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.
Robert Rother is a VWAP scalper the host introduces as someone who started at 13, built a hedge fund that managed over $156 million, and now trades about a million and a half of funded capital across more than twenty prop accounts. He has been in the industry about thirty years, including building the kind of execution algorithms he now trades against. The session is the strategy on the chart and one live attempt. Nothing in it is offered as advice. The fill that eventually prints is a one-minute scalp he describes as what he does every day.
The niche is one sentence
Asked whether a determined trader can get rich, he says yes, the way any craft works. Time, persistence, and the right connections. By setup he does not mean a pattern. He means the people, the companies, and the partners. Confidence in a discretionary method, once losses arrive, starts with comfort. The strategy has to match the character. He is a scalper. Holding three or four hours is difficult for him. Other traders can do it. There are strategies he could never trade.
A losing streak, for most people he watches, forgets the volatility index. At a VIX of 15 he can trade the strategy well and even increase size. Above 20 there is a lot of fear. The strategy is not wrong. The stop and the target have to be adjusted. Those distances are thirty years of experience, and they are no longer only in his head. Every trade and every market comment from his daily live sessions goes into a database, Claude in his description, with about three years of actual data since he started collecting it. The database tells him how to adjust size and the take-gain. The failure mode he names for everyone else is switching strategies at the first losing series, which means they never find out which idea worked. His own idea, in one sentence, is that he detects when algorithms are going to buy and sell. Not more, not less.
On a challenge he calls himself an extreme gambler. He knows his odds and he does not want to waste time, which in that phase is more expensive to him than money. He will go all in to pass a batch of accounts. The VWAP method is used there too. Once the accounts are funded, the job changes to consistency, because a home run followed by a wiped day is not what produces a payout. The same gain, as close to every day as the market allows, is what he thinks the firm wants and what lets the firm make money. Stops and targets stay tight. He is not trying to force a payout in the next two or three days. Sometimes it takes a month. Sometimes ten days. If he tries to influence that by getting aggressive, he loses.
Three averages, then the book
The concept on the chart is simple. He is a VWAP trader. Price moves away from the average and comes back, and he trades the reaction. The day he draws is a Thursday with no large trend, a sideways tape, and a fair-value area around the yellow line. That line is the day VWAP. It starts at midnight European time, 6:00 p.m. Eastern, when the electronic session opens, and it is the one he cares about most. The green line is the London VWAP, from the London open, which he likes for European traders working the pre-session. The third is the US session VWAP, from regular trading hours. He does not have a rule that picks one in advance. The day VWAP is the strongest in principle because a VWAP is price weighted by volume, and more volume and more price make it stronger. Each one still has a different job, and the job is visible. Which line price actually stops at, or pulls back from, can change by the day, and it changes with whether the tape is sideways or directional. In an uptrend the day VWAP is usually the strongest, and sometimes there is no pullback to get in on. If he cannot see which line is being respected, he is not ready. A sideways Europe, a range with no action, is a day he does not like and does not treat as an A+ environment. He does not trade those.
The next screen is Bookmap. On the ES, green is buy limits and red is sell limits, and the interest is wherever those stack. The day is boring. A level he points at on the upside has some interest. Higher up there is not much. Then a larger order appears, a red line of over 600 lots. Not huge, in his scale, and large enough to ask the question he actually trades. Is that liquidity going to sit there because algorithms will try to fill it, or will it be pulled? Pulling it, he says, is called spoofing. It is illegal under exchange rules and difficult to prove. The point of pulling it is to move the price. Algorithms read the book, see size, and travel toward it. If the size disappears, his usual observation is that the liquidity reappears a little lower, and price follows it down. He will not claim he knows the large player's intention. He does say it is another institution. While he is talking, more orders appear and price is already leaning down toward them.
A daily-timeframe trader, he says, does not have to care. He is short-term, so he does. If he knows someone is trying to push price to a level, a long he might have taken in the area below that push would be wrong. On the tape above, liquidity was put in, price came up, and the liquidity was taken out. He calls that a spoof. He would not buy above the lower liquidity while that is happening. As the host is asking, the liquidity disappears and price goes down. He says they did not stage it. He skips the trade because he does not know the intention, they have a plan, and they have more money than he does. Six hundred lots is a size he cannot pull. What he sees next is liquidity appearing, price walking down into it, and the liquidity being taken. He calls that manipulation in its clearest form.
