Chris Lori is a former bobsleigh champion who took part in four Olympic Winter Games with the Canadian Bobsleigh Team. He mas many World Cup medals to his name along with multiple Crystal Globes.
Today he spends most of his time in Western Australia as an independent professional trader. His trading strategy is almost entirely built around price action and trading the AUD/JPY currency pair.
The early years
Chris Lori is one of eight brothers and sisters and learned from his early days about the financial markets from his father, who was very much involved. His father taught his sons and daughters how to be prudent, how to invest money and the need to work hard.
From a young age, Lori was financially responsible and aware of the various options open to him. While in university, he became interested in the financial markets but was soon distracted by bobsleighing, which put his financial career on hold.
However, Lori was able to take a course in securities to move into the financial industry after retiring from the sport. However, that did not happen until he was 34 and after competing in four Olympic Games.
A career in finance
In 1998 Chris Lori took his first professional steps in financial trading. However, he also had to make money from a day job doing contract work in sport to accumulate enough capital to trade.
Lori initially made and lost money trading on the tech bubble and subsequently moved on to trading forex. He studied intensely during 2001 and 2002, and from then, with the help of a mentor, things began to fall into place.
He attributes much of his success in trading to his career in sport. He says that you are continually testing your physical and mental capacity to their highest degree to succeed when in elite sport. He just needed to convert his knowledge, experience and determination from sport into trading.
Trading model
Anyone who starts trading, he says, rightly sets out to discover what tools are available. Every trader sees the market through a different set of eyes and draws on different experiences.
He believes it is essential for novice traders not to copy exactly what other traders are doing. Doing so doesn’t work. You need to develop a deep understanding of the market, and any tools you use, you should understand in depth.
Chris Lori’s intraday trading model is 80 to 90 per cent based on price action. He uses no indicators on his charts; he watches the price behaviours throughout the day.
When working with clients, he often needs to consider long-term speculative positions based on information flow fundamentals, though this is also informed by price action. The big question is whether or not the information flow and price action are consistent.
He looks for fractals in terms of price action, in other words, patterns that repeat on different scales. He believes that price action is fundamentally trading the market’s psychology through behaviours that are repeated continuously.
Passing on the knowledge
In 2006 Chris Lori added another string to his bow by becoming a trainer and mentor of new traders eager to learn the game from a successful professional. From the start, he enjoyed it enormously, especially the speaking part. It also provided him with a refresher course of which helped him with his then-current trading.
Many of his students have enjoyed considerable success. Of those who have, they share various characteristics in their attitude and personalities. The most crucial element of successful traders is the ability to become an independent thinker.
Typically Chris Lori’s students study ten or so parameters or price behaviors using actual market data and trading virtually at high intensity. Sample sizes may be as large as a thousand.
The aim is to make the process almost automatic and instinctively differentiate between high and low probability outcomes. Thus students learn to recognize high probability outcomes when trading for real spontaneously. He says that once you have mastered this, “The market becomes a part of you.”
Fractal Geometry
Back to Chris Lori’s early days – in 2001, he applied fractal geometry to financial markets, developing a widely used tool that can be used in many situations.
Combining fractals with an in-depth understanding of market structure and behavior creates a scalable trading model applicable to intra-day, swing and position trading. He has been using fractal patterns ever since, and it underpins much of what he teaches to his students.
Fund management
In addition to the many other things that take up his waking time, he also manages various funds. It started in a small way and gradually evolved into an extensive portfolio.
He concentrates on stability and low volatility with a very tight risk model, including processes. He says it’s a good idea to avoid managing funds for family and friends.
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