Episode 2 Traders: Millions by the Minute

I want to live on a different scale to everybody else.

Money is obviously a limiting factor for life.

So, if you've got an unlimited amount of money,

it means you can do whatever you want whenever you want,

however you want to do it.

Justyn and Akil are in their early 20s.

They live on the outskirts of Birmingham.

There's noble choices, like, you know, get a job, finish college.

Can you control your dog?

I used to have a job, but I didn't really like it.

We might live here, but we're not from here.

We just think differently.

I wouldn't be able to do the sort of life I want to live

if I just did the norm.

Justyn thinks he's found a way to achieve the lifestyle of his dreams.

I found trading.

So now I've been trading for nearly four years

and now I manage over £1 million.

But he says a million is just the start.

He wants to be the richest person in history.

There's never been a trillionaire before. It's seen as impossible.

So, becoming a trillionaire is doing whatever you want to do

and just having no limits to it.

DOG BARKS

Justyn and Akil are part of a global phenomenon.

Like millions of others, they dream of transforming the life by trading.

Just a few years ago, this would have been impossible.

But now technology has made the markets

more accessible than ever before.

Now anyone can be a trader.

And I'm going to start this now at 50 million here with me.

50 million.

Over a fifth of the world's 100 richest people

owe their wealth directly to the finance industry.

Trading and investing on the markets has given them a combined wealth

of nearly 500 billion and the lifestyle that goes with it.

80 million. Sold!

Risking money to make more money...

is one of the most lucrative industries on the planet.

Trillions of dollars are traded on the world markets every day

by people in banks, dealing rooms and hedge funds.

But what was once the exclusive domain of Wall Street and the City

is now more accessible to everyone.

Online trading platforms have opened up the markets

and their potential rewards - and risks - like never before.

..the best performing developed market...

Thousands flock to trading shows,

dreaming of swapping a 40-hour week for a few clicks of a mouse.

Beginners can do extremely well from trading,

even if they have no experience,

as long as they're given a good strategy.

Many no longer trust the banks to look after their money.

It's an appalling travesty.

Most people are being robbed by the financial institutions

which they are putting their money into.

But playing with the big boys isn't easy.

The odds remain stacked against home traders,

and only 10% will make a consistent profit.

But this doesn't seem to put people off.

It's time that we as individuals learn to take control

of our own finances, and just get on with it.

This is a film about just a handful of the 100,000 people in Britain

who are writing their own financial futures by becoming retail traders,

trading the markets from home.

Oh! THEY SQUEAL

Jane is a mum to three small children all under ten.

Oh, that was rubbish!

Along with her husband Alan,

they live in their rented house in the heart of Devon.

Oh, there she goes, look.

For the past two years,

Jane has also been working away from home every weekend as a nurse.

Being a mum and working,

well, they say you're meant to be juggling your career and your family,

but I just think you're just dropping everything. You're not juggling.

Sometimes you end up, if you're not careful, just firefighting.

You all right there? Are you a bit sad?

'Because you're so exhausted, you just deal with each problem as it comes up.'

-Mummy, can we have the sandwiches?

-Yeah.

And what goes is your time for yourself.

Oh!

'The dream of financial independence, which I think is really important,'

is your own thing.

And I think it allows you more time to spend with your family.

What do you have to do?

Jane thinks trading might be the answer.

I was doing the school drop-off one day

and there's a mum there with a really nice Audi A4 Convertible.

And I said to my friend, "How can she have that?"

And she said, "Oh, I think she trades in stocks and shares or something."

I thought, "Oh, that's interesting."

So I came home and I Googled trading and I just thought, "Oh, I'll have a go."

So I just signed up for one

and just started messing about and having a play.

It's just so accessible. You can just sit in your house, trading.

Jane has been trading for nine months.

My account value is 1.6 million.

I'm not even sure what it means, but I think it's good.

Unfortunately, it's not real money.

It's a demo account, provided by the online platform companies,

for newcomers to learn how to trade.

When I see 1.6 million of pretend money, I'm gutted

that it's not real.

Sometimes I'll win, like, £50,000 in a trade

and I'll say to my husband, "£50,000!"

But he's like, "It's not real."

It's sad, really, that I can't do it with real money...yet.

Jane is using a technique called spread betting.

Unlike other types of trading,

she's not actually buying or selling anything,

she simply bets whether a currency will go up or down and by how much.

Choosing the right trades obviously is important.

I don't... I failed my maths O-level three times.

I'm not very good at numbers.

But what I do, I've just learned to literally look at the chart

and guess, and think which way it's going to go.

And if I see one that I think looks like it's going to go up, I'll buy it.

If I see one that looks like it's going to come down, I'll sell it. It's as simple as that.

Because if there's no trades on, I won't make any money.

I think I might put another one on now

because I've only got four at the moment.

Jane can trade in almost any pair of currencies imaginable.

As long as the value of one is changing in relation to the other,

she could make a profit.

I'm going to put £1,000 on

the British pound versus the Japanese yen

and I hope it comes down.

Confirm.

That's the trade. It's on now.

