Benoist Rousseau : my Trading Method

Who am I?

It’s always a bit difficult to talk about oneself, but here we go: My name is Benoist Rousseau. I’m 43 years old, I am passionate about trading and I like history, psychology, economics, cooking and art. I have a master’s degree in contemporary economic history from the Sorbonne University in Paris and several other degrees or certifications in computer science, finance and liberal arts. I started PaperTrading when I was 15 years old. As soon as I turned 18, I started real trading. I trade every day, I think about trading, I live to trade, trading is my life.

My career has had multiple paths and is difficult to describe because I also started working when I was 15. I worked on a farm, I was a street vendor, I assembled and repaired computers… and I was also a computer instructor at large companies like Renault, Sanofi and L’Oréal… I was also a researcher for the Elf Aquitaine group (now called Total). Then I was an entrepreneur, having launched several price comparison websites in the middle of the 2000-2010 decade.  During this period, I also taught history and economics and I studied psychology and psychoanalysis. While I did these different jobs, I also traded as soon as I could, even during work meetings, because my personal goal was to become a full-time trader.

At 35 years old, I quit my teaching job to become a full-time trader. This choice gave me freedom, to be responsible for my own decisions and to have, a few years later, a great experience working for a Hedge Fund. Trading is the school of responsibility. But trading is also a personal development tool to learn to know oneself, while also learning to master one’s impulses.

I do day trading and scalping on futures and limited risk CFDs with my broker ProRealTime Futures and / or IG sponsored by ProRealTime for limited risk CFD trading. For scalping, my preferred indices are the Dax 30 and / or the Nasdaq 100. I aslo day trade on the CAC 40 and Dow Jones 3. I also watch oil for swing trading. I occasionally trade a little on S&P 500 and Euro Stoxx 50, but most of my trades are scalping on indices.

Benoist Rousseau my Trading Method

My trading method

My scalping method is based on identification of frequently recurring scenarios with a high success percentage. It took me several years to identify the most interesting zones to trade, the ones that which are most successful, and are probably integrated into trading algorithms by scalpers and day traders. It’s a job of observation that I continuously do because the market is always changing and it is necessary to change with the market to be successful.

For this type of trading, I use zones where the price is likely to turn around (supports, resistances, symbolic levels of indices such as 50, 100, 1000…). It is regular trading that is not done by anticipation. We can only predict the future by understanding the present. We need to try to follow large investors, those that make the trend. Trading is also the school of humility and accepting that your own opinion is not important at all. What is really important is the opinion of hedge fund managers and banks. Trading is not the desire to be right when everyone else is wrong, it is following where the cash flows go. I also use my knowledge of psychology of crowd movements and economics to anticipate economic cycles.

Why do i make trading videos?

I have been writing articles for 7 years on my Andlil blog to share my passion and thoughts about trading. Trading videos let me go farther. They let me show you how I trade, which gives information that simple writing can’t properly transmit. You will see my psychological state when I trade, my precise timing to enter a position, my doubts, my winning trades, my losing trades, the trades I should have taken and the trades I should not have taken….

These videos also help me to grow as a trader by watching myself and analyzing the mistakes I made over the weekend. This allows me to remember the context of my trades, observe if my psychological status was good, to see if my trades truly made sense or not. This technique of filming yourself to see what you did is very commonly used by high level athletes to identify mistakes and to improve.

Conditions in which my trades are filmed

These trades are all made on a real account with my broker ProRealTime Futures and / or IG sponsored by ProRealTime for limited risk CFDs. The trades are filmed in real conditions on my main computer in my office. You will sometimes see trades filmed outside my office. They are filmed either on a second PC that I take on vacation, or on my laptop computer.

I use software that films in 4K on my main computer. This lets you have the best quality of video possible to see my trades. On my laptop computer, the trades are filmed in HD. A webcam also films me and is inserted into the video of my trades that you are watching so that you can see me while I trade. The sound of the video is the real sound environment in which I am trading. You see what I see, and you hear what I hear. You are in the same conditions as me.

You will see a selection of my most interesting trades of the week (both winning and losing), but not all of my trades. This is because I sometimes, make 100, 200 or 300 trades per week, many of which are extremely repetitive. Watching a weekly video of 60 hours of trading would not make sense for most of you, because 99% of trading is waiting.

Making these videos each week requires between 6 and 8 hours each week. This is because I need to select the most interesting trades, put the videos together, explain them, encode them, and put them on YouTube.

I have decided not to comment the trades orally in order to not influence you. Instead, I will give written indications as to why I made these trades. I will let you judge whether my decisions were good or not good, and whether or not I was in good psychological conditions to make these trades.