Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Thanks for being here. Please take a minute and like and subscribe and click the little bell thingy. As Ganja likes to say, today, I want to talk about the caustic aspect of you taking flyers. I spoke with someone who had done it. We kind of unearthed why they were doing it, and there’s some general truths to it. Your approach to taking a flyer in a trade can come from many, many sources, but one of the main truths to the whole process is just that originating trading ideas is hard. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of work, and when the outcome is uncertain to even all of that work, folks are always looking for a shortcut or some kind of a hack. In my experience, they don’t exist despite marketers being able to kind of come up with a new hook that would increase your curiosity to want to take a chance.
But ultimately what they’re looking for, as I’ve mentioned before, is subscription income. They want to get a hundred thousand. Who cares what the number is? Subscribers paying a number every month, that’s pretty much guaranteed within say plus or minus five to 10% because there is churn. People drop off, new people sign up. That’s considered churn. And so what ends up happening for you is you’re trying to hijack the system to avoid doing harder work. And instead of maybe admitting to yourself that for this particular moment in time, and it could be just for a day, all the charts that you normally look at aren’t showing you anything that you would trade either. There’s no chart pattern that you recognize, or hopefully the one chart pattern that you’re using or the one setup and it doesn’t exist. And so instead of saying to yourself, my job is to play superior defense, and if there is no trade on this particular date, then there’s no trade.
I sit on my hands, I don’t do any trades. I’ll come back tomorrow or Monday to see how it would look. That would be the mature thing to do, but instead, folks are like, man, this other trade over here is up and down 15 bucks a day, but it’s not my trade. I feel like I’m missing out on something and I have the strong emotional need to participate because after all, executions buying and selling means trading. Obviously that’s not the case, but that’s the mindset. So you put yourself in a spot where someone mentioned a trade idea to you, the upside potential probably, and then you find yourself in a trade, and what are you supposed to do at that point? Take the flyer and manage it as if it came on your wishlist somehow. What criteria do you use to enter? How do you manage the trade? Most of the times folks don’t even know. And then you’re sitting there saying, why am I even in this
Trade? Especially if it goes against you, especially if it goes against you. And I ask you before you try to take a flyer, ask yourself, what’s your edge? Because again, if you’re going to get professional style results and act consistently, you have to know what your edge is and then know how you can perform on that edge tactically for each and every trade that you want to put on. So much so that if you can’t define your edge, then there’s no trade. But sometimes people let their emotions get the best of them and they put on the trade because they’re desperate for a good idea. Maybe whatever they’ve been working on hasn’t been working, and so they want to delegate the decision-making process or all the hard work that goes with that, coming up with and originating a trade idea to somebody else, thereby hijacking the system.
The problem is is that as you have been trying to create alpha, right, your trading system is a function of who you are as a person. It’s not just a bunch of math. Yes, there’s math involved, but you are the alpha, I guess is what I’m saying, your makeup, your understanding of risk, right? Or lack thereof. There’s varying degrees of risk. How do you add to your winners, which is something I think everyone should look to do, or at least understand how it could impact their trading and better define what the trading edge is. You can almost do that weekly, certainly monthly, review your trades and see does your edge still exist? It can be modified, the markets will change, and so we don’t want to end up taking flyers for excitement or because we feel bad that our own hard work hasn’t yielded the results.
