Hey guys, welcome back to another weekly episode where Mike and I go over you guys topics, comments and questions, and see if we can add anything on Toit today. I wanted to mention before we start the episode, if you guys haven’t already, go down in the description and get your free copy of the audiobook@martinchronicle.com and sign up for the email list because Mike and I are going to be doing a very special live event very, very soon. And it’s going to involve you guys and we’re kind of going to talk about the trajectory of the channel and I guess the roadmap that we have as far as coursework goes. And just in general the offerings that he and I are going to be having really, really soon.
So make sure you guys go do that. It’s going to be really exciting. And now if you guys haven’t already, make sure you like and subscribe. All comments, help the algorithm. We really appreciate all the support. So let’s keep the comments coming. And for today’s topic, it’s actually a viewer’s comment and it was one that I thought was really interesting and I wanted to get your opinion on it. Mike, it’s from David Plyler and it says, I made money today but didn’t follow my rules, completely aggravated with myself. My two areas I need improvement are both related. After making good decisions, my confidence becomes overconfidence. And then I take trades in anticipation of a signal. I’m positive most months, but these two things and then he was very, very upset about that. So what do you have to say on that?
Well, that, I’m kind of looking at it here. I don’t know what the two things are. My two areas I need to improve are both related. I don’t think he really says what they are.
Yeah, it’s the decisions and the confidence trading in anticipation of a signal. It’s like a loop. It’s like a feedback loop.
Yeah. Well what you said you really love this. What do you think?
Well, so most of the time when you talk about creating a process, what is that for? It’s to make on average more money. It’s not to catch that one in a billion lottery tickets, so to speak. It’s not like, yeah, you’re trying to reinforce good behavior and that’s what a lot of these processes are for. For me specifically when I was a cyclist in what I do now with eSports, I have a warmup routine and I don’t deviate from that. And when I do, sure, yeah, some days I can get on and not have to spend 30 minutes warming up and it’s like, Hey, great, I didn’t waste 30 minutes, but then I could do really bad. And if I don’t do bad and just happen to do good, I’m rewarding bad behavior, right? Yeah. So it’s not a consistent behavior and what you want to develop in life and in any profession is consistency.
True enough. As far as the trading and what I’ve had to live through, just like a trader can get down on him or herself when they’ve lost a bunch of times, they can kind of internalize that. And I talked about that on the show either already this week or it’s coming up. I can’t remember from day to day to be honest with you. And so if when you run your system that you have 30% accuracy, that means seven out of 10 times you’re going to fail, which or lose money doesn’t necessarily mean failure. You could easily lose three or four times in a row and internalize that and be like, I’m a loser. But your results are kind of in models still. You know what I mean? Likewise, if you go on a winning streak, you can internalize that and be like, king of the world, I’m better than Lance Armstrong and I didn’t have the dope and I can bang all the hot bitches.
And unfortunately the world doesn’t work that way either. But guys, being guys, women are better at this by the way, just generally speaking. They have higher level of emotional intelligence. I think inherently it’s how they’re built. I know there’s a study on it. I’ll find it and send it out if anyone cares. And I wrote about it a little bit in the book, and so you can internalize this and beat yourself up over it, but this doesn’t really happen with people who have a set set of rules that they follow every day. This is something that I hear mostly from people who are discretionary traders and to me that’s the harder way to go. But I think everyone gets out of the situation that they want. It seems that there could be some impulse control stuff here at work as well in that you’re making money, you can’t really tell in the short run if you’re lucky or if you’re good at least all I can do is behave consistently. So that’s really what my goal is on any given day to not get sucked in. Cause I have 35 years of experience. I have really good intuition, I have a really great feel for the market.
And it’s funny because when I talk about the book and how I started and how I had to drop off of many things, guess how I’ve been making my money day trading options this past month or so, which is not what I am, and really how I do, it’s a coping mechanism because of the nature of the market. But I’m not, if anyone asked me, I would say I’m not a day trader and I’m not really an options player either. Just with the volatility in the market, it’s a lot better for me to know what my max losses are or can be theoretically, at least when I go to bed at night because I’m taking risk home overnight over the weekend, over the holidays. I had positions through July 4th over the weekend. I like that. I only in fact to put on positions where I can stay in the thing.
