Here's Everything You Want To Know About That Trader Who Screamed "Collapse" And "Goldman Sachs Rules The World" On BBC

 

The rumors are flying about Alessio Rastani since his BBC interview yesterday morning.

Some people are shocked about what he said ("The collapse is coming... and Goldman Sachs rules the world"), while others think he was being refreshingly honest. And then there are those who think he's a complete phoney.

They've suggested that he's a member of The Yes Men, a prank group that enjoys doing interviews posing as business leaders or bankers. Both Rastani and the group have denied that he has any affiliation.

We'll let you decide, but by our estimation, he looks like a real trader. Here's his Youtube channel, where he promotes his Facebook fan page and his website, LeadingTrader.com.

He describes himself as an, "experienced stock market trader and mentor. Keynote speaker on share trading and spreadbetting. Husband and all round nice guy."

Importantly, we were not able to find out whether or not he's ever been backed by any professional firm, or any account of his past trading record.

Now here's what did find, gathered by digging around on the internet (mostly from Forbes):

• 34 year old Allesio Rastani lives (and was raised) in London and has traded "for real" since 2006. He's independant, though he once worked for an unknown institution for a while, but realized he didn't want to have a boss.
• He says he lost money in the dot com boom
• In terms of trading, Rastani claims to be totally "obsessed" but likes to keep things simple. He has rules and he follows them, he hates risk and mostly trades on the Dow, some forex, and very liquid stocks.
• As you may have guessed, he's into trading on voltatility and trends.
• He uses TradeStation (in case you're wondering), and trades the first two hours of the NYSE and the last one or two hours of the Euro markets.
• Some traders he admires (all public personalities): Linda Raschke, Guy Cohen, and Carolyn Boroden.
• On his interview yesterday: "I think it’s overblown. I have no idea why I’m getting this attention. I don’t think it was news. For someone to say what I said, I thought everybody already knew this kind of stuff. The big players of funds rule the world, I don’t think that was news. And what I said about making money from a crash, obviously not everybody knows about that, you can make money from a downward market. A lot of people just got the wrong end of the foot, misunderstood what I was saying. They thought I was joyful or licking my lips about the idea of making money from people’s miseries. That’s probably the way it looked on the video. But if they watch the whole video, what I was really trying to say is people need to educate themselves about how to do that… what I was trying to say was, look, everyone should basically prepare. I was trying to be the good guy. If this market’s going to crash, then you’ve got to prepare yourself.."
• "Angels and Demons" is one of his favorite books, he likes watching movies, and he counts Lady Gaga and Nickelback (woof) among some of his favorite musicians.

We've tried contacting him for an interview. If he gets back to us, we'll be sure to update this post with everything we find out.

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