About Brian Schad and Schad Commodity Futures & Options Trading Corporation

Greetings (again) from Brian Schad, President · Schad Commodity Futures & Options Trading Corp.

Schad Commodity Futures & Options Trading Corporation is my private commodity futures and options consultation & education advisory service.  My mission for Schad Commodity is a simple one: To live up to the expectations of a commodity future trading professional each day as my commitment to excellence in trading.  Before you venture off into the commodity commentary website, let me share with you more about myself and my colorful background…

  My success in life can be summed up with this statement: I’ve planned my life’s goals, and have executed my plan.

Let me explain…

I grew up in Northern California.  I saw my mother and father work hard to send my younger sisters and me to private schools.  I started working at a very young age and knew once high school was over, I would be on my own.  I started planning for my future in my mid-teens.

I saved up enough to put myself through the Coastal School of Deep-Sea Diving in the San Francisco Bay Area and when I graduated from that technical school in early Autumn of 1982, I was the youngest certified “hard-hat” diver in the country at the age of 17.

Right out of tech-school, I started working for a salvage-master by the name of Lance Sundown of Sundown Deep-Sea Diving Company (Colon, Panama).  I traveled to the Orient, and the Great Lakes before ole Lance retired after his last big job in the Caribbean Sea fell through.  I then found my way to the New York City water-ways in the Summer of ’83 and landed a commercial diving position with East Coast Diving, Inc. on Staten Island.  Life was good at 18!

Then came the winter in New York.  The water was colder, the weather nastier.  One December morning at the Hess Petroleum plant in Perth Amboy, the air supply was turned off while I was working underwater…twice!  The second time was no accident the way I saw it, and it was that day I decided to join the Navy.  (Give my regards to Broadway…)

The very next month, I was marching to the tune of a different drummer – Uncle Sam’s – on the grinder in San Diego, California.  Later that year, at the age of 19, I was attending the Navy’s official deep-sea diving school and was then “certified to deport among the denizens of the deep, mermaids, and other inhabitants in the realm of Neptune”…just as my graduating diploma states.

I was attached to the diving-locker aboard the USS Shenandoah (AD-44) thereafter and traveled to Europe – diving all over the Mediterranean Sea in the first half of 1986.  In that same year, I also managed to suffer from “the bends” (a diving disease affecting the bodies neurological system) in Norfolk (Virginia) harbor.  I also ran out of air 90′ down at the bottom of Augusta Bay, Sicily, and had to be re-supplied a scuba tank while decompressing off the coast of France.  As adventurous and exciting as this may sound, I was just 21 at the time while most of my diving-buddies were in their late 20’s, married, and, well… “reserved.”  When I returned from Europe in the Summer of ’86, I tried out for – and was admitted to – the Navy’s frogman school.

I graduated from US Navy Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL Training’s (BUDS) Class 142 and my life would never be the same as I knew it.  I was first attached to a special frogman unit (now decommissioned) at Little Creek, Virginia, and with SEAL Team Five in Coronado, California.  I traveled all over the world (twice), talked to everybody once (it seemed).  I was away from home more than 310 days out of the year!  My 12-year Navy career for “God & Country” ended at the school where my Navy SEAL life began as a trainee, only this time I would be a BUDS Instructor.  Life was definitely better now well into my late-20’s.

Now if you’ve read this far, you may be genuinely interested in mini-autobiographies, just plain bored with nothing else better to do, or wondering “what in the heck am I doing on this fellow’s commodity trading site…what’s this stuff all about…what does this have to do with futures markets?”  What I would like to demonstrate to you with this groundwork and story thus far, is this:

I am no stranger to “decision making” & “risk.”  I am a straight shooter, use to working “under pressure,” and have been making “risk decisions” since my teens.  Working with the right team of people, I’ve learned & lived all things are possible.

With a background full of precise critical thinking, decision making, and risk, I successfully learned to trade the commodity futures markets while stationed in San Diego as a Navy Instructor.  In the Spring of 1994, my luck turned for the better – but not with the help of shamrocks.  It was “coffee” and a chance meeting with the author of a book I was reading – by Larry Williams – that catapulted my trading abilities by leaps-and-bounds.  In the same tour as a Navy “BUDS” Instructor, and near the end of my Navy career, I also had the great fortune to cross-paths with the legendary market researcher Tom DeMark just after reading his initial breakthrough book, The New Science of Technical Analysis.  His family happened to be vacationing at the historical Hotel del Coronado near my training facility and we all went on a tour of the Navy SEAL spawning grounds that August weekend which is something they sure enjoyed.  Wonderful, wonderful family.  Both Larry & Tom have influenced my trading knowledge 100% and without their contribution to this industry, I don’t know where I’d be (well, I do…US Secret Service, FBI, ATF, etc, etc.).  It hasn’t been all blue skies and green lights though, believe me…  I’ve experienced set-backs in my trading just like anybody else: the first in 1995, March of 1996 (both with my favorite market – 10yr. Treasury Note futures), and then again in 2006, 2011, and most recently in 2015.

I separated from the Navy in 1996 on a Friday afternoon and left a 12-year military career with “nothing” but memories and ambition to prove myself in a completely new field of decision making and financial risks.  I went to work bright and early the following Monday morning at a brokerage firm – Opportunities in Options – just north on the California Coast in Ventura County.  This was David Caplan’s options specialty firm where I honed my option trading experience and knowledge.  I put in 13 hour days and even worked Saturday mornings to excel in this field.  Although I later admitted to myself I was on the wrong side of the telephone, I wouldn’t trade the time I spent there for anything.  I needed to see “the other side” of the trading industry for myself, and what I learned was priceless.

Watching the markets trade tick-by-tick in the capacity of a commodity broker, you tend to see trading patterns unfold continually and frequently.  One day while in my usual commodity broker routine, I felt I needed to provide more professional guidance for my customers because some of them were quite “trigger happy.”  I put what I had learned from Larry (up to this point) and my own special market observations on paper to create my own unique rules for market entries and exits – or dare I say “insertions” and “extractions?”…because my Navy instincts were merging with my market convictions.

With each passing day I felt I had something more worthy to share than what I was allowed at the brokerage firm.  I needed to remove myself from that side of the phone and start my own trading service.  So one early morning in January of 1997 my decision was made.  That is how the Schad Commodity concept began.  Life has been at its best since my early 30’s!

With 24 short years “in the trenches,” I still have seen many commodity traders come and go (and this includes the professional ones).  I have never claimed to be a guru in the business, as I would like to think, rather, a highly disciplined student of the market with most of my futures trading skills learned from one main teacher – Larry Williams.

I’ve been practicing the same trading methodology each week since my broker days in 1996, and I’m one of the very first traders (in this industry) on the Internet that is still on the world-wide-web to this day – by following the very same timeless strategy!