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Things to learn before trading, man. I mean, this is where the rub is, right? I came to Wall Street thinking I had all these preconceived notions about how money was made, and they were all wrong, so it was a crack upside the head. What you learn from making money and being able to manage risk, add risk, good risks, hopefully remove the bad risks from your portfolio, is that sometimes discomfort is the more beneficial choice, and that’s how you kind of calibrate your system. What do I mean by that? Well, it’s hard to buy higher prices because of anchoring, right? “You’re like, well, it was here. It’s already here. I’ve missed the move. Nvidia broke out at $505, it went to $600. I can’t possibly buy it at $600 because in my mind, it’s already moved up 20 something percent, so I’ve missed the move.” The thing is, you can’t make that determination. You have to be unreasonable. There’s no evidence that moves go to 20% and then they stop.
So there’s all that going on, and what you need to think about is, is there really winning tickers and losing tickers, or is it winning behavior and losing behavior? For me, I live in a paradigm of personal responsibility, so whatever happens is on me. I never blame the market. I never blame an analyst because no one’s holding a gun to my head, telling me to add risk or remove risk. Those are all, at the end of the day, even though it’s systematized, the whole process is very subjective. There’s very little objectivity. So that’s why you need to be brutally honest with yourself because there are outside forces of supply and demand, for example, but whether you have to acknowledge them, ultimately it’s up to you to say, yes, I understand that that’s a data point, but it’s not relevant to my trading style. I can’t give it any weight.
When we think about trading and your trading style, because ultimately it comes in many ways, I think it comes down to your personality as a human being, and we think about two things, instant gratification or delayed gratification. What’s your temperament? How are you in life? Because so much of that can play into your trading decisions, right? Do you want to try to think about having a very, very accurate system that’s scalps or does something intraday where you make your money and you go home? Or if we go back to that famous marshmallow test, that was pretty fascinating. Anyway, I’ll put some links into the description. Were you able to say, okay, look, the kids were given a choice of taking a marshmallow today or getting to the next day, and it wasn’t just that they were judging the people, good or bad, it was they followed those. I think the study was done, I want to say in 1970. It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but as a longitudinal study, they followed those same people for 40 years and they found out that they struggled. They had impulse control, and so they had impulse control issues. And so when I think about the whole thing around trading and how we get paid to execute, we don’t get paid to know things. I’m always thinking about what’s the harder choice and how can I take pleasure in that? And I’m not a masochist, it’s not my thing, but what’s the winning behavior For Kobe? It was getting up at three o’clock and then finding the way to the gym. Even though we live in basically a city where it’s summer all year round, it is cold at three in the morning. It’s comfy to stay in bed, but he built a model that worked for him. So how can you find comfort in the discomfort and what is the discomfort for you? That’s something that you should think about because it’s not financial. It’s emotional. It’s just money.
And I think about…I’m friends with Bas Rutten – MMA guy, and he has a shirt. It has a saying that he’s kind of known for saying he’s like, “It’s only pain. It can’t hurt you.”… And so when I think about trading, I think people look at the money and they put too much importance on it. It’s really just the way you keep score because what you do with your money, what I do with my money, who cares? You know what I mean? Your goals are personal, and I can’t say that they’re good or bad financially, whatever your financial goals are. I do know that in trading, going back to yesterday’s lesson, you need to have an edge edges expressed in a very simple sense of having positive expected value based on one simple setup that you can repeat over and over and over again without making any adjustment to that particular rule.
Again, discomfort might be the beneficial choice. Is your goal to feel good or do you want to make money? Do you want instant gratification or can you live with delayed gratification? Because I can see in an armchair quarterback kind of a way, a correlation between trading styles and certainly holding periods. It might feel good to make a small bit of money today, so you want the emotional win. I always knew I had to grow my account. Why? Because I was a broke-ass-bitch. That’s why, and I didn’t want to. It’s not that I didn’t think there was anything good. I didn’t have any judgment about being that it was just life was a struggle, and by the time I had gotten to Wall Street, I had already been working like half my life, grinding to make running money. There was no other place the money was going to come from, so I had to do it myself. So I brought all that blue collar baggage with me about putting in long hours and this and that, making your boss look good. At the end of the day, none of that mattered because it wasn’t anything I could translate into a trading model. So every bit of data that you come to, you have to ask yourself the question, can I incorporate this into my trading, into my trading model? Yes or no, it’s black or white, and you can’t think of intuition when you’re starting because you don’t have any.
You can develop it. I’ll give you that, but you’re better off sticking to rigid rules and then getting fancy after when is after, I don’t know, six months, again, delayed gratification. Can you put the time in day after day after day and act consistently? It’s the consistency that’s going to get you the results that you want, and that result in the beginning might be just find the trading rules that have positive expected value. IE edge. If you’re impulsive and you need the dopamine hits, you might need to trade short term. What happens though when you can’t develop a feel? You’re going to have to find a way to get those dopamine hits from another spot. It’s not going to come from trading.
Now, I wish I knew all of this because it would’ve helped me figure out a better trading style for me early on. Remember what I said, if you don’t know who you are, it doesn’t matter what you know about really trading or anything in life because you’re going to look to get your emotional needs fed. It’s just a natural order of things. We’re pleasure seekers, and it’s in through a million years of evolution. That fight or flight mechanism is in there. What are you doing it for? And I’ve mentioned on the show in the training, we talk about this a great deal. There’s two payoffs for every trade. There’s the emotional and the psychological, and then there’s the financial. You need to know which one you’re doing it for. Maybe there’s a blend of both. For me, I take away the emotional part of the payoff of the trade because I take my pleasure in the fact that I can execute the same discipline day after day, so it’s really the pre-trade where I get my emotional win.
Can I do my postmortem? Can I do my pre-reading set up regimen to know what my wishlist is and where my orders are? Which ones am I going to enter by myself? Which ones do I call to the floor? And having that model down, that’s what gives me solace is in my preparation, so that’s where I get my emotional win. I’m powerless over the results of the trade. The best I can do is put on the trades where I know I’ve had an edge. That’s the financial side, so I do get the emotional and the financial, but they’re in two stages. I don’t get them

From the payoff, the winner loss of the trade, so steal from that. Think about it. How are you built? Do you need instant gratification? Do you need the dopamine hit or do you need the financial reward? And which one on a scale of one to 10 is more important to you? Because if you know that, again, self-knowledge is key, you can kind of go and determine what a better trading model might be for you. Even an asset class, if you know that you don’t mind striking out a lot, but you like to hit home runs, you might be able to think about maybe trading options because you can define your loss and you have lots of upside. If you buy calls, if you have puts, the thing can only go to zero, but that can kind of help you make the decision when you kind of know what emotional feedback that you need because it’s going to be there, especially when you’re starting out.
