Bilal El Yazid
Bilal El Yazid is a 34-year-old Moroccan trader with a Master’s in Financial Risk Management who treats his own emotions as telemetry on a dashboard. Here is his story, in his own words.
Can trading be run as risk engineering rather than speculation? Bilal El Yazid, a 34-year-old Moroccan trader with a master’s degree in Financial Risk Management who trades US and European indices, futures, CFDs and liquid crypto, put his first payouts into statistical software licences rather than anything personal. In this interview, he explains the systematic macro mapping and order flow execution behind his trades, the 2,000 dollars he lost by ignoring his own sizing rules on a macro release, and the dashboards he watches his own performance on.
My name is Bilal El Yazid. I’m 34 years old, from Morocco. Backed by a Master’s in Financial Risk Management, I trade US and European equity indices, derivatives – futures and CFDs – and highly liquid crypto assets.
I became a funded trader last year, and what it really did was validate my risk models. Transitioning to funded capital shifted my focus entirely, away from “making money” and towards cold capital preservation and optimising risk-adjusted returns.
The first thing I bought with trading money was advanced quantitative infrastructure. I reinvested my early payouts directly into statistical software licences and automated monitoring tools, to sharpen my edge.
It took a few attempts to get there. I failed around four evaluations early on, and I viewed it purely as R&D tuition. My background in risk management is what kept me going: I knew the math worked, I just needed to calibrate my execution.
My single most expensive lesson cost me $2,000. I over-leveraged during a macro release, ignoring my own sizing rules. The market taught me that structural liquidity gaps do not care about individual bias.
My lowest point was a severe regime shift into unpredictable chop that threw my models out of sync. I never wanted to quit, but I mandated a strict two-week pause. Sitting on your hands is an active trading decision.
Trading has affected me emotionally. Approaching daily loss limits used to cause acute stress. I fixed that by treating my metrics as cold telemetry on Power BI dashboards, which removed the personal emotion from it completely.
Today my style is systematic macro mapping on the daily and 4-hour charts, with high-precision order flow execution from the 15-minute down to the 1-minute. A typical day starts with a pre-market macro audit – yields, commodities, news. I trade the high-liquidity European morning, walk away during the midday lull, and return for the first two hours of the US session. I end the day with database logging.
My most recent losing trade was an attempted reversion long after a key support liquidity sweep. The market absorbed the buying and broke lower. I cut it immediately at my hard stop. Next time, I will wait for secondary micro-structural confirmation.
The popular rule I ignore is the generic “always aim for a minimum 1:3 risk-to-reward.” In efficient markets, forcing wide targets just results in giving back gains. I prefer high-probability 1:1 or 1:1.5 setups backed by order flow.
To outsiders, what I do looks like financial roulette. My finance degree grounds it for family and peers – they see it as rigorous statistical risk engineering rather than gambling. It has also forced a military-grade routine on me. Sustaining a sharp cognitive edge requires optimal sleep, physical health, and emotional discipline. It grants autonomy, but it demands absolute accountability.
What separates me from someone who washed out at their third evaluation is systemic patience. Retail traders treat evaluations like a lottery ticket for a quick home run. I apply identical conservative parameters to challenges as I do to live capital, and grind it out slowly. If I could advise myself a year ago: narrow your asset focus, trade only peak liquidity, and remember that protecting capital in bad market regimes is the ultimate form of alpha.
If prop firms disappeared tomorrow, I would absolutely still be trading. Prop firms are just leverage providers; the edge is in my mind. I would allocate personal capital and consult on quantitative risk dashboards for corporate finance clients. And if you handed me a $1,000,000 funded account today, I would do nothing. I would not place a single trade. I would spend the week building a hyper-conservative risk matrix, ensuring a catastrophic tail-risk event could not dent 0.25% of the capital. No execution without guardrails.
His FundedNext certificates.
About the writer – Bilal El Yazid
Bilal El Yazid is a 34-year-old trader from Morocco, holding a Master’s in Financial Risk Management. He trades US and European equity indices, futures and CFDs, and highly liquid crypto, combining systematic macro mapping on the higher timeframes with precision order flow execution on the lower ones. A FundedNext trader, he approaches markets as statistical risk engineering rather than speculation – reinvesting his early payouts into quantitative infrastructure and tracking his own performance as cold telemetry on Power BI dashboards.
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