But with the market being as choppy as it is, it’s like you get in knocked out, you get in, you get knocked out and you say, okay, that’s the world we live in. I have to adapt and how can I better reflect the risk in my portfolio given the market environment? And it’s like, I don’t want to be doing this it, it’s too, it’s too much work. I would much rather let the market do the work than to me do the work. The day traders turn trading into blue a job, they have to be at their screen. It’s blue collar despair. I guess it’s better than flipping hamburgers. But the best way to do it for me is put the risk on and then let it go and not watch it. Just let it kind of grow up. You’re planting, you’re planting tomatoes. I want a bunch of Bella de San Marzanos.
Yeah, those are the best ones. But yeah, you make a good point. And you also talked about impulse control for a second, and I think that’s a really important point to touch on because it’s not, trading in general isn’t just one step click and then it’s all put through. It takes effort and it takes time to put in a trade. Even if it’s only a couple of minutes, it still takes a reasonable amount of time. So I feel like if impulse control is something you have to work on before you make a trade, you should run yourself through a checklist. Am I doing this because of an impulse? Am I anticipating? Find the things that you want to improve on and just ask yourself questions before you trade. You don’t have to put a trade through. Like I said, you can go for it and you can chase that lottery ticket, chase the dragon. But most of the time it’s not going to work out. I mean at least percentage wise. And that’s the whole point of building a system, I think for everything.
Impulse control. So another way to do this if you want to do the homework at home, because it’s the kind of stuff that we do in the coaching, is to say, okay, go back and look at your behavior. And with all those kind of, I used to call them flyers, which means they were something I picked up on the fly. It wasn’t because I do all my, to me, I totally stole this from Paul Tudor Jones, I don’t know where I heard him say it, but he said something along the lines that trading is between five and eight o’clock at night eastern time right now. Of course the markets are closed then, or at least the outcry sessions are largely over in the us. But what he was speaking to was preparation for the next day. He could envision, and I can envision how I want to manage the trades, the trades that I’m in, and also the ones that I anticipate getting filled on because sometimes I’m looking at something, but the charts all over the place.
There’s no seasonality. And so I have an idea of where I want to get in, but we’re so far away it’d be driving from LA to San Francisco, and you’re not even in Ventura County yet. You’re asking how much longer. It’s like you got a fuck ton more to go. Or if you leave New York for Disney World is in Orlando Air Kissimmee and you haven’t made it through Delaware, there’s no point in asking how long it’s going to take because you still got 15 plus hours if you’re going by car, which is a whole other thing. Why would you want to drive in a car that long? So I don’t like to take things on the fly, even though I have really good instincts and really good intuition, I’m not really built for it here. If I was working at a day trading firm and we had that thing systematized and I had rules around it, I’m not so arrogant to think that there’s probably some training that I could benefit too because on all of this, so that could be beneficial.
So the world could be different if I had these opportunities, but being where I am and how I’m doing it now, kind of suboptimal. But the gentleman who wrote in and anyone watching, you can put yourself on a diet and the diet would look like this. You do your work the night before. If you’re short termer and you’re looking for what the catalysts are and you have to find it that morning, that’s awfully difficult again, because I think it’s looking at cloud formations, you know, can kind of see into things that you want to see. But you could say, okay, I have three trades today, three round turns, as we would say in commodities, which means long sell to go flat, sell short bite to cover, buy long, sell it flat, sell it long, that’s one round turn. So one entry and one exit. So you have three of those per day.
If you’re sitting there double clicking your mouse all day, or if you’re long and then you sell it long and then you sell it short and try to trade the reversal. To me, unless you have training in that, you could be feeding something other than your p and l and that you want the action or that you like the action. And so that to me is dangerous, is one of the most dangerous things that happened in this business is giving people access to their own accounts. Back when I started, there was no online trading. So you had to go to one of the five major wirehouses and open up an account so you couldn’t just open up your computer because most people didn’t have PCs. They were called clones at the time. And people’s sense of internet was a o l, which wasn’t really pure internet, it was Abu bulletin board, like a CompuServe.
And say to yourself, I’ve got two trades a day where I can get in and get knocked out, get in and get knocked out. And if I’m winning, I have to be up by a certain amount before I’m going to add another risk unit, even if it’s in the same name that I’m trading. So you could make all those rules up. They’re very important. I had them, ive, I put them to work very soon. I also put in stop stops on my overall account balance where I knew that bad behavior begets bad behavior and good behavior begets good behavior. Just like new highs beget new highs thing is making new lows. Get out of the way. Don’t try to pick bottoms here, wait for it to stall, wait for it to stop, wait for it to consolidate and then wait for it to break out.
