The Flipper

Is eight figures a realistic goal? It has been done by private own account traders for years. Paul Rotter from Germany, 32 years old, is one trader that has made €50-60+ million ($65-78 million) per year for 10 years trading the most liquid contracts at the biggest futures exchange in the world, Frankfurts Eurex debt futures, primarily the Bund contract.

In 2003 I received an email from a former Man Financial broker in London who said, "One of our private customers has been the highest volume trader on Eurex for the last 8 years. He trades approx 3 million lots a month and makes himself €50 million a year, which he has apparently been doing for the last 10 years." In 2004 I learned that it is Paul Rotter. He is notoriously called "the flipper".

 The bottom line is there are other traders, we never hear about, making 8 figure profits. If Rotter's trading style did not attract attention then we would have never heard of him. If Rotter and others can do it, then maybe you can to. Remember, trading is very risky and you will lose all your money if you do not know what you are doing and when to do it. So please do not trade unless you are ready and willing to accept and take personal responsibility for the outcome.
In January 1998, Kinski, Rotter and some other traders formed a Dublin-based prop-trading firm, Greenhouse Capital Management.


Rotter's balls-to-the-wall modus operandi helped Greenhouse prosper, but not without some tense moments. The firm began life with $1.3 million in seed capital and featured, in addition to Kinski and Rotter, two other standout own-accounters, Pino Curcio and Florian Albrecht, the latter one of Rotter's closes boyhood pals. As a unit, they worked well together, though Rotter was clearly the star. "It was do or die," Kinski recalls. "We knew Paul would have these large positions -- in one day we could have been out of business."

By the end of its first day, Greenhouse was up $526,000. Within three months the firm had made $6.5 million, though not without ruffling some feathers. "Paul has sometimes played a controversial role," Kinski acknowledges. "Some traders didn't like him because he was changing his position so quickly." In 2001, Rotter formed Rotter Invest and eventually moved his operations to Zug, Switzerland, an affluent town that's home to its share of traders...