How can you make money trading while you sleep?

How can you make money trading while you sleep?

Sam Robinson, known as Sambo, describes two ways of trading while asleep in this episode: pre-setting limit orders on marked chart zones so trades trigger automatically overnight, and entering live trades around scheduled news releases like Non-Farm Payrolls during a brief waking window. Both use real money and carry full loss risk.

Sambo is a truck driver from Tauranga, New Zealand, who says he was the first student to join Rihari's education platform after starting with one-on-one mentoring. On the Big Work Energy Podcast, hosted by Rihari, Sambo walks through how he built his trading around methods that do not require him to sit and watch a chart for hours, first with news trades and more recently with pre-set limit orders that trigger while he is asleep or driving trucks on a shift.

It is worth being precise about what while you sleep means here. Sambo says the analysis, chart marking, and order placement still happen while he is awake. What happens overnight is the order triggering and the trade playing out, not the decision-making itself. He also says he moved from CFD funded accounts to futures trading partly because spread costs on the CFD accounts were eating into the profit targets those accounts required him to hit, something he says mattered less once he switched.

What is set and forget trading, and how does Sambo describe it?

Sambo says set and forget is a low-input method where he marks a small number of price zones on the gold chart each week, places limit orders in advance, and does not watch the trades once they are live. He describes it as the approach he moved to after losing several funded-account evaluations trading news.

According to the video, Sambo developed the idea with another trader in the same trading community, aiming for something workable for people with limited screen time, including people with full-time jobs and busy family schedules, in his words. He says the goal is not to catch every move in the market but to wait for a small number of high-probability setups each week, even if that means only one or two trades trigger in a given week.

Sambo says the appeal is partly psychological. He describes wanting to avoid watching a trade play out in real time, because doing so causes him to second-guess entries and exits. Placing the order and being asleep or unreachable when it triggers, he says, removes that temptation. He also says the method is probably too simple by his own admission, but that it has worked better for him than more technical approaches he tried earlier.

What steps does the video show for setting up a trade before bed?

Sambo walks through a specific process in the video for marking and setting these trades before he goes to sleep or leaves for a shift. The six steps below are drawn directly from his description in the interview, not independent trading advice.

1. Mark potential zones on the 15-minute gold chart, then cross-check the same area on the 5-minute chart for confirmation, Sambo says.
2. Look for a zone showing built-up liquidity with a price imbalance in front of it; Sambo says some zones he has traded were several weeks old before price returned to them.
3. Where two zones sit close together, Sambo says he takes the lower of the two, reasoning that price is more likely to reach it first.
4. Place a limit order at the zone with a stop loss sized to cover the width of the zone, targeting a fixed 1:2 risk-to-reward ratio, per Sambo's account.
5. Size the position at roughly 1% of account balance per trade, which Sambo says works out to about three to five futures contracts on a funded account, depending on stop-loss distance.
6. Leave the order set and step away from the chart, checking the outcome later rather than watching the trade develop, Sambo says.

Sambo is explicit in the video that this process has not been backtested in any formal sense. He says he has forward tested the zones by watching whether price reacts as expected, rather than running the strategy against historical data in dedicated backtesting software, which he says he tried briefly and found he did not have time to keep up with.

How does overnight news trading differ from the set-and-forget method?

The video contrasts two approaches Sambo has used at different points in his trading, and he describes them as carrying very different risk levels. The table below summarizes his account of each method, based only on what he says in the interview.

| Aspect | Overnight news trading (Sambo's account) | Set-and-forget zone trading (Sambo's account) | |---|---|---| | Entry trigger | Wakes briefly at a scheduled release, such as setting an alarm for a Non-Farm Payrolls report, and trades within minutes | Limit order pre-placed at a marked zone; no need to be awake when it triggers | | Stop loss | Sambo says he does not use a stop loss on Non-Farm Payrolls trades, calling it full margin | Stop loss sized to the zone width, with a fixed 1:2 risk-to-reward target | | Risk per trade | Sambo says he once risked around 90% of a $2,000 account on a single gold trade | Sambo says he risks about 1% of account balance per trade | | Outcome described | One trade turned $2,000 into roughly $1,800 in profit, but news trading also cost him a funded account and several evaluation accounts, per his account | Two trades in one week returned about $2,000 combined, which Sambo calls one of his better weeks | | Sambo's own description | Somewhat like gambling, exciting but stressful when volume is low, in his words | Boring, but fits around his truck-driving schedule and produces fewer losses, he says |

Sambo says the news-trading approach cost him a $50,000 funded account when a Non-Farm Payrolls release moved against an unprotected position, and he says he has since bought and lost several evaluation accounts the same way. He describes switching toward the set-and-forget method as a direct response to those losses, not as an upgrade he made while things were going well.