Don’t wave the flag now and surrender. Stick to your discipline because again, playing superior defense is the name of the game. You don’t want to find yourself where you’re trying to harvest ideas from newsletters or discords. You hear what goes on in those. I mean, you got to pay a monthly fee for people telling you that you know, got to let your winners run. It’s like, I can’t believe people were even paying for that kind of sophomoric wisdom at that point. If you need to be in a discord to kind of hear that, you might look to see like, are you being codependent? Again, I’m not a psychologist, but you can’t really trade somebody else’s rules. You have no emotional connection to them. Even if you’re a purely systematic trend follower, you have an emotional attachment to your rules, right? No one escapes. This is par for the course. This is a matter of how things work in the trading world. So make sure you understand why you’re in the
Trade in the first place and understand why it’s important to not put on stupid trades like flyers and risk your capital because you could be acting out. You could be also saying that you just don’t even care about the quality of the money in your account. One of the things you can do to help improve your own outlook, maybe even improve your performance, is to put a different quality on the money. Some of you approach trading and you’re like, well, okay, this is MyFu money. I don’t care what happens to it. And that’s why you get the results that you get if you don’t make it prominent and very, very important to yourself. In my humble opinions, be very, very hard to grow that money to a significant level. If you just think of it as cash, you’re throwing around for the sake of doing it to see what hits like for fun or entertainment.
So one thing you can do is decide that the money is going to be more a supplement to your kids’ Section 5 29 college savings plan, or maybe you’re going to be, even though it’s taxable, most likely I’m going to enhance my retirement with this money, or maybe I’m going to grow it and then buy myself a gigantic insurance endowment policy so that I can give money away upon my death, or maybe I’m just going to grow it so that I could both live off it and put it in a trust in a charitable remainder trust. Let some folks live off the money and then when that person dies, it’ll go to the remainder men. So there’s a million things you can do if you just open your mind, but trading for excitement and winging it tells me that you don’t care about the money, and if you did that with my money, you’d get fired.
So then you have to say to yourself, what kind of standards are you holding yourself to? Because then what happens? The big pink elephant, when you start doing that enough and then that doesn’t work. So when your own research and trading stuff doesn’t work, your chart books and what have you or your discords are failing you, which they tend to do, and then the flyers don’t work, now you’re pissed. And then what happens? You got it revenge trading because now it’s just a fuck all at this point, you just don’t even care. You don’t care about what you’re doing. You don’t care about what the outcomes are. And then you have to say to yourself, would you trade like that if I was sitting next to you, for example?
And what do you get out of it by going on tilt and why isn’t it okay if you take a couple of days off because whatever it is that you’re looking for in the market isn’t showing up. So if that’s the case, why don’t you try to pivot and say, maybe I need to try some new securities. Maybe I need to try a new trading style. Maybe I need to learn to hold overnight and trade smaller and expand my universe and get out of whatever it is that you’re trading. For example, it might be the universe trying to communicate
You and push you along and give you big hints along the way. It gets deep. You can certainly think about it and come up and be bold. Be very creative with what you think the solutions might be, because when you get to that creative solution, and I’ve heard various coaches say this, write out 20 different ways that you think you can make money in the marketplace as opposed to being emotionally invested in one thing that’s just not working for you. Because if it’s not working after three or six months, to me it either means the strategy’s not working or you don’t have a good feel for what that strategy is, and it doesn’t say anything about you as a person. Did you ever know somebody who was really, really good playing baseball, but they sucked at football or basketball? Did you ever know somebody who was really good at golf but couldn’t play a team sport?
So it doesn’t mean anything. Everyone has their skill. Everyone has their way to create the alpha, and your job is to figure out what that is, because then once you do that, it’s not going to seem like work. It’s going to seem effortless. And then once you get to that spot and you know what your tactics are and what setup it is, what single setup it is that you’re looking for, the modifications become small. They become very, very small from period over period. Now, if you’re trading equities, you could look at international stuff, even if you’re trading futures, you can look at, get out of trading coffee, sugar, cocoa cotton, and look at metals. And if you’re doing metals and they’re not working, look at currencies that expand your horizon. But I would do that before I would start taking flyers on other people’s rules because you don’t have any emotional connection to the why.
