Product Description
Interview: Bo Yoder by Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan
Bo Yoder is a professional trader, author, and consultant to the
financial industry on matters of trading and risk management. He is a
frequent contributor to domestic and international trading publications,
and also writes for RealMoney.com, Technical Analysis of
STOCKS & COMMODITIES, Traders, and Active Trader magazines. In
addition, Yoder publishes the Easy Forex Course at easyforexcourse.com,
is a featured speaker internationally at seminars and industry expos,
and continues to work with individuals and market professionals on
matters of risk management and trader development. His latest book,
Mastering Futures Trading, was published by McGraw-Hill in 2004.
S&C Editor Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan interviewed Yoder on January
18, 2007, via telephone interview.
BO, how did you get interested
in trading?
About 1995–96, I was
working as a cross-country ski instructor during the winter, and
I bought a few shares of stock in the
company that my father worked for. At
the end of the skiing season I had actually
made more money on the stock —
knowing nothing about the stock market
— than I did working my job in the
cold. That got me interested in the financial
markets.
What did you do?
I started reading a lot of the standard
investment information — Graham-
Dodd, Warren Buffett, those sorts of
investing-type tomes. I learned a lot
about SEC forms and actually did an
internship in a money management firm
working in the research department,
where I learned how the market ignores
fundamentals sometimes and rewards
either bad business plans or no business
plans. That was the beginning of the
Internet bubble. I started to learn more
about trading versus speculation versus
investment. I became a disciple of the
quote from George Soros — the one
that goes, “The way to make money in
the market is to find a trend that is based
on a false premise and to ride that trend
until just before it is disproven.” You can go back and look at a lot
of the crazes we have seen,
everything from oil to the
tech bubble. The Krispy
Kreme case is one of my favorites.
At one time I believe
it had a bigger market cap
than GE.
I think you may be right!
So you can find some markets
that become maniacal.
There is a lot of money to be
made in those trends because
they are based on emotion and greed and fear rather than fundamentals.
The reality is fundamentals
don’t change quickly, whereas perceptions
do. So that was my transformation
from investor to trader. During the last
five, six, seven years I’ve been trading
full time. I started off mostly in stocks
and then moved to futures, and most
recently I have been trading almost exclusively
in the currency markets.