It occurs to me. Everyone wants to try to be immune from the emotional impact of making and losing money and trying to start your career and dealing with the uncertainty of all that. And the, maybe even the insecurity of having it. But man, if you go back and look at the folks, even like in market wizards, the first book you can see that they all went through some type of what I call hazing, some kind of emotional hazing. You know, Bruce Kovner was trading old crop, new crop spreads. I think in soybeans, which at the time were going limit up limit down. And when you’re, when you have a spread on your hedge, right, because you’re simultaneously long, two, two bean contracts of different months, right? So option traders would know that as a horizontal spread, we don’t really have strike prices in outright futures, but it would be like a calendar or a time spread.
And you’re looking to play the difference between those two instruments. And so knew earlier in his career, the broker was saying like, Hey man, this thing’s going into the moon. You’re losing all this money on your shorts. Why don’t you lift the short cover that, then you’ll be long. You’ll be off to the races. Of course, you know how this is going to end up. If you didn’t read the book, he covers the short and then the markets immediately goes limit down. So he’s no longer hedged and he’s getting blasted on his long. Right. So I think at the time that would’ve been limit up, would’ve been 30 cents in those days and then down. So it’s a 60 cents swing, which is $3,000 bucks a contract. So no, and he went on to make history, right? I mean, he went on to make history at Commodities Corporation.
Then he set up Caxton and then heI think he, he sold it to, well, he sold his stake to the existing employees and they earned them out or something like that. But you know, Michael Marcus who I know personally took Thorazine and kind of zombies out, like to deal with the, with the pressures and the intensity of it. And he too went on to probably the best ever.
So no, one’s really immune from all of that. So you want to celebrate that you’re at least in the game. Cause if you’re feeling those strong feelings something’s at stake, the key is to make sure that you’re doing really, really good behavior to not put yourself into the spot where you might need to take Thorazine, Percodan. You know, you don’t need to go on a regiment of Psilocybin every day or hit the Percy Sauce from 710 Labs. You know, you want to make sure that you could be lucid and act with a clear head and just realize that this is a game of probabilities. Every time you put on a trade it’s subject to probabilistic and outcomes and that you know, you’re going to lose you’re going to lose ahead of time. So just deal with it, understand that it’s not about accuracy. It’s about expectation.
In the movie “Trader,” I think Paul Tudor Jones and Peter took a 5% hit in one day. So again, and they went on and are still making history. At least Paul is doing everything that he’s doing both at tutor and with Robinhood Foundation, right. Which is given away $2 billion, forget what they’ve raised. They’ve given away 2 billion. So don’t beat yourself up because you’re a human being it’s part of the game. The key is to not sabotage yourself. You can learn from those lessons. To me, those are the most important lessons. Not that you know, what they made and how they did that. That’s all kind of relatively interesting, but that’s, to me like the gossipy part of the business, that’s like if the trading world had like fucking Us or People magazine, that’s the kind of stuff that would be in there.
You’re more interested in their emotional constitution, how they did the trades should not be terribly interesting. because everything that you want to know about trading, you can get for free on the internet, every type of trading strategy, someone’s done a video on it. I admit they might not all be good, but that information is out there for you to at least take a look at and then investigate. So be nice to yourself and just realize that that’s the whole game. And if you get away unscathed without taking a big financial hit, and if you get away unscathed without needing to take medication or otherwise you’re probably a step ahead of the game.
You might have your own battles to face, but no one is immune from it. There’s nothing that you can learn. In other words, and this isn’t something you probably haven’t already heard that “there are no external solutions to your internal problems.”
I’m going to say that again. “There are no external solutions to your internal problems.” There’s no book to read, right? There’s no book to read. That’s going to help you from the fear of losing money. Doesn’t work. You have to put the trades on and do it and feel what it feels like.
Paper trading have said it a million times, not going to work might help you learn how to enter orders on a particular trading platform, but it’s not going to help you feel better about losing money. Anyway, I don’t like to repeat myself cause I’ve already said everything I had to say about that. Please consider subscribing to the show, getting really good feedback from folks. And I also get the data about what you like, because I can see who’s listening to what type of episode. That’s very valuable for me so that this way I come up with good episodes that I know are going to resonate with you. That’s all I got for you today. Folks. Thanks for being here. I’ll see you tomorrow.
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