It's just shot up!

It's gone massively up now.

She's hoping that she'll soon be confident enough

to trade with real money.

It's gone down to 5,000 now.

6,000. It's all over the place.

I'm going to let it run and ignore it. Because it's best not to watch.

It's too stressful.

I'll look at that in an hour or so.

Most people can learn the technicalities of trading

in just a few weeks.

But making consistent money on the markets is not so straightforward.

A profitable trader has to predict whether something is going up

or down, by how much, and then buy or sell at the best time.

Getting all this right

while risking your own funds is immensely difficult.

And 90% of retail traders will lose money.

-RADIO:

-'The latest unemployment figures out later today

'are expected to show another fall in number of people out of work.

'The jobless rate currently stands at...'

Making sure you're in the winning 10% takes discipline.

So...

Charlie Burton has been on an extreme fat loss diet

for several weeks.

He's aiming to get his body fat down to 4%.

The average for a man his age is 20%.

This is lunch number one.

And then I have another lunch in a couple of hours.

He's eating a kilo of meat a day,

but no sugar, no alcohol and very few carbs.

If I had a really active job,

then I would naturally need more carbohydrates in my diet,

but I don't, because I'm sitting down in the office all day long.

Right, that's that.

And I do just clean up as I go along, I can't help myself.

Charlie has been trading for 17 years and firmly believes

the right working environment is crucial to his success.

Because I'm at home, I like it nice and clean.

Like if you worked in an office,

you'd have a clean desk or a tidy desk or whatever,

this is my office, this ground floor of this house.

I like to keep it clear and clean,

because it keeps my brain clear for when I'm trading.

Charlie works from his own dedicated trading room

kitted out with state of the art equipment.

It's not a hobby, it's a business.

My charts cost me not a huge amount, about £200 a month,

but lots of traders don't even do that.

You're given free charts through your brokers,

but it's free for a reason.

You can probably do eight tenths of what my charts can do up here,

but I need the full ten tenths.

Every night, he analyses the market

and decides how he's going to trade the following day.

One of the biggest things that most traders get wrong

is a lack of discipline.

You have to just be very methodical,

plan ahead, then just wait for the markets to come to you.

That's why so many traders lose, unfortunately.

NEWS REPORT: 'Today's figures will be closely examined

'for indications that is going to change...'

Today, the government is releasing UK unemployment figures.

Traders all over the world

are trying to guess how the pound will react.

A lot of retail traders have been trying to cool the top,

and yet it's just going up and up and up,

so they're getting caught

on the wrong side of the market at the moment,

and all the time they're on the wrong side of the market,

I want to take the other side of their bet,

because in the main, the herd are wrong.

I am going to take a trade shortly, so we're going to...

Let's, erm...

Charlie is waiting for the pound to reach its highest value

so he can buy as many dollars as possible.

He's then predicting the value of the pound will drop

and will sell those dollars for more pounds than he bought them for.

OK, so I'm trading.

With the press of a button, Charlie has risked several hundred pounds.

That's what I love about the markets -

it's a challenge every day.

An off-day in the markets means that not only are you not getting paid,

the market's actually going to take money away from you,

and there's no other job in the world like that.

His disciplined approach has made him a millionaire.

Most novice traders think about how much money they can make,

whereas most professional traders

focus on how much money they can lose.

It's a simple recipe for success,

but it's amazing how many people get it wrong.

Charlie's instinct was spot on.

He bought at the right time.

I've banked over £700 so far in this trade.

If I can make £1,000 or somewhere round about whatever it would be,

approaching £1,000, then pretty much that's me done for the day.

PIGEONS COO

Justyn and Akil's trading empire is run from Justyn's parents' house.

While Akil runs the day-to-day business,

all of the trading is done by Justyn...

in his bedroom.

You could say I don't really look like a trader,

cos a trader should be in London.

He should wear a suit,

but I'm just sitting here in whatever clothes I want.

A lot of the time, I'm sitting in my pyjamas.

It's a case of you can either look like a trader or actually be one.

Four years ago,

Justyn realised his life wasn't going in the direction he wanted.

I dropped out of college because you know when you see stuff on the TV

like nice cars and big houses and everything?

When I was at school, if the person teaching me

hasn't got any of the stuff that I want, what's the point in listening?

I looked at what I had, a car and a computer,

I didn't want to be a taxi driver,

so I typed, "How to make money online",

trading came up and then I just looked into it deeper from there.

He enrolled in a course in London

and soon discovered home traders like him

have far less access to market information than the professionals.

You need to know the news

and all the economic data releases before everybody else knows them,

so you need to be able to get that data

then enter the trade before everybody else,

but because I never had any access to that sort of thing,

there was no point in me learning,

so I just focus completely on the technical side of trading.

Justyn completely ignores the news

and instead uses charts built from statistical data

about how the market has behaved in the past

to predict what it will do in the future.

Because history repeats itself,

you just have to work out the trends,

apply your technical knowledge and get into the trade.

It's about having a consistent plan that stays the same non-stop.

Whether I'm trading 1,000, 10,000, a million or 100 million,

it's no different to me.

