Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin, thanks for being here. Please like and subscribe. If you can leave a comment, I always read them and gives me good feedback on what you think of the content. Get a lot of questions on scaling up, and I know it comes from folks who have smaller accounts sizes because they don’t like being small, they don’t like having small accounts. They know that obviously trading larger can bring greater gains. Of course, my thought process is, you know, could end up losing a lot of money by scaling up too quickly. This is a tough one because I think it’s why a lot of folks actually don’t make it, or they curtail their growth and they stunt their growth by actually growing too quickly. So say you had say 10 K and your account’s up to 11 K, you’re up, you know, have an extra thousand.
Now your position sizing should grow and your scaling should grow as a percentage of your assets. I don’t think you can go from trading ones to, you know, have to remember going from ones to twos is a 5100% increase. So in my experience, I haven’t seen folks emotionally they want to go from five to 10 or from 10 to 20 contracts, but I think it’s much more gradual. So if the volatility of the instrument stays the same and your account grows from say, 50 K to 60 K, so now what’s your risk unit? If it’s a percentage of your overall assets.
So then the number of contracts that you would have in your risk unit would have to grow proportionally with what that risk unit is. So you’re, yes, you’re trading a thousand dollars risk unit and then all of a sudden your assets grow from 50 to a hundred K and you were risking say a thousand dollars at 50. So now you’re risking 2000 at a hundred, you’re still risking the same 2%. So the number of contracts that you would have into that risk unit might grow. It might not grow by a hundred percent. Volatility can change as well. So the key is to start with what is your risk unit size? What is it of your overall capital, of your overall account balance, whatever it is your asset under management and know what that number is. Usually it’s a fixed percent, right? So if you’re trading, say one half of 1% on a hundred K, you’re risking $500.
If your account drops and you’re still trading that $500 number, you’re actually taking more risk. So if most folks that I know who are in the pro space are always thinking in terms of percentages, so that this way any loss is always the same percent, even if the dollar sign is different. So if you’re looking at trading, who knows a thousand dollars and that’s just your risk unit. No matter what your account size is, you might want to translate that and see what percentage it is so that this way you don’t amplify your position size is too big too soon because what ends up happening is, in my experience and from the folks who write in is they’re like, yeah, I was in a losing streak. I went from 50 to 40,000 and I’m going to wait and see if I have five really good trades or five winning trades in a row that I’m going to scale back up.
And my whole thing is, it’s almost, you shouldn’t even have to think about it. You shouldn’t have to come up with a rule like that. You can think in terms of saying, Hey, I’m going to trade one half of 1% of whatever my account balance is at any given time. And then I can look at the volatility and see, multiply that through the contract or calculate where my stop is on my protective stop is on my stock positions and then multiply it out by the number of shares. But before you worry about scaling up, I would more recommend again, have a good attitude always, and then two, scale up proportionally, right? Because then no matter what happens, if you’re making money and your account is up, you’ll, you’ll be trading bigger. By definition, if you’re in a losing streak or a drawdown, you trade the same percentage, but the number of contracts or the number of shares that go into that trade will be lower.
