How to save money when the economy is dying

From electrical engineering to a telecom desk job going nowhere

The episode opens with Muzamil framing the conversation around a problem he had been raising across multiple podcast episodes: Pakistan’s growing dollar-based remote economy was generating real money for freelancers and remote workers, but almost none of that money was being invested. To explore what to do about it, he brought in Syed Muhammad Faraz — a technical analyst, trading trainer, and Director of Syed Faraz Equities.

Faraz’s early life was split between the UAE, where he was born and raised until fifth grade, and Islamabad, where he completed his schooling at MCB and later graduated in electrical engineering from AIR University in 2010. The path after graduation was, by his own description, entirely predictable. He found a job at a Huawei subcontractor in the telecom industry, spent six months escalating trouble tickets about faulty telephone poles, and quickly concluded he was wasting his time.

What changed things was a single class he accidentally attended in his final semester — a session on Cisco networking certifications. The instructor mentioned that a CCNP or CCIE certification could earn someone $10,000 a month. That number stuck. Faraz pursued the certifications, made a trip to the UAE to assess the job market, came back to Pakistan, and eventually sat the CCIE lab exam in the UAE — and failed. He returned to Pakistan nearly broke, with a salary in the UAE that had been lower than what he could have earned at home.

Back in Pakistan, his CCIE-level preparation made him immediately attractive. Within his first week he had four job offers, including one from Huawei directly — the dream posting in telecom at the time. He took it, joined as a network solution manager, and his career trajectory became, in his words, “exponential.”

The first million, the leverage trap, and the resignation email

With a good salary finally coming in, Faraz started watching a colleague at the brokerage house buy stocks just before market close and pocket small profits by morning. The logic was simple enough: buy at 3:15 PM, check the price at 9 AM. He started doing the same. Within his first month, he had put one million rupees of his own money into the market. The portfolio climbed to 1.4 to 1.5 million rupees.

Then he made the mistake that defines the early career of almost every retail trader. He borrowed an equivalent amount from his broker — leverage, in plain terms — to amplify the gains. When the market corrected, he lost not just his own money but the borrowed amount too. The portfolio collapsed from 1.4 million rupees to roughly 250,000 rupees in about fifteen days.

A rational person, Faraz acknowledged, would have taken this as a signal to focus on the job. He did the opposite. “Jis din portfolio ḍhāī lākh kā huā, usī time resign kiyā, email kar dī” — the day the portfolio hit 250,000 rupees, he sent his resignation. His colleagues were baffled. His director was baffled. His performance reviews had been strong, his bonuses good.

He then took his provident fund payout — around 15 to 16 lakh rupees — and put it straight back into the market. The portfolio rebuilt to 1.8 million rupees. Then it went to zero. Then it went into debt, because some of his positions were in stocks that had no buyers when the market fell — he could not sell even if he wanted to.

The absconding case, the lost project, and the trading bot

What followed was a period Faraz described with unusual candour. He tried to rebuild through a small IT services company, took on minor projects, and eventually made a trip to the UAE on a visit visa to explore opportunities. He landed a significant project, took out a trading license, began building a team — and then, when he returned to Pakistan to convert his visa to a work visa, he was flagged at the airport for absconding from a previous employer who had him on a four-year contract.

The project collapsed. A friend who had connected him to the client panicked and called the client directly, who then distanced himself to protect his own trading license. Faraz was left with personal loans, bank loans, no income, and no clear path forward.

His response was to teach himself to code. He had no programming background. He built a trading bot. It took eight to nine months. The goal, as he described it, was to eventually sit on a beach in the Maldives while the computer generated income. The bot never quite delivered that fantasy, but the process of building it turned him into something more valuable: a rigorous technical analyst who understood market structure from the inside.

The $20,000 forex contest and the career flip

A friend mentioned a trading contest with a $20,000 prize. The entry fee was $100. Faraz’s friend gave him the equivalent in Pakistani rupees — around 1,000 rupees at the time — and told him to enter.

Faraz spent two to three weeks preparing on a demo account, working out lot sizing, risk management, and entry logic. He entered the contest. On the first trade, his hands were shaking — not because of the dollar amount, but because it was someone else’s money and his credibility was on the line. “Issse pehle maiñ $10,000,000 rupees kī trade karke jā chukā hūñ. Mujhe us kī fikr nahīñ thī. Yeh $100 kā itnā pressure thā.”

Over fourteen trading days and seventeen trades, he turned $100 into $452. His win ratio across those sessions was 85 to 90 percent. He won the contest and the $20,000 prize. Combined, he had roughly $28,500. He then took on a separate assignment: a friend gave him 20 Bitcoin — worth around $4,000 each at the time, in 2017 — and asked him to grow the quantity by trading against altcoins. Faraz traded the Bitcoin up to 3.75x and sold near the top.

In weeks, he had gone from a 25-dirham-per-day survival budget to having more money than he had ever held. The contest win also put him on the radar of brokerage networks, and he began doing technical analysis as a freelancer for two UK-based brokers and one UAE-based broker.

Building a reputation in Pakistan’s stock market

When Faraz returned to Pakistan, he approached the branch manager of Pearl Securities with a proposal: bring in retail clients, generate volume, share the commission. The idea was well-received at the branch level but did not get traction with senior management. He was eventually hired two months later.

