How to make a living a trading, trading one only hour a day. Guess what folks? You can’t. I’m putting you on. The thing is trading’s hard. I know there’s a ton of videos out there that tell you how you can use AI for this and that, or you can just do this one particular pattern on one minute bars in foreign exchange, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s all bullshit. At the end of the day, I’ve tried every damn thing under the sun to make money because I had to. I was broke and after 35 years I’ve really seen it never ceases to surprise me. The creative stuff that the marketers will come up about, just how easy trading is. It isn’t easy at all. It’s fantastically difficult. Trading is going to test you on every corner of your life, 360 degrees.
You’re going to be constantly under attack, your money’s under attack and your emotional constitution is under attack, and if anyone tells you that you can hack a system or that there’s an easy way to go around this, there’s not. Admittedly, you can get some insight, right? Oh, but Mike, I know the guy. I’ve seen him do that. Well, that’s awesome. Does he have 35 years of experience doing it? I don’t care about how much money he made last week doing something because in the short run, we don’t know if we’re good or if we’re lucky, and that goes for me too. In the short run, it’s very difficult to tell. All I can do is act consistently day after day after day, and then after many, many years, I’ll be able to look at my scorecard and say, okay, am I happy with what I’m getting?
What modifications do I need to make? But to go out there and try to tell people who are desperate to make it that it’s going to be easy if you just follow this one particular set of rules is not genuine and it’s misleading. If there is a way to be close to that, it’ll be in your preparation, right? Because the actual, when you think about it, you put in a few hours of preparation. That’s probably a good thing. If you run a trading system, you don’t even need that. The data is uploaded into your server through whatever data program you’re using. There’s a good one out of Florida called CSI Data. Then your engine, whether it’s Mechanical or Tradingblox for example, knows where the data is on your machine. You just hit F9 or whatever it is to run the thing, and there you go.
You’ll get the results spit out within a couple minutes. That’s about as much as you would need if you’re running a system, if you’re a chart reader, you probably have your chart book or your flip chart or whatever you want to go through, and you can do that preparation. So that is maybe how you can do it in an hour, but it’s not from sitting at the desk for hours. The entering stop orders to get in and out of trades is actually very, very easy to do. That part doesn’t take a lot of time. What I think is insanely difficult when you’re starting is to actually put up charts in any different number of timeframes and sit there and think that you can kind of see patterns. That’s very, very difficult to do, and if you’re doing that and you’re looking at multiple timeframes, and if you’re looking for convergences and divergences, you need years of experience in order to pull that off. Granted, if you’re in some kind of training program, the numbers and the results may be different from you, but you’re also probably paying 10 K or more for an education to get that type of wisdom. Those types of programs didn’t exist for me, so I had to do it myself and I don’t regret it. I learned a lot about myself in the process. I really wouldn’t want to do it any other way, but I think it’s not genuine to say for those that the rest of us who have to do it by ourselves for one reason or another, that you can do that. Now. Also, for those of you who might live here on the west coast and the opening bell is at 6:30 am or you start to trade earlier in the morning and you think you can get a few hours of trading in, I think that’s very, very difficult. So I’m not telling you to stop, but I would ask you to be realistic with yourself that the particular setups that you might need might not happen with that two hour window that you have before. You’ve got to get on the road and get to work. If you’re working from home, then figure it out, but you put a lot of pressure on yourself if you’re going to constrict the entire day of trading from 6:30 to one into a two hour window in the morning before you have to do your thing for your employment.
It’s just not the way things work. If it was that easy, everybody would be doing it and it’s not, especially on the short end. The estimation is that 94 to 95% of the people who try to make money trading in the short timeframes don’t make it. They don’t show up on Instagram. They don’t show up in social media because it’s humiliating and emasculating, right? Let’s face it. Are we going to say, “Hi, I’m Mike Martin. My expertise is in tax loss carry forwards. It’s like it came natural to me. I didn’t even have to try. I could lose money. It was nothing.” You know what I’m saying?
So yeah, “How I blew up my 401k in 25 easy steps.” You could have some fun with it, but I don’t celebrate the pain that people might be going through if that’s where you are. I know what that’s like. I thought wrongly that I could follow some gurus. I wrote about it even of one particular guy who I liked. I knew him very well when I worked at the wire house, and I wrote about that in The Inner Voice of Trading. You can get the audio book version for free. The link is in the description. I won’t blather on about it here, but I learned the hard way that if you’re going to rely on other people’s research, you have no emotional connection to it other than you’re paying a monthly fee to be in the Discord or this and that because you kind of want that payment and that commitment to absolve you from the duress that you feel. Well, you have to live with the uncertainty of making these decisions for yourself. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to have a come to Jesus where you learn how to be self-sufficient and you make those decisions and whatever amount of work it takes for you is the right amount, but to say that you could do it in 15 minutes or that there’s some algorithm that you can put to work, it’s very, very difficult to do. It looks easy on paper, but once your emotions start to churn and you start losing money, you’re not going to trust the very algorithm that you paid for and then you’re going to stop because you don’t like losing money, and once you stop even a system that has positive expected value, you’re probably going to be locked into a drawdown for a protracted amount of time because you’ve lost your nerve, you’ve lost your confidence, which we talked about yesterday, so I’m not here to call your girlfriend ugly. Try whatever it is that you think that you want to try, but just understand that trading in and of itself, especially for your first five years is very, very difficult.
Very, very difficult, and I wish everybody the best. I do my part in trying to speak to it here for free about the realities of it, whether you’re six months, six years, or 36 years like me, it doesn’t necessarily get any easier. I’m used to my process. That’s going to come with time. You’ll get there too, but you have to do it day after day after day and doing it day after day also means sometimes sitting on your hands because there’s no signal and you don’t feel the feelings of missing out or that you have to be in the game. There are times when you’re going to see things move, but it’s not your setup, so therefore it’s not a missed opportunity. You wouldn’t have been in the trade otherwise. I had to get over that one too. I’d see things move and say, how did I miss that? Go back to the drawing board again. Your work should be put into your preparation and that should be done while the market’s hours are not open.