Trading is all about percentages -

the more you trade with, the more you can make,

so attracting investors can be very profitable.

Justyn and Akil have set up a business

where clients can open their own private account

that corresponds to Justyn's trading account.

In this kind of trading,

the investors stand to make profits or losses

when the trader's account goes up or down.

The way it works is all the accounts are joined,

so they all just mirror the same trades, basically.

It's a really simple model.

Justyn never actually holds a client's money.

He just manages other clients' funds.

So we're not millionaires yet.

The clients split their profits with the trader

and also pay a performance fee.

Justyn has been using social networking

to display his trading skills,

putting some of his best trades online for all to see.

This is a trade that I done.

The green line shows the price that I got in,

the red line shows my risks, meaning I can only lose a maximum of 3%.

The chart continues to go down

and it ended up taking profit around this level,

so I risked that much to gain that much.

The distance between there and there on this one account here

works out to be...

23,998.

On that one account.

No-one can make as much money as traders do.

A trader can make a million in a week.

It's going to be difficult for a business

to make a million in a week unless you're massive,

but a trader could just be one guy in a room.

Trading's going to take us where we need to go.

Unlike professionals working in financial institutions,

retail traders can't access the markets directly.

Many use a broker,

the intermediary between the trader and the exchanges.

This is 40 Bank Street, Canary Wharf...

OK, BG Group, long, 325 shares, yeah?

..home to Saxo, a bank that makes most of its revenue

by providing an online broker platform where anyone can trade.

Stripping emotion out of it, what does that tell you?

That it's a good stock, they've got the business model right,

they got the good products out there in the market, people are buying it.

The role of the team overall is to support our customers

in their own adventure of trading.

We've don't actually trade ourselves, for ourselves.

We assist with news that comes up, potential problems, anything.

The nitty-gritty of trading.

Brokers make their money by what's called "the spread".

They buy direct from the market

and offer the same products on their platforms at a profit.

The perfect client for us is an active, profitable client.

They're trading actively and every time they trade,

they pay us commission,

they're profitable so they're here to stay.

The last thing we want is a client to trade very actively,

but then blow themselves up within a short period of time and disappear.

-NEWS REPORT:

-'On the currency markets,

'the pound was down more than half a cent...'

The vast majority of online retail traders

are trading on the biggest market in the world,

the global currency market, or the forex, worth 5 trillion every day.

-NEWS REPORT:

-'Against the euro, sterling was down 0.2 of a cent...'

It's essential, enabling businesses in one country

to pay for goods or services in another,

but this only accounts for a fifth of all currency trading.

The remaining 80% is generated by traders

-simply speculating for profit.

-'..making a euro worth 83 pence.'

Retail traders are a small but significant part of the forex,

counting for around 200 billion every single day.

Rene Muccio is one of them.

He gets up early every morning to prepare for the markets

and get in the zone.

Trading is so rewarding.

I don't think I've actually felt like this since I was a small child.

I feel at peace.

I know what I'm doing, I know what I want to do

and I know what I want to achieve.

I look forward to it every day.

Professional news feeds can cost around £1,000 a month.

Rene makes do with his tablet.

My page has got Financial Times,

Barclays Stockbrokers, then you've got CNN,

but I'm not good enough yet to have the paid feeds.

I'm still learning the art of trading.

That'll take me up to another level.

The final part of his prep is a refreshing walk around the block.

Quite often you can wake up, you might be angry,

erm, sad -

I want to clear all of that and get...

..emotionally neutral...

..so that when I sit down,

I look at the markets in a completely balanced way.

I walk with a stick, cos 22 years ago,

I broke my back in a motorbike accident.

I was paralysed, I was in a wheelchair,

so I keep walking to help build up the legs.

I feel good.

I've had my coffee, I've been for a walk, it's a lovely morning,

I'm feeling balanced,

psychologically neutral...

Looking forward to the markets.

Rene's about to pit himself against millions of traders worldwide,

including hedge funds so large they can move markets.

I've been doing this now for seven years.

I knew absolutely nothing about trading.

I looked at it and I wanted to do it and I believed I could do it,

and I think in the first week, I lost £2,000.

I had no idea what I was doing.

Absolutely criminal.

Now I have a good understanding of fundamentals,

a good idea of market sentiment,

and I have a good basic trading plan.

Rene looks for volatility in the price of a currency,

trying to spot good places to enter a profitable trade.

Dollar-yen has maybe moved five points.

It hasn't set any patterns yet,

so I'll just watch it

and see what it's doing.

I think, I think, you get to a point

where you get a genuine feel for the market,

and once you've got that, you're away

and that's learning the art of trading and it really is an art form.

To contain his losses,

Rene has reduced the amount he trades with each time.

I trade £1 or £2 per point.

I've brought it down to the minimum.

I'm still playing with money,

because I can't trade if there's not money involved.

But £1 or £2 keeps it real.

In the last couple of months, I can tell you I've made no real progress,

but I'm up by about ten points.

Which is £10.

So this is a Porsche 911.

This car was six figures.

