He Quit His Engineering Job and Became a Full-Time Trader Within a Year
From Engineer to Full-Time Trader
Alfredo is 26, from Colombia, and only entered his second year of trading after already making a major career change. He quit his engineering job in December and began trading full time in January. That decision was not made blindly. He says he already had a strategy, understood what he was doing, and had another source of income before walking away from his salary. What changed quickly afterward was the scale. He had previously earned less than $1,000 a month as an engineer, while trading began producing significantly larger months and giving him the freedom he had been looking for.
He Didn’t Try to Learn Trading Alone
Alfredo believes one of the reasons he progressed quickly was recognizing that he needed guidance. Instead of assuming YouTube videos and screen time alone would make him profitable, he looked for someone who already had the results he wanted. He studied smart money concepts, then became obsessive about backtesting. He repeatedly tested years of gold price action and eventually narrowed his attention to one instrument. His mentor had told him to stop trying to master everything and focus on one market, so Alfredo chose gold and committed to learning how that chart behaved.
His Gold Strategy Is Simpler Than It Used to Be
Alfredo still uses ideas from smart money concepts, but he deliberately stripped away much of the complexity. He starts with market structure on the 30-minute chart, then moves to five minutes for execution. He watches how Asia and London develop and prefers both sessions to be moving in the same direction. At the New York open, he waits for a retracement and uses Fibonacci levels, commonly around the 50% area, to look for an entry. If the earlier sessions are mixed or the direction is unclear, he would rather stay out than force a trade.
He Was One Trade Away From Blowing a $100K Account
Going full time did not immediately make everything easy. Shortly after leaving his job, Alfredo had a $100,000 funded account sitting around $90,300, close enough to the loss limit that one more bad trade could have ended it. Instead, he recovered. That same account later produced a $5,000 payout. Alfredo sees that turnaround as part of a larger mental shift. He stopped identifying primarily as an engineer who happened to trade and began thinking of himself as a full-time trader. In his view, that change in identity affected the way he approached decisions, discipline, and pressure.
He Believes the Strategy Isn’t the Hardest Part
Alfredo’s strongest belief is that trading success is less about finding the perfect setup and more about becoming the person capable of executing one consistently. He argues that traders can take the same setup on two different days and get very different results because their mindset and behavior have changed. His routine reflects that idea. He wakes early, exercises, takes a cold shower, reads his trading plan before looking at charts, and only trades if the market presents something that fits. If there is nothing there, he closes the computer and moves on with his day.
Trading Strategy/ Mindset
Alfredo’s Gold Trading Strategy
Alfredo focuses on gold and deliberately keeps his strategy simpler than when he first learned smart money concepts.
He begins with market structure on the 30-minute chart, paying attention to breaks of structure and directional changes. From there, he drops to the five-minute chart for execution. He is not trying to use every smart money concept available. Order blocks, fair value gaps and other tools eventually became too much information, so he filtered the framework down to the pieces that actually helped him make decisions.
Session alignment is important. Alfredo likes to see Asia and London developing in the same direction. He then waits for a retracement around the New York open and uses Fibonacci levels, often near the 50% retracement, to look for entries. His example in the interview uses roughly a 1:3 risk-to-reward target.
If Asia and London are giving conflicting signals, he may simply stay out. That selectivity has become part of the strategy rather than something separate from it.
His preparation is also highly structured. He wakes before his trading session, exercises, takes a cold shower, and reads his trading plan before opening TradingView. The goal is to remind himself what he is supposed to do before the chart starts influencing his decisions.