We had a good informal catch up over some Dim Sum in Sukhumvit Road for 3-4 hours discussing everything from ex-pat life to finance.<\/strong><\/p>\n Recent experience with FX trading left me a little dubious where I wanted to invest in what appeared to be a very risky investment vehicle. I have put some money into your managed fund though and have seen solid profitable months<\/strong> (see my monthly investment updates<\/a>), so thank you for that!<\/p>\n I know we\u2019re looking to catch up in Bangkok on my next trip in December 2018, hopefully with Brian too. Looking forward to enjoying some drinks with you guys.<\/p>\n So, thank you in advance for answering my questions, and let\u2019s jump into some questions for you, we look forward to your answers.<\/strong><\/p>\n My name is Teng Su, I was born in China and grew up in New Zealand and Australia. I\u2019ve been living in Bangkok, Thailand for the past 5 years.<\/p>\n Academically, I have a Sports Science\/Medicine background (interestingly similar to my background<\/a>), but since a chance meeting with a retired central bank Governor that evolved into a mentorship over a decade ago, I\u2019ve been a full-time Currency Trader and Fund Manager.<\/strong><\/p>\n Bangkok is one of our favorite cities in the world. We\u2019ve had so many people who\u2019ve come to visit us both personally and professionally that have absolutely fallen in love with the place. Quite a few have actually even either ended up moving to Bangkok or spending the majority of their year here.<\/p>\n To be fair I\u2019ve seen my fair share of people who\u2019ve become swallowed by it all with the crazy selection of great restaurants and amazing nightlife, but I\u2019d have to say that we\u2019re fortunate enough that a combination of our work, personalities, and tastes have kept us away from falling off of the deep end. <\/p>\n We love what we do<\/strong>, and with our work, in particular, the sometimes-extreme highs and lows that we experience day-in-day-out, keeps us grounded and forces us to focus<\/strong> enough to prevent us from becoming too distracted by the charms of the city.<\/p>\n Art of FX is an asset management company that specializes in trading Currency Pairs, Commodities, CFDs, and Indices on the retail spot market.<\/p>\n Our work is similar to a stock trading firm, but our expertise is profiting from the movements of instruments such as Euros, Yen, Gold, and Oil.<\/strong><\/p>\n Depending on a client\u2019s investment goals, risk appetite, and capital available, we can either add investors to our large Managed Fund or individually manage their capital account with a custom strategy to suit their needs.<\/p>\n As a small firm, we prefer to keep our heads down and work, so I can\u2019t really speak much for our competitors. However, through our broker, we\u2019ve learned that we're relatively different from their other larger management partners in that we focus on volume over scale.<\/strong><\/p>\n The thing with the markets that we\u2019re involved in, in comparison to say stocks and bonds, is that instruments such as FX and Commodities have so many more variables influencing price action. <\/p>\n With this in mind, our execution strategy boils down to a high number of trades per session with a relatively small scale of exposure per trade and exiting those positions as quickly as we can, as opposed to making an analysis, entering a single trade, and letting it run to either a profit or a loss over the long period of time.<\/p>\n Minimising time exposure also reduces the chance of outside variables<\/strong> from entering the equation and potentially counteracting our analysis. The FX and Commodities markets have so much volume (over $5 trillion USD per day) that liquidity is never an issue, and with the volume that we do (around $1-2 billion USD in transactions per month), our per-transaction costs are very low, which allows us to work in this way.<\/p>\n However, this strategy has the major downside that it requires a pretty intensive work schedule<\/strong>. The only thing that makes it work is that we truly enjoy it and have pretty much gotten accustomed to working 10-15 or more hours per day for almost 10 years. Doing all-nighters due to major market events doesn\u2019t really bother us as much as it used to. Luckily for us, the markets are closed on the weekend so we do get time to enjoy life when we get the chance.<\/p>\n As of Q4 2018 we have in the region of $25 million USD and around 200 clients.<\/strong><\/p>\n Originally when Brian and I met, he was working alone in Texas while I was working out of my apartment in Australia and we were both managing our own separate Funds. We\u2019d have a Skype voice channel open for up to 20 hours a day just chatting and working, and after a very profitable 6-month period we decided to fly somewhere so we could work face to face.<\/p>\n For anyone that\u2019s self-employed, working alone and at home for an extended period of time (and I imagine that includes a lot if not most of your Life Hacker Guy visitors), the chance to not only get a change of scenery but to work together with a successful well-respected peer is something you don\u2019t pass up.<\/p>\n We chose Bangkok as it was a city that I was familiar with thanks to previous holidays with friends and family, and the Indochina time zone is perfect for trading<\/strong> the most active times of the day (late Asia, Europe, and the EU\/NY market overlaps).<\/p>\n Through our broker we have been referred a number of institutional-level investors thanks to our performance record<\/strong>, but we don\u2019t market to those types of clients directly, and we prefer to work with retail-level investors. We prefer not to over-complicate our lives, and while we very well could go after the Tier 1 accounts, evolving ourselves from a small shop into a more corporate-style operation doesn\u2019t really interest us.<\/p>\n Our average client is an accredited investor (although we do accept non-accredited) from Europe or Asia with an existing portfolio of between $500k-$2m, looking to diversify and put their money into something that\u2019s different and maybe more aggressive than their usual 5-10% per annum holdings.<\/p>\n We\u2019re quite happy with the level of growth both in terms of the number of clients and funds under management that we\u2019ve been seeing over the past few years, and our current setup can easily handle the current rate and more for a few more, without having to expand our operations too extensively. With that said, we\u2019ve also streamlined our workflow enough to be able to accommodate time for adding more services as well. <\/p>\n We're currently working on launching a client-side Trade Copier service<\/strong> which is designed for people to get involved with us who maybe can\u2019t afford our managed account deposit minimums, or who are learning to trade themselves and want to follow a professional in real-time.<\/p>\n We also run a Trading Room social space<\/strong>, with a chat room, trade calls, and screen sharing, that we\u2019re considering expanding the features of in the next few quarters.<\/p>\n So, as disclosed already I have invested with Art Of FX this year. <\/p>\n My investment with Art of FX since May 2018 is up 10.1% at the time of posting this article<\/strong>, so I am pretty happy with that – 6 months and 10% gain. This investment strategy may not be for everyone as it carries some risk, you need to also have the cash to invest and not need access to it for 3 years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Meeting](\"https:\/\/lifehackerguy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/meeting-teng-su-art-of-fx.jpg\")
<\/p>\nCan you give us a quick bit of background of yourself, where you\u2019re from, and where you live today?<\/h2>\n
Living in Bangkok is awesome, I personally love spending time there, but a few days is normally enough for me. How do you stay focused living in such a vibrant, exciting, and distracting city?<\/h2>\n
I first heard about Art of FX listening to the Invest Like a Boss Podcast. Can you outline to my readers what you do?<\/h2>\n
How does the strategy followed by you and Brian differ from your competitors?<\/h2>\n
![\"Art](\"https:\/\/lifehackerguy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/artoffx-trading-screens.jpg\")
<\/p>\nHow much do you guys currently have under management? <\/h2>\n
You have a somewhat unique structure. Can you go into why you went for this structure and location?<\/h2>\n
Do you attract institutional-level investors or are you aiming at the retail sector? Is there a typical type of person who invests with you guys?<\/h2>\n
How do you see the business going in the next 12-24 months? Are you looking to grow your money under management or add other services?<\/h2>\n
My Art of FX Investment Performance<\/h2>\n
![\"Art](\"https:\/\/lifehackerguy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/artoffx-performance-chart.jpg\")
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