Ben Smith
Ben Smith is a 21-year-old former professional footballer from Hertfordshire, just outside London, who now trades Gold futures with a disciplined, price-action playbook and a maximum of two trades a day. Here is his story, in his own words.
What does a decade in professional football leave behind? Ben Smith, a 21-year-old from Hertfordshire who came through the Watford academy, made two first team appearances at 17 and played a play-off final on television at 19, now trades gold futures and nothing else. In this interview, he explains the top-down playbook that caps him at two trades a day, what elite sport taught him about performing under pressure, and why he puts the process ahead of the earnings.
I am Ben Smith, 21 years old, from Hertfordshire, just outside London. I trade Gold futures. One instrument, one focus. From the age of six I was immersed in elite sport. I joined the Watford FC academy and progressed to a full-time scholarship at sixteen, spending over a decade in one of the most demanding high-performance environments in English football. I made two first-team appearances for Watford at seventeen, against Brentford and West Brom, before going on to play at National League South level with St Albans City, where I earned my first-team spot and signed consecutive contracts. I played the full 90 minutes of the NLS Play-Off Final on BT Sport at nineteen and recorded the highest pass accuracy in the league that season.
Elite sport does not just teach you how to play. It teaches you how to perform under pressure, how to handle setbacks and come back stronger, and how to hold yourself to the highest standard every single day regardless of how you feel. That environment shaped everything about how I approach trading: the discipline, the attention to detail, the willingness to do the unglamorous work nobody sees, and the ability to stay calm when the pressure is real. I also relocated independently to Australia to pursue a football opportunity with Essendon Royals, a decision that tested my ability to back myself completely when nobody else could make the decision for me. That is the foundation everything else is built on.
I passed five funded accounts with Lucid at the beginning of June and have also been funded with Top One Futures. But I want to be honest about what being funded actually means, because there is a perception that once you get funded you have made it. You have not. It is essentially a small account once you are funded, because that is the drawdown you have to work within, and prop firms are an ROI game, not a salary. So what changed when I first got funded? Honestly, nothing. If you understand how you passed the evaluation and did it with a repeatable, profitable system, all you need to do is repeat your edge and let probabilities play out. You have not made it until you get a return on your initial investment. Until then you are a business running at a loss.
I failed multiple times before this. I have spent over 2,700 pounds in challenge fees across failed attempts. What kept me going was the data. Every time I went through my journal I could see the strategy works. My win rate when I follow all my criteria is over 70 percent. The failures were not the strategy failing. They were me failing the strategy. That distinction is everything. You cannot quit something you know works. You can only quit on yourself.
The most expensive lesson I pay for, and continue to pay for, is what every broken rule costs the future of my family. Every time I step outside my system I move the people I love further from what they deserve. There is no problem with losing. I have a 30 percent loss rate, which means losses are a built-in part of a working edge. But when losses come from outside the system, that is where the gap between my current reality and my desired reality widens. I treat every blown account like a university tuition fee. Students pay to learn, and every time I lose money outside my plan, that is my tuition fee. The difference is that most students graduate, and I intend to as well.
My lowest point comes every time I break my plan. The beauty of trading is that there is no final destination. You are always accountable for every decision, and the moment you act out of emotion you pay for it immediately. You can do everything right and still lose, and everything wrong and still win. In terms of quitting, every time I look at my dream board and ask myself why I am doing this, the answer is the same. I refuse to waste the one life I have living it on terms set by someone else, so that the people I love get the best of me and not what is left of me. It is like the story of the Chinese bamboo. Nothing visible for years, then everything at once. That is where I am. Still underground. Still growing.
Trading has affected me mentally, massively. But as a trader you have to learn to regulate yourself emotionally. Nothing in the markets is personal. The market never comes to wipe out your stop loss, it simply moves, and it is your job to follow your playbook and repeat your edge every single time it shows up, win or lose. When I lose and I broke my rules, that is when it affects me. Not the loss. The breach. Trading exposes your psychology in a way nothing else does. Every weakness you have shows up with a price tag on it.
My style today is Gold futures only. One commodity, one system. I am a pure price-action trader. I read candlesticks and their anatomy and have built a complete playbook around that. Top-down analysis is central to everything. I work from the daily down through the 4 hour, 1 hour, 30 minute and 15 minute, trapping price as I move through the timeframes using support and resistance, and the 4 hour typically leads the way for direction. Within my playbook there are five setups. I only trade during high-volume windows, the London open and the New York open, with a maximum of two trades per day and a strict checklist before every entry. Nothing gets taken without meeting every criterion.
A typical day starts at 6am, when I journal before I do anything else. At 6:45 I arrive at the desk and run a full top-down analysis from the daily down to the 15 minute, marking key zones on Gold and deciding in advance what conditions would make me trade that session. London opens at 8am and I am looking for an A-grade setup between 7 and 9am. If it is there I take it, set my target and walk away from the screen. If it is not there I close the laptop. No second guessing, no watching price. I come back at 1pm to observe the New York open building, ready for when my business opens again.
My most recent losing trade was in Gold, early morning. The 4 hour had direction, but I had noted a qualifier in my journal, a support level nearby that gave me slight hesitation. I entered anyway. Price tapped that support, consolidated, then moved against me and stopped me out. What I saw was a setup that was 80 percent there. What I did was talk myself into the other 20 percent. What I would do differently is simple: if there is a qualifier on the 4 hour, the trade does not exist. No buts. Ever.
There is one popular rule I completely ignore: always look for the trade. I do the opposite. I look for reasons not to trade. My edge is not in finding setups, it is in having the patience to only take the very best ones. The market will always give you something that looks tradeable. Trades are like buses. There will always be another one. The question is not whether a bus is coming, it is whether it is your bus.
Most people around me do not really understand what I do. They hear futures trading and either think it is gambling or do not understand what it means at all. The people closest to me are supportive, and I am fortunate that all they want is for me to be happy, but I am aware of a silent pressure beneath that. In a way it is good. Every time I am tempted to break my rules I know I am not just letting myself down. You do not need everyone to understand what you are building. You just need to understand it yourself clearly enough to keep going when it is hard.
What separates me from someone who washed out at their third evaluation is honesty about why the failures happened. Most people who wash out blame the strategy or blame bad luck. I went through 155 trades and identified exactly where and why my edge disappears, on specific days, in specific time windows, in specific psychological patterns. When you know exactly what is wrong you can fix exactly what is wrong. The single most important part of trading is data collection. If you have no data you have no edge. You are just guessing with a story attached to it.
The advice I would give myself a year ago is to stop negotiating with yourself. You know the rules, so follow them without exception. Every trade you take that does not meet every single criterion is a vote against the evidence you personally collected. If prop firms disappeared tomorrow I would still be trading, on my live account, smaller size, same strategy, because the edge exists regardless of the vehicle. And if you gave me a million-dollar funded account today I would do exactly what I do now. Same rules, same criteria, maximum two trades a day. The account size does not change the process, it just changes what the results are worth. You have to go through the learning process before the earning process. Get the process right, and the returns follow.
About the writer – Ben Smith
Ben Smith is a 21-year-old trader from Hertfordshire, just outside London, and a former professional footballer who came through the Watford FC academy and played senior football at St Albans City. He trades Gold futures only, using a pure price-action, top-down playbook with a maximum of two trades a day. Funded with Lucid, Topstep and Top One Futures, he treats trading as a business built on data, discipline and process over outcome.