Back to the upside if you need to be. Don’t try to be smarter than the market. So you know, can say to yourself, I’m not going to risk if I hit on my equity. If I lose 1%, I’m going to flatten out all my trades on any given day. So if I have a hundred K, as soon as my equity hits 99,000, I puke out everything. Doesn’t matter whether it’s winning or losing. And I’m going to go flat because job number one is to play superior defense. Most people come to the markets and be like, yeah, I’m gung ho, I’m going to trade all these things. And I got my email news alerts and they send me 15 names and somehow I’m going to have to pick one of them. I don’t know which one, but I’m going to pick it anyway. And they have bad money management rules to me.
That’s why the majority of people fail, is they don’t have impulse control. But the impulse control stems from not having good money management, which is the name of the game. It’s not about bullish flags and bear penance and all that other bullshit. It has it’s stupid 14 year old immaturity. Don’t be focusing on that. Learn about yourself. If you don’t know who you are, what the hell does it matter? If you know what a bullish flag is, it’s like the most amazing thing. 80 80, 80% of the trading is about you. So spend 80% of your time studying yourself. Most people have it fast backwards and they’re looking at the markets too long, not doing any personal work. Money is made and lost by position sizing and trade management. And that’s where if you’re going to think about trading, that’s what you need to work on. And that’s maybe half of the trading side. So that’s 10% of it. The other 80% should be work on yourself.
And that’s what the pros do. Pros aren’t stuck in Bloomberg reading news articles and doing back testing. That’s part of it. But the best ones are looking at their performance. That’s why we’re doing the show. Cause it’s the most important part of it. Important. So put yourself on a diet of the mind and limit your behavior. D, everyone wants to talk and Jocko and Goggins, but you have to actually do it sloganeering and putting the shit out on Twitter as if you’ve invented it yourself is empty and kind of shallow and banal to be quite honest. So same thing with weekly rules. You could say, well maybe 1%, I’m a little bit more aggressive, but I am going to set a 5% weekly rule. If I’m down 5%, it could be Wednesday, I’m done for the week, I’m going to come back Monday. Paul Tudor Jones had a 10% monthly rule where he didn’t want to have a double digit down month.
So if he was down seven, eight, 9%, he would really curtail stuff because he knew if he stopped trading in say, week three or July 20th, and you’ve got 11 calendar days, he’s going to sit on his hands and wait that out. I doubt the people watching can feel the burn of watching the market move and not participate. And that tells a lot about where the person’s head is at because the markets are going to be around for decades and decades. They’ll be around for a hundred years long after you’re dead. So you really have to think about what is it that you’re doing here and why do you do what you do? So I just knew very, very quickly if I acted like an idiot and blew up my account, what was going to happen. Everyone knows the answer could go back to waiting tables, could caddy golf bags or could go back to landscaping.
Cause I’d already done that very well and I had made a lot of money doing it, but I wanted to change my paradigm. And paradigm is the sum total of all your habits. So I had to adopt new habits. And the number one thing about trading is keeping your losses small and learning to play superior defense. That’s the difference between the pros and the amateurs is they think they wake up every morning and they want to be Lawrence Taylor, who’s the best defensive player ever in the history of the N F L, not the other LT who stole his nickname, LA LaDanian Tomlinson, who I think was a running back for San Diego.
So you want to focus on playing defense and putting those limits in, put it in for the day, the week or the month, but have ’em, or at least have an idea. Because if you don’t have any good boundaries with yourself, how are you going to have any boundaries with your p and l? To me, that’s car that’s correlated and that’s not post hoc ergo proctor hawk or any kind of logical fallacy. If you don’t have good boundaries, it’s going to find its way into your p and l. This again, is the kind of stuff that we do. We don’t look at charts. All that stuff seems really interesting. But human, if I know who you are as a person, I guarantee you, I can tell very quickly how you’re going to behave in the markets is all. Cause it’s all a personality type.
Right? Yeah, no, it’s a good point. And you know, talked about sloganeering and stuff like that. I think people do that way too much now. It’s crazy. It’s stay
Hard. I’m like, shut up, Goggins, stop being an idiot. I’m sick of your anger. Get over it already. You have all the resources in the world to stop being angry. Fuck’s sake.
