Interview with contest winners. Mechatronics engineer from India talks about risk management and scalping

The winner of the 392nd round of Drag Trade lives in India, works as a mechatronics engineer and has been trading on financial markets for about five years. Pongurlekar Sunand Sudhir told us how beginners should polish their skills, what strategies should be used with scalping and how to choose a broker.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, how old are you, where do you work?

I am a 27-year-old engineer with graduation in Bachelor of Engineering Mechatronics. My work is related to automation and robotics, I have to calibrate machines to work in the desired manner with the help of computer programming.

How did you start trading? How did it all begin?

I started with Forex trading during my final year of studying engineering so I have been around the world of Forex for about 4–5 years. I started Forex trading when I looked at the volatility in Forex market during major economic data releases. I found this volatility as an opportunity to place trades. Initially, I started with a demo account and have been participating in many contests including those conducted by Grand Capital for more than 3 years. It is only last year that I started trading on live accounts so I am still a novice when it comes to trading on real accounts.

How popular is trading in India?

Forex trading was somewhat less popular in my country when I began 5 years back. However, nowadays there is more awareness about Forex trading in India and many brokers are offering local bank deposit/withdrawal option at competitive exchange rates to Indian customers. Many international brokers have their partners and IBs in India and even some have opened up offices in India.

How did you learn to trade?

I learned to trade from reading technical analysis books, technical analysis research of analysts, watching Youtube videos and attending seminars organized by brokers.

As a novice trader, I experienced a lot of problems with risk management and placing stop losses to exit losing trades. As a result, I believe that the paramount factor in Forex trading is how to manage your losses.

What’s your trading style? What strategies do you use?

The volatility is my best friend. My trading style is scalping and news trading during important economic data releases. My prime trading strategy involves scalping and using technical tools such as moving averages, Bollinger bands, MACD and Fibonacci levels on short-term charts like 1m, 5m, 15m. I believe in cutting my losses as quickly as possible and never average the trades.

What are your favorite trading instruments?

I prefer to trade mainly major Forex pairs such as EURUSD, GBPUSD, USDJPY, USDCAD, AUDUSD and EURGBP. I believe they have the best liquidity and as a result the tightest spreads of all the asset classes which is important while scalping.

What do you look at when choosing a broker?

I mainly look out for tight spreads, faster execution of trades, no hassle in deposit/withdrawal of funds, security of funds and lastly, local bank deposit/withdrawal option for Indian customers. In fact, I opted Grand Capital for the local bank deposit/withdrawal option. Also, I admire the way Grand Capital organizes contests regularly.

What are your impressions of Grand Capital contests?

As I said earlier, I like demo contests and moreover, your Drag Trade contest is a high reward contest as the winner stands a chance to win a prize in a duration of only 1 hour. Drag Trade contest offers high initial capital of USD 100 000 so even if you make few losses then also you can recover and come back.

What piece of advice can you provide for beginners?

Lastly, I am myself a novice trader but if there was one piece of advice I would give to rookie traders than it would be "Do not worry about your profits but restrict your losses to a minimum and the profits will follow".

I would like to conclude by saying only this quote "The world of Forex is very fickle so our job is not to reason why, but our job is to only sell and buy".

P.S. Learn the contest rules and sign-up for the next round here.