Over time, you can become numb to it because then it’s just a business. It’s like, okay, here’s the setup. Oh, there’s that one over there. In a particular ticker, I’ll just put the trade on over thousands of trades. I know I’m going to make money. I don’t necessarily care about the outcome of this particular trade. If the faster you can get to that spot, the better off you’re going to be because then you could shrug your shoulders of the weight of the world. Don’t look at your p and l because if you’re doing something that has positive expected value over time, that’s mathematically proven that you’ll make money. Expected values don’t go from plus five to minus five overnight. They can change a little bit, but they don’t waver that much anyway.

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The most important thing in your trading is your trading edge. And for some of you, without getting into it, because probably a myriad ways to look at this, it is the expected value of your trade, right? The expected value takes into account what’s your frequency of winning. Obviously that compliment and of winning and losing has to add up to a hundred. And then you take into account the magnitude of your average winner, the magnitude of your average loser. There’s a video on the YouTube channel already about it, so you can go check it out. I’ll see if I can drop a link in the description, but at the end of the day, to me, that’s the most important thing because that’s really the, for whatever system, mechanized system that you’re trading, whatever chart setup you’re looking at, and if you’re just starting out, it should be one that is what tells you to put the trade on or not. You need to have an edge and to simplify things. For those of you who are struggling and cannot find the consistency that we spoke about yesterday and how to build your confidence, you want to try to simplify your trading rules back, test them. If you don’t have actual trades, you can get the expected value from back testing. That might come as a shock to you because they don’t speak about it enough, but it is possible to run your entry rules subjectively choose a risk unit that’s subjective, figure out how much you want to risk dollar wise, percent wise, whatever it might be, and then simulate that entry and exit system. That risk management system to me robustly over several dozen names rather than trying to focus on one instrument. And the reason I say that, because some of you were like, I’m just dedicated to trading MNQs right now. The problem with that is that when you’re starting out and you should only be trading one setup to get good at it so that you can set and develop a feel, okay, there might not be enough setups for you to hit your goals. What’s a bad goal? I want to learn how to trade. It’s a bad goal, and I’m not even going to tell you why, because I want you to figure it out for yourself. Leave a note in the comments for me. When I see people struggle, my heart breaks because they overcomplicate things and ultimately, whatever it is that you think you want to learn, remember I said we don’t get paid to know stuff. We get paid to execute.

That’s the key to everything in life. Can you execute, even if you’re an employee, can you create more financial abundance than what you’re getting paid for? That’s how companies work. And in return, you get a guaranteed paycheck, you get benefits, this and that, right? So there are trade-offs to make. I didn’t want those trade-offs in my life. I chose my own path. So I’m not talking out of both sides of my mouth, but it comes down to a personal preference. I don’t judge you based on because I didn’t walk a mile in your shoes. I didn’t live with you. I didn’t know what your environment’s like. I don’t know who your family members are. I don’t know what the rest is you had to live through or overcome. I can’t tell you what’s best, but I do know that if you are willing to look within yourself and see what you’re working on and then conjugate that with the results that you’re getting in management, we used to say, “you’ve got to change the man or you’ve got to change the man,” which of course is meant to sound like a Dr. Seuss rhyme in management. You’re like, okay, look, here’s what’s not working. Let’s have a discussion about it. Why? Perfect. I hear you loudly and clearly. Here are the resources that we have. However, there has to come a point in time where we get the results that we both need. And so here’s what happens, and this is what a good manager would say, right? Because people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers. So I was always crystal clear with people and say, here’s what needs to happen and here’s what needs to happen by when. Here’s what happens if it doesn’t happen, so that everyone’s crystal clear. Are we clear about stuff? Because typically it comes down to behavior. We’re not getting the results that we need for this. It makes sense.
Would you agree yes or no? These were your goals that you stated you weren’t under any type of duress. You put your goals down, you haven’t hit them. Why? What more resources do you think you need from me? Or that I can get access to help you because I’m willing to do it. I’m the guy who jumps on the grinis for people. You probably probably doesn’t come as a shock to people because when you win, my heart’s full and I don’t care if you pay me because karma wise it will come back to me in another way. You see what I’m saying? That’s why I do the show. You all know that because when I started, there wasn’t anyone to help me and I felt scared and I knew I could do it and I had zero resources. So anyway, and so that’s to change the demand internally. If those parameters don’t work over the next three, six months, whatever it might be, then you have to change the person by physically changing them, getting a new person in the seat to get the job done. So you can borrow from that and say, perfect, put yourself in my shoes. Change the camera. Now you’re speaking to me. Would you hire yourself? What is the asset? What is it that you bring to the table?
I don’t allocate. I don’t typically make introductions. I don’t the politics of it. I’m not a third party marketer. I have helped people understand what marketing is, especially if they’re traders and they’re Mr. Inside, so to speak. There’s an episode, an audio only episode that you can see on Spotify or if you go to Martin Chronicle in the top right corner, there’s a search bar that says, search my site or something like that. And if you type in the word backers, you’ll see an episode that comes in how to find trading partners who would put up money and how to bring them on, how maybe help you build a company around that. There are certain industry that are kind of standard, but ultimately what matters for if you’re a trader is do you have an edge? And that’s the most important thing because if you can express an edge, then there’s really no reason to put a trade on the edge is the whole reason to do it.
And for those of you just starting, think of it as positive expected value. That comes from consistent behavior. Can you do the same damn boring thing every day or you do need more action? If you are less than two years, two years or less in the business, you should be focusing on one thing and mastering that. I’m sorry if you were told that it can happen easy and fast and you could make a lot of money working 20 minutes a day. I look at that stuff and I think as a skit for Saturday Night Live, that’s comical. Some of you, very few of you, one in 10,000 will be born with a knack or a good sense of timing or have a good feel. You probably already have that in other areas of your life, so that’s a good thing. But it’s extremely rare if you don’t have an edge and you can’t express that edge. If you can’t tell me what your edge is in two or three sentences, you don’t have it. You can develop it. You just have to keep working at it, but it’s not that sophisticated. Simplify, simplify, simplify. It’s a great exercise for you to do that. Think about it. If you can’t explain to me what it is that you do and you have an edge and you can’t do it in two sentences, it sounds to me that you’re confused. And then I start to think like I’m happy the person made money. I wish them financial abundance, but at that point, I can’t tell if the person just has no sense addiction and can’t enunciate and say specifically what’s on their mind or if they were just in the right place at the right time and they’re really the victim of luck. Therefore no hypothetical allocation. You need to have clarity of thought, the clarity of thought, right? Thoughts, feelings, actions and
the behavior or the actions that predicts where you end up in every area of your life. So that’s why I like to think about expected value. Think about the expected value. If you don’t have enough of actual trades or if you try to do 75 different things, the expected value is not worth much. Why? Well, because you’re all over the place and you’re not likely to replicate that same path going forward because you were throwing darts. That’s why I say if you really want to get good focus on one damn thing, days and weeks and months are going to go by.