I mean there’s definitely some motivation in that for some people. And I understand it. I used to goggins,
Not me, not me. It’s like a snooze.
I used to Goggins for a little bit, but yeah, it did get a little old after a while. I still think he’s pretty crazy. But yeah,
I like his first book. I don’t have time for audio books, but I have can’t hurt me. And I thought it great. If you haven’t read it or listened, it’s worth doing.
Yeah, it’s a great book. But
After it’s been through it once, it’s like, okay, I don’t need 20 years of that.
Right? Yeah, no, fair. I think it’s also important to mention with the slogan or thing, it’s like if you have taken the time to analyze things you need to improve on and you’re not doing it, I think that’s just willful neglect. And I’ve done this before as well. Sometimes it might not be intentional, it could just happen that, oh, I didn’t think about that or whatever. But part of trying to improve and knowing the things you have to improve on is keeping that in the back of your mind a lot of the time. At least that’s how I’ve improved on a lot of things really, really quickly, is with the eSports thing. The first team I ever practiced with, they were like, Hey, here are the things that you need to do better. And they broke it down list by list. They’re like, yeah, you need to communicate a different way.
You need to tell us how you’re going to be doing things and you need to think five steps ahead. And I’m like, okay, I can do all that. And it didn’t just happen. It wasn’t like you said, I didn’t post it on Twitter. Stay hard. I’m thinking about what I’m doing five moves from now. It was like I actually, in every game that I played, within every waking second of my three hours a day that I was playing, or four hours a day, five hours a day, I was thinking, okay, I need to communicate differently and I need to keep those things in mind. And I was actively trying to improve on those things
A hundred percent. And that’s why you’re, you’re a rockstar and that’s why you’re sitting here and not one of the other million frigging guys who write me and want help or want to, you don’t want the help. But they always want to barter. And I’m like, no, I don’t want the money. I’m not bartering. You got to feel the burn. Because if you give away shit to people, they’re not going to use it cause they don’t appreciate it because they have no skin in the game. So that’s why I’m, I’m willing to give this away. Everything else, you got to feel the burn. Two, it’s willful neglect, but it’s also for me, if I know that you’re not disciplined, trading is largely anonymous. We never really know who the contra broker is. You don’t know who the other, who’s on the other side of the trade. Obviously if you’re buying stock, someone has to be selling it doesn’t mean they’re bearish. They could be selling out of a position that they owned a hundred bucks ago and they’re getting out. So they’re not necessarily bearish, they’re just not bullish anymore. So you have to have two opposing views for the trade to happen.
And I don’t mean to sound this way, please tell me how undisciplined you are. Why? Because that’s job security. Because all the money that I’m going to make is already out in somebody else’s account. So the person who can de and show the most disciplines is the one who’s going to walk away with the most money at the end, or at least weather the storm to come back and play tomorrow. So I don’t want to sound this way, but the secret that the people who are selling their day trading systems and their swing trading lists and their flagship, other flagship is such a funny word.
First of all, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to stick to that, but it’s the undisciplined trader that’s going to give me job security. Because we feed off of those people because they’re basically philanthropists. You might as well give your money away to your alma mater or shul, which is a Jewish term for your school or your temple could be the same thing or your church or a hospital. Because then at least you get to direct the money to a cause that you believe in when you come to the market and you’re not disciplined. That’s great. I’ll take it all because I know if I’m in a losing position, I don’t stop and think about it. It either hits my stop or I puke it out right away. So when you talk about having discipline, it’s not something you talk about, it’s something that you live, it’s a lifestyle choice.
But the feelings that you need to feel when you’re disciplined can sometimes in interfere with the daydream of what it is that you want to feel. You’re just not there yet. You keep working hard, you’ll definitely get there. But again, we come back and this is a theme in almost everybody’s life in one way or another, the feelings that you want to feel next month are on the other side of shit that you have to do today that you don’t want to do. So that willful neglect, it feels good because you don’t have to engage, you don’t have to invite the failure. Cause I’d rather sit here and bitch and bellyache than actually do the frigging work and improve. So I could read Rumi and all these quotes and cut the screen grabs and send them out on Twitter, but it’s empty because although it might mean something to you, it’s not, doesn’t mean enough for you to actually do the work.