Again, if you’re watching TV and someone says they like United Healthcare, who the hell cares? What are you supposed to do? How do you position size? Where do you get in? When do you know you’re wrong? You have to be able to answer all those questions by yourself. No one can tell you that. And if you’re in a discord saying, is this a good time to get into the einy? You’re in the wrong group, or You’re satisfying a need that has nothing to do with trading. You see what I’m saying? So I want to leave you with that. It’s been a good week. I hope you have fun plans for the weekend. Again, please like and subscribe, go to Martin Chronicle, get your free copy of the audio book version of The Inner Voice of Trading. Have a great weekend, folks, and I’ll see you Monday.

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Hey everybody. Happy Thursday. Hope you’re doing well. Please like and subscribe if you care to. I was talking with another client on the consulting side, and it occurred to me that the person was actually holding themselves back. They were doing very, very, very well. But check this out. When you are with a peer group or on a trading desk, just by the natural order of things, there kind of becomes a hierarchy. There’s someone always competing to be the dominant primate, right? Which is such a snooze, what a waste of time. But at any rate, when we talked about complacency and not setting goals and getting comfortable, so much so that when you try to take some actions, it can evoke anxiety or fear. You might also, look, I’m not a psychologist, but you might be comfortable also in your peer group. And if you go out and achieve too much, even if you have natural ability that you know, kind of know that you’re not tapping into, you can be deliberately holding yourself back because you’re comfortable with the natural order of stuff in and around your peer group and the pecking order, right?
So when you invite that change, the person that everyone is used to you being is going to change and it isn’t going to exist anymore. It’s almost a new person coming into the group. Now, if you’ve witnessed new people coming into the group and you’re already there, doesn’t matter where you are in the hierarchy, you hear the chatter, you hear the gossip, right? And it’s really toxic for an entity to have that. But it, it’s, it’s seems like it’s almost human nature to make fun of the new guy or kid aunties on them, either in front of them or certainly behind their back. And so since you can witness that now, and that’s a definable data point, you don’t want to put yourself, this is deep. This is subconscious stuff. You don’t want to put yourself in the spot of being the new guy, and that’s exactly who you would be, man or woman.
If you attempt to make any change, you open yourself up to that type of teasing. You open yourself up to that type of ridicule. You’re opening yourself up to making a statement, not verbally, but you’re a different person. You’re going through some type of metamorphosis that you endeavor to do. So not only do you have the fear of the change in yourself, the fear of failure, you could have a deep subconscious understanding of what’s going on and within the dynamic of the group that you’re with. Could be the trading desk, could be the firm at large, could be where your firm ranks on hedge. I mean, it all adds up. I’m not saying one is more material than the other. It’s all important, right? I care for everybody listening here. But don’t be afraid of striving for greatness, your own personal greatness, because you’re afraid of how everyone’s going to be reacting to you around the lunch table or on the trading desk. You are effectively going to, and you kind of have to do this too, whether you
Like or not. You kind of have to kill off the old versions of yourself because the markets evolve and you’ll have to evolve your trading style. But if you have other types of goals in your personal life, you can keep ’em close to the vest. But don’t be afraid to endeavor to do them because there’s just a certain group of people who are going to be, not necessarily Schaden Freud, where they’re happy that you fail, but they themselves can become very comfortable in where you are in the group. And if you go and try to assert yourself and try to change or maybe become more of a leader, there are people who might have very, very strong reaction to that, even though you’re supposed to be on the same team. So this kind of stuff comes up when we have some very frank discussions at the team level.
When I work with groups or folks who are on a trading desk and how can you help your peer or the person sitting next to you? And I put this question out there, how can you help them be better than you? How can you help that person become the best person on the desk? Again, it goes back to think and grow rich and having abundance that’s at least one source of it. There’s there’s many, but because when you give of yourself, then you can expect to get some type of reciprocity. It might not necessarily come from the desk itself, but it’s going to come from somewhere, and that’s what you need to trust in. But be bold. This is your life, and we don’t have as much time on planet earth. We don’t have as much time together as we would hope. Life is very, very precious, and it’s remarkable.
