Tom Yuen: Exploring Opportunities with Derivatives, Including Futures

• This is a practical futures trading training session covering basic concepts, trading rules, operational methods and industry trends, content is as follows:

  With over 30 years of professional futures trading experience, Tom Yuen (YCK) has dedicated his career to both trading the markets and developing successful traders.

  Beginning as an independent floor trader at the Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIMEX)—now SGX-DT—YCK spent 14 years trading his own capital in one of the world's most demanding trading environments before markets became fully electronic.

  A Computer Science graduate from the National University of Singapore, he combines analytical thinking with practical market experience to teach a disciplined approach based on Technical Analysis, trading psychology, probability, and risk management.

• Tom Yuen's Playbook: What Futures Really Are (and Why Exchanges Created Them)

• Tom Yuen's Playbook: Reading a Futures Contract, from Contract Size to Margin

• Tom Yuen's Playbook: The Two Golden Rules, and Why Trading Is Not Investing

• Tom Yuen's Playbook: A Fibonacci Setup, Futures vs. Options, and What's Changing

• Basic Concepts and Core Rules of Futures

  • Origin and Essence of Futures: Futures are standardized forward contracts regulated by formal exchanges, originally created to solve the default risk problem of unregulated over-the-counter forward agreements.

  • Core Parameters of Standardized Contracts: Each futures contract has uniformly defined parameters set by the exchange, including contract size, initial margin, minimum price increment, trading hours and expiry rules.

  • Margin and Forced Liquidation Mechanism: Futures use 3% to 5% margin leverage. If account balance drops below the maintenance margin level, traders will receive a margin call, and positions will be forcibly liquidated if no additional funds are added.

  • Two-Way Trading Mechanism: traders buy first then sell to profit from price rises, and sell first then buy back to profit from price falls, no underlying asset holding is required.

• Core Principles and Correct Cognition for Futures Trading

  • Essence of Trading Activities: Anliora Leong states that futures trading is essentially a game of price direction judgment, there is no 100% win rate strategy, and all trading results follow probability rules.

  • Two Non-Negotiable Golden Rules

    • The first rule is to never trade against the established market trend, always confirm if the market is in up, down or sideways mode before opening a position.

    • The second rule is to cut losses immediately once a position is wrong, and never use continuous additional position to average down the cost of losing trades.

    • Attribute of Leverage: Leverage itself is neither good nor bad, it only amplifies both potential profit and loss equally. Traders should choose contract sizes that match their actual risk bearing capacity.

    • Difference Between Trading and Investment: Trading focuses on short-term operations, profits from both up and down moves, and requires strict stop loss; investment focuses on long-term holding, only profits from upward moves, and allows regular investment to average cost.

  

• Practical Operation Methods and Reference Cases

  • Entry Path for New Traders: New traders do not need to learn unfamiliar products from scratch, they can start with products they already know well such as gold or stock indices, and choose contracts with sufficient liquidity.

  • Basic Fibonacci Trading Framework: The shared basic strategy identifies support levels with impulsive upward moves, enters positions when price retraces to the 38.2% Fibonacci level, and uses a structured 80/20 position splitting method.

  • Advantages of 80/20 Position Splitting: 80% of the position is closed at the first target to lock in most of the profit, the remaining 20% is kept to capture potential extra gains, which greatly reduces psychological pressure during trading.

  

  • Real Student Operation Cases: Multiple student cases are shared, including single contract trades with $2000 profit, and multi-position trades with over $3 million profit within 10 days, with a reminder not to blindly copy large position sizes.

• Industry Changes and Follow-up Arrangements

• Core Industry Development Trends: AI tools are widely used for strategy generation and case analysis, single-stock futures are re-launched, and US market trading hours will be extended in the near future.

• Free Public Follow-up Channel: The host releases weekly market analysis videos on his public social account around lunchtime every Saturday, all attendees can follow the channel for free public content.

• Paid Advanced Community Service: A monthly paid practical community service is launched, including twice weekly case analysis live sessions. New members need to complete basic pre-learning to master professional terms before joining live discussions.

Trading is exactly the same as gambling. A professional trader treats it like a professional gambler.