Liquidity is the most important thing on the book. The US session VWAP is on the same screen. If the market went to that price he would consider a short. There does not have to be a special Bookmap signal for the short to exist. Liquidity sitting at the VWAP is a stronger confirmation, and after thirty years his conclusion is to take the trade and not think about it. The reason the liquidity matters is that it is interest already there. Sell limits stacked at the VWAP, with price coming up into it, can feed the small pullback he wants. Algorithms know their competitors. They often do not rest the order in advance. They send it, usually a market order, when price is actually at the level. His own order in the example is a sell limit at the VWAP, and then he waits. Trading, for him, is boring. He builds Lego, and he has a large collection. One eye on the chart.
The first touch, then the copy
He will cancel the limit. If price is two or three ticks from his order and the pullback has already started, the order comes off. The second or third touch is not an A+ setup. It can still be taken. The risk of a loss is higher. The first touch is the one he wants. He has no fixed number of ticks that resets the count and makes the next touch a new first touch. If, in this case, the market comes up toward something like 65 or 63.5, he considers that a test. It is discretion. Fixed numbers, he says, never worked for him. A data analyst might get something out of them. If the market reaches 64 and then falls to 61, the pullback he wanted has already happened without him, and he was unlucky. There is not much else to the strategy.
The account he calls the master is the smallest size. A trade syncer copies it across platforms and multiplies it, two contracts or three or four, according to the balance. Private accounts and prop accounts get the same trade. He likes 50K accounts because the target is $3,000 and the drawdown is $2,500, which he thinks is a better ratio than a 150K account with a different target and a different loss rule. He is blunt that firms use those differences to make money, and he picks the option that is most valuable to him. Once a 50K account's trailing threshold has locked and the stop is fixed, he will get more aggressive and scale. He seldom maxes the size. A maximum day tends to break the consistency rule, either as a big win or a big loss. He thinks in daily gain per account, not in a target number of contracts. Right now that gain is about $250 a day on a single 50K. He can be in twenty or thirty of them. If it does not work, the loss is the fee. The rules still have to be read, because payout rules, consistency rules, and stop rules are not the same firm to firm. A $5,000 gain on a 50K often cannot be withdrawn as $5,000. Mostly, he says, something like $2,000. Even $2,000 is not his target. At a gain of $500 or $1,000 he applies for the payout. He thinks from payout to payout. Traders who fall in love with an account and want to make it big are, for him, doing it wrong. Blow it, open another, and do not take it personally. Strange moves come out of nothing. Slippage on a sweep can fill at something like double the planned stop. Since the Iran headlines he has cut the usual three or four contracts to one or two. The slippage still happens. It is bad luck, it is unavoidable in this style, and the preparation is the smaller size.
He seldom closes before the target or the stop. A bad feeling, and he reduces the loss. If the pullback is not fast enough, he will take what is there. There is no fixed rule. Price chopping around VWAP is the example he does not like. He wants a quick move in and a quick move out. The limit in the example sits slightly under the VWAP because the average is moving, and he moves the order by hand. They have also built tools that fire automatically, and the first version was a disaster. Price touched VWAP and the software took something like a hundred executions in a millisecond, one contract per touch, and the accounts were blown. That was a programming mistake. Automating the idea has been tried for years, with a lot of money, and it has not worked. The market is sometimes sideways and sometimes trending, and detecting which one is present was the failure. A system cannot understand the environment. On a past chart the distinction looks easy. Predicting it, he says, is impossible. He does want to avoid a range with this particular strategy. A trend, a pullback to VWAP, and a continuation is the trade. Classifying the range is a bet. A previous high, a previous low, and price that is not making higher highs and higher lows, or the mirror to the downside, and he will sell the high and buy the low. In a trend he waits for one direction and enters when it returns to the average.
An anchor for the funds that are not scalping
He does look at the daily and the hourly, ordinary chart work, to know where the market is. On TradingView he anchors a VWAP from a low. Price trails above it, touches it, and he reads new buyers there. The three session VWAPs are every day. The anchors go on certain highs and lows that define a trend. Above that line, the trend is long. A return to the area is where buyers have shown up. He agrees that execution algorithms use VWAP as a benchmark for a fair fill. He also says an anchored VWAP from a turning point gets the same respect, in a trend, and that the algorithms calculate those anchors across the market. A pension fund or a hedge fund is not in the day-trading business. They think in months and years, so a longer VWAP is how they look for an entry, not only how they get a fill. His example is an instruction to buy 100,000 shares and the question of what price is fair. At the VWAP, the algorithm treats the price as fair. The session VWAP is the usual reference for that execution. The longer anchor is the one he is talking about for the funds that are not trying to scalp.