So this is one of the ways that you kind of stay sane through the whole thing is that you only actually trade bigger when your account is up or you’re on a winning streak and you deliberately end up trading smaller when you are in a losing streak. The goal for me would be to behave consistently, because if you get tied up in like, well, I’m tired of trading two contracts or two cars, I want to go to fives. So this is an ego thing though, right? It’s not based on the math that’s in your account. So you can stay emotionally or grounded and have a plan for scaling up. That’ll happen organically based on the performance of your trading. And that’s really two pieces of advice at once. Because if you are in a losing streak and or in a drawdown, I would absolutely haircut your capital to make that financial and emotional impact smaller on you, if that makes sense. Because ultimately I think it comes down to ego is that the folks want to grow their accounts too quickly and they trade and they want to increase their risk unit size to get to a bigger
Level, but they do it too soon and that puts them in a precarious spot. So you really have to think about risk units based on a percentage of your asset or as a percentage of your account size, and then go from there. I know with commodities it’s a little trickier because they all have different standardized units and if you look at the volatility, you really have to kind of create a spreadsheet. So I’ll do that for you guys and talk about it on another episode on what the math would look like cause it’s harder to visualize just in an audio format like this. Anyway, I appreciate you being here. Please leave a comment if you can always make a suggestion because I’ll do what I can if it’s something that you’re working on and if you work at an institution and you’re going through draw down, I can go through some specific examples on how you can haircut your capital in order to get your feedback underneath you and get back into the swing of things. Otherwise, thanks very much for being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Thanks for being here. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe. I get some good data based on, based from YouTube, based on the show. So I get to see what it is that you all like and hopefully create more videos like that. Last thing I want to do is waste my time creating stuff you don’t care about. Or even worse, waste your time creating videos that you don’t care about. So I’ve been answering a lot of questions. I’m getting a lot of them, which is great. So I might have to actually increase the length of the show a little bit and answer two questions in the same lesson. Otherwise they start to back up. And then I have the people waiting too long to get the feedback. So the first one is, what do you do do during the day?
All right, so what does your trading day look like? And I get up super early California time. I typically just take a look and see where my levels at are anything, are any of the instruments that I’m looking at, close to the levels of where I would get in, where am I moving my stops to? And then once the market’s open, I’m just babysitting a book of stop orders. Basically. I’m not sitting there looking at short term one minute bars or what have you. Price is going to go wherever it’s going to go, whether I’m watching or not. So don’t typically sit and watch. Sometimes I’ll put an alert in that I’ll trigger before the actual stop price that I can see. Cause I typically don’t like to add orders too far away myself. Then I answer, read a mail if I can or create videos if it makes better sense to do that.
I’m also working on Victor’s going to teach a day trading class. So we’re working on building the guts of that out. Cause we want it to be very substantial and in order to do anything right, it’s going to take some time, some experimentation, a little bit, build it out, maybe provide too much information at the beginning and then get some student feedback and figure that out. So we’ll air to this air to the side of putting too much as opposed to too little. And so that takes time to put together a good course because it’s one thing to have the information, but then you have to deliver it in a way that makes a lot of sense. So that’s what I’ve been working on these past few month or two behind the scenes. And the other one email that I got was, could you say something about adding to winners? And so I don’t think adding to winners is a form of greed. I think it’s really just another way to look at risk management. There are folks who, so first of all, let, let’s take a step back. Adding to a winner is a systematized or a rule-based ideology
That you would acquire more of what’s working at higher prices, some quantity of that at even a higher price than you first had when you acquired the instrument, whether it’s commodity futures or stocks. So then the question becomes by the time you’re going to stop adding to the winner, are you going to add Once you’re going to add several times, you have to take a look and see, okay, well what is it based upon? What is the rule for adding to the winner? Is it going to be X amount of dollars or is it going to be some type of a ratio of the standard deviation or maybe all are part of the average true range? So I think a lot of it depends on what kind of risk you ultimately want to have by the time you’re done adding. So if you put on your optimal position size at the beginning and you’re going to add to winners, what is that going to look like if you add a second, third, or a fourth, what we would call a risk unit, your first piece would be your first risk unit.
For some folks, that’s what they’re just risk on, risk off, risk on buy it long, sell it long, sell something short, buy it to cover. So they’re not really cannon ballers, but they have their set position size, they add the risk and they remove that exact risk and that’s it. Then there’s other folks who say, okay, well I’m going to put on my first risk unit and then after say one half of an ATR goes by or increases in price, no matter what, I’m going to add my second risk unit, then I’m going to have to adjust all my stops because now I have a position that is larger. Could be fractionally larger, it could be twice as large. So it all depends on what you think your optimal size is going to be. Some folks don’t have, like I said, they don’t have to add to the winner because they’re executing with their optimal position.
