Hi Stephane. First of all, thank you for giving us an interview.
From the beginning, can you tell us about your journey that brought you to the world of trading and investing in the financial markets?
Hello Giancarlo and thank you for your invitation to share my journey that brought me to the world of trading and investing in the financial markets.
Very early on, the financial markets piqued my curiosity, no doubt my father’s career had a lot to do with it. Although he was not a businessman, he had a doctorate in finance and was very interested in finance. I still remember my first questions when I was ten years old about the stock market, listening to the radio in his car on the way home from school and a reporter listing the prices of the indices. Since his explanations hadn’t really enlightened me, I had searched in vain for explanations in the many piles of financial papers he kept in his office. I think it was at this point that I started to catch the trading bug, but it was a far cry from my childhood concerns and it wasn’t until much later that I returned to it.
15 years later, in 2002, I joined a bank as a specialized telecommunications advisor, and among other things, I was responsible for placing stock exchange orders for the company’s customers. My training for this position was quite superficial for my taste and did not satisfy my thirst for knowledge, and when my line manager suggested I set up an investment club with him, I jumped at the chance to learn more about markets. Our investment club with a typical Marseille name: MIA (Massillia Investment Agency) had about ten active members when it was launched and we shared our humble financial analyzes during bi-weekly meetings. Fortunately, the markets during this period were bullish, and it was not necessary to have great technical knowledge to preserve our capital because, in retrospect, it was much closer to the Marseillais bistros than to Wall Street.
I left this investment club 2 years later to be more independent in my strategy and decisions, mainly training myself on the markets, burning a few accounts along the way, but always basing myself only on fundamental analysis and news. At the time, I saw technical analysis as self-fulfilling sham at best and didn’t really seek to train myself in what resembled reading coffee grounds. The big shift in my way of approaching the markets happened in 2008 with the collapse of Lehman, which I did not see coming at all, and the appearance at financial markets.
In April 2009, during a trip to NY with my father, I decided to buy his book The Art of Trading for the trip as well as another book on technical analysis “The secret code of Japanese candles” by Felipe Tudela. It was a true revelation and a 180• turn in my view of the markets and technical analysis. I then put the financial markets on hold for almost 5 years to devote myself to other investments and primarily to real estate between 2013 and 2018.
I still remember the day the financial markets reinstalled themselves in my life, never to come out again. at the end of november 2017 the man who would become my best friend and partner a few years later came into my office and asked me my opinion on the Atari value…here I placed a buy order an hour later and definitely back to the markets.
Are you more of a trader or an investor?
It is quite a long journey to find out what suits us best, but although I have a real investor streak, I am more of a swing trader (long swing) and rarely hold a title for several years.
What are your favorite markets?
I have a clear preference for the stock markets and especially the US Tech stock markets, but I also sometimes buy in other geographies or other sectors when I spot (or think I spot) a nugget, and also according to sector rotations . I put no restrictions on geographical areas or sectors of activity.
Did you experience adversity before becoming profitable?
Unlike some traders who became profitable after only 2 or 3 years for me, it was a long journey filled with burnt accounts and disappointments. Trading is not easy and it is even often counterintuitive. I made many mistakes, very often first due to a lack of strategy and then later due to overconfidence in my strategy, but these mistakes were a source of reflection and each time they allowed me to grow. The biggest danger in trading is probably starting out winning for the wrong reasons, luckily I started out losing.
What is your approach to the markets?
I have a macro-sectoral approach which is quite top-down. Often I look at sector trends first and then with technical analysis I identify stocks that are in the uptrend sector and have yet to catch up. Once the values have been identified by the technical analysis, I check if the company’s fundamentals justify the gap with the rest of the sector.
You are the chairman of the group Le Club des Traders, which has more than 19,000 members. What motivated you to create this group and what are the goals of the community?
Traders Club was born during the first lockdown and was the answer to many questions from investors during the Covid period.
My associate Anthony (private banker) and myself had noticed a renewed interest in the financial markets on the part of our clients and even in our close entourage and had decided to bring our humble expertise to a handful of friends. by creating a Facebook group.
After only a few months, this group, which only had about ten friends when it was launched, now had more than 10,000 members, and a journalist from BFM contacted us to offer us an interview about a Bruce Toussaint program, the theme of which was the enthusiasm for French for the financial markets.
This unusual enthusiasm was the starting point for a reflection with Anthony, which led us to the creation of bulltribe 3 years later.
You recently launched bulltribe. Can you tell us about this application and the services you offer?
bulltribe is a fruit of our Facebook group “Le Club des Traders”. At that time in 2020, we had begun to wonder about the reasons for this group’s success, and we began to believe that behind this singular enthusiasm there might be problems to be solved and ultimately a business model. We therefore conducted surveys in our community to find out what the investors who came to join us expected from us and quite quickly we understood that if the demand for financial information (newsletters, buy/sell signals, coaching , training etc.) ) had exploded in the face of this demand, a very poor quality offering had developed with scammers, dream sellers and apprentice traders improvising as professionals after 3 months… in short, what was missing the market, it was not a new offer, but rather a platform that would centralize offers of financial information (newsletters, signals, portfolio monitoring) but also and above all filter them so that French-speaking investors would have a platform where they could come with confidence and follow the analyzes from professional financial markets. selected and certified by the upstream platform.
What are the features that differentiate bulltribe from other available applications?
bulltribe has nothing to do with the applications that you can currently find around financial investments.
bulltribe is the result of 3 years of design and development work to create a disruptive and completely new business model.
We didn’t really have a model to benchmark ourselves, so we took a lot of inspiration from existing network platforms in other activity sectors, such as blah-blah-car or even Booking and Airbnb.
With Anthony we rented apartments on Booking and it was immediately an architecture that spoke to us for our platform.
In addition to the surveys and market research we had carried out, our main driving force was our experience in the banking and investment advisory sectors on a global scale. We wanted to offer an alternative to bank advisors and CGPs (wealth management advisors) because we know the flaws in the system and the lack of impartiality of advisors due to the bank’s business policy, the goals to be achieved for the advisor or commissions. he receives. When designing bulltribe, our goal was to put the interests of the investor back at the center, and this has become the DNA of our platform and the heart of our business model.
The goal of bulltribe is to support investors and introduce them to market professional(s) who are the perfect match for them. We are almost a dating site lol
But new features are already being designed and bulltribe aims to become an important platform that will eventually include all the best product and service offerings around investing. But shh I won’t tell you more so as not to spoil the surprise effect 😉
How can our readers reach you?
Your readers can discover our platform on the website www.bulltribe.com or by downloading the mobile application, which is already available on Android and in a few weeks also on the AppleStore. However, a web app version is already available for iPhone owners by simply going to www.bulltribe.com.
If your readers have questions or suggestions, our teams can be contacted by phone on 04.67.57.14.12 and by e-mail at contact@bulltribe.com
See you soon at bulltribe!
Thank you for taking the time to give us this interview and we wish you the best of luck in the markets and in your businesses.
Disclaimer: The information and statements contained in this report are for general information only and do not constitute an offer or solicitation to buy or sell foreign exchange contracts or CFDs. Although the information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness and assumes no responsibility for any direct, indirect or consequential damages that may arise as a result of any reliance on such information.