I got it just under a year ago.

I didn't even tell Rachel that I'd bought the car.

It was a bit of a gamble,

but I thought it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Charlie's trades are looking after themselves

and he's taking a break from his screens.

If you gave someone a sponge and a bucket,

they would be able to wash a car,

but when it comes to trading, you either make money or you don't,

so why is it that so many people, so many traders, can't do it?

It's not technical ability -

you'll gradually get the technical ability just with time.

But you need to be able to cope with the knock backs

and there are a huge amount of knock backs in trading.

Most human beings I don't think can cope with it.

Like many traders, Charlie learned the hard way.

My first account, I put 40,000 into it and took it up to 250,000

in the space of six months, something like that,

then over the following six to nine months,

I lost the lot.

I think a lot of people would probably give up at that point.

Most traders who do give up

probably didn't quite give it as much as those that do.

CHILDREN CHATTER

So far, Jane has only traded on a demo account.

She's turned a mock £300,000 into 1.6 million in just nine months,

and she's now convinced she can get similar returns with real money.

She wants to open her live account with £6,000

and has come up with a plan to help raise the cash she needs...

Come on, then.

KITTENS MEW

..10 Bengal kittens worth £200 each.

You coming out?

Come on, then.

..six, seven, eight.

Nine, ten. Yeah, got ten, that's good.

I've got two litters of five kittens and I've sold six,

got 4 to go, so that's 1,200 towards trading.

When you're making a lot of money and it's pretend,

you've got to try it. I've really got to try it.

Even if it goes wrong, I've just got to try it with real money

and these represent the opportunity for me to start doing that.

I think if you know when you start that you're going to sell them,

you can handle it. You aware of it from the beginning,

so you don't get too attached, but this one here,

I think I might have to keep this one,

because she's just always cuddling me, aren't you?

This is going to make a lovely pet, aren't you?

Jane's husband Alan has also contributed several thousand pounds

to help her start trading.

She does enjoy it and she's very passionate about trading,

but when she first told me about it,

I was a bit like, "Really? Is that possible?"

I didn't quite get that you could do it from home.

..four...

I don't understand the mechanisms behind it or how it actually works.

Let's pop you in there.

If it works, it will offer my family a whole new life,

a lifestyle, if it works.

It's a very big "if", though,

because I'm very aware that it could quite easily go wrong.

Not all home traders are doing it just to make money.

Some of them also trade for the sheer excitement.

Nothing thrills me more than to see zero variance

at the end of the month.

If that's OK, I'm OK.

John Leggett is the founder and administrator of SABOM,

or Serious About Our Money,

a trading club with a mature membership.

Tomorrow is the club's monthly meeting.

Got to prepare the agenda.

We have to prepare the valuation of the club.

Then we do a few slides

showing our performance against either the FTSE

or against ourselves a year ago.

John was the chief financial officer at Boots for over 30 years.

There is nobody who is more interested in your money than you

and if you believe anybody else is interested in your money

for your sake, you are mistaken.

My opinion is that the people who work in banks

are very nice, laudable people,

charming and useless.

-Morning, Michael.

-Hello, Mike.

How are you?

Every month, the members of SABOM meet in a local pub

to discuss how their trading portfolio is performing.

Well, good morning, everybody.

ALL: Good morning.

Welcome to our first meeting of our new financial year.

There we have it.

We've not made a big profit this month.

Must do better.

The group was originally set up as an investment club,

buying shares for the long term.

We found that there was no point in meeting,

because there was nothing to discuss.

We'd bought the shares, we were holding the shares

and somebody would say it's gone up a bit

and somebody would say it's gone down a little bit.

And then we took the decision

that we would move into more active trading.

Everyone in the club has invested their own money...

..but the actual trading is entrusted to just a few members,

including Stan and Michael.

Michael, let's just think about the conversation

you and I had earlier on this morning

when you were trying to persuade me that we ought to buy ASOS

and I said, "No, not now."

What was the essence of what each of us was saying? Can you remember?

No. THEY LAUGH

There's no fun in investment.

Full stop. All the fun's in trading.

That's one of our objectives,

is to have fun and we have fun.

-It's actually quite exciting, isn't it, Michael?

-It is, yes.

Trading is, as opposed to investment,

cos investment, you've got to take a very long-term view...

..medium term, one year, two years,

whereas with trading, of course, we have dealt within hours, haven't we?

We've bought something, just by chance, of course,

-and sold it within hours.

-No, no, I don't agree by chance, no!

It's was luck...skill, rather.

-Skill, yeah!

-It was skill.

As one of the designated traders, it's Stan's job

when to decide when to buy and sell the club's shares.

Where do we start?

Well, we look for this volatility,

that's a huge factor in choosing a share to buy.

You can trade more frequently and thus make more money

if you are dealing in shares that are volatile,

where the price is doing that.

As opposed to the price doing that.

Stan wants to buy shares in mining company Rio Tinto.

It's 3,380.

It has been down as low as 3,150 within the last month.

Club rules mean he can only spend £6,000 on any one trade.

Six...one, two, three...