Size, risk on risk off. Folks like myself realize that we’re not really looking for a short-term move or a swing kind of a move. So I have my optimal P piece on it swings to where I need it to go, I offset it, I make my money. My way of looking at things is that I can anticipate something at 20, going to 40 or 50. So for me, it doesn’t make sense to get 20 to 22 because I can withstand the swings in the short term and not panic. If what you might have as a price target is something where I might be adding risk because I would much rather have smaller risk size at the beginning and add along the way so that if my timing is good and I do get lucky because no one can predict the actual magnitude or the duration of the move.
Every once in a while you’ll find yourself in a spot where that exactly happens. It goes to 25, 25 to 27, 27, 31, 31, back to 28, 28 to 29, 28, 29, 27 back to 30. And I would prefer to stay in that whole time. It doesn’t affect my intestinal constitution, but everyone’s different. Some folks would be much more happy buying a risk unit and then offsetting it with a winning or a small loss. For me, I would start much smaller perhaps than many of you, but I will keep nibbling and adding in so that by the time it gets to 25 or 30, now I’m fully loaded, I know where my stops are, I have my gains reinvested into my stops and then let the thing run. So it’s a different style. So I think the way you figure out how do you add to your winner in a long-winded way is to figure out after all the adding is done, what’s the most amount of risk you can withstand, right?
Because this isn’t a day trading tactic. Adding to your winners is at least an intermediate, if not longer term type of trading strategy. Now, maybe during the day some of you can find inflection points and add a little bit more. That’s more of a victor strategy than my own because again, my ethos wouldn’t be one by which I offset the trade at the end of the day. Unless of course there was like a reversal or my stop got hit or my exit criteria got hit. But that would be incidental. It’s not my intention to do that. So you might find it easier to add to your winners if you trade smaller at the beginning, right? Because I think unless you’re trading your own money or you’re at a prop desk where you’re paid to take gigantic risk, you don’t really get paid to offset the risk. At the end of the day, you get paid to take bigger risks.
So conjugate it with where do you see how lo, what’s your holding period? Something that you would need to know, maybe from observation you could go back and look and say, okay, well here’s some of my past trades and here’s how I could have done if I had added to the winner. Now you could say, I’m going to add equal amounts, kind of like what the turtles did. They added up to four units directionally the same size. There’s ways to do it where you’re pyramiding, where you do put maybe not your optimal size on it first, but you put a larger risk unit on, maybe that’s four gold contracts for example. And so if you add, you might add one or two. So it’s proportionally smaller. That’s why they call it pyramiding, right? Because the higher up you go, the smaller it gets. And so
That might be a way to look at it and then see how many times can you add, right? So systematized, I know folks that add one extra risk unit. I know folks who have traded up to four and I know there have been times in my own trading where I had, I just kept buying, I had 5 67 directional units all going in the same direction. So if it’s not going up, don’t buy it in the first place. So you have to do some experimentation, you have to feel the uncertainty. You might find that yes, if you buy 24 contracts at 20 another four contracts at 22, your break evens at 21. So maybe you know want to say, okay, I’ll buy two contracts or four contracts at 20, but just one more at 22 so that if the thing does pull back on me, I don’t have losses on my second risk unit that will all have offset the gains that I had in my first risk unit.
So you can do it again, we are talking about systems and discretionary. I mean on some level everything is discretionary because even for systems, you have to choose the inputs. So that’s a discretionary element. Then you typically don’t use discretion in the execution of those rules. Whereas with discretionary trading it might be discretionary as to what trading. Trading say chart pattern, you’re going to look at that particular day, you might have had one or two losses and you decided not to put on your third trade. That’s a discretionary decision. So you have to really do some experimentation and see what feels best for you. Where can you add the risk and actually stay with it and feel good about it emotionally. Because if something goes up, and admittedly it’s harder for you to add that risk unit there because you’re used to offsetting the risk, you know, might have to start trading smaller at the beginning. Benefit is trading smaller at the beginning or when you first add risk is that if you’re wrong, you’re not going to lose as much. So your losses will get smaller and your average loss will trend smaller as well. But you have to then condition yourself to hold onto the risk longer, I think, and then let the market do the work for you. That would be, that’s how I would approach it and then try to trading it in real time.
