Everybody, it’s Michael Martin, happy Friday. How’s it going? Hope you’re doing well. So I know the volume on one of the mics was a little low on Wednesday’s episode, so we’ll get on that. We’ll fix it. Just growing pains, but we’re on top of it. Appreciate it. Today I want to talk about something that I live by and it does come up in both the mastermind and the group. I know I was going to tell you the differences, but I just don’t feel like doing that today. Maybe I’ll do, we’ll do it Wednesday with ganja or the week after. I want to stay on the theme of self-improvement and what you can do for free here, and it’s something that I say to myself, I don’t think I came up with it, but it’s something that I live by and the saying is progress, not perfection.
It’s true for everything in life, right? I mean, perfection’s hard to find. You might have the perfect trade, but you really wouldn’t know it until after the fact. You’re looking for the perfect partner, boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse. I don’t know that perfection actually exists. I think if you make a list of the 10 things that you’re looking for in a partner and you can find six or seven of them, you’re probably cooking with gas as they would say, but do what you think is best as far as trading is concerned. When I think of progress, not perfection, it’s along the lines of like, can I get half a percent better every day, right? Because what I hear from the emails is this sense of urgency that folks have to get there tomorrow and you rob yourself of enjoying the process of your growth because those haha moments are very, they’re very valuable to you.
They give you a lot of great insight, and I get emails from the students and the breakthroughs that they’re making are extraordinary and they’re changing their lives in very profound ways. So when I look at myself, even at my stage, I say, okay, how can I improve this one thing? Here’s something that I became aware of and I can do it better. I can improve it, take a shot at improving it. Maybe the first time it’s a strikeout, maybe the second time’s a strikeout, but I’m still in the solution. That’s the way I look at it. I’m still taking the chances, I’m still in the solution and I’m testing. I’m putting things together to kind of see what the results are. And two, if you’re going to make a test, very rarely are you going to get the results in one day that are going to satiate you.
If you’re doing and trading with live money and not back testing, say over 20 years of past data, sure, you can get that hypothetical spit out on the results screen and see how it would’ve done, but when you put the thing into practice, it’s a whole other ball of wax, and so you need much more data. So to think that you’re going to make improvement over the course of the week and you’re making gigantic leaps and bounds, I hope and pray that that’s the case for you, but it’s not typically how it goes. Yes, from time to time there’s a big light bulb that goes up and you’re like, oh, wow, I didn’t know that. All the route on the highways that go east to west end in a zero and the ones that go north and south have a five at the end. I never
Knew that. And it blows you away when you find it out, and so you’re like, wow, big aha moment. I hope you have those, but they’re few and far between. They require a lot of work, a lot of insight, a lot of personal work, a lot of experimentation, especially with real money. And so suppose you could improve your own account half a percent a day, what would that mean for you? How would you feel about it? Would you feel excited or is it me? It’s not big enough, right? I don’t think in terms of dollars, I don’t think you should either. I don’t care what instrument you’re trading, I just feel like thinking percentages, it’ll help alleviate, especially if you’re coming out of blue collar despair or a working class background and you have to deal with getting out of the idea of like, wow, you just lost 300 bucks or some nominal amount of money and then thinking of what that money could have bought, right?
You have to get out of that thinking, and one way that you can do that is to think in terms of percentages. Two, it allows you to be, if you get used to it, it’s not going to happen on day one, but if you think of your R, right, your risk unit as a percentage of your capital, call it one fourth or one half of 1% of your capital, then you don’t have to become married to any one particular trade. Now, I know that’s going to be hard for those of you who, yes, I sometimes make fun of who are trying to just trade stock index futures, and damn it, if you don’t find it in the daily chart, you’re going to downtime it until you find something that looks recognizable. I feel like that’s a mistake in you’re forcing the issue, but I feel like if you could grow your account by one fourth of 1% or even a half a percent, what we have about 250 trading days, and if you could grow one half of 1% over 250 trading days, you’re going to be up over a hundred percent by the end of the year.