So to me that’s phony, that’s idolatry, right? Because who cares about Rumi anyway, not me. So I would say the best thing that you can do, and that’s why, look, it might not be the most popular guy out there, but I get results because I don’t let any people, anyone hide if they want to improve, people come back. The testimonials we have is not only is the trading better, but their lives are better. Because whatever you think you’re doing in the market, you’re probably doing in your life too. Especially in your relationships with people. Even if it’s for business, if they’re platonic friendships or if they’re romantic through your wife or your spouse or your girlfriend, your significant other, whatever it might be. All those things are patterned there. Everyone’s running an emotional system in addition to whatever discretionary or systematic rules they might be running. But as far as the gentleman who wrote David, you know, might just give yourself a limit as to how many trades you’re going to take per day.
And then having strict rules on what you think the signals are as far as having impulse control. You might give yourself a limit to how many positions you have on at the same time. That’s helped some people, it might a lot. There’s not really one prescription that could help you. There’s probably several. But for discretionary day traders, some of them can’t handle having more than one trade on at any given time. So that might be something that helps a person modify their behavior and curtail their behavior that stops them from getting into things that they might have regrets about. And then if you want to take it further, look in your life where you’ve acted impulsively. Because I know if you looked at me from the outside looking in towards me, you might say that he’s impulsive. I just didn’t have the fear of failing. Cause I knew that if I didn’t take the chances and change my behavior, adopt new habits again, what was I going to go back to? Blue collar despair. And I knew I was really good at that. I wanted to change my paradigm and go from blue collar to white collar. I knew that absolutely, I was crystal clear on that. So I knew I had to invite, you know, want to talk about the four years that it took me to make it. Every day was uncomfortable.
And everyone would say, well it sucked. It didn’t suck. It was really uncomfortable because I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have the habits built yet. I was willing to try it because I to, I knew again what I had already done in the past. It served me well. It got me to that point. But then I wanted to change. I wanted to have intellectual property. I wanted to be a business owner, not a business manager. Cause I already knew I could work hard. I had been working since I’m 12 years old. So I had that. I knew that. And no one could take that away from me because I had the money in the bank. I had the results. So I wasn’t BSing myself that I had phantom success or I was making more out of something than it actually was. I knew I had great financial success, working hard and saving money.
But now I wanted to learn how to work smartly. How could I actually use my brain, which I kind of did in those other jobs because there is a bit of a knack to it. When you’re caddying, when you’re waiting tables, there is a small intellectual, but it’s still one of those things where it’s a job where if you don’t go, you’re not getting paid. So I knew day trading wasn’t going to really work for me because it was too expensive to do back in those days from a commission and spread standpoint. But I also knew that I didn’t want to be sitting at the computer all day. That was not the idea of macho stuff for me. I didn’t care about monitors. That stuff was all lost on me. I don’t fit the mold for that. I don’t find that people really need all that stuff either. But it certainly looks good in Twitter pictures, I suppose. Which of the great biggest comedy tweets, show me your trading set up. What do I got? I got a frigging Mac.
Yeah, for sure. I mean I think you brought up a lot of good points there. But yeah, I think if I had anything to add on that, it’s kind of what I’ve already said in this, just ask yourself questions before you take action. I call it my pre-flight checklist. Whenever I go to do stuff, whether it’s in regards to matchmaking or even in the play stuff, I always ask myself, am I doing this? Or what reason am I doing this for? And I have a list of things I go through. If I start performing poorly, I have a checklist. Have I been eating? Have I been drinking water? Have I gone outside today? Have I walked around? Because if I don’t do all those things, then I do perform noticeably worse, much worse. So I just ensure before I take action that I’ve asked myself the questions and I know that I’m not acting out of impulse because I am a fairly impulsive person, to be honest. I don’t think you can get into eSports without being impulsive. Yeah, that’s the whole thing is being able to think really fast on the fly. Really, really fast. So I gotcha.
Yeah, I, that’s the only thing I think I could add to that.
But that to me is as much as instinct as it is impulse two, you can look at the opportunity cost. If you looked at having that impulse to want to add an extra trade when there’s no si signal there because you’re overconfident, you could go back and if you’re honest with yourself, pull out all those trades and say, okay, here’s what my overconfidence has done for me. Here’s how I performed when I’ve isolated these particular trades. And then look and see what it does to your p and l. If it’s negative, the easiest thing is to eliminate it. If it’s positive, the best thing to do would be to hone it and to see, okay, is it more of an instinct, right? Because who really knows what overconfidence feels like in your body? It could be different for everybody. So you want to investigate that, isolate those trades and see, okay, well maybe it’s not all bad. Maybe there something in the overconfidence that’s like the appetizer for intuition.
