So I got an email from someone who said, “Hey Michael I don’t know whether I’m spinning my wheels. How can you please help me to become more efficient in my day and help me know if I’m wasting my time or not.”
That is the big question because we have to be effective and efficient as managers, not as portfolio managers, but just as managers who have to create a surplus in an effective and an efficient manner. So that talks again about Pareto Efficiency and how much work are you putting in to get the results that you’re getting, or how much work and time are you putting in for the results that you want to get, but you’re not getting. If we work one on one, we would just have a conversation and you explain your process to me at the beginning and of I’d give you some feedback.
I’d do a lot of listening. You can’t really talk over people. There’s no point in doing that. So I do a lot of listening, ask some good questions and, and then I ask some solid follow up questions that might get you thinking in ways that you hadn’t thought before. And it’s not, not to sound like a jerk, but I can’t be bullsh*tted. You know, if there’s one culture of people that I know on planet earth, it’s traders. So, but, but it’s not like this, David Goggins “Be hard motherf*cker!” It’s not that, it’s like two people having a conversation. The slogans sound great for marketing: “Get some!” and they’re slogans. But it’s not, it’s not a good bedside manner to work with somebody.
A good homework assignment that you could do on your, on your own is this: if you’re not already time blocking your day, write down like you would with your food, like your daily diet what do you eat? And, and at what time what’s the quantity. You might also be concerned with how much money you spend on food, also, including snacks in the afternoon scone with your mocha frappuccino or whatever it is you’re into and take a diet of your day in terms of where you’re spending your time. You know, 5:00 AM to 6:00 AM. I’m doing this thing from six to eight. I’m working on getting my orders filled, blah, blah, blah. And just right out the day in the time block of how much time you’re spending on each thing, then what I would do is I’d go back and I’d think on a few levels, I think practically and I’d think emotionally. So the practical part is what, or how can you measure the effectiveness of that particular segment of time in the day? How is that serving you as it relates to your P&L? So this is a little bit of a brutal honesty kind of deal.
The other thing is go back and take a look at all the things that you’re doing. And since human beings are emotional beings by definition, and we’re all supposed to be pleasure seekers, even if you’re into BDSM or masochistic things look and diagnose during the day, what are you doing that actually makes you feel good? What are the feelings that you have attached to those same items? So that this way, by the time that you’re done, you can see this is what I think it’s adding up to or not. And this is the feeling that I get. What you want to do is have basically good feelings about the things that add up to your P&L. Now, if you can’t ascertain whether a particular task adds up or not try removing it or decreasing the amount of time that you do it, because those we talk about routines and rituals.
There are some things that you might be spending an awful lot of time on during the day that feel good, but might not necessarily add up to helping you become more profitable, which means perhaps better research, better trading tactics, better execution, more frequent winners or than losers or winners that are many multiples, more than what your losers are currently. That type of a thing, because you can only get better when you start to measure things. Because what gets measured can become improved. And that’s a good exercise to do on, on your own every day. Then you look at the week and say, okay, what did I do on Monday? What did I do on Tuesday? How do I put these together? Because what you’re going to find is that you have an emotional system that you’re running and a lot of it might be this busy work that makes you look and feel like a trader.
But at the end of the days, trader traders have to make money. Or they have to follow at least a set of rules or a systematized set of rules or a chart reading pattern with which they’re compatible to eventually create net income with rules that have a positive, expected value. So that’s a really good start. You could do that on your own and of course, if you’re, if you want professional help or whatever, then reach out. But that part I think you could do on your own for sure. And that’d be very, very insightful exercise to do.
Next, add up all your profits (or losses) and divide them by the amount of hours you’ve put in. Include research, reviewing charts, watching tv, and executing trades. That’s your hourly wage.
This is a computer generated transcript.
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