But that’s the nature of the beast. If you feel like you, oh, I have fear of missing out. I have fear that other people are making money, I’m very competitive. The competition is with yourself. It’s not some funding challenge, it’s not some trading competition. That’s all macho man bullshit. You compete with yourself. Kobe wanted to win so much that he’d be out on the court when it was still dark outside working on his craft when he had already had personal accolades. There was something within him that made him want to win. And I’m not even a basketball fan. I haven’t been to a basketball game in 20 years, but I appreciate the mindset that’s the key.
Baseball’s probably worse, hardest sport in the world hit a round object with a round object. You fail 70% of the time just like trading still end up in the hall of fame. So if you don’t know what your edge is, you should go inward and try to determine what that is. What is it that you think you bring to the table? Because it’s not in a chart pattern, it’s your ability to focus on doing one thing that works over and over and over again, not for the excitement, but because it only makes sense for you if you’re a capitalist and you want to make money to express a trade. When you know that setup or that mechanized rule or that moving average crossover is one that has over time over thousands of trades, positive expected value.
If you’re making stuff up on the flight, think about it. It’s really an act of desperation and I know that happens when you’re underfunded. Why I started, I was underfunded. I’ve lived it, and it’s very frustrating. You have to make choices and the opportunity cost is enormous, but when you’re underfunded, you find yourself doing shit out of desperation because you just don’t have enough money and you don’t have enough. If you don’t have enough margin, you have to find yourself trading these micro contracts where the opportunities just aren’t there as frequently as you would want. Every day is not a trading opportunity. It might be a revelation for you.
And that’s the hard part is knowing when to sit on your hands because sometimes, again, I’ll leave you with this as a speculator, you have one thing going for you that’s an enormously powerful tool, and it might be counter emotional. It’s certainly counterintuitive in that you have the right to not participate. Pensions, they have to be invested endowments, they have to be invested. Investors in their 401k who are outworking jobs, for the most part, they’re buy and hold, so they kind of have to be invested. But as a trader, speculator in stocks, foreign exchange options, commodity futures, the ability and the right for you to sit on your hands is enormously powerful because it helps emphasize the fact that you should only be putting on trades when you have an edge, a definable edge that you know can replicate. That might mean you sitting and waiting like a sniper, not for sniper like entries, but just waiting for your setup and waiting and waiting.
It’s probably easier to do if you’re looking across 150, 200 instruments rather than trying to find something on one instrument day after day after day because you don’t have enough money. I talked about the ills of being underfunded. You find yourself doing things out of desperation because the pain of not trading is actually bigger than the need to make or lose the money. You have to be emotionally engaged. But I feel like this week should really help you put things in perspective because when you think about the pros or anyone that you look up to, they may have their set up and sure over 30 years you can probably develop a couple of them, but keep it simple. Define, get one trading edge. You have to understand how rare that is, but it’s what makes or breaks people as traders is they have a trading edge. They can articulate it. Can you write it out on a piece of paper? You don’t have to send it to me. In fact, I don’t even want to see it. I just don’t. In some level I’m apathetic. But I know that that’s what’s most important for you is to have that edge, be able to express the edge.
That’s the key. It’s why the casino makes money. They have an edge. The game for you. You’re thinking you’re getting what they call economic utility. Another fancy way of saying pleasure because it’s fun to gamble, I suppose. It was never fun for me to lose money, but as long as they have the edge and you have the money, you’re seeking fun. They’re trying to make money. If you’re selling a stock, you can’t be bullish. You might not be bearish, but you’re certainly not bullish anymore. So even in the world, you have these opposing ideologies. You’re going to Vegas or Atlantic City for fun and they’re operating to make money and create a fun environment for you, give you a back rub, we’ll bring you free drinks, whatever it might be so that you have opposing ideologies, your different needs that are getting met. But as long as the casino outside of say, blackjack or poker, they have an edge on everything.
That’s why they’re in business. So you have to make yourself the casino by finding a rule, an entry rule with a corresponding exit based on a position size that makes sense for you, which is a subjective choice that you can follow day after day after day, and do that consistently, then grow from there. You have to be patient. So whatever feelings that you have to feel when you have to be patient are things that you’re going to have to reconcile and come to terms with. It’s not going to happen overnight, and I’m sorry if someone gave you, sold you a bill, a bunch of goods or services that made it sound like it was going to be easy, but it’s not. I wish it was different.

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The best way to build confidence in your process is to do the same thing every day. If you try to come in and be scalper one day swing trader, another day long-term trend follower another day, you’re really all over the place. And I really look at those trading strategies, those potential setups as really religions, and so you can imagine trying to be Monday through Friday, a different religious person every day. It’s too confusing. You say the same thing about politics, right? So at the end of the day, your confidence is what’s going to carry the day and it’s going to help you with your belief system and your confidence and your entitlement, right? Again, and we’re not talking about entitlement issues, we’re talking about you doing the work. You playing Kobe Bryant in your own respective way, for example, putting in the hours and hours of practice because at that point when you’re doing more work than your peers, and we’re not just talking the quantity of work, we’re talking about the quality of work.
So we don’t want to sit there and spend 18 hour days bringing blue collar despair into a white collar job. You have to be efficient, right? And that might mean letting go of some closely held beliefs. Here’s one that makes a lot of sense to let go of. It’s always been a market of stocks for me more than a stock market, so I don’t care at the general direction of the overall market. Each instrument for me has always been its own market, whether it be Microsoft or long or short or Intel back in the day or A OLN, didn’t matter what the ticker was per se. I just never cared about the overall direction. Two, I didn’t come up with a thesis first, right? That’s investing. Traders don’t have the thesis. What you’re looking for is price, volume. You can look at open interest and start there.
It’s too much to go through here, and this is not a channel on how to trade as much as it is you looking at yourself and why do you do what you do? Because that’s 95 trading is, like I said, 75, 80% psychological and emotional, and I think 99% of it is your temperament and your personality. So the 1% is really the tactical. You all think like, well, I don’t know what I’m doing, so let me go the intellectual route. Where to me, and I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, I’ll keep saying it, is that if you don’t know who you are, it doesn’t matter what you know about trading, it doesn’t matter what you know about anything for that matter, because who cares? Those are all data points and the ability or the prestige of being or having an encyclopedic mind or memory doesn’t matter anymore because anything that I need is a Google search away.
