Shares Magazine carries a feature most weeks in the Trading Section about individual traders, their profile and style of trading. Don't forget the magazine now carries a huge amount of weekly ideas on Trading including suggested short term stock plays, currencies and indices. I will endeavour to update the Trader Profile on here every week. You can some of the Traders profiled in action in the 'Traders Room' here on MoneyAM.

Alan Saunders revolutionised pension plans in the late 1970s and has been trading successfully ever since.


A sign hangs over Alan Saunderss desk, which reads: Do not have an opinion trade what you see, not what you think.

Saunders was a war baby, born in September 1940 in Edgware as the Battle of Britain raged overhead. Early memories include rationing and being held by his mother to watch the VE Day fly-past.

Leaving Christs College in North Finchley in 1958 with half an A Level, young Saunders began work with the Liverpool, London & Globe insurance company selling life and pensions. In 1964, he moved to Hogg Robinson in the same business and was shortly posted to Lagos, Nigeria, where he spent five years. On a flight back to the UK he met air hostess Eileen, his wife to be. I loved Nigeria and caught the end of the colonial era, he recalls, but it wasnt a place for the faint-hearted. When the servant next door decapitated his neighbour with a machete, Saunders decided to return to the UK. His next posting was to Glasgow, where he continued to work for Hogg Robinson for the next ten years.

In 1979 he formed an independent financial advisory firm and along with his partner invented something called the Portable Executive Pension, or PEP, which allowed those with company-assisted private pension schemes to transfer without penalty from company to company as their careers advanced. It represented a major advance in the world of pensions and heralded the flexible pensions environment of today.

A little while later, the name was hijacked by the government for its new Personal Equity Plan scheme. Having already registered PEP as a trademark, Saunders and his partner wrote a polite letter pointing this out. The net result was a rather generous settlement by the Thatcher administration.

In the early 1990s, he started to trade a portion of his wealthier clients funds in the options and futures markets, having strict rules on losing no more than 2% of a clients capital on any one trade. He used (and still uses) a trading system, now called HawkEye, that was developed by fellow trader Nigel Hawkes using relative strength, breakouts, various levels and volume.

Many of these principles are implemented in his latest passion that of trading equities on a weekly basis using a package called Sharehunter. In the non-long trending markets we have now, says Saunders, equity trading is only practical on an intra-day basis (like a drug, he reckons) or weekly, which he prefers but not over a few days, as shortterm whipsaws make this highly impractical. Having used Sharehunter for the past 18 months to buy into equities successfully, Alan has now become the UK distributor for the product. Recent Sharehunter breakouts include Amlin (AML), Burren Energy (BUR), HMV Group (HMV) in London, as well as Baxter International (BAX), Anadarco Petroleum (APC), Constellation Energy (CEG) and CSX Corp (CSQ) in the United States.

Though Alan no longer trades futures, he is active on an intra-day basis trading forex through FXCM. He uses his own uniquelyresearched version of the Gann eighths levels principle to trade the euro and Cable. A version of this may shortly be available on eSignal as a proprietary add-on study.

Saunders feels that the current financial regulatory framework in the UK is totally over the top, leading us to pay a huge price in terms of flexibility and future development. Saunders still lives in a small village near Glasgow and drives a dark blue metallic Jag Sovereign. His son Andy, 34, lives nearby and works with his dad on trading, while daughter Emma, 31, is living in New Zealand and working in the wine industry. Hill walking, gardening and golf are his hobbies, having given up bee-keeping at the behest of his neighbours. He remains fond of Africa and completed a tour of South Africa but admits that in the long term like most traders, I would like to be sitting on a beach in the Bahamas with the laptop, busy for about 10 minutes a day. ■