DailyForex.com’s Huzefa Hamid had the pleasure of interviewing David Katz, a.k.a. The Trend Doctor. David originally came from a background in teaching and medical sciences. He educated himself in trading, built his own strategy and became a profitable futures trader. Today, in addition to teaching in the medical sciences in Arizona, he runs a trading room for people of all levels to teach them his strategy.
[Huzefa Hamid] David, thank you for speaking with me today. Let’s begin. Tell me a little bit about your background. What was your journey into the markets? What were you doing before you discovered the markets?
[David Katz] The first education I need to be thankful for is to my parents for introducing me to the concept of stocks and bonds from an early age. Every kid wanted a Tonka truck; for me, it was the occasional bond or stock in companies like DeBeers that made me first interested in the market. I grew up in Chicago where I went to school, University of Illinois, for a degree in education. I became a teacher, an instructor, but I also had a passion for the sciences. I was always interested in numbers, business, from the time of high school but education seemed to be my path. I progressed through the years ’til about I’d say, five years ago, where I had an opportunity to organize a stock market competition in an economics class that I was teaching here in Arizona to middle school and high school students. Over the course of a year and a half or so, we won many of those simulations. I then spent three years with the Arizona Counsel of Economic Education; I was the state coordinator for the “international simulation†for stockmarketgame.org. I did workshops one after the other here in Arizona. Let me regress a little bit: some years after college, I decided to return to medical school. I felt a lot of that education I received in med school – the analysis, the critical thinking, and the problem solving – gave me that foundation to look at the markets the way I do today. But prior to all of that stock market simulation stuff, about ten years ago I started with commodities and invested on the probability of pullbacks in the market. For example, what was the likelihood of cotton or soy beans to go up the next day after a pullback in price action the day prior. Alongside that, I was reading  Investor’s Business Daily which started a foundation in my trading. Shortly afterwards, I met two individuals who introduced me to free local workshops that met once a month on a Tuesday night in Arizona with about 50-60 people showing up. That’s when I got exposed to Fibonacci patterns. I ended up taking a couple of classes being offered on Fibonacci and I implemented what I learned with my students and that led us to those wins in stockmarketgame.org.
I used to cut out a lot of articles from money magazines only to realize that it was month old news and I had to be current with what’s going on and that’s probably why I got interested in day trading. With the Fibonacci analysis and so much of the classes and workshops I’d attended and even taught, it all started a platform for me to feel comfortable speaking about trading more publicly. My interest was always to promote my knowledge and offer my education. Through the coordinator of stockmarketgame.org I had the opportunity to attend a workshop at the New York Stock Exchange Euronext and from that moment forward I just knew my passion was to become a day trader. I opened up an account with thinkorswim about five years ago. My background in education said that I need to share what I know with many traders. I started using Twitter. I started using StockTwits. I opened up a YouTube channel. I started a website and I just started sharing what I knew. And, yes, I went on a quest to find the holy grail of trading but the truth was that I had a good foundation in Fibonacci and when I started picking up a couple of things I started to come out with my own trading strategy and eventually opened up my own trading room community. For about three years it was free of charge and now I’m with Marketfy which brought everything together.