Because if you do something enough, you can get a good feel for the markets. What you don’t want to do is look at your p and l and be like, I’m onto something. I put this trade on, therefore I’m great. You can’t reverse engineer that and make those conclusions after 10 years. You can look at your p and l and said, I did what I had to do and exhibited the type of behavior to get where I’m at. But on the other hand, this is where I’m at right now and I have to behave in a certain way because behavior predicts where you end up. So I wouldn’t necessarily adopt it and say that it’s all bad. You’d have to look at your p and l and say, okay, when I acted in what I thought was an overconfident matter, here’s what actually happened to my p and l and what can I do postmortem to change my behavior around that? What can I do you see to improve my performance?
So it gets deep. It gets really deep. You have to look at it. And again, this is one of the reasons why, again, you can do this stuff online and study if you worked. This is the kind of stuff that we would look at together. But it takes time. There’s a lot of time involved if you want to do it. So you can either do it by yourself or we can engage. But either way, it’s going to take a lot of time. And the question is, how quickly do you want to grow and what type of insight do you want? And how do you want to shorten your learning curve? It’s different answer for everybody, but how are things going in eSports for you?
Oh, so it’s really good. Yesterday was a bit of a difficult day with matchmaking, but that’s fine. I had practiced later, so I think I played in total six and a half hours yesterday. But yeah, I ended up, like I said, everything’s kind of like chess in this. And each different piece has a different combination of things you can do with it because there’s unique utility. And so, hold on, my dogs are freaking out. Hold on. Okay, we’re back after a little minor interruption there. But no, everything’s really good. I came up with a really interesting combination of these different characters that you can play. Cause they all have unique utility and it’s kind of like how popular combinations of things. Or there’s a fashion line that everyone loves this year or for summer or whatever it’s called, the meta in this game that we play. So if there’s a particular combination of these characters, it’s considered to be the meta for a specific map and it changes based on every map. And
I think I
See came up with a meta for a map that just came out that nobody’s come up with. Holy cow. And so I think I spotted something before anybody else did and I actually ran it and practiced with my team last night and they’re like, dude, you’re crazy. What are you talking about? This doesn’t make any sense. And so what I did was I sat down and I developed strategies. So I was basically writing a book on the game how I wanted it played. And I developed protocols. So if this happens, common scenarios that the enemies would do on attack or defense, I was like, if this happens, then here’s what we do. If they do this, then this is the utility I want to use to punish them. And then this is how we’re going to use the utility to get into the fight again. And so I spotted some really, really unique stuff. And needless to say, we won with a landslide last night in practice and it was really, I, I’m excited to keep working on it. I think I came up with some really cool stuff.
So again, preparation.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Done it probably I think 1130 at night, not five to eight at night, but 1130,
Which is kind of the culture.
Yeah, yeah, no, and I kind of stray away from that because I like going to bed early at a reasonable hour. But yeah, I do tend to stay up and that’s when I develop all my really good ideas. That’s kind of how I’ve always done it I guess.
Yeah. Well you all should know ganja is ranked in, well within the top one half of 1% of players in his game. He’s badass and that’s remarkable. He’s not looking for people calling up looking for freebies, but because he is busy and when he is not busy doing his shit, he is working with me. So if you want coaching tips on that stuff, there’s probably other places. But nonetheless, when you’re high performance, there’s lots of things that you share. And we shared a lot of common personality traits. We understand each other very, very well. And in jujitsu we worked together quite a bit as his eSports stuff was evolving. So again, folks put yourself through the ringers, the harder you are. There’s a saying about practicing hard. And if you can practice hard and think about what Kobe Bryant used to do, he’d be out shooting at four in the morning till six, taking a break, hitting the sauna or the steam room, going back out another two hours, having a lit light breakfast.
Then his teammates would be showing up at quarter to 10, 15 minutes before practice from 10 to 12 and he’d already have four hours of work in by the time they got there and they would only get there 15 minutes before. And these are his teammates. And so in my opinion, the harder that you work in practice and get in your preparation, I think that’s going to show up in your trading if you’re trying to practice and do that stuff like the morning of, you don’t give yourself enough time to really get ready and to learn your craft. Very, very difficult to do things on the fly. Cause at that point you’re just kind of guessing and throwing darts. So you really have to put the time in and do the practicing, which is why I do that in the evening. Come back from Juujitsu.