So I don’t care about what you know or what you can remember or what you can recall. It’s a circus trick at this point. It meant something back in the day before the internet. I think maybe having an understanding of history certainly can help you create models, but trading knowledge in and of itself really comes down to you being able to replicate the same thing day after day after day, and that’s what you take solace in. That’s what gives you the reassured, the reassured that you need. That’s what can validate you as a person is can you do the same basic boring bullshit every day? Most people cannot. They keep seeing big ticker moves like, oh, MSTR is moving. I got to find a way to be in that SCI is doing this. I got to be in that. And then you’ve got the fanboy in the AI space or crypto, and as an aside, the way you build your confidence is not sticking or going to those mummified names because if you ask anybody who’s been around the memes can change from 82 to 87 in that bull market, there were a group of names that were burgeoning.
Then you look at what happened from 95 to 2000 in the.com era, and it was like vertical net Siebel systems, CMGI, global crossing. Of course, we can’t forget JDS, Uniphase and everyone would talk about those names and these are the top 10 names that you need to have. They were on the magazine covers and a lot of people made a lot of money. But what they don’t tell you is that those same names are the ones where people lost the most amount of money to
Because without a trading plan, you’re being the moth to the flame. So the consistency comes from your confidence, which comes from you’re being consistent. They’re so closely related, it’s tough to see which one comes first, but if you can do the same boring thing day after day after day and not take flyers and just stay in your damn lane, that will build you your confidence. When you practice that and you replicate that day after day, then you can start to see, this is why I’m entitled to the richest. I have an other worldly sense of discipline, and when I lose, I keep a good attitude. I don’t get into all pissiness because I’ve had five losers in a row because ultimately going back to Monday’s episode, I believe I can do it. It’s just a matter of time. I’m not quite sure right now. But what I’m going to do is follow my process.
My process has positive expected value. The best thing I can do is follow every single trade. When the setup shows up, I can feel my feelings around fear. I’m speaking about you now and still take the right action. But Mike, what happens when I’m up a thousand percent perfect? Stick to your same position size. That’s how you control fear and greed is trade the same bed size risk unit, whatever you want to call it. There’s a million names for the same thing that will help you build your confidence in that. You don’t say, well, I really love this AI stuff, so I’m going to buy Nvidia on a pullback. Or I think just because it’s sold under eight 50, it’s not going to go down anymore. Or just because it’s in the pinch from anchored v Wap, I can make up my old ruse on the fly.
Sure experiment, but do it with a minimal size, trade it with one share because the point at that point isn’t to make or lose money, it’s to try it on for size to see if the idea works absent a back tester. You can do it a lot quickly, more quickly and cheaper with a back tester. You could also do it when markets are closed so you can make good use of your time. So the thing for me about confidence came from I was unrelenting in my work ethic and what I needed to do is stop worrying about learning stuff and start to think about the execution in the application. That’s why I say, and it might make sense now that we don’t get paid to know things. We get paid to execute. Can you create alpha? It’s yes or no. It’s not. Maybe it’s not. Sometimes it’s net net of all your trades. Can you create alpha?
And if you can’t, I would suggest extending your holding period. Most of you are probably trying to trade on the short side of things, not short selling, but on the short term timeframes. And that’s where the struggle is because the data are more random and no one tells you despite selling you telegrams and discords and other trading systems and this and that, that that’s the hardest thing to do when you don’t have any discipline because you don’t have any experience, which comes from putting a lot of time in and they don’t tell you that you need to have a phenomenal feel. Doesn’t matter if they’re saying this is the biggest traders at X, Y, Z companies are scalpers. Well, it’s very difficult to scalp with $10 million because of depth of market. If you want to try it, good luck. But at the end of the day, if you’re a newer person in the game and you hear these stories in an unregulated market, there’s no one consumer report that stands up and says you’re making a misleading statement or you’re leaving some material information out.
What’s material information? Well, I always think about the prudent man rule as it’s called an investing. Is the information material enough that a prudent person would use that to make a better decision? And the answer is yes, meaning that I can’t sell you a trading system if the caveat is you need to be born with a phenomenal sense of timing or you need to put so many years in because it’s not going to come in two months after you’ve bought the fucking system that you need to develop a feel, which only a small of the people can do. If I said that as a disclaimer, guess what? No one’s going to join my telegram. No one’s going to join my private Twitter feed because I can’t sell it.
So part of developing your confidence is to not fall victim to kons because I’m not saying that it’s snake oil, but in an unregulated market, people will tell you anything and everything doesn’t matter what trading style it is. I’ve seen it from scalping through Trent following stuff. The claims are rather outrageous. Even still, if you went up and got up at four in the morning and shot 300 free throws, free throws like Kobe did and then came back and did another shoot around, it still doesn’t mean that you’re going to be able to do it, but it will infuse you with confidence to it. Even go out and try. Who knows how good you can be? All you can do is try. That’s my humble opinion on things like that. You won’t know until you try. These people were motivated, these athletes to be the best, so they figured they had to put in the work. But again, there’s a qualitative aspect to it as well. It’s not just grunt work.
And so when I was thinking about how did I build my confidence and how did I know I didn’t look at my p and l? I know that’s probably crazy. How else are you keeping score? The thing is, day after day after day, an individual day, so say I was trading and trying to develop my craft over four years, there’s a thousand trading days that’s much more reasonable to look at that much data. I can’t look at five days and draw any conclusions because there’s so much going on in the world, and I wasn’t smart enough even having gone to an Ivy League school to be able to wrap my arms around some global macro themes or nevermind the themes themselves, but which one was in play on that particular day or week.
When you don’t have the experience, it’s very hard for you to draw those conclusions. And so what happens is you become very hard on yourself and you become discouraged because you’re digging too deep into stuff. You’re looking at random data, intraday data, random news headlines, and trying to draw big conclusions about your ability. The people that suffer the most are the people who already come to the market with an enormous amount of self-doubt, and that typically comes from, again, your household where you grew up. So for me, I would say do everything you can to build your confidence, because even if you have average intelligence, a confident person is someone who I know is going to hit their goals. I’ve seen it happen. When I went to Wall Street, there were people who came from enormous family wealth and all they did was lose money, and they had a great advantage in that they had assets to manage. They didn’t have to worry about that part, but they were also very, very comfortable. They were already rich, so they didn’t have the drive and everyone’s like, oh, put my arm on. He’s going to be a huge star, which was politics again, which why I hate politics because you don’t want that person to leave and go to another firm.
So I could see that very, very clearly early on. That was the level of ass kissing was just disgusting.
And then you take the person, I think it was Gordon Gecko who said, give the people who are poor broke starving, this and that. They have a good work ethic, they’ll figure it out. And so I knew people who I knew a guy, I won’t mention his name. He was a paper salesman at a time. Again, when there was, you did a door to door and he’d put a ream of paper like reams, what is it? 500 sheets he’d put. Then they come in a box, there’s probably four or five reams in the box. He’d put it up on his shoulder in East New York, which is a very tough section in Brooklyn and walk from business to business and sell paper. And I was like, that guy’s going to kill it, because he knows his work ethic. He knows how hard it was.
