Learn to be an independent thinker

So I received a follow up email from a previous episode where the guy was saying he talked about isolation and my thing was like to just be a solo player, don’t get engaged with this stuff. So I received follow up. “Well weren’t you in the Trading Tribe? And so seems like it’s a little bit of contrasting views here. Like you, you’re saying one thing, but you did another.” And so let me address that – for one that was 20 years ago and I have the right to change as a human being. So do you.

The Trading Tribe is owned by Ed Seykota. It’s his technology, it’s his thing. I don’t have any control, ownership or anything of that. So let me just be clear. I’d just like to footnote that. I did participate in it for two years. I subscribe to the point of view that it works, but that was more about trader psychology and emotional intelligence for us as human beings.

For example, we would find that either in our trading, certain feelings would recur for us, or there were feelings in our lives that would recur for us that could impact our trading. And so the work was “can we get to the nth degree of that feeling to see what it’s trying to teach us?” But I can assure you that I can’t think of a single time when we were in a meeting and we talked about where sugar was going or any type of trading or any type of system or any type of a chart or any type of a segment.

Like my friend, Bud used to kid “Big Cap Pharma.” Like that was totally not the point of it. We never talked about trading. There were times outside of the meeting where Ed might say, “Hey, you in that sugar?” And I’d be like, yeah, he’s like, yeah, I saw that move. That’s your trade. That kind of a thing. But it was more like in passing it, wasn’t a sit down kind of a situation. My feeling about the Discords is that it’s a gigantic time suck. I know people who are pretty good people and again, they intellectually understand trading. So when you’re sitting in the Discord and you’re doing all the work for the people who own the program, how do you get paid?

You get paid because you have high self-esteem because you’re contributing to the community, but who’s making all the money? Maybe you don’t care about making the money, but if your goal is to be a trader and to manage a set of rules or a system with which you’re compatible so that you can trade and make net income, how in the name of Christ the King, just sitting on a Discord responding to every comment to be helpful help you? My guess is that it’s emotional and it gives you self esteem.

Maybe you feel like “I can’t be a leader as a trader. So I’ll be a leader in the chat room.” Sorry to smash you upside the head. Because I know that that’s what it is. I prefer to just say I wish everyone the best I do my show here for 5 to 10 minutes per day. And that’s how I contribute and give back to the community. But that’s as far as I’m willing to go. Anything else or any deep dive that you want me to do, that’s going to require more of my time. And that means we’re going to have to have some type of exchange of value. That’s only fair. So I have boundaries as to what I’m willing to do. You know? So that’s my take on the isolation. If you feel nervous or insecure about what it is that you’re doing for one, don’t do any trading because the market will only amplify whatever feeling it is that you don’t want to feel.

So get clear about what that feeling is and what it’s trying to teach you. Because I can assure you going to some chat or some morning group or this and that. That’s not going to allay any of your emotional issues. I’ve said a thousand times before, there are no external solutions to your internal problems. So you might as well start working on those by yourself. And so going back to the Tribe – a group of us decided to meet on every other Thursday at 7:00 PM in Incline Village, in the north shore Lake Tahoe, to work together as a group to explore those feelings that we couldn’t quite understand where they came from, but we certainly knew that they were recurring so that we could get to the bottom of it, trade better, but also live better lives.

So I appreciate the write in. I’m glad we could get clear on that.

This is a computer generated transcript.

Subscribe to the show  

Click here to  get your free copy of The Inner Voice of Trading audiobook.