So think about if you would apply that ethos to your lifestyle and what you’re doing in your personal growth as a human being. Yes, it can be related to the trading tactics, kind of where you make your money. You don’t need to memorize chart patterns, and again, I’m talking to the folks who are trying to learn how to have one setup that they can trade across many instruments as opposed to saying, I have 12 different trades that I’m going to try to find, and by God something’s going to work. I find that those folks are the ones who are pushing when they shouldn’t push, and it’s hard to make money when you’re pushing. Remember, I’m not the only one who’s ever said that in order to put on a trade, you have to have a definable trading edge. So if you’re pushing, there’s no edge there and your edge is not going to be in the chart pattern or knowing a chart pattern. It might be how you trade it, but that’s because you are the alpha. We’re going to talk about that
Another time, but I don’t like to see people pushing because they’re not in the natural flow of things. When you’re pushing, it’s like you have an emotional urgency that you need to fulfill, and then you’ll have the financial one. You want to get to a place where you understand that the emotional and the financial always go together, and you don’t want either one of those things to be tipping the scale and inducing you to have to put on a transaction. Again, that’s why I advocate look at trading one strategy, maybe two strategies across 60 different instruments because then you’ll have something where you can affect your edge. The probability of finding something over one particular over 60 different, the probability of you finding at least one or two out of 60 potential instruments that you’re following to me is greater than you trying to find, stick with one instrument and try to overlay 12 different trading strategies.
Ultimately, you are your trading strategy, and it’s very difficult to have that kind of split personality, especially if you’re at the beginning of your career. Again, I get the emails and I have the benefit of hindsight, but I also lived it. I also tried to go to Wall Street and be not a he-man, but I thought I could do everything everywhere all at once, and it doesn’t work. It didn’t work for me, and so I can only advocate what I’ve experienced in my own life and then studied in other people over the years, and that to me is the best way to do it is to take the growth slow and steady, one half of 1% every day and give yourself some space to be wrong. Give yourself some space to be a human being because there’s lots of pressures these days, lots of stuff going on.
There’s all kinds of political crap. There’s financial stuff, there’s gender politics, there’s just so much that can infiltrate your day, so give yourself a pat on the back for doing the work and kind of pulling it out, but be kind to yourself at the same time and realize that Rome wasn’t built in the day and you’re going to figure out exactly what you need to figure out as long as you’re taking the steps, you have to actually take the steps. You can’t ideate your way to financial freedom. You actually have to do it and then learn to be patient because sometimes it’s in the postmortem or it’s in the studying of your own behavior after the fact that you can learn something and see patterns in your own behavior. That’s where the gems are. That to me is where you can start to pan for the gold and start to uncover where your alpha might be, where your edge, your trading edge might be. It’s in looking at your own behavior because again, behavior predicts where you end up. So study your own behavior and then make the modifications if you can, and realize that we are emotional beings. Even if you’re purely systematic, you still have emotions running through your body. We can guarantee you if you’re trading a purely systematized set of rules and you’re down 20%, you got a lot of emotions running through your body, despite what folks would tell you the
Amateurs, you’re a human being first, which means you’re an emotional being, and that’s just the way it’s going to be. What you don’t want to do admittedly, is let your emotions affect your judgment. Your judgment affects your behavior, and you know what happens after that. And so you, you’ll have to calibrate your system to be very, very disciplined to stick to your rules, but that’s true whether you’re discretionary or if you’re systematic. I knew of guys coming up that are like, yeah, I’m going to be just like Ed Dakota. I’m going to trade systematized rules and this and that, and I said, okay, well be careful what you wish for because you’re still going to have a strong vein of emotions running through your body when you’re making a lot of money or if you’re in a big drawdown and what ends up happening or can happen anyway, is you get so psyched out that you don’t run the system the next day because you’re in a drawdown.
You’re afraid to lose more money, so you have the rules. They probably have positive expected value, but you still can get sidetracked. But anyway, I think all that notwithstanding, if you just think about growing a little bit every day, you’ll be surprised at the progress that you could make over bigger periods of time. Most folks, they want to get there tomorrow, and part of the discovery process is allowing for the time because that’s when the aha moments kick in and you really learn about yourself. Anyway, that’s all I want to talk about today is just think about little bits of progress each and every day. Be con to yourself because you’re probably doing a lot better in and around all of that stuff. You can’t see the fire sometimes when you’re standing on top of it, so just keep sticking it out, become insightful, increase your sense of self-awareness, and I think over the course of several months, you’ll start to see some growth.
