About Me (A bit of my life story)


Hi, my name is Renato Santos, I’m from Brazil, Sao Paulo, I’m a full time futures trader, diamond expert and entrepreneur, below you will know more about how I started in the financial markets and a bit about my life journey.

I started working with diamonds and jewelry when I was only 10 years old in a jewelry shop in Sao Paulo when my boss used to send me downtown to buy diamonds at some Jewish dealer's offices so that he would make jewelry to sell to his costumers. The dealers had all different qualities and sizes of diamonds and I had to use a loupe to check the quality and make sure the size was right, I worked there for a period of five years... Years later I worked all around the world as a diamond dealer myself in places such as: New York, Los Angeles and Miami (USA), Ramat-Gan (Israel), Antwerp (Belgium), Amsterdam (Netherlands), Hong Kong (China) and, of course, Brazil.
I went through many different businesses during my adulthood but my passion for diamonds had always been present, but after the episode of 911 the business became much more difficult, and also because I was already a bit tired of traveling so much on business, I decided it was time for me to look for something else to do as my main business.
I knew I wanted to do business, but what kind of business? The thoughts of being free to be anywhere I wanted in the world and still be able to be at work were very clear in mind, so there would be only one way to go: work on line.

Once, I was with a friend from New York in his Manhattan office telling him about my thoughts of doing something else besides trading diamonds (it's impossible to quit trading diamonds, but that's another story) he said he knew something that might interest me as he knew I had no problem at all dealing with risk as I had been for so many years in the diamond business and we do lose money in some deals when we make a mistake... So he told me I should learn  about how to day trade the “futures markets”. He told me I could “easily” make a thousand bucks a day with US$100,000! I said: – “wait a minute! That’s 1% a day! Are you nuts or what?” And he said: – “Well, you could make even more… you just have to learn how to do it.” And then from that day on I started thinking about getting into the markets for day trading… I could hardly imagine what I was going into…
Back to Brazil I opened an account with a broker I knew in one of the largest brokerage firms, my idea was to start by day trading stocks, the so-called “blue chips” (largest volume stocks). The first time I had thought about trading the markets was in my early twenties when my brother got a job at a brokerage firm, so I asked him what I would have to do to learn how to trade stocks, and he thought that as my older brother he should protect me, so he said: - "forget it! That’s only for real wealthy people, you got no chance!" So by saying that he made me postpone my desire to trade the markets for almost 20 years!
So, I finally started trading stocks in January 2005, market was very bullish and anything I bought would go up and I made money, so I thought: I must be a genius, been working in this thing for a couple of months and making money every single month, so easy! Like taking a candy from a baby… But, in a long term bullish market like we had on that year, even a child would make money in the markets! 
So as it was “too easy” to make money in the markets I decided to start trading naked options and it was then that a long nightmare started… I was losing consistently: 10%, 30%, 100%! ...and that lasted for almost 3 years! Losing every single month consistently. Of course that after I blew up my first account I decided to start studying (do not do that at home, start studying right at the beginning! :) ) and started learning more about the market structure.
…but there was much more to come. I blew other 4 accounts losing hundreds of thousands of dollars, until I decided to do the right thing! It took me a looooong time to realize that the market was not against me, but I myself was my biggest enemy.
Well, on this blog I’ll tell more details about those stories so that you may avoid some of the pitfalls I had during the long and hard time I had learning to survive the markets.
Happy trading!

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