The problem he encountered was cultural. Technical analysts in Pakistan had a poor reputation — not because the discipline was wrong, but because the practitioners who had come before him relied on one or two indicators without understanding broader market structure. “Technical analyst ho — woh muñh udhar kar le.” Brokers would turn away when he introduced himself.

His response was to start a Facebook page called Trade With Faraz and post his charts and analysis publicly. What he predicted kept happening. Pearl Securities eventually launched a YouTube channel, and Faraz became its on-screen analyst. He called the market bottom at 27,000 on the index and tracked the rally all the way to 42,000, then called for a move to 47,000. Over 44 consecutive weeks, he identified four stocks each week with specific entry and exit levels. His accuracy across those 44 weeks was, by his account, 95 to 96 percent.

“Maiñne market kā bottom 27,000 index par pakaṛā huā thā. Wahāñ se market gaī 42,000. Maiñne kahā yeh top nahīñ hai, 47 tak jāegī.”

That run established him publicly. Clients found him through the page. One of them was building a trading app and brought Faraz in as a consultant. That relationship eventually led to requests for formal training.

The training programme: structure, philosophy, and what it actually costs

Muzamil, who had personally attended one of the training batches, noted that the programme was not what most people imagined when they heard “trading course.” The first batch had 50 students. Subsequent batches grew to 70 and then 100, though Faraz was explicit that quality, not quantity, was the constraint.

The structure was deliberate. One lecture per Saturday, a Q&A session on Sunday, then a full week of practice on a demo account. After eleven lectures, students sat a formal exam. Those who passed moved into an alumni group — a continuous mentorship and community where live sessions ran for five to six hours at a stretch, members shared charts, and discussions covered global capital flows and where smart money was moving.

The cost was 50,000 rupees, and Faraz argued that most students recovered that amount within the third or fourth lecture. His stated benchmark: starting with $1,000, a trained trader should be able to generate $500 per month within 45 to 50 days, and eventually scale to $10,000 per month purely on skill — without additional capital at risk beyond the initial stake.

He was also direct about the failure mode. “Sauñ meñ se sattar log jo hoñge nā woh chaskay wāle hoñge” — roughly 70 out of 100 people who sign up are looking for a shortcut. The programme’s design accounted for this: the fee was refundable, the workload was front-loaded, and the first two lectures were structured to filter out anyone who was not serious. He had not yet had a student who completed the second lecture and then dropped out.

The training also covered adjacent careers in the trading industry — marketing as an introducing broker, programming, market analysis, strategy analysis — because Faraz’s view was that the ecosystem needed more than just traders.

Pakistan’s stock market in May 2022: bearish, discounted, and waiting

Later in the discussion, Muzamil noted that the conversation was taking place on Monday, May 16, 2022, with the stock market down roughly a thousand points that day and broadly red for weeks. He asked Faraz for his read on both the short and long term.

Faraz’s position was clear. He had been calling for investors to move to the sidelines since September or October of the previous year. Stocks that had been trading at 30 rupees were now available at 10. The trend remained bearish, and the accumulation phase that typically precedes a recovery — a period of three to four months of consolidation — had not yet appeared. His advice for anyone still holding: sell into any rally, even at break-even, and wait for the market to offer a better entry five or six months later.

On the long term, he was more optimistic. He argued that certain stocks were trading at extreme discounts and that a significant upward move — potentially parabolic — was coming, though not yet. For investors with a two-to-four-year horizon, the potential to double capital was real.

He also addressed the psychology problem directly. Most investors, he said, could articulate a plan — buy at 70, add at 50, add again at 40 — but when the price actually reached 40, their hands would shake. He gave the example of a client he had advised to cash out six million rupees at a market top and hold it in trust. When COVID crashed the market and Faraz called to deploy the cash, the client had already spent it. The plan existed on paper. The discipline did not.

“Aap nerves wise kitne strong haiñ apne plan ke ūpar? Rahte haiñ, nahīñ rahte?”

Pakistan’s youth as an untapped financial asset

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asked Faraz how he saw Pakistan twenty-five to thirty years from now. Faraz declined to speculate that far out. He focused instead on the next five years, which he described as critical.

His argument was straightforward. Pakistan has a youth population of roughly 45 to 50 percent. That youth is already opening crypto accounts at university. But their teachers are telling them not to trade — not because trading is inherently dangerous, but because the teachers themselves have never done it and do not understand it. The result is a generation that has the instinct to participate in financial markets but no framework for doing so safely.

Meanwhile, the global forex market is a $9 trillion-per-day market. Pakistan’s PMEX allows legal participation. The PSX exists. The opportunity is not abstract. Faraz pointed to specific students: one who turned $1,000 into $27,000 in three weeks; another who turned $3,000 into $15,000; a 22-year-old in Rahim Yar Khan, with unreliable electricity at home, who built a trading bot better than Faraz’s own and generated a 3,000-times return on his initial capital.

“Itna talent hai. Masla yahī hai ki yār inko aap right direction deñ.”

His conclusion was not complicated. Pakistan’s problem is not a lack of talent or a lack of opportunity. It is a lack of direction — at the university level, at the policy level, and in the broader culture around money. If the country’s youth could be pointed toward earning dollars from global markets rather than sending rupees out of the country, the macroeconomic picture would look different within four to five years.

Muzamil wrapped the conversation at the one-hour-twenty-minute mark, noting that Faraz’s next training batch was scheduled for the first week of June, with a 10 percent discount available for viewers of the show.