Robert Carver

We recently sat down with Robert Carver to talk about his new book Advanced Futures Trading Strategies. Robert is an independent investor, trader and writer and manages his own portfolio of equities, funds and futures using the methods you can find in his books. His previous books are: Leveraged Trading, Smart Portfolios and Systematic Trading.

What made you decide to write the new book? 

Firstly, I have over twenty years of experience in trading futures in both investment banks and hedge funds. But I’ve never really written about trading them in detail in my previous books, except in Leveraged Trading, where they appear as one of five classes of leveraged instruments that I specifically discuss.

Also, my previous books are rather short on specific trading strategies – which was a deliberate decision. All of them include simple trading rules, but most of the bad reviews on amazon have come from people who were expecting rather more than that. Of course there are plenty of books on trading futures (I normally recommend Jack Schwagers work here), and there are also books full of trading strategies (Perry Kaufman seems to have written the most comprehensive), but I still felt I could offer something new.

My third source of motivation was a book I wrote a few years ago, but which very few people will ever read. When I took over the fixed income team at AHL the team consisted of a disparate group of people, some of whom had little familiarity with the asset class. So I wrote a ‘book’, which mostly consisted of a lot of graphs showing how various instruments had behaved in the past, their volatility patterns, how the yield curve had behaved, and how various types of trading strategies performed across different instruments. 

I can’t remember the exact title, but if I wrote such a book today I would call it the ‘Fixed Income Almanac’. It once occurred to me that a ‘Futures Almanac’ would be an interesting project. I imagined a book with a couple of pages per market, with a graph showing the price and performance of various simple trading strategies, plus some interesting market statistics. Of course such a book wouldn’t be commercially viable, and would go out of date very quickly! However it struck me that if I did write a book about trading strategies, I could make it ‘almanac-like’ by testing my strategies over a comprehensive set of futures markets, and showing the results.  

Who will benefit from this book?

Pretty much anyone who trades futures. You might expect from my previous work that it would be purely for systematic traders, but that isn’t the case. Naturally all the strategies are completely objective – you don’t need to interpret a particular candlestick pattern to trade them. But there is nothing to stop someone from using these strategies alongside discretionary opinions to decide what positions to hold.

As well as the strategies themselves, I also explain a systematic approach to all aspects of futures trading, including instrument selection, position sizing, cost control, which contracts to hold, risk and cash management.

A few caveats: this isn’t a book for complete beginners – for them I’d recommend my previous book Leveraged Trading. I also recommend a minimum account size of $100,000 for trading futures. However UK readers of Leveraged Trading will know that they can get away with less capital by using CFDs and spread bets to replicate positions in futures. Finally, although most of the strategies require only basic mathematical knowledge and can be run on a spreadsheet, a small number need more advanced maths and the ability to code. Both spreadsheets and example code are available on the website for the book.

What is the key takeaway from your book?

That you can make profits trading futures without needing to know or discover any secret strategies, and by avoiding some key mistakes. 

What is the best financial advice you have ever received?

Spend less than you earn.

What’s your best investment of all time, and your worst?

Best investment: I bought shares in Barclays, where I used to work as a trader, within a few pence of the bottom during the 2008-9 financial crisis. I sold them a few months later for many times my buying price. Unfortunately I didn’t do the trade in enough size, so my profits were pretty meagre. I wouldn’t make that mistake now. 

Worst investment: Every car I have bought. I only buy cars with cash, which means I notice the depreciation happening rather than seeing it tied up in a monthly payment. Needless to say, I don’t buy expensive brand new cars.

What is your main interest/hobby outside of your work?

In the summer, sailing. In the winter, thinking about going sailing!