And that’s all I can really think. Cause that’s actually what I did. So there’s some theoretical things I can teach you about, but it’s much more powerful to tell you what it was that I actually did. Now if you’re using the same risk unit size all the way through and you’re adding 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 risk units and you really catch one, yeah, you’re going to make monster gains for sure. But if there is a whip saw or if there is
A pullback or if there is a wave of profit taking, you might find yourself having had a winning trade all of a sudden now you’re, you’re overall in a losing trade and you’re fully loaded. So you don’t have that much room to give before you have to undo the entire position. So again, it comes down to your emotional, the emotional constitution. There’s not one way that’s better, there’s just that. This is how people develop their knack. They know what it is that they can do and they kind of stick to it and they replicate that. And that becomes kind of who they are as a traitor and they’re able to replicate that behavior over and over and over again. And they understand that sometimes they’re going to have some gains that they give back. They’re going to get knocked out flat. They might have small winners that end up being small losers, but they know more times than not when they really catch a good move, they’re going to make 20% rate of return on their portfolio perhaps.
And then that’s kind of what they do it for. So they know their why, right? And then they know their craft on how to get to it. So if you’re feeling a little antsy about adding to winners, maybe try trading smaller for your first risk unit so that when you add your second, maybe now you’re doing, instead of buying say four contracts all at once, you buy two and then you add two. So you get to four, right? Then you add a fifth at the end. I don’t know, you can back test the stuff for sure, but not having a simulator, you’re going to have to just go out and do some trial and error and some experimentation. But those are my thoughts. Again, please like and subscribe, leave a comment if you’d like. I read them all and if you have a suggestion for a show, I’ll be more than happy to do it if it helps you. Thanks for being here folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Thanks for being here. While you get a chance, please like and subscribe to the show. Leave a comment if you’d like, because then it gives me good feedback as to where I might’ve hit it, done it well, or done it poorly. For example, in the show, got a question about what’s the best attribute that a trader can bring to the table from, say a personality standpoint if they want to be a great success in the market, is they have to be math whiz and they need to know how to code and python or rubion rails, whatever that it might be, or just have a great feel for the market. And the answer probably won’t surprise you. In my humble opinion, the best thing that a trader can bring to the table is actually a good attitude, which probably makes sense because I don’t think you can do anything in life as a profession if you have a poor attitude.
It’s okay to be in a bad mood once in a while, but you have to watch it because ultimately you get what you think about. And if you’re walking around pissing and pissing and moaning all the time, you just get more of the stuff that makes you feel that way. So my take is because it’s such a game of failure like baseball and that you’re going to be wrong, some of you probably have very accurate systems, but for the majority of traders, in my opinion, they’re wrong. More than half the time could be 50 to 70%. And so if you know that from a mathematical expectation, you could also set up, say, an emotional expectation that’s attached to the results of your trading. Now, if you’re doing it by hand and you’re discretionary, you have to keep a trade ledger of all your trades and then download them into a spreadsheet or keep it going and then see what’s your winning percentage.
And then when you win, how big, what’s your average winner, and then what’s your average loser? And from there, you can calculate the expected value of what it is that you’re doing with the trading system, it’s a little easier because most of the software will calculate it for you and give it to you on the results page and do it very, very quickly and very, very accurately. So that’s one of the benefits I have in the software. But I think having a good attitude is important, especially when the markets are crazy, when you feel fearful when you’re losing money. Because if you know the expected value of your trade and what your winning percentage is, you can actually use that data to help you create a good attitude. Because if you’ve back tested your system for 10 or 20 years, for example, and you’ve seen that you lose 50 to 60% of the time, that just typically means that every other trade that you put on is going to be a loser on average.
