“I had already done my Sports Science and Coaching degree at Manchester Met and I wanted to get into sports psychology, but I retired at 34 and busted my neck in a game where I broke my disc and I had to have a big operation through the front. So, I thought you know what, I’m going to do something else.”

“When I was playing football, it was just all about football and actually it was quite boring really, at the end of the day you’re training to be a professional sportsman playing football with other interests. So, I started to look at the stock markets as friends of mine outside of football were buying stocks and shares, so I was buying stocks and shares as well and I just got really interested in it…… and that’s when I flew to the USA to learn how to trade the markets. As soon as I retired from football I started trading.”

“In trading, there’s no end. It’s not like coming to the end of a course and you get a certificate. It never ends, you can make as much money as you want and you can lose as much money as is in your trading account. So, there’s loads of ups and downs, it’s all mindset and psychology. It’s just like professional sports.”

“The worst thing is getting instant success at the start of trading, because now you think you’re the Wolf of Wall Street. And you can do it easily. I mean without failure you’re not going to get successful. You need failure in your life to learn from it and to try and fight that off and not accept it, you’re blind to it. So, you have the down moments just like sport. It’s how you react to what has happened to you, that makes you better. That’s a skill really.”

“At the start of my journey when I made good money, several thousand pounds on a trade it was a buzz, but now it’s just routine because you’re managing your losses as well as your profits. I think there’s no better buzz than scoring a goal in front of 20,000/30,000 people. There’s no better buzz than that and it won’t replace making a few grand on trading at all. The buzz is at the football. Absolutely.”

“I could have seriously got into being the first sport psychologist that had played six hundred first class games, I probably would have been the first sports psychologist that had the football experience, and that is one regret. My lecturer at the time said you got to do a sports master’s in sports psychology, because you will be the first one in the world to have the qualifications and the playing experience. And I didn’t do it.”

“Going from football and then going into trading I didn’t mentor anybody for a long time. I mean, the first 18 months, I lost about 44 grand trading the markets. And that was my apprenticeship. The thing with me, I had the money to come back. So, I could go again. It took me a good three years really to be any good at it. But I didn’t have a Trading College to teach me, I had to go to the US and learn from a few other individuals. I didn’t have an organisation like Trading College to teach me how to do it.”

“This is a financial industry, people wear suits and ties in the city, they’re teaching people how to trade. Then you’ve got somebody who comes along in a tracksuit and starts teaching people. I got so much stick but I was a good trader by that time. I was just honest with everybody, why would you learn to trade from somebody who works for a bank that has got millions and millions of pounds in their trading account, when you can learn for somebody who’s actually done it, and grown their trading account themselves? It was a different level and it’s great, I loved it. As we grew and grew and grew, we got more stick but now we’re just so established.”

“You’re a long time retired, you play football, if you’re lucky, you get to 30. I was really lucky, I got to 34. And then you’ve got until 80, to do something else. I would say, just find something you want to do and have a passion for it and educate yourself really. It’s so easy these days… I came out of school with an O level in pottery, so it doesn’t matter does it? You just got to keep on growing, do what you want and find the passion.”