I cadd golf bags. I had a bag on each shoulder, which was different from Cadian for a PGA pro where there was a club minimum. Some of these people had 21 clubs in their bag. They had sometimes two or three dozen balls plus a pair of shoes. I’d rather carry you on my back for 18 holes than some of these golfers who mind you weren’t that good. Some of them we used to say, well, you see the whole course because they’d be left rough, right? Rough, left, rough, right, rough. And so if the course was par 72, if you counted all the lost balls, they’d shoot one 40. Anyway, the point being is that you can do a lot to build your own confidence by not being your own or your own worst enemy or even a bad enemy. It doesn’t have to be the worst enemy.
You just have to type a think about, be mindful, be mindful of the things that you’re actually practicing. And if what you’re doing is trying to look and see random data, intraday, but you’re not getting the results, why don’t you change? You have to have the courage. Chapter two of my book is surrender. There’s nothing wrong with making a pivot. It doesn’t mean that you’ve lost because the idiot who doesn’t know what he or she is doing, and I include myself at the top of that list, at least when I was starting, if the best you can do is just learn to keep your losses small, your way ahead of 90% of the people, most new traders don’t have any sense of risk management. And so my whole thing is not to sound sarcastic or snarky is just be a philanthropist because you’re giving your money away. You might as well direct it to a place that is meaningful for you. There’s nothing wrong with surrender. That’s part of the pivot. And if you’re not seeing what other people are seeing in the short term and you still want to struggle, answer me that question. What is it that you think is going to be different, right? Thursday or Friday? Tomorrow or Friday,
What is it that you’re not getting? What is it? How come you’re not developing the field that you were promised that you would get if you followed somebody else’s rules or you were part of their discord? So in order to build self-confidence in that regard, you have to step away and try something different. It might be different from what you want to do, but if you’re not showing any skill in that space, then you have to pivot If you want to be a trader, otherwise, you’re feeding some kind of emotional need and being a martyr.
Martyrs go down in history, but not for the reasons that you want, right? If that’s what your goal is, if your goal is to be a martyr because you want the attention, there’s plenty of those people, plenty of failed traders, you won’t see ’em show up in social media, but they’ve littered the streets for ages. You’re stepping over the bodies. They can’t peacock on it, certainly can’t sell your courses, but at the end of the day, be mindful of your own behavior because that’s what you’re in control of, and you have to be very suspicious of everything that you see and hear.
I try to speak with a lot of candle here because I don’t like to see people getting taken advantage of because I know they have the best intentions, but ultimately, it is eventually up to you. If someone got the best of you once, okay, burn me once, burn me twice, kind of a deal. But you have to pivot. If your goal is to actually make it and things are not working for you, you’re going to be that much further from building any confidence because you’re listening to too many gurus. You see, you are the guru, you are the asset. It’s not the trading pattern, it’s not the timeframe within which you speak. Some people have a way with words, some people don’t like me, but at any rate, I wish you the best. The whole channel here is to get you to think introspectively about why you do what you do.
Sometimes it comes from your subconscious. Maybe you’re trying to prove something to somebody. All that matters is what is it to you? And I know I told you the story about keeping the rejection letters. I actually think they were thrown out. I don’t have them, but I remember getting them, and that just was fuel for that stage of my life. Now, I don’t have any regrets because everything worked out. God has a plan for everybody. And so I feel like if you can build your confidence, then that’s when you can actually become unstoppable. It doesn’t even really matter what you want to do in life at that point, because a confident person’s going to at least have the faith in themselves to go out and try and iterate. And that’s when things get exciting because that’s when you begin to go into your little Petri dish of trading experimentation to figure out what’s going to work.
And that’s what I mean by there has to be a certain level of promiscuity in your approach. Because until you really know who you are, you don’t know what’s going to be best for you. I do know that if you’re struggling in the short run, you can invite a lot of success by extending your holding period, perhaps even trading smaller. Why do I say that? Well, on a simple back of the napkin methodology, I know people who have bought the s and p and held it without having any exit strategy. They have an open-ended strategy and they make money.
So when you start to think about adding risk, but then saying, I need to offset that risk within a super short period of time, you see the exit strategy becomes the problem on some level. To me, that would be common sense. Now, I was immune from that because it was too expensive for me to scalp or day trade when I was starting out. Given that bid esque spreads were 25 cents and that stocks traded in eighths, I was looking at if I was trading Wendy’s quick service restaurant at $20 and I had 50 cents, what’s 50 cents as part of $20? What is that? 2.5%? Just as a break even. So it made it too punitive for me. I don’t want to go through all that, but when you can build your confidence, to me, that’s when you get to the point where then, well, I’m doing the work. I’m acting consistently. The consistency is going to get me the results that I want. And that stems from my belief that I’m entitled to all the abundance in the world, which is not greed, it’s just financial abundance. And I believe that I can do anything because I can act consistently. If you like this video, check out this one.

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So today I want to follow along from yesterday’s episode. We talked about belief, right? You have to believe that you can actually achieve your goal. Goal setting’s important to me, it’s the beacon. It’s both what pushes you and pulls you to where your point B is, right? If you want your life to be different from where it is today, it’s behavioral. But in order to execute that behavior, because behavior predicts where you end up, you first need to come up with the idea. To me, that’s a goal. And the goal should scare the shit out of you. There’s no point in saying, I need to get a new Ferrari, or I need to buy another monitor, you know, can do that. The goal is to change your life. The goal is to utilize all your skills that starts your belief system, that it has to be possible.
Then you have to think willingness and ableness are, you probably have all the ability that need. The question then becomes are you willing to do the work? And that’s important. It’s really, really important. Were you the type of student that just said, fuck it, I’m going to go to class and wing it, or did you actually care? Right? Because that’ll tell you a lot about your temperament and your makeup, and I’m not judging you per se, but if I was an allocator, which I’m not, that type of person wouldn’t turn me on. There’s nothing exciting about that person who wants to just bullshit their way through life. I’m looking for overachievers because that excites me to be around them. It doesn’t matter what field they’re in at all.
So here’s the thing, while I don’t like entitlement issues, people who think that they deserve shit just because of who they are intentionally, if you are doing the work, then you are entitled to the rewards that go with it. So that’s why the coaching that I do is I think invaluable because it puts you in that mindset that this isn’t something where you have to live in blue collar despair or you have to be a starving artist in order to deserve it by virtue of the fact that the resources that are out in the world that you might want to acquire or bring into your own sphere are out. There is enough of a magnet for me to tell you that you deserve it. You’re entitled to it. You don’t need to ask anyone’s permission.