And so having a good attitude and not becoming emotionally invested in the outcome of any particular trade, even if it’s your favorite setup, to keep your head on straight and have a good attitude and just say, Hey, it’s just one trade of hus, hundreds or thousands of trades that I’m going to put on. And no one likes losing per se, because you can’t be really good loser, but you kind of have to learn how to lose well so that you don’t go on tilt, right, and maintain a good attitude and just realize that your next winning trades around the corner, and it might take a couple of small losses before you catch one that really goes right. So that to me is the biggest thing I think is having a good attitude. When I look back and see what I was struggling, it was my belief, it was my vision that I had for myself and where I thought I could be once I got it down.
And that kind of pulled me to that goal, to the completion achievement of that goal, even though I had no proof. So it’s a little trick you can play on yourself in that, think of all your successes that you want to achieve in the future, but think of them as if you have them today and speak in your inner voice in the present tense as if you’ve achieved what it is that you’ve wanted to achieve, whether it’s making X amount of percent or a dollar amount of money or other types of goals that you might have. Usually it’s attached to a process, and usually your goal is in and around what it is. What is it that you want your money to do for you, for example, right? Because accumulating wealth is one thing, but if there’s no emotional attachment to it, it’s a lot harder to achieve when you can get excited about what it is you’re endeavoring because you can see what you can do with your ability or with your new found capital as it’s grown over the years.
I think that can help you keep a really, really good attitude because you know that you’re just one or two trades away from getting into a winning streak that you’re at any given time. You could lose money, but it could also be just bad luck and bad timing. So you try not to internalize the results, right? Because if you just follow the process and the process is bonafide, the process has positive expected value, then it just pays you on average to take those trades day after day after day, even if you find yourself taking small losses.
So if you know you’re going to lose, what you can do is kind of mentally prepare yourself for that ahead of time, maybe even Sunday, just say to yourself, Hey, here are my rules. Here are my setups so far for Sunday night, Monday morning, and here’s what I’m going to do. Here’s how I’m going to win the day is I’m just going to follow my rules and I’m going to stick to my system. And even if I lose money, I want to be able to look myself in the mirror and say that I kept my discipline and I didn’t get knocked off balance because I had a losing trade, or the market didn’t set up the way I needed it to or the way I wanted it to. It’s on it’s life, on life’s terms, and you just have to have peace around it. And sometimes it can be super aggravating and it’s not bad to get aggravated, but it’s what you do with that aggravation.
That’s where you don’t want to go on tilt. You don’t want to get into revenge trading. You just have to be completely placated and say, okay, win or lose. I’m going to get out of this situation exactly what I want. So if I want to get super, really, really angry, I’m sure you could find a way to let the market help you get into that anger and let that teach you what it, let your anger teach you something about yourself and your own behavior. It never paid me to get super angry because I only ended up hurting myself. And I think that’s probably a truism for most people too. Regardless of what your credit line is or how much money you’re running in your own account, if you’re not like at a hedge fund or a prop firm before the risk manager comes down and say that they’re cutting your risk by 30%, sometimes that’s just the way it goes.
So you got to make hay with what you have and stay in a good mood. I know it’s easier said than done, but whatever it is that you can do to keep a good positive attitude on things really is worth its weight and gold. I can’t think of another mental criteria or personality trait. Obviously you have to work hard, but you have to work smart. Putting in a long hours isn’t so virtuous if you’re not spending the time wisely. Cause a lot of folks just like to rack up the hours and see like, wow, I’m putting so much time in. But you know, have to get results. You have to get the results from the time that you put in. Otherwise you’re just going to find yourself putting a lot of time in and not getting any results, and then have nothing to show for it.
