The World's BEST Trader Reveals the 10 Commandments To Profitable Live Trading

ELI5 / TLDR

Louis Borsellino was the biggest S&P futures trader in the Chicago pits in the 1980s and 90s — back when trades were shouted across a crowded room, not clicked on a screen. In this follow-up interview he walks through his “10 Commandments” of trading, which turn out to be less about charts and more about temperament: take small losses fast, don’t bet everything on one trade, don’t let a good month go to your head, and be honest with yourself about why you’re losing. His core claim is that almost nobody fails at trading because the strategy is wrong — they fail because they can’t sit still, can’t take a loss, or are trading money they can’t afford to lose.

The Full Story

The man, briefly

Borsellino ran the largest share of order volume in the S&P trading pit in Chicago. In the 1987 crash he made $4.7 million and got written up in USA Today as the country’s biggest S&P futures trader. He later built one of the first trading-education websites (teachertrade.com, 1996 — it cost him $150,000), ran a Nasdaq prop-trading room, and after leaving markets started a nursing-home company and then a cybersecurity firm. The interview leans on legacy: a well-known trader, Tom Hogard, wrote in to say people will study Borsellino not for his strategy but for “who he was, what his belief system was, what his inner dialogue was.”

A useful frame he keeps returning to: trading is athletics, not academics. The traders he backed who lasted were often ex-athletes, not Harvard MBAs.

“When you’re trading, there is no practice day. It’s game day every day.”

His theory is that a pit trader’s job was reflex, not analysis. You absorbed a flood of physical signals — who was buying, where the big orders sat, when the panic showed on people’s faces — and reacted in seconds. Athletes had already trained their bodies to do exactly that: repeat a motion thousands of times until it’s automatic. He even half-suspects the “less cerebral” people made better traders, because the academics overcomplicate it, hunting for reasons the market moved instead of just reacting to the fact that it did.

How he actually traded

He wasn’t a lone genius reading tea leaves. He paid three specialists — one Gann chartist, one reversal expert, one intraday trader — and each handed him their price levels every morning. He’d walk into the pit with those levels marked, then watch the live order flow either confirm or reject them.

“That’s all trading is — recognizing patterns and jumping on the pattern.”

One detail worth keeping: a partner’s computer program (buy on a bullish open, 600-point stop, 1000-point target) made about $2 million in six months — then one day “just stopped working.” His comment on this is the whole game in a sentence:

“There’s no such thing as a bad trading program… you just run out of time. If you have a good trading program, it may go against you for a while and then it’ll turn around, but you’ve got to have enough cash to survive that drawdown.”

In other words, the edge is real but lumpy. Survival is a function of capital, not cleverness.

The commandments

The bulk of the conversation is the host reading out each of the ten rules and Borsellino riffing on it. They’re listed in full in Key Takeaways below. The thread running through all of them: the strategy is the easy part; the person executing it is the hard part.

A few stand out. On knowing yourself, he describes traders who made $300–500k a year trading tiny size with almost no risk — and fell apart the moment they sized up, because suddenly the dollar figure clouded their judgment. The lesson isn’t “trade bigger,” it’s “know exactly where your nerve gives out.”

On ego, he tells the story of losing roughly 90% of his net worth — about $50 million — in his late fifties when his bank failed and the loans he’d personally guaranteed on the nursing-home business came due. He started over in cybersecurity with three employees.

“Anything in life that hits you and you think it’s over — you’ve got to get up, pick yourself up, and go. Move forward.”

On hoping, he’s precise about the failure mode: the market goes against you, you start making deals with yourself, and instead of cutting the loss you add to it, then add again, then “puke it out” at a far bigger loss than your stop would have cost.

“When you put on a trade, you should have an idea where your stop loss is going to be. And what do they do? They violate all the rules because they’re hoping they’re going to be right.”

On base hits versus home runs, he’s blunt that he made a famous million dollars in 13 seconds once — but that was never the plan.

“I was never swinging for the fences every day. I was swinging for the singles.”

His one extra rule, only half-officially listed: “Thou shalt not shoot their whole wad.” If you risk everything on one trade and can’t come back tomorrow, you deserve to be out.

The detours

The interview is padded — there are at least four ad reads woven in (TradeZella, Alpha Prime, Market Journal, Chart Fanatics) — and Borsellino wanders into colorful territory: a phone call with Alan Greenspan during the 1987 crash, managing money for Marc Rich (the fugitive oil trader later pardoned by Clinton), and the SOES “bandits” who picked off Nasdaq market makers in the early 90s.