It's about 180 shares. I could up it a bit to 190.

That's the price it's going to cost us.

We submit the order and I've now got a screen up

which is asking me to "order confirm",

so I need to read that very, very carefully.

And I confirm it -

you will see, as if by magic, it's appeared there.

It can be a bit stressful, yeah,

particularly if you're trying to do a lot all at the same time.

It's exciting as well,

particularly that day when we bought and sold ASOS twice in the same day

and that was really, really...

We'd never done that before, and that was really brilliant.

Rene started trading with £10,000.

He's now down to less than 4,000.

Recently, he thinks he's seen an improvement.

My equity curve is going up

and more importantly,

my understanding of the way I'm trading

is becoming a little more precise.

Rene believes he's finally beginning to crack the elusive art of trading.

My most exciting trades are where I'm just watching the charts

and I will enter a chart and I don't even know why I've entered.

It's something inside my brain saying, "Go long, go short,"

but it's telling me to do something and those trades don't fail.

So far, they always seem to win.

But I don't get enough of them.

Providing home traders like Rene with access to the markets

is one of the financial sector's fastest growing industries.

Online platforms can make money whether a trader wins or loses,

as long as they trade.

In 2013, Britain's biggest provider took profits of £192 million.

For brokers Saxo,

today is one of the busiest trading days of the month -

the announcement of US employment figures.

If the number's massively distorted,

then there's normally a massive spike in the markets.

They can move very, very quickly, be very volatile.

The announcement is due in a few minutes,

but for those with access to the instant news feeds,

there are already hints to what it might contain.

Did they give a number on that, Theo?

Fisher says,

"Jobs data significantly affected by the weather."

So we're reading about number in that, probably.

The number might not be as good as anticipated,

so prepare yourself for a bad number

and probably a decent market reaction.

You'll have to excuse me.

One minute, guys.

-NEWS REPORT PLAYS

-Canada On-line.

"Appalling number, no revision", that's really bad.

Really bad.

113, no revision.

FTSE's gone negative.

A really bad number, guys.

The US dollar is off by about 0.3 of a percent at the moment,

like, instantly. Across everything.

The numbers might be bad for the US economy,

but the volatility they've caused is good for trading

and the brokers are quick to inform their most important clients.

Hi, Roger, it's Theo here from Saxo. Really bad number from the NFP.

Dollar is off.

..trading at the moment of the day's range and now going negative.

Within just a few seconds, the markets respond.

It's been a very steady overnight market, around the 136 level.

Over the number, we've grown up to about 136.40 or .50,

so that's about 0.25%,

moving the dollar across a number of currencies.

All about the game of information, right?

NEWS REPORT: 'So how was it looking on the share markets today?

'The big news, of course, was the US jobs figures...'

'..by a lot of snowy and icy weather,

'investors have decided the jobs report

'may not have been as good as they thought.'

Just a few miles away,

Rene also watches the monthly figures affect his charts.

When you've got information coming into the market,

hitting it hard and different traders interpreting it in a different way,

to me that's too much volatility. I can't trade it.

It's pure gambling and I'm not interested.

Rene has spent years trying to work out the fine line

between trading and gambling.

One of the problems I used to have was I would enter a trade,

of course, I would have a positive expectancy that I was right

and it would go against me.

You're down £100 already and you're thinking,

"Oh, I don't want to lose £100, so I'll wait."

Then you watch it go down another £10 and you're £200 down

and it will come down to a level where you think enough is enough.

You will then stop out the trade

and you have just gambled away possibly hundreds of pounds.

Being able to cut your losses and leave a losing trade

is one of the hardest things to learn for any trader.

Does that mean you're a loser?

Does that mean you're a failure in life?

It comes with an awful lot of baggage.

So having to close out a losing trade is hard.

'BBC Radio Devon's travel news.

'And in Barnstaple,

'one lane is closed on Braunton Road due to drainage work...'

Jane is also discovering how emotional trading can be.

I logged on to do my personal banking

and I saw that the money was ready,

which was a bit of a shock, really.

I remember my legs started trembling and I was really shaking

and I was just staring at the screen, thinking,

"That's it now. It's up to me. I've got to do it."

She has opened a live account

and has now been trading with real money for six days.

The first day I made £99.50.

I'll never forget that figure!

And the second day it was about 105

and then I lost £350.

Jane risked too much money by mistake.

I put a trade on, thinking it would be about £3.

I hadn't checked, it was £30.

It went wrong, so it went wrong really quickly and too much for me.

So I had to bail out of that trade really quickly

at minus £350.

So I was...

It was a horrible start. It made me feel sick.

Now she's trading for real,

Jane's approach has become more methodical.

I'm a little bit more careful now.

I've had my fingers burned a couple of times.

I had some hideous mistakes.

I do think, now, more before I pull the trigger.

So I'm just looking at the US dollar and the CNH.

First of all, I look at it on the four hour chart,

and it's up.

Then I look at it on the 30 minute chart, way up.

And then the five minute.

I wouldn't buy that one now because it's gone up,

it's turned around and it might be coming down.