Every year I learned something along these lines that we kind of live like we’re supposed to live forever, but oftentimes we don’t take the chances that we need to in life. I lost a good friend of mine who died tragically in Italy. He was a famous Jiro, and I’m not ready to talk about it now, but I will be in the future. You see that marvelous effect on me, not just on the mats, but just in life with his outlook and stuff. So I’ll leave it there, and I’ll be back tomorrow with some more. Thanks for being here, folks. I appreciate everybody. Love yourself, love your neighbors, and just do the best that you can. All right, I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Do I have a hum dinger for you today? So I was talking with a client who admittedly had gotten really comfortable, and this is something that happens in life and this happens also. If you look at any wirehouse, you walk into any financial advisory firm, I don’t want to mention any names, I really don’t. I’m not picking on anybody, but this is what happens. There’s growth in the first anywhere, 2, 3, 4, 5 years, and then they plateau out and they kind of service their book and there’s not a lot of growth and they get comfortable. They can pay their bills, they can raise their family, they can do that, but they don’t. They’ll take referrals, they’ll be attrition. Some will die, some will move. Maybe it’ll be because of bad service. It oftentimes isn’t because of bad results. It’s oftentimes because of bad service or double talk.
I know that community pretty well, but it’s gotten so bad that even if they’re going to the office, if you walk in the office and kind of take a stroll around just to get a tour, you’re going to see most folks sitting around watching tv. There are times of course, when they’re on the phone servicing their clients asking this and that, doing paperwork, but they farm that out. And so the decision makers are kind of coasting, and that’s a tough spot to be because you can’t really make any growth if you’re not doing the work. Now you can take that. This particular client is at a big hedge fund and they’re making good money. They have a big line of credit. They made a few good trades, actually a handful of trades that made 95% of the money, which is kind of how it works.
But with that, you can get used to making a certain amount of money and then being super comfortable because face it, I mean after you have one or two cars, a couple of houses, after a while you’re just kind of collecting toys. So then the question is, what’s the motivation? Well, I can’t really divulge into that here because I think I’d be betraying the trust. But the point is that it’s all relative. Whether you’re upper middle class, whether you’re upper class, whether you’re 1%, whether you’re the top one, 10th of 1%, you always need to have a goal. Once you start to what I have written down here, when you get comfortable doing nothing, taking action can invoke fear of failure. And if you’re making big money, seven, eight figures a year, what’s there to complain about? Life is good. So you just have to keep doing more of the same. The problem though, just like any endeavor, sooner or later, the style of clothes that you wear, your haircut, the shoes that you wear, the car that you drive, they’ll all go out of style. So you need to constantly evolve. Doesn’t mean you have to turn your trading rules upside down overnight, but you do have to maybe give the quality of money that you have in your world a different meaning. For
Me, when I started making money, it became important for me to want to give some away and help some of the things and the causes that mean a lot to me. So that was a big motivator to help me earn more because then I could give away more and have a bigger impact on the people that I cared for. And the things like I said that are important to me in my life, it also allowed me to peel off some time and work more efficiently in a Pareto efficiency kind of manner where I could get the same results for putting in less time. So anyway, be careful about plateauing and then standing still a lot of life to live. Even if you’ve made it and you’re making big money, you can still dream big dreams, dream bigger dreams. How do you get it so that maybe your name is on the front door?
How do you get it? What happened at Commodities Corporation? A lot of those guys broke off and started their own company. Bruce, I mean, Bruce Covner, one started Caxton I think in 83, and I’m almost certain he was Grubs staked to a degree from Commodities Corporation. He built his own company and then he evolved and he did a lot of things with the American Enterprise Institute. He may have been involved or at least aware of what’s going on at reason. I know Bill Dunn was big at reason. He played a big role at Julliard and in Lincoln Center as well, and he acquired very valuable artifacts in and around music and this and that. And then I’m pretty sure donated them or put them up somewhere. So you can continue to push into new strata, if you will, without being egomaniacal or greedy and serve the greater good you see.
