Interview with Ali Biggz

“…slow and steady wins the race”

Ali Biggz

Ali Biggz and his team had a good run in the just ended WSDT. We have put together highlights from an interview we had with him, to draw from his experience, strategies and his whole outlook on the competition as we did with #1 team leader Stelios Stelianou and Pablo, who came up third.

How does it feel to be an accomplished Team Leader of WSDT? Does it feel like an important milestone in your mentoring career?

It feels pretty good being someone who leads a team into a trading competition.

As day traders, we are all continuously growing and I feel honored to be able to help people advance their career in trading and kind of support them every step of the way, especially because when I was trading I never had that.

How would you describe your overall experience with the competition? Was it more of a challenge that you took seriously or more of an entertainment event for you and your team?

I think the overall experience was amazing, everybody loved it, everybody had fun. It was a great contest, it gave people the ability to actually trade and get that real emotion even though they are trading with a demo account.

Emotion is the most important part of trading and by doing a competition like this, and where essentially there are prizes on the line, gets people’s heart pumping in and out of the trade. I think it was amazing and great and personally, I think a lot of people took it seriously.

Your team

Do you have any message for your team at this very moment?

I am so proud of every single person in my team. Everyone on my team did so well, they tried so hard.

Every morning, we came together and discussed trades. Discord was going off the hook, a lot of people loved what was going on and a lot of people learned a lot on the way and that is a big part of the entire thing.

I want everybody to learn going forward without damaging their bank account.

What advice would you give to novice traders who have tested the waters of day trading with you in the competition and are preparing to tackle the challenges of the real world?

Honestly, I think everybody experienced that taking a big size in this competition can really crush you.

Not only does little spread on the stock affect the way you are trading when you take a heavy size but also you have the ability to scale into a position given the size of your account and that’s the important thing.

I think you guys gotta prepare to cut loses really quickly and let your winners run and that’s a big part of trading overall.

Was it hard to coordinate such a great amount of traders? What are the new challenges that you had as a mentor?

It wasn’t hard to get together and coordinate everybody simply because we had Discord.

I put my watchlist on my Discord channel every morning before the market opens, people have plenty of time to go over the trades and look at the stock and see where they wanna enter and exit.

I think coordinating was very good, it was very important. I have no regrets about how I coordinated the entire thing with my team.

What kind of feedback did you get from your team? Will it affect your approach to leading and mentoring in the future?

I think a lot of people wanted a lot more of a live commentary kind of thing, so I think in the future we gonna try and approach that, and in the next competition that would help people out.

What was the overall sentiment within a team? Were they competing with each other, or preferred to help each other out?

On my team, everybody had one goal and that one goal was to get the team to the top.
Obviously everyone had their individual goal, but the best part about this competition is that once one person succeeds it affects the entire team, and that was a very important thing for me.

I didn’t really find anyone trying to jump over each other, everyone was working as a team and that was the best part of this entire thing.

Join WSDT – Spring games – 2021

Trading

How was paper trading during the competition different from trading on a real account?

In terms of emotions and technicalities, like I said earlier, I think that for this competition trading under a paper account is pretty close to trading in the real account because what is happening is that a lot of these traders actually feel their heartbeat when they are in and out of the trade and that is exactly how it feels when you are in a real trade.

A lot of new traders, when they are in a trade, their heart is racing, their palms are sweaty and that is exactly the feeling that this competition gives traders.

Did you change your trading strategy to adapt to the competition? Maybe took more risks or played safer than usual?

I personally took heavy risks on this competition but as I was mentoring my team and my people in the WSDT, I made sure that they knew that slow and steady wins the race.

A lot of the top 3 guys on my team, who actually won prizes, were simply people who didn’t take big hits, who didn’t take big risks and who steadily increased their account profits by having $1000- $2000 days.

Was there anything special about the market during the competition? Any events that affected your strategy?

As a day trader, I trade where the charts are, I trade the news. So it really didn’t affect my strategy, I was just simply trading off my level, my pivots, my indicators that I had gotten confirmation on. My strategy did not really change.

Mentoring during the WSDT

Describe your strategy during the competition — did you have a plan, or decided to take advantage of the situation on the spot?

As I said, my strategy was personally going heavy and that was simply because I was trading on a live account. I do it full time and I needed to make money on my real account.

So, in the mornings I would spend about 15-20 mins on the competition account and whether I am in or out, I wrap it up and get back into my real account and start making trades.

However, I warned everyone in chat about this and said “you guys need to take it slowly if you’re gonna win and you need to cut your losses really quickly because the max loss is very small for a $240,000 account and you guys need to let your profits run as much as you can”.

Were there any key moments that set you on the way to where your team has ended up – planned decisions, luck or crucial mistakes?

I think as a community that I have right now, there are a lot of new traders in there, a lot of people who are just starting out and for the way they competed in this competition, the way they finished in this competition, not many of them blew up and not many of them had big red days and that was amazing to me.

I feel honored to be a part of a community that managed to cut their losses really quickly and finish the competition without blowing up, which in itself is an achievement.

What did you have to change in your mentoring style to adapt to the competition conditions? (Change your communication channels, engage with your team more than usual, change your trading strategy, etc.)

Not really much, we stuck to the plan and what I do every day. Every morning I give premarket notes to people, mentor them after the market is closed, discussed trades, go over what happened, what went wrong, what didn’t go wrong and that was my strategy and that has been my strategy.

That is how I help people grow their accounts every day and that is the exact same plan we had going forward.

What factors, in your opinion, kept you from taking the first place?

As I said, for me, one big aspect of it was that I was going in with a very big size. I was trying to hit a home run or go back to trading with my live account.

The fact that mainly kept me from going to the first place was probably trading with my live account. It was more important to me as I needed to pay bills, so I simply started trading with my live account but I think the main thing here for a lot of traders was that they had a big account to trade with.

They need to understand that with a big account if you are taking positions that are 10,000 and the stock is down 50 cents. If there is a bit of a dip in the stock you are already halfway, you are in the hole. That is a fact to take into consideration for the next timer.