He also offers an unsolicited macro view, which is worth flagging precisely because it’s an old pit trader speculating rather than analysis: he thinks the $37 trillion US debt gets resolved through dollar devaluation, that gold at $4,000 is signaling this, and that the currency eventually gets re-pegged partly to gold and “maybe Bitcoin.” He’s also openly nervous that AI is a bubble “brewing that we don’t know anything about yet” — while simultaneously saying it’ll “make more millionaires than you could ever think about.” Take all of this as flavor, not forecast.

His closing advice circles back to honesty:

“If people are being honest with themselves, they could sit down and say why they’re not profitable.”

His bet is that most failing traders are simply undercapitalized, trying to pull a living out of an account too small to support it, and that they’d rather blame everyone else than look in the mirror.

Key Takeaways

The ten commandments, as read out in the interview:

Trade for success, not for money. If you obsess over the dollars made or lost on each trade, the money clouds your judgment and shortens your career. Read the market well and the money follows.
Discipline above all. The ability to shut out the external world — phone off, no outside noise — and stick to your plan, then regroup after a bad day without revenge-trading.
Know yourself. Everyone has a different tolerance for risk. Some traders are excellent at small size and fall apart when they scale up. Find where your nerve breaks before the market finds it for you.
Lose your ego. Markets humble you; a winning streak makes you think you can’t do wrong, right before a loss reminds you otherwise. Ego is what makes people “swing for the fences” to recover losses.
No hoping, wishing, or praying. The classic failure: market goes against you, you add to the losing position instead of cutting it, then exit at a much bigger loss than your stop would have cost.
Let your profits run and cut your losses quickly. When order flow confirmed his algorithm was right, he’d add to the winner (“loaded it up”) and ride it to target; losers got cut at the pre-set stop.
Know when to trade and when to wait. Avoid choppy, low-volatility, low-liquidity conditions (e.g. the day before a big employment number). Overtrading a dead market only enriches the clearing firm.
Love your losers like you love your winners. Losses are the lessons. “If it didn’t cause you some pain, it wasn’t a lesson.” Money is the byproduct of a good process; corrupt the process and the money goes.
After three losing trades in a row, take a break. A deliberate circuit-breaker to clear the head before emotion takes over the decisions.
The unbreakable rule. You can break a rule and get away with it once in a while, “but one day the rules will break you.” Repeated violations eventually cost you your profits.

Other concrete points:

No such thing as a bad trading program — only running out of cash. A profitable system will still draw down; survival depends on having enough capital to outlast the bad stretch, not on the system being perfect.
An informal eleventh rule: never risk everything on one trade (“thou shalt not shoot their whole wad”) — if you can’t trade tomorrow, you’ve already lost.
Trading is reflex, not intellect. He recruited ex-athletes because they’d trained their bodies to react at “game speed”; the over-thinkers tended to underperform.
He multiplied his read by paying three specialists (Gann, reversals, intraday) for daily price levels, then used live order flow to confirm or reject them.
Managing other people’s money is a different discipline. A 20–30% drawdown is survivable on your own capital but would blow out most funds; the psychological pressure of others’ money made him stick to trading his own.
Most failing traders are undercapitalized and trying to extract a living from an account too small to bear it — and won’t admit it.

Claude’s Take

The title is the usual YouTube inflation — “World’s BEST Trader” is a claim no one can verify and Borsellino himself never makes; he’s careful to say he was in the right place at the right time and was “the number one person to laugh at myself.” Strip the marketing and what’s left is a credible old pro restating well-worn trading psychology with the authority of someone who actually did it at scale and then lost most of his money once, which gives the humility some teeth.

The commandments themselves are sound but not novel — cut losses, manage risk, control ego, don’t overtrade. Anyone who’s read Market Wizards or any trading-psych book has met all ten before. What earns the points here is the texture: the pit-trader’s physical-reflex framing, the “no bad program, just no cash” line, the $50 million wipeout he narrates without self-pity, and the honest admission that he simply couldn’t trade other people’s money. Those are the bits worth keeping.

What drags it down: the interview is heavily padded with sponsor reads and a meandering macro monologue (debt, gold, petrodollar, AI bubble) that’s an old trader’s gut feeling dressed up as insight — entertaining, but you’d be foolish to act on it. The host is reverent to the point of being uncritical, mostly reading the rules aloud and agreeing. Net: a 6. Genuinely useful temperament lessons from someone who lived them, wrapped in a lot of filler and a clickbait frame. Worth the time if you want the human story; skippable if you only want the rules, which fit on an index card.