And that will kind of propel you forward and keep you growing. It’ll also help ensure that you don’t let the world kind of catch up to where you are because it’s all about the pace of the race, right? The race is a marathon, but there’s also a pace to it. And what you don’t want to do is get used to coasting when someone’s behind you, when you have a two minute, if you run a 26 mile marathon and you have a two minute, three minute lead, there’s someone in the back who might want it more than you. So you don’t want to get lazy and start to procrastinate or get comfortable or too satiated with your reflection in the mirror and keep moving forward. Have a goal. It could be personal goal, could be a business goal. You can always evolve your goals to the next step. Paul Tudor Jones and Peter Boris founded Robinhood Foundation, which has given away over 2 billion over the course of its existence. And that’s quite something. And they show no signs of stopping their annual events and their programs are getting bigger and better every year. So you can just keep dreaming
Bigger dreams if you’re creative. If not, give me a call. I’ll help you process your feelings around that. But at the end of the day, remember that if you start to stagnate, the rest of the world’s going to catch up to the market is going to change. It will evolve. There’s no way around it. If you would’ve told me when I started where we were making so much money in commission dollars that one day commissions wouldn’t even exist like in the world we are now, for the most part, I would never have believed it. I didn’t have a vision for it. Luckily for everybody that evolved. So for the very, very active traders, that is no longer an issue. But don’t be afraid to dream big dreams because once you start to apply yourself, you never really know until you try. And the response from this person was, well, who the heck am I to even think about something like that? And I said, well, who the heck are you to not?
Where’s the judgment in there? Okay, to use your judgment, I think. But you can oftentimes hurt yourself if you try to be a judge. So you have to study in your life. Where do you see the difference between being a judge and using one’s judgment? Because you can carry limiting beliefs no matter what of the strata that you exist in. There’s always some other person who might be doing better or has a bigger name or has a bigger mouthpiece, but that doesn’t mean anything. It has nothing to do with you because you don’t have to compare yourself. You can just be the best version of yourself and dream the biggest dream. Carve it out. Maybe start a family office. Maybe start an art collection. There’s a whole bunch of stuff you can do. You can endow a school. You can look at estate planning using insurance to leave big gifts upon your death. That can put a lot of wind in the sails of smaller operations that could use a lot of help. There’s a million things that you can do. And along the lines of think and grow Rich, the more you give, the more you get. So think about it. If you need any help, reach out. I don’t kiss and tell. And other than that, I appreciate you all being here. Please like and subscribe and I’ll be here tomorrow with Ganja. Take care.

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Everybody, it’s Michael Martin, thanks for being here. Happy Monday. Hope you had a great trading week. A lot of volatility out there. So that might help some of you. It might hurt some of you, but either way, I hope you’re weathering it. I get a lot of great feedback from folks, and I just want to give a shout out to everybody who’s making comments and writing in it means a lot that some of it right, I can’t be perfect, but at least some of it might be resonating with you and helping you evolve in your trading game. So I want to talk today about trading and progress in your trading game. One of the expressions that you hear a lot around coaching is progress, not perfection. And folks seem to be like to be saying, get 1% every day. Well, again, at 1% every day, you’re going to more than double your money by the end of the year if you think about it. So if you can do that in your personal life, you’re cooking with gas. I mean, that’s incredible. Now, I started thinking about this. We talked about ganja and I talked about a question that had come in about a person who was trading, I think a micro contract for a year and hadn’t shown any progress. And so I think we answered that in this coming Wednesday’s video, which is already recorded.
And I started to think about it again, there’s two sides to every trade. So you might not show financial progress, but maybe you’re coming more to terms with who you are as a trader and what it is that you can do, right? I mean, you can’t make it any smaller if you’re trading a micro contract. But the main thing is, and I’m just looking at my notes, you can track how you feel like if you were in constant and utter fear when you started, but now at least you understand the dynamics of the market. It might be a little awkward to have made some emotional or maturity style progress but not financial progress. Well, that kind of kicks in because sometimes the stuff doesn’t work or evolve at the same time. You can learn things intellectually about the marketplace and how to trade trading tactics, trading chart patterns, this and that.
