Trading with friends and Greek wine — a day that demands a repeat

Warm-up for the day

On Friday morning we first walked the largest trading fair in the German-speaking world, Finance26 — formerly known as World of Trading. We ran into the first familiar faces between the exhibition stands. You stand among broker booths, recognise someone you had only known from Discord until then, and you are straight into a conversation. A relaxed start to a long day.

We all gathered for lunch at the hotel next to the fairgrounds. 14 traders in the end, and almost all of them members since the very beginning. That gave the whole day a baseline you cannot plan for: we did not have to explain to anyone what and who Onlytraders is, or what our philosophy stands for.

As much value as possible packed into one day

Fed and already in a relaxed mood we headed into the seminar room — we had a lot planned for the crew over the next five hours. Apart from a short coffee break, we tried to pack as many golden nuggets into the workshop as we could. The focus was on new strategies with the potential to make it into our real-money strategy mix.

The story of how Onlytraders came about in the first place made for an entertaining start in itself. Let us put it this way: Matthias and I would never have found each other if we had thin skin and took offence easily. After that it came thick and fast:

• Wounded Bull Sprint as an end-of-month strategy with a particular twist
• Flyaway Laggards, built on a bonds-versus-equities comparison
• OT-Terminal live — we placed a real order for 15:30 and showed how quick and easy trading with it is
• My Precious: a mean reversion strategy on gold and silver
• Rotate it like a Surfer: trading just once a month, nice and comfortable
• Dump that Vola: selling volatility, but only once fear has risen
• Short is not long in reverse — Matthias pulled out all the stops to make the risks of short strategies clear to everyone
• Sunset Short, that first short strategy: one day short, then done
• Portfolio Maker live: the enormous power of blending several profitable strategies

Four new strategies for a more robust mix

The essence of the strategies we presented for the first time at the workshop: these four potential additions cover market conditions where our existing strategies have little business being active.

One strategy only becomes active once a month — close to zero effort, and still a building block in its own right. My Precious trades gold and silver and therefore barely correlates with anything else in the mix. Dump that Vola sells volatility, but not blindly: only after a rise in fear. And Sunset Short is our first short strategy at all — which in turn brings requirements and risks of its own, and we went into those in particular detail.

Enter the Portfolio Maker

The second big block was not about individual strategies. It was about how they work together. We used the Portfolio Maker live to show what happens when you combine profitable strategies — and that the result is not the sum of its parts, but considerably more powerful when the combination is right. One plus one turns into three.

Alongside that, the part usually missing from the trading industry’s marketing: how to keep your risk small. Position sizing, correlations, what you have to be able to stomach in the worst case. In our experience that is the difference between someone who trades a strategy for two months and someone who trades it for two years and more.

What effect do the new strategies have?

The 7 strategies currently official and traded with real money for months are known to every Onlytraders member in detail, including every disclosed entry and exit rule. In a combined backtest reaching back to 2004, that can look like this:

With the allocation chosen for this demonstration we are invested only 60% of the time. Plenty of spare time and capital, then, for the four new candidates. Give them a slice of the cake as well, and the buffet afterwards looks like this (the 7 individual strategy curves from above are hidden here for better readability):

Now the capital works for us 72% of the time. That lifts the annual return considerably, at a proportionate and tolerable increase in maximum drawdown.

Important: these visualisations are calculated without compound interest — non-compounding. Keeps us all nicely grounded.

What surprised us most

Nothing technical — with all due modesty, that part we have covered. But the chemistry in the room genuinely blew us away.

We drove home with a feeling you rarely get this clearly as a provider: we appear to attract exactly the people we are comfortable around. No immature get-rich-quick disciples. Instead, like-minded people with both feet in life who are serious about building wealth through trading. With a mix of robust strategies cast one hundred percent in proven rules.

That sounds like a platitude, but it has a very practical consequence: the conversations during the breaks were at a level where little needed explaining. Which is why the exchange of experience between attendees was enormously valuable, with plenty of takeaways.

“There is no superlative for thank you”

Happily, several attendees gave us a short statement right there on the day. I swear there were no free subscriptions involved, and (almost) no merch.

A response like Ronny’s is priceless anyway — that one warmed our hearts.

And the Greek wine?

After all that concentrated know-how and the new setups, we had earned a change of scene for the evening. Off to the Greek restaurant we went, and that part of the evening quickly took on a life of its own. Full tables, good food, and conversations that at some point only loosely had anything to do with trading.

That passably well-known Udo Jürgens song — Griechischer Wein, a 1974 classic every German-speaker knows by heart — then kicked off the dancing on the tables, with Matthias leading the charge, passionate and light-footed. While Michael, pouring ouzo rather than wine, could barely keep up.

From that point on there was no slowing the evening down. The hard core found their way to a club afterwards. Photos and videos of that are better kept under lock and key.

To be continued

The whole day was such a success that we definitely want to repeat it regularly. Planning for the next event has already started.

A small hint: Matthias is a trained winemaker, and we intend to put that to good use. So you can already look forward to the next event in spring 2027 in Rheinhessen, one of Germany’s largest wine regions. With a matching wine pairing for every course of the workshop.

The exact date is not fixed yet. Anyone signed up to the Tradingletter will be the first to catch wind of it. And next time we would love to see some strong women in the room as well — after all, almost a fifth of our members are women.

Who and What Is Onlytraders

For half a year now we’ve been building a community for systematic, emotionless trading strategies with reproducible real-money execution. No hindsight-backtest marketing, but a transparent strategy library that grows month after month. Members get the complete rulebook and the resulting daily buy and sell signals for several stock and index strategies for convenient execution before 15:30 CET, with the OT-Terminal a dedicated order tool for the TWS (Trader Workstation), and access to a community of like-minded people on Discord.

The “we” is so far a 2-man show consisting of Michael Hinterleitner and Matthias Runkel. Both active in the markets for years and convinced that a mix of robust strategies beats any single over-optimized or discretionary strategy.

Our aim: away from gut feeling, toward transparent strategies that anyone can understand, follow and implement with their own risk allocation.