What happened when Sambo traded news events without a stop loss?

Sambo describes one trade where a $2,000 account gained about $1,800 on a single gold sell around a news release, entered with no stop loss and close to full account margin. He says he considers that result unusual, not typical of his overall trading.

He also describes the same method going the other way. Sambo says a $50,000 funded account was invalidated in one move when a Non-Farm Payrolls release reversed against a position he had entered without a stop loss, and that he lost several further evaluation accounts the same way, saying he jokingly calls them lessons rather than losses. He also says his partner, Charlie, later told him she did not fully remember him waking her to share a win from one of these trades, which he offers as a sign of how late and impulsive some of these sessions were.

The video also touches on a rule some prop firms apply, which Sambo refers to as a consistency rule, limiting how much of an evaluation's total profit can come from a single day. Sambo says this worked against him early on, because he was trying to hit large one-day profit targets to pass evaluations quickly, which conflicted with the rule and made his results less consistent, in his words. Sambo says he now avoids applying the no-stop-loss approach to CPI and PPI releases specifically, saying those are less predictable for him than Non-Farm Payrolls. He frames this as a rule he adopted after direct losses, not as advice for others to follow.

What do independent statistics say about the odds of making money this way?

Two independently published figures are relevant to weighing claims like these, and neither comes from Rihari's platform or the video. ASIC Report 828: Risky business records that 68% of Australian retail CFD investors lost money in the 2024 financial year, based on regulator-reviewed account data.

That figure applies specifically to CFD trading, the product type Sambo describes using for part of his trading history in the video, and it covers the broader Australian retail CFD population rather than any individual trader or platform. It is not a claim about Rihari's education platform, its students, or Sambo's own results, and no figure in this article should be read as a prediction of what a new trader will experience.

Separately, the BIS 2025 Triennial Survey reported average daily OTC foreign-exchange turnover of US$9.6 trillion in April 2025. That scale helps explain why sessions like the New York open, which Sambo says he targets for volume, see fast price movement. Market size and liquidity do not indicate anything about the odds of an individual trader profiting from it.

Read together, the two figures point to a market that is very large and highly liquid, and a retail segment within it where most account holders lost money over a full financial year. Nothing in the video changes either fact, and nothing in Sambo's account should be read as a typical result.

Is trading while you sleep the same as passive income?

No claim in the video supports treating this as passive income. Sambo describes active weekly work, including marking charts, choosing zones, and sizing positions, all of which happens before or after the sleeping hours rather than instead of them.

Sambo is direct about this distinction himself. He says the method suits his schedule as a truck driver working up to 14-hour days, because it lets him place orders when he has time rather than requiring him to watch a screen during work. But he also says the zone-marking and order placement still take real effort each week, and that trades that do not trigger simply do not happen, which he treats as normal rather than a system failing.

He also describes the financial stakes as ordinary trading risk, not a return on a passive investment. Every dollar placed on a limit order in his account is capital that can be lost if the trade does not go the way the zone suggested, in the same way as any other live trade.

Should a beginner try to copy this approach?

The video does not present this as a recommendation for beginners to copy, and this article does not make that recommendation either. Sambo describes years of losses and several blown funded accounts before changing his approach, not a plan that worked from the start.

Sambo's own advice in the video, when asked what he would do with a limited amount of money starting out, was to spend most of it on education and only a smaller portion on a funded-account evaluation, rather than risking a full account balance on early trades. He also says patience and reducing trade frequency were the biggest factors in improving his results, describing his earlier full-margin, no-stop-loss news trades as the period when he lost the most money.

Sambo also says a required waiting period before a funded account's first payout became available, which he recalls as around 20 days, added to his impatience early on. He says he blew through funded accounts before reaching a payout on more than one occasion because he kept trading heavily while waiting, rather than stepping back.

Given the ASIC finding that a majority of Australian retail CFD investors lost money in the 2024 financial year, anyone considering either method described in this video should treat it as high-risk trading with real capital, not as a passive or reliable income source. Sambo's account is one individual's description of his own results and losses, not a template with predictable outcomes.