And this follows in with the belief, right? If you follow sports, right? The majority of this crowd is male. So I don’t want to just talk about sports because the women tune out. But if you look at the folks who were like legends in their space, they all talk about having a work ethic that was otherworldly, which is me, because that’s all I knew how to do. So when I hear about the late Kobe Bryant going to shoot 300 free throws at three, four o’clock in the morning, then at six o’clock doing the ice bath, having breakfast, going out and doing more, and then having four hours of practice in, I’m like, yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing for the last 36 years. So while it’s impressive to hear that I’ve been living that myself because I was too stupid to know anything else, I knew I had to put the time in.
Nothing was going to come to me just because I thought I deserved it. I had to do the work. So when Kobe was out playing, when Michael Jordan was playing, when Wayne Gretzky was playing, when a younger Mike Tyson was preparing, he’s up at four o’clock in Catskill, New York, running 10, 20 miles at four in the morning. You have to be willing to do the thing that the other people aren’t doing. While they’re focused and looking at short-term timeframes, thinking that they’re going to find their edge there, you’re probably looking at the data. You’re understanding because you’re doing your research and understanding that you don’t want to buy weakness. You don’t want to get trapped by or sell short inside trading zones. To me, you’re doing the work and once you put in those hours, it should build your confidence because now you have something to fall back on when you know that there’s winning and losing streaks. You don’t have to internalize that because you know what the numbers are. You know what your data is, and if you don’t, well, you have to wing it because if you don’t take the chances, you’re not going to get anywhere. There’s no sense of certainty that I can give you. We live in a probabilistic world.
If you are a person who needs reassurance, there’s going to be tough business for you. You’re going to have to work on where that feeling comes from. Why do you have self-doubt? Did you have an overbearing parent? And I don’t mean to bring that up. I don’t know your parents, I can’t judge them, but we’re products of our environment, and that typically comes down to whoever was in your nuclear family, which is usually a mom, your father, brother, sister. Some cultures, it might be a grandparent aunt or an uncle too. So I don’t have any judgment, but you need to go back and find out where Adam met Eve and where did you get that? Could you never do anything right? Are all these people full of conventional wisdom? So you’re entitled to that money. You need to change your mindset around money because the financial abundance isn’t going to come and kick you square in the ass just because you’re looking at chart books or you’re part of a Discord.
Again, take what you want, feed your brain, but then you need to move on. Just had a long conversation with someone who’s in the mastermind but was having a little bit of, not a struggle, but needed a breakthrough. So I said, look, I’ll just send you the zoom. We’ll get on a call. We’ll go outside the boundaries. I’ll do it for free and we’ll talk about it like you overthink things. At the end of the day, when you put the work in, it should build the confidence that you are entitled to the work, to the abundance that you’re seeking, right? If you practice hard, you get to go play in the game. If you win or lose, you get to reevaluate shore up some things. I don’t like to focus on improving weaknesses, though. If you have a weakness, let it go. Focus on building your strengths. You need to change your mindset around money. You don’t have to go through living hell in order to get to some nirvana in your trading. You’re entitled to it right now. If you follow smart rules around managing risk, you have to also understand that the expected value, if you stick with what your trading rules are, the expected value of a trade isn’t going to change. And that each trade that you put on is like that independent coin toss. It’s not predictive of what’s going to happen next. So you have to let go of resulting and saying to yourself, well, I put this trade on.
I lost money. I put three trades on. They all lost money. That has nothing to do with what the fourth trade is going to do because on each trade, the expected value is the same thing. So if that’s your setup, it’s in your best interest to put that trade on. Now, you might be able to build your confidence if you spend time back testing, because then you can see over the last 10 or 20 years how that would’ve worked. What did the losing streaks look like? Then you might be able to say, okay, well maybe if my instrument is below a three or a five day simple moving average, I don’t put the trade on. I use that as a filter for risk on risk off. Allah, my good friend Brian Shannon, he uses anchored vwp for a lot of things. However, if the instrument is below the five day, that’s a go no go model for him. You can steal from that and see if it works for you. But make no mistake, the belief system that we spoke about yesterday and your mindset that you’re entitled to win.
You can’t be a victim in this business. It will chew you up and spit you out. It’s like a great white shark. The first bite is the kill to bleed out the prey. The next one, they just come back and feed after they watch the body of the seal floating in the water. That’s what you are. You don’t want to be the body of that seal just sitting there. You have to do the work. And of course the work is the work on yourself. The trading rules are not that sophisticated. On some level, you could say, if it’s not going up, don’t buy it in the first place. If you stick to some basic tenants, you can improve your p and l. Mind you, I don’t advocate looking at your p and l to internalize if you’re doing well or not. You judge yourself by, are you following your discipline? Focus on your process, not the results. Because over time, you’re going to have streaks that are winning. You’re going to have streaks that are losing, and it says nothing about your intelligence. You don’t to be above average intelligence. Part of the conversation with my friend yesterday, I’ll call him Thomas, it’s not his name, was that when you’re too smart, you can find 45 different reasons to put the trade on and adjust as many to not put the trade on because you can see all the possibilities and what happens is that actually shuts you down. So you have to actually simplify things to several steps. A good book for this, if you like, I’m almost reluctant to mention books though, because you could spend your life reading books. The key is to learn and put the information to use. I don’t like the idea of reading books to fill your brain with stuff that’s not necessary for trading. The book is called “Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart,” and in the book, I think it’s the book, I haven’t read it several times.
They talked about when someone would come to the hospital complaining of shortness of breath and chest pains, they had to figure out was the person in or about to go into cardiac arrest. And I think they had, again, I might have the story, I have the story, but I don’t know if it’s the book, but it’s the tenet of the book that matters. And it’s to simplify. They used to go through, I think the story goes like 12 different measurements to see if the person was in fact either in cardiac arrest or having heart attack. Now, when you’re in that space, and I know a little bit about it, the time is of the essence.
And so in order to administer these 12 tests, it would take more time. That was very valuable time that could help the person survive it or avoid it by using blood thinners or this and that. So what they did was is they said, okay, well what of these measurements can we use that actually have high predictive value for this illness? And I think they reduced it to two or three measurements that they could get done within 90 seconds, saving an enormous amount of time and getting the sick person the treatment that they needed much quicker. And the accuracy rate was amazing. So whereas you had 12 measurements, they might’ve had 95% efficacy. They were able to cut it down to three measurements and have similar results. So when you think about your trading, if you’re super intellectual, you need to let go and let God. There’s too much information out there that doesn’t necessarily help you with signal. You see? But you want reassurance because you’re used to that. That’s your culture. That’s the culture of you, is to probably be the smartest person at whatever table that you’re sitting at. But that doesn’t help you with

Trading. We no longer need to have an encyclopedic knowledge. Sure, if you want to go on TV and tell stories and impress people because you’re an asset gatherer, that’s one thing, but that’s part of the currency of being a marketer. A trader doesn’t care about that. They don’t care about nosebleed valuations. It’s bullshit price, earnings, multiple. No one cares. That’s investor language. We don’t use that in trading. You need to understand that when you put that work in. Your job is to minimize and make your model as simple as possible. And if you can’t describe it in three sentences, it’s probably too sophisticated. And if you’re just starting out, you don’t need to have seven different setups. Pick one and excel at it, own it. Reduce it to as few steps as possible. This way you don’t anyway. You’re entitled to all the abundance that you seek. You don’t need to ask permission. You don’t need to put in a certain amount of time as a grunt. There is no bootcamp. That’s all language that you’re bringing in from other cultures. That’s not necessary here. We’ll talk more about it this week.