In fact, I'm going to leave that one altogether. I don't like it.

Trading with real money is proving harder than expected.

I feel a little bit anxious, to be honest.

Silly, reckless, very excited when it's going to profit

but at the moment,

lots of mixed feelings, really.

I'm just looking at the British pound and the Turkish lira.

I think it might be about to go down but I've lost my bottle.

I'm going to leave it alone. I'm not...I can't do it!

Once I'm back in profit I'll be all right

but I'm still at a loss

because of that awful thing that happened on the third day.

But once I resolve that, get in my stride,

I think I'll be a little bit more...

confident with my trades.

..and then Adrian's for dinner on Friday.

Also, I am doing CrossFit on Saturday morning at Hungerford

-if you fancy it.

-Are you?

-Yeah.

-What is CrossFit?

-CrossFit is...

Charlie's still in training for his fat loss programme

and friend Jason is his regular running partner.

Rhea text me about it at the weekend

and said it's the hardest work out she's ever had,

so I thought, "I've got to be all over that."

Jason is a regular competitor in Ironman,

an extreme fitness event.

Charlie's very good to train with.

He keeps you motivated

and he's always available for a run

if I'm home early from work,

or I want to get out for a lunchtime.

Nine out of ten times you give Charlie a call

and he's straight in the car and over

and we can go for a five, six mile run

and get any tension worked out from the day.

It's great.

He's a person that would not show that he's keen

but under it all, he's very keen and very competitive,

although he doesn't show people that.

I've never seen someone so focused on just eating

and doing the exercise he needs to achieve a certain goal.

So you were saying about the Ironman...

-Yeah, I'm not fit enough yet. I've got lots...

-No cake.

Is it no cake from now on? No chocolate...

Charlie's reputation has led to an opportunity

that will take his trading to a whole new level.

I've been asked to trade a fund,

-so they're giving me 50 million to trade.

-50 million?

Yeah, so... Yeah, they got in touch a couple of weeks ago and said,

"Look, really looking for some traders,

would you be interested?"

I thought, "Well, there's no real change to my dynamic,

"my working day," so I said, "Yeah, I guess so."

And so it's already started, so it's moved really quick.

How come they've given you so much money?

Well, it's not a lot of money, actually,

cos the fund is running into billions.

And so what they do is they appoint tranches of money,

blocks of money, to different traders.

Charlie will receive a percentage of any profits,

so trading such a huge fund could make him a lot of money.

I like the Fiat...the sport one.

They may not have access to billion pound hedge funds

but that doesn't mean Justyn and Akil are not well-connected.

Through their network, they've managed to land introductions

to a few of the richest young men in Britain.

Where's the bass, mate? Where's the bass?

HE TURNS UP THE MUSIC

Today, they're driving up to South Cheshire,

also known as the footballer belt.

This car is a Mercedes C63 AMG.

It's a 40 grand car, quite fast.

I think Justyn has trouble handling it sometimes.

You can't even drive!

They've come to see Leon Best,

a premiership footballer who plays for Blackburn Rovers.

I'm not too sure what Leon is worth

but I know from the newspapers and stuff like that

you've got footballers out there that are worth...

How much is Rooney worth these days, Justyn?

-He gets about...

-300k a week.

So, you know, I'm not too sure if it's to that extent

but it's a considerable amount, I can imagine.

It's not really a question that we ask.

The only question we ask is,

"How much capital can you afford to invest?"

If this meeting goes well,

he'll make a serious investment in their trading company.

Leon is just a few years older than Justyn and Akil,

and also grew up in the Midlands.

-Good drive?

-All right, all right.

So, no traffic?

They have a lot in common, including a love of trainers.

Before they talk business,

Leon is keen to show them his new designer range.

Collection for L'Homme de Maison.

As you can see, I love my shoes!

Love your shoes is an understatement, mate!

These are really nice, actually, you know.

Leon has over 350 pairs of trainers.

Like, these boots here are 1,686 of 1,998.

Original.

THEY LAUGH

I always wanted the newest, best pair of shoes

when I was younger, growing up.

And a few of my mates would have them

and I'd always have to wait until they got into the sales to get them.

So they wouldn't be the new, best ones, then.

Basically, I want to have this but for cars.

So I just want to have a massive showroom,

-just loads of cars in there.

-For cars?!

-Yeah!

I just want both. Shoes and cars!

It's good to be able to come to Leon's house

because most people won't be able to see these sort of things

so they won't be able to see it as attainable

so they won't aspire to have it.

A few months ago, Justyn opened a demo account for Leon,

to show him the profit he might make on an investment.

You're probably going to want to see some past performance, here.

All the profits and losses you can see.

Loss is a maximum of 3%, profits are unlimited.

So on this graph it's 18% profit.

That was with only 3% risk.

The downward periods are a lot smaller than the upward periods.

-More gains.

-Yeah, more gains.

From there to there, in four months...

-Yeah, things have been tweaked.

-That's crazy.

Since there, everything was tweaked

and constantly just keep on tweaking everything

so that everything gets better and better.