And then what happens? You get frustrated, angry, bitter, resentful, everybody else is winning, but I’m not. So it’s a very tricky deal. I live more like a hermit monk and I, I’m not engaged with other people cause I don’t want to hear how they’re doing, good or bad. I just want to focus on what I know I can execute day after day and therein is my discipline and my strength. So I hope that helps. I think attitude, whatever you can do to keep your attitude high and keep yourself esteem high in this very arduous practice, because sometimes, look, you might lose 10 in a row. There’s other times when the markets might be on fire and very amenable for what it is that you do. And you could be cranking. You know, I’ve had 15, 16 winners at a clip, and it happens, right? It’s random.
You can’t predict it, but you just take the trades and the market’s like, okay, we’ll go with you. Other times it’s like you can’t do anything. So if you trade long enough, you’ll kind of see one of everything. So just take it in stride and realize that the main thing is that it’s a marathon and you have to be able to come back and play tomorrow if you let your attitude fall by the wayside and start taking actions on the feelings that you don’t want to feel. You could put yourself in financial harm by losing more of your principle, and then you’ve got to dig out of a deeper hole. Remember, after 10% the rates of return that you need, meaning after a 10% drawdown is if you keep drawing down 15, 20%, you know, need a big, big winning streak to get back to break even. So be comfortable taking these small losses because the small
Losses are much easier to recover from than if you’re going to take a larger destabilizing loss, right? Because you’re acting out of emotion. So I would actually take solace in that and keep a good attitude and say, Hey, I’m doing just what I promised myself I was going to do, putting on all my trades and I’m losing good. I’m taking small, consistent, small losses, none of which could ever hurt me or put me out of business. And even if I added them all up, if you’re risking say two tenths of 1%, you could have five losers in a row and still have 99% of your overall capital at work, which effectively is all your money. So do whatever you can to keep a good attitude. Keep the comments coming, folks, keep the suggestions. I appreciate the time that you put in and I will keep making videos about the things that you think are important, at least for my experience to see if you can’t help you on your journey. Thanks for being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Thanks for being here. So I got some follow up on my video that I did while back on getting a feel for the market and whether or not you’re supposed to develop a feel or be purely systematic, that’s a very personal decision, right? Because your trading style’s going to be as unique to you as your fingerprints are. And it’s really not for me to say which one is best. I know people who are great discretionary traders, and I know some really good system systematized folks as well. Systematized would be, at least in the modern definition, someone who’s taken data price volume in futures. You can look at open interest change in price, standard deviation, average, true range, this and that, and tries to organize his or her orders by just using those data points to calculate what’s the highest expected value of a trade that they can get.
And so that takes a good amount of time because you need several, you’ll probably need two decades of data. 10 years is good, but then you don’t have oh 7, 0 8. So you really have to go back 20 years from today, take you back to oh three and see how robust your system is. How can it withstand shocks to the system? Because if you’re going to do pure systematic trades, you’re going to let the computer calculate your entries and your exits, your position sizing. It’ll also calculate where your protective stop is based on your predetermined criteria. It can also help you calculate when at what price to add to your winner and how much of it will you add, right? Are you going to double your position or will you do more of a pyramiding style edition? Whereas chart readers are discretionary and they are looking maybe for a particular type of setup.
They might have one chart pattern that they trade really, really well, and that’s all they’re looking for. It can take more time to do it that way because you have to do it by hand. I suppose. Some of you can program it, but then again, you have to have programming skills or at least the wherewithal to go hire a programmer. And again, it’s not to say one is better than the other. What is one that’s best for you? Because I think when I looked at some of the comments, the folks who have a system also have a feel. It’s just that they aren’t going to change their behavior from day after day after day. Whereas I think folks who are discretionary chart readers need to bring a lot of discipline to the table because that’s where if you don’t have hard and fast rules, you can find yourself taking flyers. And that’s really not where you want to be. I think it’s not a cardinal sin because you have to experiment, but if every day you’re taking flowers because you don’t have a system that’s a different
Ball wax. So I would say do what feels best, right? Because you’re not going to be successful at something that doesn’t feel good. The simulators that you would need to back test are, they’re not necessarily cheap, but they’re not expensive. But you also need the data. And the data is typically a monthly subscription fee, right? Because you want to stay current, which brings up, I’ll kind of add this into this episode as well, is that people go indicator crazy. I found that when I was starting out, I didn’t know what I was doing. Probably you might feel, or even if you’re working at an institution and you’re going through a losing streak, you can still have that talk creep up in the back of your mind as if you don’t know what you’re doing. And so when folks send over charts to say, Hey, can you help me understand what’s going on with this chart?