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The most powerful mindset for your success is your belief and you can achieve your goals. If you think you want to start trading by reading a bunch of books or doing this and that we all know what your options are to learn charts or the craft of trading, which will never end, there’ll never be a lack of sights for you to look up or charts to follow or this and that. The single most important thing that you need is your belief in yourself that you can achieve a goal. That’s why when we do in the coaching program, in the program goal setting is job number one. You have to know what the target is. If you think that I’m going to acquire information first and then I’ll figure it out, not going to work even before that. You have to see from the periphery like, okay, I’m interested in trading.
I might have a certain proclivity, which I will find when I start risking real money. My interest might be in position trading. It might even be in investing. It might be in short term stuff like day trading or scalping or swing trading. It’s all legit, but high performance people that I work with and the person that I’ve become, the only reason my success ever came was because I believed I could do it. Because when you’re in your darkest hour, and excuse me, when nothing else seems like it’s going to work, if you don’t have belief in yourself, what else is going to carry the day? You might think that this is a game of accuracy. I think you’re going to learn the hard way that it’s a game about conditional probabilities, expected values and probabilistic outcomes. So a smart trader is going to know that ahead of time, and we’re going to talk about all that this week about mindset because I feel like on many levels, and the more of you that I get to speak with, which thank you very much for being here.
By the way, I wrote about my struggles in “The Inner Voice of Trading,” which was published by FT Press in 2011. If you’re new the channel, you can get the free audio book download. The link is in the description, and when you read through that book and you think about how I was getting my head kicked in, even though I was making a lot of money, I didn’t write about the gloating part. I wrote about the failures because I think that’s what everyone could identify with. Even if you are a fan of a certain trader, it could be anybody from the market wizards or the legends that are out there to people that you might know personally, everyone’s going to lose money. Doesn’t matter. Your status doesn’t matter. Your assets under management doesn’t matter your trading style or your holding period. So when people say, well, what are the qualities and the characteristics that you need?
There’s a lot of them. I think having a good attitude is one discipline. Yes, true from work ethic standpoint, but if you have a pissy attitude, even if you have a good work ethic, it’s tough to grind on yourself. The grind of trading is going to be enough. If you beat the hell out of yourself, you’re going to find that trading is the perfect vehicle for you to continue to beat the live shit out of yourself is like having 10 devouring moms. So the most important mindset to me for success was my belief that I could do anything. Oh, Michael, you’re amazing. You can be president one day. I never believed that bullshit. And to be honest, I hate politics. I don’t really get along with people either who were too far one way or the other. I’d find it really obnoxious. But do what you think is best.
The point being is if you don’t have, because I think belief, right? Think about any type of, whether it’s politics or religion, the key word there is belief. It’s what are you but for your faith, right? So that comes down on belief. So in trading, because it’s such an entrepreneurial activity where you have to be both a leader and a follower, and you’re a team of one, no matter who else is out there, even if you are listening and you are or you currently are, you were, or you think you’re going to be a coaching client, you’re still on your own. I can help you shorten your learning curve and help you go geometric in terms of your ability for sure. But if you don’t believe that you can do it, there’s nothing that I can do at any price point to help you. You have to have this unwavering ability to believe in yourself that you can get the job done no matter what, even if you don’t have a clue about what it is that you’re going to trade, because in that regard, it shouldn’t matter.
And that I think is really good advice for life. I mean, if I look at the things that I’ve done in my professional career, I’ve certainly lost a lot of money. I’ve definitely made some boneheaded moves, but if I look at some of the major achievements that I had that I’ve achieved and not be prideful, most of it came about because I believed I could do it. Even in getting, I would call it the book deal when I was reaching out to publishers and I was doing it via cold email. I didn’t have any relationships. I just thought I had a memoir in me in the form of a book that would be informative and entertaining different from all these how-to books. Because my whole take was that if the how-to books, this goes back and I’ve got every how-to book out there, and I’ve got the collector items because sometimes I too need to be reminded, but most of the time I’ll say 90, they say trading is 75, 80% psychological. I’ll go as far as to say that I think 99% of your success is going to come from your belief in yourself and your ability to pull it off. Doesn’t matter how you’re going to do it, don’t focus on that. I would say focus on yourself. That’s why I spend all the time here talking about you because you are the asset here, not the chart pattern, not your trading style. It comes down to you.
And anyway, I was calling these, there’s really two big publishers. I mean, there’s a couple of publishers, but I went to the two that everybody knew. I cold emailed, I won’t mention, well, fuck it. I emailed Wiley and I emailed FT Press. I made two emails. I don’t believe Wiley even got back to me. And FT Press was just like, yeah, tell me more about this idea. I had sent them a treatment, a three-page treatment. They loved the idea. It was unique. It’s the differences that sell. And I got on the phone, I had a successive group of chats with the executive editor who was very, very helpful in the whole process, not just getting the deal, but through the building of the book. I didn’t know anything about the book business and I got the deal, and that’s to God’s honest truth. I sent out two mails, two emails.
Like I said, one never got back to me, but I believed that I could do it. And was I in the right place at the right time? Could be was I lucky? Could be. The book has four and a half out of five stars, so it seems to have resonated with folks who are fans of that type of book. There are other good books out there that can help you, but that’s not my concern. I’m looking to fill up my Karma Bank. Why? Because you, I’m a one person shop who has to believe in himself, who has to be a follower and a leader. I have to be entrepreneurial and I’m going to have good luck and bad luck, good timing and bad timing. And I’ll probably have mostly good analysis because after 36 years, it’s not to say that I can’t be an idiot, but I’ve come past the point of worrying about what’s my trading edge.
I don’t worry about that anymore. So in that case, I’m lucky, but I’m still going to lose money. I still have to keep my losses small. I still have to use my protective stops. So in that regard, we’re equal. So what’s the difference then? If you think I have any type of success that you want to emulate? I’ll tell you what the key is. The key is that you have to believe that you can do it If you have any insecurity about it, I tell you, they say bees and dogs can smell fear. So can the market, any ticker symbol can smell fear. And fear doesn’t have to be like I’m afraid. It could be trepidation, it could be insecurity. It could be that you’re not any of that stuff that would take you away from the middle line. That would make me say he needs a little more time.