Leon's wealth manager

has already okayed an investment of £100,000

but for Leon himself it's more personal.

I'm not going to just throw 100 grand

into something that I don't believe in.

Like, no-one would.

You hear about all these big bankers.

They don't know you on a personal level.

He's come to my house, he knows my family, you know,

he sees how I live.

So once you're in that circle,

if I was to then say to my other friend who's a footballer,

"Yeah, I am doing this with Justyn,"

he'd then want to just do it, just because I am doing it.

-Let's do this.

-Yep.

-Make it happen.

The Serious About Our Money trading club

also understand the value of a bigger fund.

The 10 members have pooled their resources and trade with £65,000.

Club members Stan and Michael live 93 miles away from each other

so every morning they plan the day's trading by phone.

PHONE RINGS

Good morning. You have reached the Wheatley residence.

-This is the butler speaking, how can I help you?

-Hi, Stan.

Morning, Michael.

-How you doing?

-Yeah, OK.

-Yeah, I see...

The call gives them a chance to share useful information.

Looking at Europe,

they're all moving along quite nicely as the FTSE is, isn't it?

Yeah, the London stock market expect it to open about 18 points

higher than yesterday. Yeah.

I think we ought to be buying into ASOS...

Stan thinks he's spotted a possible trade on one of the club's

favourite shares, ASOS, famous for selling dresses online.

It's a very interesting price, Stan, ASOS.

The current offer price is 40.18. Yeah.

The price is going down but both think it's about to go up.

Retention's there, we know that, yeah.

They need to decide when to buy and when to sell.

You talk about a low limit,

what about a high limit before we get back in?

I wouldn't want to let it go much above 40.50.

Neither would I. No.

-Right.

-OK, so we have an agreement?

-Uh-huh.

Wahey! We have an agreement.

That's got to be a first.

Stan is buying £6,000 of ASOS shares at £40.15.

Now the currency is GBX...

They've entered the market just in time.

We just about got it, didn't we, Michael?

I think that's about the lowest it's been.

It went 40.15, then it went to 40.14,

from there on, it's gone upwards.

That was a good one.

-Speak to you in about what? Ten minutes?

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

-OK, then.

-Cheers.

-Yeah, cheers.

-Bye.

If the price continues to go up to 40.50 as predicted,

the club will make £50.

All the skill is actually in choosing the right shares

to be trading in any way and the club does that

and, in its wisdom, it more often than not is right.

We are reliant upon a collective input.

That's a crucial part of our operation.

The SABOM members may not realise it but their way of sharing information

for better trading is at the forefront of new finance.

For years only the privileged few

had access to the kind of information and the investment

that gave them the power to move markets

but now that's changing.

There's a new wave of trading activity erupting alongside

the established banks and brokerages.

People like us want to disrupt the financial ecosystem and

the revolution is all about creating more equality through technology.

It's all about creating more access and more opportunities

to more people around the globe.

Yoni Assia's London office is on the 39th floor of One Canada Square.

So time to shed this idea of using the social index system...

He's one of a new breed of canny pioneers

with plans to transform finance with technology.

We can actually give you access...

He developed the world's first social trading platform, eToro.

He wants it to be the Facebook of trading.

The idea is basically to take the concept of investing

and merging it into the concept of social networking.

So people open their investment account with eToro,

they start trading in the markets

and every trade and investment they make in the markets

gets automatically published on their walls.

The site has 3.5 million users from all over the globe

who all share their knowledge and ideas about trading.

You can really see the active discussions everybody's having.

This guy from Indonesia talking about his gold position

or this person from Algeria talking about Apple,

so you can actually see what people are doing

in their own trading account.

Users don't just share information,

they can also copy people they think will make profitable trades.

Malsolo here is one of our most copied people on the platform.

You can actually invest 1,000 in him,

copying every investment he makes in his account,

directly into your account.

So if he in his account will make 20%

then you in your account will make 20% on those 1,000.

Being copied can be very profitable.

The site's most popular traders can earn 10,000 a month

on top of their trading profits.

But Yoni stresses there is more to it than that.

Social traders tend to be from a generation

that is used to sharing everything online.

They want to have more social features,

communicate with one another more, have more transparency

because when people in the big banks around us make decisions,

their information is just closed there.

This takes these existing conversations and makes them public,

makes them accessible for everyone.

So instead of two people understanding

and knowing about an idea,

suddenly 3.5 million can know about it.

Justyn and Akil have taken advantage of the power of technology

and social networking from day one.

How many followers have you got now?

Now there's over 1,000 followers.

Justyn's been posting recent activity on Instagram

to raise his profile.

-So here's the two recent footballers.

-Yeah.

-This one's Cyrus Christie for Coventry City.

-OK.

The other one is Callum Wilson, he also plays for Coventry City.

Oh, yeah.

And being connected to one professional footballer

has opened the door for others to take a risk on investing.

What did Callum comment?

"Let's do this, bro." "We work in." "Nice work."

Leon coming on board has definitely boosted

a lot of confidence in other people.

Two footballers came on as a result of him

so he's definitely done positive things for us but, you know,

there's still a big pond out there that we're trying to explore.