Trading systems. The list goes on of all the crap that’s out there, but you might be the hardest nut to crack yourself. In other words, how do you acquire self-knowledge? You see, that’s the tougher ball of wax, and that’s kind of why I focus on that part of it on the show because to be frank, anybody who’s looked at a chart for six months can record a video and put it on YouTube. It’s free. You can use your phone, doesn’t cost you anything but the time you put into it and give you their 2 cents on a chart. But what you have to understand that chart patterns are a lot like human beings. And there’s people that, they’re acquaintances, there’s some people that you’re friends with and you actually, and then there’s other people who you might have something more formal like a business relationship. You might have romantic relationship.
And then even in that dating, you might have folks that you like to spend time with or hook up with, but there’s varying degrees of chemistry. And so what I’ve been trying to educate everybody on is that those chart patterns and those setups have an emotional output as well that is either going to resonate with you or not. So we talk about that compatibility in people. We call it chemistry. So I think that you’ll end up having a relationship with that type of chart pattern of that setup. And so going back to the original question, progress not perfection. You might be a very, very loyal person who doesn’t like to quit. I’m one of them. I wouldn’t say I’m stubborn, but I know that my goal can be the same, but the way that I get there can change. So don’t be afraid to shake things up a little bit and try another instrument. You might be trying to guess the headlines every morning and pick a direction in one of the indices, which is really, really difficult to do.
Whereas I do advocate trying to understand what the crowd’s going to do, trying to understand that behavior within any short term aspect to me is very, very difficult even for the best of them. Now, there are a handful of traders that can do it and I applaud ’em, but I also know that the greatest number of people who fail are the ones who are trying to sit there and kind of hammer over their heads with these trading stock index futures, intraday, trying to catch the emotion of the day as opposed to what are the forces going on during the week. So just be kind to yourself and realize that as long as you’re making an attempt, you look, if you took you another year to answer the question, you still would’ve completed or gotten to a place of confidence and the ability to execute in half the time that in less than half the time that it took me.
So if you look at me as some kind of harbing or then by all means do it. I feel like everybody is as unique as their fingerprint, so there’s no one way to do it. But I just know that if you’re struggling and you’re not putting any points on the board, it might be time to shake things up a little bit. But also remember, the main takeaway from today’s discussion is that there are two ways to progress. There’s your emotional and psychological progress, and then there’s your tactical progress. I suppose there’s a third, which we can take tactical and talk about the analysis because if you’re running a system, you have to know enough to build the set of rules that are robust across any number of instruments. It could be five, it could be 60 futures contracts, it could be the 100 securities in the NASDAQ Index, for example. Or it could just be a
Basket that you’ve put together back test that make sure that you’ve included at least 10 years. And I’d be so bold as to say, make sure that you know what happened to those types of names in oh 7, 0 8 when the market was under duress. You see what I’m saying? Because that’ll be very telling on what you might face going forward. If you’re a chart reader, the same type of a deal, pick one or two chart patterns and just stick to one of them as opposed to trying to trade all 12 of them. Very confusing for the newer mind. It’s very difficult to build confidence if you’re all over the place. So kind of bifurcate what you think your progress is. Is it on you, the person, or is it on you? Your trading in the analysis system or discretionary stuff? And then tactically, because then you have to pull it off. And there might be nuances in how you create alpha when you look at how you actually deploy the trade, you see. Anyway, I appreciate everybody being here. Please like and subscribe to the channel. If you haven’t already gotten a copy of the audiobook version of my book, the Inner Voice of Trading, you can get that over at Martin Chronicle, top right corner of the page, and it’s all yours. Thanks for being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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