Frequently Asked Questions

1. What qualities do you possess that will act as a catalyst to your success as an intra-day or end of day trader?

2. If you are already trading professionally, how much capital are you trading? What were your last two years of net earnings?

3. Describe your current philosophy / methodology.

4. What is the largest capital loss you have taken? What did you do after taking this loss?

5. What has been your largest capital gain in a single trade and over the course of a year?

6. Briefly describe the largest calculated risks you have taken in your life and/or career. If your coming into trading from a long term salaried position then have you reconciled the fact that your now in a performance & probability based business?

Protege Class enrollment requires approval by Alexander. The traders that come into the class need to have some basic behavioral & personality traits to succeed in our view, and it is our intention to place those traders together in the small group environment.

Here is a link to a presentation made in September 2009:

http://www.screencast.com/t/mn4T0724

It is our opinion that a page full of text with comments from clients does not suffice to answer any legitimate questions. Our training process stands alone with regards to quality, duration, intensity and personal monitoring. Our time is not spent hiring salespeople, but working on screen with our firm traders and clients. Your best bet to read reviews is to go ahead and use Google. Alexander Tzavaras has worked with many professional traders over the past four years, and a few have been kind enough to write objective reviews of their time and investment in the Protege Class. These are your peers in this industry, and all the reviews have been performed by experience professionals that have achieved much in their own careers. These are not reviews by a new trader that may not have the necessary experience.

All traders that qualify to trade with the company under an employment contract will have a specific statistical breakdown done based upon their results from the training or current trading. The statistics will help to project drawdown duration and depth for custom position sizing and risk management protocol.

There will be no fixed dollar loss boundaries under the agreement, but instead you know in advance all the details of your risk levels namely, daily percentage drawdown and maximum monthly percentage drawdown. All traders will maintain low levels of overall portfolio risk by focusing on the disciplined trading that earned the position to trade professionally.

The profit split agreement dictates the percentage of weekly and monthly that the trader takes home. Currently we have five levels for each trader to work through with each level increasing the percentage split to the trader. This is designed to maintain the incentive to perform at a high level. Company benefits are potentially available to traders after at least one quarter with the company.

Yes, risk control is the foundation to trading success irrespective of your skillset and methodology. Speculators, market makers, arb traders must all manage risk to survive and prosper over their career.

You will learn a new way to view the markets from a technical structure standpoint, but the foundation is based upon controlling the risk within the limits of each individual trader while minimizing overall risk in each sector and your total portfolio. You will learn a powerful position sizing algorithm to correctly size your positions in any set up and in any market.

Absolutely. You will be able to trade any liquid market in your portfolio utilizing the same technical structure and set ups. Trading multiple instruments is an excellent way to move through markets to locate the sector that may be providing a higher level of volatility for a directional trade.

We will be focusing on a small portfolio of futures markets in the Protégé Class covering the Indicies, Treasuries, Energies and Currencies. Our intra-day focus will be primarily on the indicies (ES as primary contract). Be careful when using a system or method that specializes in certain markets and/or has arbitrary fixed values for stops and targets. Your method must be robust to succeed year in and year out, and any good trader should know when to break rules based on market conditions. No black box software program will provide a substitute for becoming a trader.

No. The only software you will need is a charting platform such as Tradestation, Esignal, Ninjatrader, Ensign among others. We can arrange a free simulation with a broker utilizing a front-end that provides charting.

Our focus is price, volatility and risk studying technical structure. Technical indicators are not inherently flawed, but the trader utilizing such tools must be able to understand the context of the set up in the market before placing any such trade. Popular oscillators such as the MACD, Stochastics and RSI will not make up for technical weaknesses in your trading ability.

This is a very important question. Experience has taught that those who are currently in highly volatile situations will have a lower probability of successful trading. Some examples could be poor health, financial peril or a divorce. You must commit the time and effort necessary to learn the behavioral and technical skills of a successful trader.

This question can be answered with a litany of information as there are many sub-topics inside of the generals information covered. I would certainly advise that each trader watch the link to a recent webinar in the FAQ section for more details.

First, the Protege Class is a multi-quarter to multi-year training process designed to build an expertise in price structuring. We focus solely on price action as all technical traders must become experts in analyzing data sets. From Price Structure alone we can quantify directional bias in both sideways and trending markets, what zones/levels constitute a mathematical edge, Bid and Offer Zones, Inside Bid and Inside Offer Zones, multiple entry techniques that are all needed to sequence trades together, risk management protocol, variable position sizing etc... We focus in the first quarter upon laying a strong theoretical foundation to how markets move, the repetitive steps that are made and how to trade under consistent conditions. Most technical traders have no philosophy or methodology to put to work every day, and the result is equity draw down month and month. Divergence, oscillators and other traditional technical indicators & set ups are not enough. Do you know when to buy a pullback? When should I fade that same pullback? Buy/Sell the breakout? Context is critical and without long-term training and hundreds of repetitions the results are normally random at best.

After the theoreticals are in place the focus is placed on each individuals track record. We maintain every trader's record on our servers and perform private reviews ongoing. There is no hiding a losing track record. Part of the Protege Class homework is to actually send in your day to day results for live review in class or intra-day....You will see how your fellow traders are doing by reviewing actual executions from professional and up and coming professional traders. This process works and is part of the only proven way to take a non-profitable trader to profitability.

Our goal at Pride Trading is to build long-term relationships with all of our traders & clients. Our classes are maintained within a size limit to avoid losing the benefits of small class size. We have hired all our traders through the Protege Class and continue to search for talent with plans to hire through mid 2011. We do not nickle and dime our clients and nor do we accept everyone into the class that can just afford the tuition. Your classmates and fellow traders working with Pride Trading have on average over 3.5 years experience and have a definite purpose defined for joining. Nearly 50% of the participants in our intra-day rooms & classes earn their living through their trading. The variance in income levels is rather significant in this group as some have 10 year track records while others are just finishing their first successful quarter.

It is recommended to set up a private call to discuss questions, goals and your own defined purpose.