I know that in not necessarily the Mastermind, we do more trading stuff, but in the group coaching, it’s a 12 week program, and by week three or four people are already starting to see big changes in things, so I know it’s absolutely possible. I know that you don’t need to be part of a group or a mastermind. Some people like to do it. I just know that I did it. It just took four and a half years, not 12 weeks. So it depends on how do you want to amplify your results? Do you want to use leverage, lever, your time and money to accelerate your learning curve? Anyway, I hope you have a great weekend. I hope if you’re in Florida and the southeast of America, you’re doing all right and I’ll be here next week. We’ll see Ganja on Wednesday. I hope you have a great weekend, and I’ll see you Monday.

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Everybody. Happy Thursday. Hope you’re doing well. I wanted to address a question that came in on Michael Martin show, episode number 25, how to win more Consistently. It looks to me that if most people ask for trading advice, they’re really asking for happiness advice, would you say to have found fulfillment in your career as a trader? Right? Then there’s, hang on, there’s some punctuation stuff here. The process itself, things like developing a trading plan routine, the execution preparation, the ever-changing markets and adaption to it. I’m currently asking myself if it’s really worth it, especially under the pressure of not making any money even after years. It’s very frustrating and hard to cope with, but I know there are only two choices giving up or keep on trying. Yeah, I mean, welcome to my world because every day that you wake up, the market has evolved. I have evolved. So you have two independent entities, the markets right, which could be you could interpret markets to be anything. There’s a market for an nvidia, there’s market for corn. Then there’s just the markets at large, right? When people say the markets, I think that’s what they’re referring to. But I do know people that just make a living trading a handful of things or one or two instruments.
I shouldn’t say this, but I’m going to, if you’re trying to day trade like any of the many other stock index futures, you should probably move away for that and expand. It’s the best way if you’re struggling and not making any money doing it to kind of immediately improve. You could also consider increasing trading smaller and increasing your holding period. There’s some psychological tricks that you can do as well, which I’ll get into at some point, but fulfillment doesn’t come from the money. Everyone who doesn’t have any money or isn’t at a place financially where they’re comfortable and want to grow their current income, their net worths, any of that stuff, it’s all legitimate, and I don’t think it’s greed. I think seeking abundance is good. The fulfillment comes from being able to execute a plan every day and sticking to one’s discipline. That’s what the addiction would be.
I guess if you were going to say that trading is gambling, it’s like you want to wake up and be somewhat present. You want to be willing to feel of your feelings, interpret them, understand them, listen to them, see what they’re trying to teach you, and despite your strong feelings that you have in your body, even if you’re a purely systematic trader, the goal is to follow your rules every day. That’s the process. All you can do is follow the process. You’re powerless over the results, which is the p and l part. Most people come and think they can steer their p and l, and they find out the hard way that they can’t. When I let go of that, because when you’re starting out, you hear a million different things from a million different people. You don’t know which to believe. You don’t know who’s telling you the truth.
It all might be true at the same time. That’s the thing is that everyone has their own truth, but it might not necessarily mean anything to you because it all comes down to behavior. Behavior predicts where you end up and if you can’t pull it off, if you can’t follow the same rules over and over and over again, you’re not going to get the results. If you’re all over the place, as I like to say, you get all over the place kind of results, and that’s hard to look back. So when I study my own behavior or I’m working with a client or two here and there, or even in the mastermind or the group coaching, a person has to learn how to be accountable to him or herself. You see what I mean? And if they don’t have good boundaries with their own behavior, it’s very hard that kind of leaks into other areas of their life.
I’m not saying it always does, but I haven’t seen people who were huge drinkers or overeaters or were chain smokers or people who lacked discipline in other areas of their lives come and make it over the long haul. Everyone can have their moment in the sun, but I haven’t seen people who have lasted as long as I have exhibiting that kind of behavior because sooner or later you think the rules don’t apply to you, and you start doing that and living those lifestyle choices inside your trading, and a couple of things happen. The luckiest thing that could happen at that point is you blow up and then you can go find something else to do because you don’t have any money left. You’ve lost all your confidence before you kind of blame it on the market or somebody else because the market did you wrong. Even though you’ve been exhibiting reckless behavior for a long period of time, I feel like if you want to develop the right type of mindset, you have to find the process with which you’re compatible and be able to stick with that in the face of uncertainty and the fact that your trading deals with probabilistic outcomes. That takes a certain type of temperament, right? People do stuff. They want to see, okay, if I put tab A, I want to see it fit in slide B and I need to have that emotional response.
