Meet the guys!

Charles (aka Senticharles)

Co-Founder & Head Trader

I have been trading since 2004. It was a rough journey for a few years, until I finally understood how the market actually worked.

During that time, I traded almost everything that there is to trade, honing my skills and mastering the markets.

Now I am using Market Structure and Sentiment to pull money from the FX markets. I founded SentiFX to share the tools & methods that I developed, so other traders don't have to go through the long and strenuous process that I had to in order to find out what really works.

Bob (aka Sentibob)

Co-Founder & Tech Whiz

I began trading a couple of years ago. I started out with options, which are widely considered the premier class among all financial assets, because of their complexity and pitfalls. I quickly learned that to conquer this field, you need access to high quality tools and automation whereever possible, to cut down on the time spent analysing and maximizing your ROT (return on time).

I went down the rabbit hole of quantitative finance and came out the other side, with loads of knowledge about quantitative finance and algorithmic trading.

Now I am trading almost exclusively using algorithms. I joined Charles in founding SentiFX to develop and share first-class tools with other traders and give them the chance to maximize the efficiency of their time spent in the markets as well. 

How It All Began

I, Charles, started trading penny stocks in 2004ish. What a lesson. Talk about manipulated markets!! I participated in penny stock forums and signed up for the newsletters.

What I didn’t know at the time was a thing called pump and dump. These folks would pump up some crap penny stock and it would go to the moon, then they would dump it to all the people jumping on board. So basically, they got in early, pumped it up – people started buying (where they were selling). I learned what it truly meant to be a bag holder and price never – ever returned back anywhere near the entry. Talk about pain when something has run up 100s of percentage points or even 2500%+ many times and then it go back to zero. Then I switched to small cap and mid cap stocks. 

Getting serious

Eventually started trading only the 3x leveraged ETFs. I bought a few thousand dollars’ worth of FB stock on the IPO (2009??) – I think around $18 or $19 if I remember right. It immediately started crashing down and I got out. What I learned is that I wasn’t a buy and hold person. If I held on until today – well, that would be worth many times that now. Not my style.

I did well with the ETFs so I stayed there for a while. I had found out about the FX market eventually and was very intrigued. I really liked that I could leverage it like penny stocks and control my risk. What I quickly discovered is the FX market didn’t have directional wind. You’d get into something and immediately get killed or it would go in your favor for many hours, only to come back and be in a loss later. I studied and studied and studied the markets. Countless hours trading all timeframes, marking up charts, reading everything I could. I couldn’t understand for the longest how I could do well trading equities but was getting destroyed in FX. 

Decoding the market

Eventually switched to Futures where I traded GC (Gold) mostly. It was here that I learned all about REAL order flow and what really moves the markets. I also began to see how the markets were highly manipulated by those who had the fat pockets. After years of Trading Futures and really getting in the weeds of market structure, order flow, and the games they played... I began to see what really mattered and what didn’t. I also learned volume profile in Futures which took me to a new level in understanding the market once I was able to SEE it in a different way. Seeing something in a different light changes the way you think about things. 

I took that knowledge back to the FX market and started using Sentiment (tracked manually in EXCEL – what a pain). I started noticing patterns and traded them and started finally succeeding in FX once I figured out the game that is played. The market manipulators have access to ALL orders so they know when one side is overloaded and they take them out. This is the game that’s played in Futures – and definitely in FX.

Mastering FX

If they know that too many people are loaded up in the direction they want price to go, they take stops first then aggressively push in the direction since there is no more order resistance in the way. After tracking and carefully studying Market Structure Patterns in combination with Sentiment… I saw in FX what I was looking for. It was very similar to watching real orders in Futures and seeing the orders shift. I needed to know positioning to know which side was likely to get taken out. Sentiment gave me that edge. At some point I was studying Python and R to do statistical analysis and always had the vision of having 1,000 plus robots (aka employees) working the FX market for me around the clock. I studied algorithmic trading and met Bob along the journey. 

The birth of SentiFX

Bob is a technical guru in computer science, math, statistics, and programming. Excellent at data analysis studies and visualizations – especially with R. Bob has unbelievable skills that I truly admire. I needed his help to create this tool. I knew if we could only create it to be like it is now – that we would get deeper insight into the retail order positioning over time. He wasn’t much into the idea of discretionary trading… so I shared the vision with him of using it as a guide to turn bots on and off so that they could increase their probabilities. Bob was intrigued and agreed to help develop the tool. For me - Excel was too painful to keep tracking everything manually. I needed to see animations in a simple to understand format. So we built the SentiFX Sentiment Analysis Suite over many… many …months…. Then I started using it manually to verify the tool worked as intended and with the way I traded Sentiment and Market Structure. I tested the tool real-time and… It gave MORE of an EDGE than what I was expecting!! I saw more detail with the bubble movements. Their change over time - and size changes over time. I couldn’t see any of that with Excel. Since we built the tool to be very specific but simple – we could quickly see what retail was doing at a glance. The included playback feature was SO POWERFUL. We could now see patterns that weren’t available otherwise. This compounded an already strong edge with understanding Market Structure and Order Flow patterns.

Sharing the love

Finally, we are able to see the FX markets in a NEW NON TRADITIONAL LIGHT that shows how the retail orders are working – not that much different than seeing orders in FUTURES. Even though we don’t see the real orders, we see how the sheep are positioning and changing their positions – and that’s all we need! We are able to see more deeply into what is going on in the market. I eventually want to use the tool to turn bots on and off so they can exploit the market when conditions are favorable. I’d like to even make proven ETF type portfolios of bots that people can invest in. That all might be dreaming too big for now. Because - I also love trading manually and being intimately involved with the markets. I enjoy constant learning and studying everything that I can about the markets… and I enjoy teaching what I know. I am so excited that you can be part of this journey with us.

We can ride the coat tails of the market manipulators together!