops very tight, and he let that one run back toward the daily high. Until it appears, the job is to stay inside the daily loss limit. Every counter or breakout whose stop is tight enough gets taken. Five, six, seven, or ten failures are acceptable if the one that works pays for them and finishes the day.
The stop itself has four homes. A high-volume node on the profile of the candles, which he will inspect on a five-minute chart and then narrow. High volume is resistance, the same idea as the point of control, and he can hide both a stop and a target behind it. A swing low, the lowest price of the movement, including the open of a candle. He cares about the open. A marubozu, a candle with no wick above or below, is a price the market reacts to, and the stop can sit beyond that open. Last, the footprint of the current candle. A cluster of active buyers, then nothing, is a place to hide the stop. Those are the four. The rest of the day is the same decision, repeated at the next shelf.
He does not want the result compared with a person who had his setup. Two years with traders he calls Germany's best, one of them a world champion. Months and years of that, the equipment, and parents' house, so a day without a gain still came with food and a roof. He started in a room with two monitors and no idea what he was doing. All of that had to line up. The only question he thinks is worth asking is how long someone is willing to wait. The second correction is the number. A successful retail trader is someone who makes money. He says 85 percent of the people who try lose. Ten thousand, thirty thousand, or a hundred thousand a month is not the definition. Maximal input can produce maximal output, and it is not a promise. He describes two years of sixteen-hour days and the dishes. The average American salary, as he states it, is about $33,000. A hundred, two hundred, or three hundred dollars a day is a paycheck and a job with freedom. If the effort is not the maximum, the output should not be expected to be. The people worth learning from, in his test, have results that can be checked. Patrick, at the company, has finished in the top three eleven times and has been world champion twice. Hendrik treats that as settled. The other test is whether they treat the work as a job. He thinks he could cut himself to two hours, 3:30 to 5:30, the window with the most liquidity, and keep something like half, or 30 to 50 percent, of what he makes. That is the job. It is not the version in which the money arrives without the hours.