You can not just learn new trading techniques, but can also make friends for life at Traders Carnival 2021: Dharmaraj Janakiram

Pack your bags as the biggest trading event of the year 2021 is here. Expert traders from across the country assemble at the event to showcase their skills.

The 3-day event will go on from March 25 to March 27, 2021. Traders do not come to conferences for the ‘strategy’ alone. Even at Traders Carnival, traders typically come for networking, learning, peer-to-peer teach, and yes make friends.

This year’s Trader Carnival to be held in Goa, is a bit different. It will be the first Indian Trader Conference to add a complete segment on Cryptocurrency - both as a trading instrument and as an addition to one’s portfolio.

Traders Carnival has set many records under its name. It was the first conference to showcase ‘LIVE TRADING’ during market hours. The first time this was done was at the Carnival in 2017 at Mumbai and televised by CNBC-TV18.

Dharmaraj Janakiram, popularly known as DJ and his wife Rekha are the brains behind the annual traders' meet. In a chat with Moneycontrol, which is the Digital Partner of this year’s event, DJ talks about what makes Traders Carnival 2021 a must-attend event for traders.

Here is a slice of that chat:

A) The 14th edition of Traders Carnival is being held at the Alila Diwa, A 5 Star Hyatt Property in South Goa. Dates are 25 to 27 March 2021.

Traders Carnival 2021 is special for us in many ways. Post the lockdown on March 23 last year, mobility had been severely limited, and when the lockdown was removed, the mental hangover of the health situation remained for many.

Over the last few months, many previous attendees at the Carnival connected, mostly asking a singular question. When is the next Carnival? And, most of them wanted Goa as a destination if and when we held the next Carnival.

We could see some severe isolation fatigue from March of last year. So, Goa it came to be for the 14th Edition of the Carnival - 10 Editions of Traders Carnival and 3 Editions of Investors Carnival.

A lot of people are joining the Carnival along with their families, over 20 of them in fact, adding a well-deserved vacation to their Carnival experience.

Topics covered at Goa this March include the following:

1. Bi-directional Futures Trading

2. Options Trading - Buying Options, Writing options, paired option strategies

3.  Yes, the flavour of the month, year et al - Cryptocurrencies. Both as an addition as an asset class to one’s portfolio, as well as a trading instrument. Moves in cryptocurrencies, especially in altcoins easily rival those in Bank Nifty. By a huge margin. And since traders thrive on volatility, these moves are most welcome

A) The journey has been exciting for us. It is the first-ever residential conference for traders and investors in the equity and commodity markets in India

2. The first conference which showcases ‘LIVE TRADING’ during market hours. The first time this was done was at the Carnival in 2017 in Mumbai and televised by CNBC

3. The first conference to bring to mainstream and to national prominence via our community, CNBC, Bloomberg Quint, and Moneycontrol a good number of brilliant traders, especially from Tier II, III towns in India

4. The first Indian Trader Conference to do an event outside Indian shores – Bangkok in 2016, a 4-Day residential event, again brought LIVE by CNBC

5. It will be the first Indian Trader Conference to add a complete segment on Cryptocurrency - both as a trading instrument and as an addition to the asset class to one’s portfolio

A) Contrary to what is popularly perceived, Traders do not come to conferences for the ‘strategy’ alone. Even at Traders Carnival, Traders typically come for networking, learning, peer-to-peer teach, and learn aspects.

And, the added attraction that is Goa, some come for a quiet drink by the beach in the company of old friends from earlier Carnivals.

So, Traders Carnival has really evolved from what it started out in 2012 one cold October morning in Bangalore, to now in 2021 to all of the above.

The separate complete segment on trading and ‘HODLing’ cryptocurrencies being an added jewel to the Carnival crown. Over 200 Traders are expected to spend 3-Days of learning, networking, brainstorming by the beach in Goa this summer.

A) Sometime around 2011, Santosh Samuel, a friend and a fellow trader from Bangalore and I met at the century-old Bowring Institute on Saturday afternoons.

Both of us came to the markets from the Technology space. He was into the programming side while I was in the Computer Security space.

Programming in the Civil Engineering space to be precise. These Saturday afternoons around the summer of 2011 started off around lunch discussing the market over a few chilled ones and chilly chicken and usually ended up until dinner time.

We found that while the Technology space lent itself well to networking, brainstorming, and peer-to-peer learning, the markets domain did not facilitate the same natively.

One such Saturday afternoon, several beers later, one of us said, ‘Let’s start something on our own’ and thus started the first successful discussion on Traders Carnival (though the name was thought up much later).

These were the days before Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram. What we did use was a legacy blog by yahoo called Yahoo groups. A known acquaintance, Prashanth Krishna ran a Yahoo group called ‘Technical Investor’ and we used his network to promote Traders Carnival to the online space.

Prashanth also happened to be one of the speakers in the first-ever Traders Carnival Conference in October 2012.  About 70 traders participated in the first-ever Carnival.

Thus Traders Carnival was born.

A) Yes, barring a couple of them, most of them are first-time invitees to the speaker panel of the Goa Carnival this March. Each of them possessing a highly exciting combination of skills in the markets, extremely articulate, and share a common passion to impart these skills to the audience over the 3-Day event at Goa.

