Andrea Unger loves juggling numbers, except when the numbers are used to identify human beings.
Unger spent nine years as a middle manager for a major corporation in Italy. He enjoyed putting his mechanical engineering degree (University of Milan) to use in the workplace, but he didn’t enjoy the harsh realities of mid-level management.
“I had 30 people working under me, and I saw how people can be treated like numbers,” Andrea says. “The maneuvers I saw in business were sad because you were dealing with people, and people have stories and families and lives. Top management would come in with directions to reduce here, to move people there. This is normal to meet the objectives of a company, I understand that it must be like that. But it’s not what I like.”
Andrea decided to move in a new direction in 2001, and set his sights on a trading career. He sought advice from famed Italian trader Domenico Foti, and soon became a top protégée. The two have become close friends as well, and now collaborate daily on trading ideas and system development.
“I am much happier now, because as a trader I am paid depending on my skills,” says Unger, who trades from Maltignano in the Marche region of central Italy. “The better I am, the more I gain. I am alone against the market and I am free to manage my own time.”
Unger has established himself as one of Europe’s best traders. He won the futures- trading title in 2005 Top Trader Cup competition, sponsored by LombardReport.com, and one year later published “Money Management: Methods and Applications,” the first Italian-language book on money management for traders. (Andrea normally uses the fixed-fractional method in his personal trading but also develops combinations of methods to suit certain strategies.)
Unger fulfilled a dream by winning the 2008 World Cup Championship of Futures trading, which he captured with a 672% net return. Proving it was no fluke, he recorded a 115% return in 2009 to become the first back-to-back winner of the competition in nearly 20 years.
"Participation in the World Cup was a way to measure my techniques in the most important contest in the world -- and become the first Italian trader to win the championship," he says.
Andrea is a full-time trader who appreciates the complexities of the markets. “There is no easy money out there,” he says. “Markets require discipline and application to be understood. I try to develop methods that apply to the markets. I never try to apply the market to my ideas.”
The profile above includes statements of opinion. Trading involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. World Cup Championship (WCC) accounts do not necessarily represent all the trading accounts controlled by a given competitor. Accounts trading in the WCC may be subject may be subject to commission rates different from those following the AutoTrade program. WCC competitors may control accounts that produce results substantially different than the results achieved in their WCC accounts.