-Do you want some cucumber?

-Yes, please.

It's half-term

and Jane's children are keeping her and her husband Alan busy.

It looks like pizza.

There's times you really want to watch a trade, it's really moving

and you want to know when you want to pull the trigger and buy

and then your children want to borrow your iPad to watch Frozen,

that sort of thing can be quite tricky.

Or one of them falls over and you've just got to stop everything

and go and sort them out. That can be very hard.

I don't imagine City boys having to deal with things like that

when they're about to put a massive deal on.

Zoe, yours are ready!

Jane finally gets the opportunity to check her trades.

So since eight o'clock, I've taken £50.

I've done 3 of a tenner and a 20. So I'm quite pleased.

It's lunchtime and so far today in the background quietly

I've made £50.

I like that. It's nice.

Despite things going well, Jane is still leaving the family home

every weekend to work as a nurse.

I've been doing it 20-odd years and I've specialised.

I'd probably earn about £22-25 an hour.

So a tenner is like half an hour,

time spent out of the house, doing that, away from the family.

It's quite physical. It's quite exhausting, nursing.

It's much nicer to sit on your sofa with a laptop

and earn a tenner than go out there and earn it.

Charlie has now been on his fat loss programme for two months

and today, he's come to an exclusive city gym

for the final part of the challenge.

Come on, mate, five more.

He's been on a strict regime with no sugar or alcohol for two months.

To me, it's just a structured plan, just follow the plan

and you'll get to the end result.

His wife Rachel has planned a slap-up meal to celebrate

the end of his diet.

I love it.

He worked so hard for it and he looks really good. Really good.

Very, very proud of him.

I'm really looking forward to going out for dinner.

Charlie's also going to be featured in a men's fitness magazine.

That really is amazing. I'd less shots at the wedding.

He's very determined.

He'll have to do it better than anybody else as well.

That's classic Charlie, that is.

Despite being away from his desk,

Charlie is still hoping to have a profitable day.

Just because I'm down here doing this,

I still have to have trades into the market.

My analysis is done so the orders are in and I'm just going to

let them play themselves out. It's all automatic.

It's all about risk to reward so whatever happens,

I'll either lose this much or I'll make that much.

That's the name of the game.

The final part of the challenge is

to see just how low Charlie's managed to get his fat level.

6.1.

4.1.

3.8.

'I started out at 16% body fat so the goal was to get to about 6%,'

I think I've probably surpassed that.

Rich's just measured me and I've come in at 3.3% body fat

and like Rich says, you can't really get much lower than that.

It'll be nice to have a small part of our social life back

but actually I do want to continue

so the next challenge is going to be to see if I can get bigger with this.

I've gone really lean

and now I need to start to try and maintain the leanness

but get a bit bulk out as well so that's the next challenge.

Loving it.

DOORBELL RINGS

Before he started trading,

Rene was a successful antiques dealer for 14 years.

-Hello.

-Buongiorno!

-You all right?

RENE SPEAKS IN ITALIAN

-You speaking Italian today?

-James.

-Rene!

Tonight, some of his old friends from the business

have come round for poker night.

Also invited is younger sister Roma.

-Rene, are you having wine or beer?

-I'm having beer, thanks.

-OK.

-Are we all put in?

-Yeah.

-I'm going to put in one.

Like most brothers and sisters,

Rene and Roma have always been competitive.

I'll go 10.

I'll go five and I'll see you.

Read 'em and weep. King high.

Sucker!

Three of a kind.

Well-played. I've been losing for seven years!

THEY LAUGH

It's the one thing I'd like to think I've perfected.

Come on.

Roma has always had reservations about Rene giving up antiques

for trading.

As an antique dealer, you were successful and you earned money

and you could earn money very quickly in three days

-that could see you through to the month.

-Mm-hm.

So you considered yourself successful?

No, because although I could make money...

..I ultimately felt empty inside.

I could see no purpose in continuing.

Trading has given me feelings or emotions or has helped me grow

in a way none of the other businesses ever did or could do.

But you're still on zero after seven years so how does...?

Inside, how's your confidence?

Don't know about confidence,

my self esteem probably isn't as good as it should be.

But what am I to do?

I have found a career that...

..for want of a better phrase, that I think is worthy of me

and it's what I would like to do.

But the bottom line is, financially you're not making the money.

No.

But I'm happy in what I do

but as you're aware my lifestyle is going downhill.

As your sister, I don't normally give you compliments

but I do admire your passion

-for doing something that you absolutely love...

-Thank you.

..even though you know if you went back to antiques tomorrow

you can earn money but you choose to stick with what you do.

So either you're absolutely crazy or it's admirable.

I don't know which but...

I'm a trader. That's what I want to be.

-Are you betting?

-I'm in five.

Did anybody bet?

ASOS shares, it's fallen off a cliff.

Slow, that's it and relax.

Pop them down.

CATS MEOW Are you cross?

-That's the wrong door! That's the wrong door!

-Is it this door?

It's the wrong door. It's the wrong door!