The live short never fills. He pulls the order. Liquidity on the downside, and another block he first calls fake and then corrects: it was in the market, and they took it out, in a way that looks like they want price a little lower. On a larger view the question is whether the low, around the level he marks, can be taken out. In a range he likes to buy the low. He is a second late. He puts himself in front of the liquidity, wants the sweep, and wants the pullback. The entry is the deep concentration, sitting at what the host calls a swing low. They take the liquidity and the market turns. He would have placed the order one tick lower, at the liquidity, and price is already going. He wants to be part of that liquidity because that is where the business is. Buyers and sellers meet, they exchange, and when everybody is filled the market can turn. There is no assurance. Nothing is showing below. Maybe the liquidity just gets taken, both sides are done, and more liquidity appears again at 32. What is on the screen is more than the other levels and it is not, for him, a lot. Two thousand lots would be a lot. This is 140 or 150, at 5:40 p.m. Central European time, which is not when the market makes large moves. The correction is already underway. People buy lows because they think it might be the bottom. The other reading is mechanical. Retail stops sit under a low. Other participants wait for those stops, buy into the cascade, and get the liquidity. A transaction still needs a counterpart. He wants to buy and does not get the chance. He wants to sell and does not get it. The work is waiting. Normally this is Lego, or his community. He is not joking about the bricks. They keep him busy, he is still on the chart, and it is how he stays relaxed.
Boring on purpose, and a one-minute fill
Simple is the instruction. What he is showing is thirty years, including as a hedge fund manager, of knowing where to look. Most traders, he says, have never heard of it. He is lazy, he does not like complication, and he trades to make money rather than for enjoyment. Indicators, theories, and stories, in his view, are the search for a holy grail by people who are gambling. They will not find it. They also forget to ask who they are. He will ask whether they trade futures and whether they can explain a futures contract, and he expects the pause. He wrote a beginner's guide to the contracts on the CME, which news matters, and which front month, because metals and energies are not the same listing. He says he put at least three years of his own material into Claude and let it write. He copies the result out.
He will not take the early trade on his own funded account. The laptop in front of the camera is not his office. In the office he would be doing the live session with his community, answering questions, feeding the same database, and watching five or six markets, which he cannot do here. The important act is still waiting. If day trading feels exciting, his advice is the casino, Las Vegas, poker, dice, and then come back. Trading has to become boring before it is a living. It took him a couple of years to accept that. He was lucky at the start. At 13 he inherited money from his father, became known young in Germany in the 1990s, and two partners arrived. He left school, moved to Frankfurt, and was taught the investment business rather than a setup: how to run a hedge fund, how to manage accounts, how to run private equity. He sold his shares, moved to China, and did it again at a different scale, up to the $156 million. The market, while he is telling that, turns before his entry. Liquidity builds higher, gets rejected, gets pulled, and price goes up into the next pocket. It is August. July and August, on the island where he lives, are tourists and people not working. A lot of retail, he thinks, is on holiday too. The uncomfortable trader sees the move and has to be in it. That is where the performance gets damaged, even if the account survives. The upside does not bother him. It makes him tired. The idea was right. The fill was not there. Close, then a full reverse, and he calls the day unlucky. Chasing is the addiction. His suggestion, which he means, is to spend the need to gamble somewhere else so these moves can be ignored.
The next opportunity is still the same area, and they are in the middle of nowhere. He does have VWAP deviation bands. Sideways bands mean a sideways market. Bands that spread, one up and one down, mean a trend is starting and volatility is coming in. He sometimes trades the bands as a pullback zone. It is not an A+ setup. More risk, and it can pay, depending on the style. He does not use them as targets or as stops.
Then the order fills. He waits for the take-gain and the pullback. The liquidity has been taken. The question is whether the market continues down or comes back. He will not close early. He has tried to manage this trade in a number of ways, and interfering with it never improved the result. The target prints. He can time it. They started at the level he marked and closed at 56, in one minute. That is the trade. On the account he can show, a funded account the caption renders as Bulinox, the result is $275. He describes that as $275 on every 50K account, and he is talking about on the order of twenty of them. The host cannot see the rest. The minute is the method he is willing to repeat: be patient, do the same thing, and do not take the trade that did not reach the order.