And I see five or six overlays, it reminded me of when I was younger and I was starting out, I used to look at those indicators because I wanted to something to help me take away the uncertainty, right? Because that’s where, that’s what happens. And that can amplify your behavior. If you don’t like what it feels like when you have to feel uncertainty, you might override your rules. You might interject a rule or create a new one on the fly just because you don’t like how you’re feeling in that particular moment. And so as I got older and I got more experience, I was eliminating indicators. I found that the majority of ’em didn’t work, but they made me feel good because they could kind of confirm things that I could already see in the price. But it gave me a reassurance. As I got older, I started to understand that I didn’t need the reassurance because I could see it in the price, and I built more confidence in myself. And so the way I reacted to that was to drop off indicators so that now I don’t even have any, I know some of you like them, some of you swear by them, and I say more power to you. It’s not calling your girlfriend ugly because you’re using indicators. It’s just that for me, I don’t need them.
But I think the less you can rely on those indicators, the quicker you will be to develop your own instincts and your own ability. That’s my experience. The more I stopped relying on other people and out things that were external, I got to hone my own instincts and my own ability in trading the markets that way. It does take time, which can be frustrating because folks want to see success and they want to see it now. They want it fast because the, there’s uncertainty about the trade, but then there’s also uncertainty of how long is it going to take till you make it to hit whatever goal it is that you’re trying to hit. So be mindful of the indicators of why you’re using them. How do they fulfill you emotionally as opposed to financially? Cause I’ve just found that the majority of ’em are not necessarily, they’re mostly lagging indicators in many circumstances.
And so I would just prefer to let the price tell me what I needed to know. But anyway, I hope that gives you some clarity. There’s no judgment. It’s really just two different approaches to the markets. Maybe it’s a budget concern, maybe a, you would much rather kind of figure it out on your own. So I don’t say that one is better than the other just because I’ve seen people fail with both. I’ve seen folks go out and spend thousands of dollars on simulators and then subscribe to data feeds and then work and just they couldn’t get it to work. And it was very, very frustrating. And then I’ve seen folks who with a lot of hard work, but not a lot of the technological stuff, just develop really, really good instincts and trade off the charts or chart patterns. So it’s really, I wish I could remove that uncertainty for you, but that’s part of the joy of it, is that you get to figure it out.
And just remember, the uncertainty could be perceived as risk. And without risk, there’s typically not reward, right? So you don’t want to go taken on excessive risk just for the sake of doing it. It has to be measured, has to make sense. But anyway, those were the key similarities and differences that I saw between discretionary chart reading and folks who were purely systematic and trading with systematized set of rules. The indicators can play a role in both, but in my experience, I haven’t been able to test to see what is the magic indicator that works all the time, very few of them. So I just chose not to use any of them. Anyway, just my 2 cents. Please like and subscribe and keep your comments coming. I appreciate the feedback. Gives me good ideas to create more videos for you. See you tomorrow.

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Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Thanks for being here. Happy Friday. So a question came in on what do I do to prepare for Monday, being that it’s the end of the week and everything. So it’s interesting, I tend to think of Sunday night, start my prep, prepare my preparation for Monday day, right? And then when I get to Friday night, you always do like what we call a checkout. Make sure all the orders are either filled or canceled and that if you did get filled, how much do you have at what prices, right? And then if there’s anything left in the portfolio, you have to bring that to the trader’s attention because someone might have fat fingered something and someone else’s trade ended up in your account. That’s a pain in the ass. So you got to get that fixed quickly. So we call that the checkout here.