She needs a little bit more time to ripen on the vine before we’d give them an allocation. They don’t seem sure of themselves. People will their way into success. So I don’t want to come up with a cheesy title like the Secrets of Proven eight Figure Scalping, day Traders, whatever, because I’m not trying to sell you something. And those people can still make mistakes and they can still lose money. Now, I hope they don’t because I just don’t care about most other people because I’m in this alone. There is no frater. Yes, you can kind of cohort with people behind the scenes and I’ve got a lot of really great friends and they’re good people and I’m grateful to have them as friends because meaningful for me and my life. But at the end of the day, when I go to trade, it’s just me and my higher power. And so that higher power has to stem from a belief first and foremostly that you have will do it. You will get it done. And if you don’t have what resources you’ll need, you’ll create the ones that you need.
The world is trippy, man. When you think about how things come together, I can remember when I was looking to kind of go pro and associate with a bigger firm, the funding account style stuff wasn’t around. So you were looking at where inside Wall Street were there firms that took proprietary risk. There were really two places there were real, because proprietary trading today is a bastardized version of the word proprietary trading. To me, it was best represented inside of Bear Stearns, for example, where they gave you a desk and your resources and they gave you the money to trade. You didn’t have to pay for an education and you didn’t have to put up any of your own money. They just said, here’s a person who could create alpha. Let’s give them the tools that they need and then we’ll give ’em a certain amount of time with which to get it done.
Since then, it’s evolved into include a whole bunch of other stuff that in my mind, because I’m a purist, probably conservative too, and I’m grouchy old man that I don’t really see it as proprietary trading the way, and I’m talking about all the firms that I don’t really think of them as prop trading, but at any rate, we can disagree or agree to disagree. And I sent out resume and cover letter mostly by fax because there weren’t emails at the time. And I was like, I can show them I have a track record. I had assets under management. I had proven documents that showed that I could make money, and it showed drawdowns. What did I lose portrayed? I had all that worked out. I had to do it by hand because the resources that you have today don’t really exist or didn’t exist then. And I mean one after the other, I got thank you, but no thank you. I had a lot of you’re overqualified, which I couldn’t quite understand because I thought if you give somebody money, wouldn’t you want people to have mostly, which is your track record, to try to go out and make money but also not have the massive drawdown? And my ratios were good. My ratios were like five to one, which means my best month was five times the size of my losing month. So I made a point to know that not losing is just as important as having the ability to make because if I have a million bucks to give you to trade, I don’t want to see you having plus 500 minus 500 months. They might happen coincidentally, but normally you want to see drawdowns that are much smaller too because of the emotional aspect of trading and that you don’t want to have to dig yourself out of a deep hole of what it does to you.
It could put you in a make or break kind of a situation. Plus some places they don’t necessarily have the 50% puke point. It might be a much tighter leash when you’re starting out. And I remember keeping those letters, not because I was proud of ’em, but because I knew that these were people who discounted my ability. And of course, not from an ego standpoint, but from my own self-esteem, which is different from ego. I wanted to prove them wrong. And like George Bernard Shaw said, if you can’t find the resources that you need at David Shaw’s house or Renaissance, I don’t know if they were around at the time, maybe they were mostly programmatic anyway, which wasn’t my deal. But Bear Lehman, this and that. And it’s interesting because now if I look back to those names, they don’t even exist anymore. Now, who knows, maybe I could have been there for a few years and then moved on or scaled up.
Who knows how it would’ve worked is myriad combinations. But the point is, is that I always believed in myself that I could get it done. So I went to the place where I thought would be the lowest hanging fruit. Go to a place where there’s a desk, a computer, there’s capital. They’ll give you a line of credit, you could meet with other like-minded people, share resources, give and take maybe obviously get an education in that process and everyone’s better off. And that wasn’t the path that God picked for me. So I kind of had to do it myself. Now again, I had someone hand, I caddied for John Merriweather at Wingfoot, great guy. And I’m sure I had a friend of mine hand deliver a cover letter and resume to the hiring person at Long-term Capital Management. Now, that didn’t work out for me. They weren’t interested.
But look what happened to the company. So I think the universe had a way of saying, this guy’s for real. He’s true in his aim. He’s probably what they would consider a good guy. So let’s not put him, let’s save him from himself and let’s not put him in harm’s way because of the two or three dozen firms that I went to. Again, bear Gone, Lehman Gone Long-Term, capital gone, and the list goes on. I won’t bore you with the details, you might not have heard even of the names, but they were big for the day. And so I got saved from all of that. There would be nothing worse than going to work and saying, Hey, we can’t meet a margin call. We have to scuttle our firm. You are out of a job. And now there’s you and 200 other people who are highly qualified, who have really good track record track records, all now looking for five open seats.
And I was never put in that situation. I got shut out. I was “0-for” in trying to get a job on a desk, and so I just went out and started my own company and I haven’t worked for someone else ever since in that type of space. And that came down to my belief in myself. It was like, okay, I’m going to try to walk through the front door. I’m even going to try to jump through the bathroom window. Sorry, ma’am. Didn’t know you were sitting here. That’s seat taken at the end of the day. So then I said, I’m just going to find my own way. Can’t cut a hole in the roof. I don’t want to do some obnoxious things. I did try, I won’t talk about it now, but I did try some clever things to try to get people’s attention, which I’ll talk about another time on maybe an episode that really, who knows, it’ll be a little bit more of background of my life more than trading stuff, but I’m not sure that those stories are actually even interesting for you.
So I’ll spare you the details. But when you’re thinking about it, if you’re trying to, and you’re several years into your practice and you’re trying to figure it out and you think you’re close, honestly, just keep believing in yourself. I don’t want to sound like some kind of bong, smashing, granola bar, California guy, but even for the rough edges on my New York personality, it was really my unwavering and unlimited belief in myself that I’m a guy who hits his goals. I went to a public high school. I got into Columbia when I didn’t even know how hell I was. I going to pay for it. So there was enough things in my life that I could go back and reference and say, huh, when you do put your mind to something, you find a way to manifest all the resources that you need. Why? Well, they already exist.
Everything that you need to make money and to succeed as a trader is already in existence. What you probably have to do is some emotional portfolio management and cut away the bullshit that doesn’t serve you. That’s where the coaching could come in. I don’t know, but I’m telling you, don’t keep looking for external solutions. The internal solution is your belief in yourself. It’s the single most important thing. Tap into it when you look back in your life and see, look at the other things that you had to achieve. Well, how did that go down? Try to create a model out of that and then replicate that model and overlay that into your trading.