I get my head kicked in most nights, even though I’m really good, I’m always training with people who are better than me. Saturday I got smashed by two black belts, but that’s the way it works. If I don’t like it, I can quit. But I also learned a lot. I also needed the entire weekend in a good chunk of Monday to recover because my body aches. But the thing is like you learn how to perform best when you’re doing your practice. And so what I find is that most folks aren’t going through the rigors of practice enough. They think what they’re doing is practice because they’re sitting in front of the screen. But I would argue and debate that that’s not practice, that’s not the insightful work that you think it is. And then ultimately, if you have a wishlist, if you haven’t done any personal work, not that you even need fixing, but just learning about who you are, what makes you tick, what things do you want out of your endeavors?
Are your goals realistic and attainable? Do you have a fundamental understanding of how markets work, right? Because there’s a gigantic difference between equity markets and futures, co commodity futures markets. And it’s not just the leverage. So there’s an enormous amount of work to be done. And as I like to say before we go, if this took you all a year, which most of you think that you don’t have because you don’t like the feelings that you have to feel when you have to be patient, you still would’ve done or did what I did and what took me four years. So it’s going to take time. Very, very few people walk into this business and start acting like Michael Jordan, who is the best all time basketball player ever.
Despite what you might think. Best offensive player, best defensive player in the same year. I don’t care about total points. It’s all bullshit. You got to put the work in and the more work that you’re willing to do and the more you’re willing to surrender to that process and know that it’s a process and know that it’s an ongoing process, I think you put yourself in a really humble mindset. And that’s a good place to be if you’re trying to be in the markets because the markets are very erratic in the short run. They’re very random. You can’t really tell what’s going to happen. You have good insight, but it’s awfully difficult to predict. The best you can do is enter your stops and protect your capital. And if you make money then great, but you have to put the time in. That really is the number one thing that when I listen to people when they write in on their emails is that they just haven’t put the time in.
And there’s a lot of reasons why they might not have it, right? If they’re working nine to five and they’re getting up and trying to trade for an hour or so in the morning and then trying to do more at the close, I know people that can do that. But it’s still is going to come down to your preparation. And if you have a personal life and a relationship and you’re working a full-time job and then you want to hit the gym, you know are at a bit of a disadvantage because you just don’t have the time to put in.
And I have empathy for that because I know how frustrating that might be. But just realize if you don’t have the time, you’re competing against people who do and you’re competing against people who are putting in a lot of time and it’s mindful work. It’s not like, well, I’m going to put in eight hours of quantity, right? Because everyone has seen the study when you’re doing a nine to five job you’re doing out of the eight hours that you’re there there only four or five hours are actually quality work. You know what I’m saying? People still want to fucking unionize even though they’re getting paid for more that they’re not doing. At any rate, appreciate the comments. The folks who have downloaded the audiobook version of the Inner Voice Trading, which you can get at Martin Chronicle in the top right corner. We’re going to notify those folks first just because it’s easier and they’ll get the date and the time for the webinar will.
We’ll be talking about a whole host of stuff, trades and some of the stuff that we do behind the scenes that we’re not going to cover here on the channel. And then also plans for the channel. How are we going to add some education and marry your emotional constitution with different trading strategies? See if that can help you amplify stuff. And so again, seating’s going to be limited only because I know everyone has questions and the worst thing to do is open it up to a thousand people, which could easily happen given I have been given the audio book away for 10 years, so I have a big following in the email list, even though I don’t email them all day long about offerings, it’s going to be held for people who actually want to do the work or want to get pointed in the right direction. So that’s why we cut Victor’s class off because we didn’t want a million people not getting any attention. So it’s easy to sign people up, but we have to be considerate of the user experience and make sure everyone’s going to get some FaceTime because again, the numbers are really vanity metrics. What’re trying to do is actually help people. So the work has to be high quality. But that’s all I got. Thanks everyone for sending in your comments. Appreciate all of that. And Danja, you got anything left?
No. Thank you guys so much for the support. We really appreciate it. Thank you for all the comments. Thank With that said, we will see you guys in the next one.
Take care. See you tomorrow.
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