A) Glad you asked this question, Kshitij. I sounded out the speakers and felt this question would be best answered if shared in their own words, as below:

Elliott Wave Principle was established in 1930’s and much work went on the patterns till 1980’s. However, the advent of crypto currencies changed the game entirely. With its extreme volatility, Crypto needs to be treated slightly differently.

I will be covering the current scenario in major Cryptos and how to approach them. This will give participants a better grasp of the dynamics of the Wave Principle with respect to trading Crypto.

The topic I am going to cover at Traders Carnival it is a framework that has clicked for me over the years. The mainstay of my framework is Market Profile.

But, it covers everything right from the underlying philosophies (ATA) to understand the functioning of markets, to tools (MP & VSA) useful for monitoring what markets are doing at present followed by a set of guidelines to nail entry and exits and a unique take on risk management (VSA & OFA).

The best part is this framework can be combined with your existing trading method or system seamlessly. What I am sharing may be a little different but it will make you ask some really pertinent questions about your trading.

At Traders Carnival I will be sharing my trading journey as well as my mindset, because I believe mindset is more important for trading than the setups and strategies.

How you act psychologically and emotionally during draw-downs and profit streaks makes a huge difference to your trading results. Moreover, it will be fun sharing at the beautiful location of Goa with beaches all around.

I will be sharing my insights from practicing powerful Techno-Funda investing systems for over 12 years. This is an extremely powerful Investing and trading system that has given me amazing returns. I will be covering the various nuances involved and how one should tackle them step by step.

I am also looking forward to amazing networking with other like-minded traders which should be to cherish for a lifetime. Of course, the scenic beauty of Goa and the lovely Alila Diwa experience is topping on ice-cream.

I am an Options Scalper. I will be covering the various strategies that I use for Options buying. My talk will focus on the tools that I use and the various parameters that one needs to be aware of before making a trade.

Participants can get a great overview of my process and how I use various pieces of data to take my buying and selling decisions.

Looking forward to share my insights, strategies, entries, exits, and more with the Traders Carnival audience. Three takeaways that I hope they will learn….

a. Learn about all things Crypto, the new age digital asset class

b. Crypto Trades made easy like child's play

c. You will learn about the 'real' freedom crypto offers.

The first thing the participant should expect is the great energy oozing out of the Carnival, where he/she could not only meet and network with the best of traders but also find out the best of strategies being used by great traders and speakers

It’s like the Physical Twitter trading community, coming under one roof to share each other’s Trading experiences.

One thing for sure once the carnival is over, true passionate traders will be longing to come back again in the next edition. Such is the impact of the Carnival.

In my session, I will show Option Buying strategies using conventional Indicators. And also cover why Option buying makes sense.

Also, one key and interesting takeaway for participants at Goa is this. Over the years, investors have reached out to us to spot good trading talent for them via the Carnival. We have been doing a facilitator role in this activity.

And like in previous years, Traders with exceptional track records are likely to be hired at Goa too.

A) Yes, and this is a pleasant surprise for us at Goa 2021, Kshitij.

Apart from the usual Carnival culprits - all metros, we are seeing good participation at Goa from Tier II, III towns like Jhansi, Nagpur, Nashik, Coimbatore, Bidar, Jodhpur, Raipur, and others.

Most pleasantly, we are seeing participants from Guwahati, Assam, where Saurav Deb and his two trader friends are traveling over 2900 Kilometres each way to come to Goa. Also, from Manipur, a 3400 km drive to Goa.

Seen increasingly at Goa this summer is the participation by large groups of traders.

Some examples - Avichal Agarwal, with an inspiring story of his own,  an entrepreneur in the Oil business and a trader who suffers a 98% visual handicap owing to a childhood disease, is coming with 6 of his trader friends from Raipur, Chattisgarh.

A group of 6 doctors from Bangalore, also trading buddies, join the Carnival.

Jagdish Kanani is joined by his family of 5 active traders. They hail from Rajkot, Gujarat. Gujarat? No surprises there.

Naveen Taparia leads a team of 6 other Trader friends from Jodhpur, Rajasthan.

Allamaprabhu and 7 of his Trader friends from Bidar Karnataka will be at Goa.

Add a good number of 19-year-olds, getting off to an early start in the markets, coming to the Carnival for the first time. 58 year young Mr Anil Dudani from Mumbai provides a nice contrast to this context.

Jaikishan Vaswani, popularly known as Jackie. Key sanity checker at the Carnival. Thanks, Jackie, all your inputs, time, and sweat. For more clarity, Jackie was a participant at the Bangkok Carnival in 2016, and is now a friend, philosopher, and misguide :)

On a side note, inspired by my interactions with the crypto community in the run-up to Goa Carnival, I have run a small experiment.

In a little over a month, I have employed a Crypto Bot with the active help and mentoring from Pradeep Simhan, a serial offender at the Carnival. Pradeep and I will be presenting an interesting study involving a crypto exchange with an API, an Algo platform and a signal provider which has given 304 successful trades from the time we started this experiment on 4th Feb 2021, with 3 failed trades.

Each successful trade made between 1 and 8 % profit per trade. I would be happy to discuss this study in detail during one of the late-night sessions with those interested, at Goa.