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Anton Kreil's Professional Trading Masterclass Review
  • Quality of Education
  • Price
  • Credibility of Educator
3.9

Summary

In this article, we take a critical look at Anton Kreil’s Professional Trading Masterclass. Find out if its a good fit for you and whether or not it is worth the money.

Who is Anton Kreil?

Anton Kreil is the founder of trading education and asset management company Institute of Trading and Portfolio Management. He started his career working at investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and J.P. Morgan. He rose to prominence in 2009 when he and Lex Van Dam hosted reality TV series Million Dollar Traders, where the two attempted to recreate their own version of the Turtle Traders experiment.

Since the release of his first trading course in 2011, he has been in the seminar business. According to Kreil, “almost everything you are taught by brokers and trading educators is rubbish and will never make you a successful trader. This is why 90% of retail traders never stay solvent.”

Anton Kreil Course Overview

Anton Kreil’s Professional Trading Masterclass teaches you Kreil’s trading/investing approach, process, and principles. The course teaches one a basic global macro outlook, that according to Kreil, is similar to an approach that would be taken by a professional hedge fund manager.

His process involves taking a top-down view of global financial markets, as opposed to the more traditional bottom-up approach taken by Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham. He gets a view on the world economy by establishing views on currencies, commodities, and interest rates, then a specific nation’s economy, then the industries within that economy, down the specific stocks in those industries.

Key Takeaways

Top-Down Approach

topdownapproach

The most important principle that Kreil stresses in this course is taking a top-down approach to financial markets. This involves letting your view of the macro market climate guide your investment decisions. One starts at the global economy, and forms a view based on currencies, commodities and interest rates, the view you establish from this would dictate which regions you invest in. From there, your view on the industries within the region you’re investing in will dictate which industries you invest in. From there, you do individual analysis on stocks.

As mentioned earlier, this differs from the traditional bottom-up approach mostly taken by value investors, which involves looking for stocks that represent great value, analyzing the stock, only moving up their analysis from the stock level once they have determined the stock is a good buy.

Kreil calls his top-down approach the “W.I.S.H. Framework,” standing for the following four tenants of the framework:

  • World view
  • Industry view
  • Stock view
  • Having discipline

In the course, Kreil shows which macroeconomic indicators are important to watch, and helps traders cut through the noise of information overload.

Volatility

volatility

One of the quotes often repeated in Kreil’s course is that “traders are slaves to volatility.” He emphasizes that traders must chase volatility, while portfolio managers do everything they can to hedge for it.

Kreil’s approach to volatility is quite different from most of those in the trading world, as he thinks there is only enough volatility in markets to short-term trade about 20% of the time, and that for the other 80% of the time, traders should focus on managing a portfolio with a 1-3 month time horizon.

Kreil determines whether one should be day trading on any given day by a simple traffic-light system.

  • Red is when the VIX falls 25% or more. One should be portfolio manager during this period
  • Amber is when traders should be getting ready for short-term trading opportunities to present themselves by raising cash.
  • Green is the day trading zone, when the VIX rallies 25% or more.

Day Trading Approach

spdailyreturns

As mentioned earlier, Kreil believes that the markets only present favorable day trading conditions about 20% of the time. This 20% of the time occurs when the market volatility is rising, and Kreil says one should take directional trades with a 1-5 day time horizon.

Kreil is a huge proponent of the Kelly Criterion to determine trade size, the criterion, in a nutshell, dictates that you should increase your trade size when you’re doing good, and reduce it when you’re doing bad.

To the chagrin of many technical analysts, Kreil says one should avoid any technical indicator that isn’t based on volatility, and instead use economic and asset specific newsflow to gauge sentiment and hunt for volatility.

My Opinion

I’ve taken more than a dozen trading courses, some very good, and some terrible. The courses range from rudimentary technical analysis, sophisticated options strategies, to order flow trading. However, Kreil’s course is the first to even graze the topic of global macro, probably because filming some stock charts with indicators is a lot easier than having an understanding of macroeconomics.

I much enjoyed Kreil’s course and learned a lot from it, however it’s not without its flaws. The top down approach was well defined and he walked everyone on conducting an analysis, however, he only very briefly touched on individual stock analysis. While there are countless books and seminars on stock valuation (or stock picking service like the Motley Fool), one would think that because of Kreil’s contrarian nature, he would also have a different stock analysis criteria.

The question of whether or not to invest your money into Kreil’s course comes down to how much capital you have for trading. If you only have a small amount of capital your money is better spent on great trading, investing, and economics books, while deploying a small amount of it to trading.

If you are, however, in the market for a trading course, Kreil’s course is within the industry average, at $1,499 for a month’s access, and $2,999 for a year’s access. And of any trading course I’ve seen, this is the best one.

Pros

  • One of few global macro focused courses
  • Kreil has a verifiable track record, working at top investment banks as an equities trader
  • Very little in the way of esoteric theory, course gives concrete information

Cons

  • Lacking in individual stock analysis
  • The first tier of pricing only gives access to the course for one month.