Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Thanks for being here. I’ve had a great week. I’m going to do see some artwork this weekend. I hope you have some fun plans. Get your minds off the market, give some space, put some space between you and the marketplace. Today, I want to ask you all a question because I might be the only person who may ever ask you this as your significant others might not fully understand how trading works, what goes into it, but this, are you making enough money for the work that you’re putting into your craft and all this study and your preparation? Are you making enough rate of return as a percentage for the capital that you have? And for those of you who’ve been around a little bit longer like me, are you making enough money for all the experience that you bring to the table, right?
Because as you’re in this business, the way you keep your scorecard or your report card changes when you’re newer, you don’t know anything. So the expectation is much smaller. It’s much lower. What you’re really trying to do at that point is learn how to behave consistently. But as your account grows, right, as you set newer goals for yourself, as your number of years of experience increases, you have to hold yourself to a different standard, right? Like I mentioned to this week, I found myself day trading a couple of days because that’s what the market presented. Trust me when I tell you, I had no skill at the beginning of my career to pull that off, but it was only through years and years and years of repetition of not knowing my backside from a hole in the ground that you have to execute. You don’t get paid to know stuff, get paid to execute, and the market environment that we’re in right now presents itself a certain way.
So you have to adapt. Might be harder for the newer person because you might not have one strategy down right now, I prefer to not even trade this way, but the style of trading that I bring to the table, who I am as a man and how I do things, isn’t working in this environment. You see? So I have to adapt, so right, because I get you have results or excuses. That’s it. You say, oh, the market sucks. No, you don’t get to say that market’s the market. The market’s the market. The market doesn’t suck. It’s that you might not have the skill to adapt. And at the beginning, that’s okay. After 35 years, no place to hide, no place to hide, right? You have results, you have excuses. That’s it. So you get to judge yourself again. At the beginning, I think it’s probably based on skillset. I would suggest that you focus on one asset class and one trading style, one holding period. People think right, holding periods are the trading style, and that’s how their language, that’s how they use the language. Anyway, now over time too, yeah, Paul Tudor
Jones can probably trade options. He could trade futures. He could trade stocks, but not when he first started. So those skills, you can’t accumulate over time. But again, it comes through trial and error. And that means are you willing to risk money doing something where you don’t know what you’re doing? They asked, I saw, I don’t know where I saw, it might have been on YouTube. Somebody was interviewing the late Anthony Bourdain, who was a chef about his juujitsu practice, because he started later than me. I think he was in his late fifties when he started. And the question was along the lines of why Juujitsu and why now? And his answer was really interesting, which kind of applied to me too. He was like, I wanted to start something in my life, a life where I already had great success in other things. But go back to the spot and feel the feelings of what it was like to be the absolute beginner with no particular skillset set, and then have to grow from there. There’s a lot of wisdom that you can get for yourself when you put yourself in those situations. Of course, you have to have the willingness to look like an idiot, to look like a newbie. A lot of people who make it, they don’t like to suffer any type of humility, so they miss out on a lot of growth opportunities, which is great. Cause there’s more job security for me, right? Cause I’ll smoke those. Can’t put the word in there. Cause it’s rated G. Actually, no, it’s rated R, but that might be very strong.
And so I think yes, you can definitely attain those skills over time, but when you’re starting out, you have to start small and you have to think about acting consistently so that you can build your track record, right? Because your partner might not fully understand what the heck it is that you’re trying to do. And again, there are a handful of people ganja talked about, the folks on his E-sport teams, there’s initiators, there’s in-game leaders, like people play roles. And so if you’re going to think about what would you say to yourself if you were the boss, you might say something like, those are all interesting. And yes, you can experiment. We’re going to talk more about that Monday. But for now, stay in your lane. Stay in your lane, because that’s a form of discipline. Don’t give yourself permission to be like, oh, I made money on three trades and I’m going to go take a flyer and give it all back.
I’ve done that so I can share with you. That’s not a good feeling. So in the beginning, stay in your lane. Over time, you can create a different type of scorecard for yourself, you see? But in order to have success, you have to do one thing very, very well. You have to control your behavior regardless of what’s going on in the marketplace. And you have to do that day after day after day. If you have the discipline to do that, you may have a chance. The market still might suck. Keep in mind that in the late seventies, late sixties, excuse me, there’s two years of a bear market and the s and p got cut in half. I’m not saying we’re there now, but imagine if you came with a back-tested model that worked for 50 years, and then all of a sudden you stepped into this window of time and it wasn’t working
Right? When people typically don’t predict bear markets, they usually don’t know it until they’re in it or until it’s almost over. That’s my experience. And the perma bears, they’re an interesting group, right? Because no matter what happens, the day’s always cloudy. So that’s kind of what I would do depending on where you are, if you have more experience than are you making enough money as a percent rate of return, forget dollars. Professionals think in percentages for all the skillset that you have, for all the knowledge and the wisdom that you have attained. How would you grade yourself? If I was your boss, how would you think I would grade you? Because I have some very frank conversations with people who are used to making seven figures, well into seven figures on some of the consulting stuff and some of the numbers. And for the capital base, you’d be surprised they are not playing up to their potential. So we kind of helped them see things by reformulating, reinvestigating, rephrasing, rewording, rewriting. But anyway, it’s Friday. It’s been a long week. I hope you have fun plans for the weekend and that you do great research and that the next week’s next week of trading is just unbelievable for you. Thanks very much for being here, folks. I’ll see you Monday.
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