So you do that and then I review the orders, see what happened, why didn’t they get filled this and that. Sometimes it’s just simple that the price never traded at or through the stop. So the order never got done. So what I try to do just right then and there is I spend not a lot of time, but probably 10 or 15 minutes going through everything because of whatever didn’t get done. Friday is likely going to be the same order I enter on Monday or Sunday night, depending on whether I’m calling it into the desk. Sometimes I do that, but I very rarely execute things like on the keyboard, so then I don’t have to do a lot of modulation. I’ll think of creating the same list. If the prices are in the neighborhood of where my levels are at likely whatever, the orders that were entered on Friday and weren’t filled, we’ll also get entered again Monday.
Not all the time, but very close to it, close to all the time. Then what I’ll do is very quickly Sunday night is I will come back and do some review and see if there was any movement in things that where I didn’t have orders and then harvest more or by orders or moving my protective stops. So that way come Monday morning, I’ll have everything that carried forward from Friday as well as the new developments all on one piece of paper. Double check the math on everything. And then again, depending on how busy we are, call the orders in the night before for outcry only or just wait until very early Monday morning and call them in that way. That’s just my style. It’s how I do it. I’ve been used to doing it the same way for a long time. It works for me and that’s part of my ecology. Same thing for you is I just tend to try to be as prepared as possible because when I think of preparedness, right, we talked about that all wars are won before the battles are fought. Victorious warrior first wins and then seeks battle. My whole thing is to try to be as prepared as possible so that my instincts are as sharp as possible so that I can see things that I otherwise wouldn’t miss, that
I would’ve missed. And that includes stuff like being hydrated eating very healthy, having good energy that way, not jacking up on sugar or Coke or C, caffeine. I was going to say cocaine not during the week. Then there’s rest and sleep. I’m in la local stock market opens regular opening bells at six 30. Cocoa opens at five in the morning. So the idea is is that when you’re up that early, you got to be sharp. That means you got to sleep well. It also means I can’t and I don’t drink, right? I don’t drink at all. I don’t never really had a taste for it. Certainly in LA we’re all in cars driving around back in New York where pedestrians ha hailing cabs and going in subway trains. So you could drink then and not necessarily worry about it. But now even with Uber and Lyft, you’re still in a car.
But I just found that maybe I’m a lightweight, but I can still feel like if I have one drink, I can feel the effect of it the next day. And since that doesn’t help me trade better, I just have to make the decision that the night before doesn’t work for me. So I just try to keep all my faculties. Some of you going to sit back and say, what I need my beer at the end of the day, I need whatever, this and that. And so those are choices that you make. I can’t judge you based on that. I just know for me, it doesn’t parlay into excellent performance cause I feel sluggish, and that’s kind of how I build out my routine is I try to get some of the work done actually Friday so that I know I’ve wrapped up the week as best I could.
Leave it behind me, do a little preparation for Monday, and then enjoy some downtime with virtually no exposure to the markets or the data or anything. Say for a brief little window Sunday night to round out the research and the prep for Monday morning and then it’s all systems go and I have solace and I have self-esteem and I have the confidence that I did everything that I could for the time that I had to be prepared. And that’s the best you can do. That’s how you win the day. Then the second part of that is consistent behavior. So you just repeat that process over and over and over again over weeks and weeks and weeks, and you’ll develop a really good track record because behavior predicts where you end up. Anyway, it’s been a long week. I hope you had a good one. Hope you have fun plans for the weekend. Please like and subscribe to the show. I enjoy doing it. Happy to help you. Please leave a comment or suggest a topic. I’ll be happy to cover it. Have a great weekend, folks. I’ll see you Monday.

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This is an automated transcript