But there’s so much uncertainty on things. I think people who live and come out of a world of accuracy, especially in student like academia, it’s very difficult for them to get used to, at least at the beginning, the aspect of trading and that it’s probabilistic. And there might be losing streaks, there might be drawdowns, and all of that is kind of probabilistic too, because you don’t know if you’ve had two losing trades in a row, you don’t know that it’s not going to be 10. It’s very difficult to know. And then what happens is you have the emotional response, which can give you any number of feelings. So all of that has to come and be part of your fulfillment process, which sounds weird because why do you want to be fulfilled feeling frustration? Well, it’s because if you want to get the results that expert traders get, they feel those feelings too, but they persist. They’re determined. They know intentions, equal results. They know they’re going to win. It’s just a matter of time, even when the world isn’t giving them evidence that they’re winning or that they’re going to win, they have to have that belief in themselves that no matter what happens, they’re going to come out ahead and reach their goal.
So that becomes a real test because most folks, I don’t want to say that it’s hard for anyone to really know in their life when they’re coming, when they’ve tested their metal, and trading can certainly be one of the first instances in life when you’re really going to have to see what you’re made of. And so as I like to say, you have results or you have excuses when people haven’t felt failure and had to persist through that, if they didn’t have to try out for a sports team and run the risk of getting cut, which is very public, if they hadn’t had to compete in some type of any aspect of life where the results were public or at least well known, it can be very challenging for them. And it can put you in a spot where you really never go for it because if you go for it, as I mentioned once, some people deliberately sabotage good trades because the outcome is predictable.
Whereas sitting on winners or taking risks home overnight deals with a certain level of emotional intelligence that’s necessary for the unpredictable aspect of taking trades home overnight or over the weekend, for example. And they’d rather no failure because it’s predictable than deal with the uncertainty. It doesn’t feel good in their bodies. They don’t like feeling like they’re not in control. So one of the best things that I ever did was surrender to that. I don’t necessarily need to be in control the way a shorter term trader would need control. Now, admittedly, in markets like this that are make it and take it markets, the people who are short term and have that skill or have that ability can do very, very well. Where I have lots of false starts because of my trading style and for the fact that there’s not a lot of follow through.
There’s these sharp moves, but I’m deliberately much smaller on my entry. I don’t put my optimum position size on all at once. So when people were catching short squeezes in Carvana, I wasn’t fully loaded as the markets moved too fast, we made money, we did that with Crocs. If you look at the Brian Shannon video, any of that stuff, but that’s life on life’s terms. I don’t get to sit in Bellyache because there are plenty of other trades where I got in with my position size and I got knocked out with small losses, paper cuts. So to wrap it up, I think fulfillment for me just means that I’m comfortable being me. I’m comfortable feeling all my feelings. I know that my feelings aren’t going to sabotage my trading and cause me to adjust my stops or get frustrated and trade bigger when I have no business doing so or doing all those things that most traders would consider pratfalls.
I did them in varying degrees when I was just starting out. And then you just learn that trying to do that doesn’t really pay and you have to go through it yourself. But again, at least I’m consistent. There is no course that’s going to teach you that it’s experiential. Another problem with trying to become a successful trader is that you can’t paper trade your way to financial freedom. You actually have to do it. So if you think you can kind of jump the gun or cut the corner or do something in a gray area or lose your discipline or adjust your stop lower or not put on a trade that you know should be in, you get to see the results of that after the fact, and then you can conjugate your behavior with how you feel about missing out or doing something that you know is not in your best interest.
So the fulfillment for me these days is more just saying I know who I am, which is the asset. Number one is personal knowledge, self-awareness, emotional intelligence, knowing what I can execute and sticking with that. And then yes, as necessary, making modifications. But I’m at a different stage than many of you, so I get to experiment and understand that it’s experimentation. I already have several things that I know how to do very, very well, and I wish all that for you too. But again, the best teacher is you actually doing it. There’s really no way around it. You can’t read it in a book and try to understand it intellectually. Anyway, folks, as always, I appreciate you. Thanks for all the comments and the emails, and I know a few of you have written it about the mastermind and the group, and what’s the difference in all of that. I’m like the world’s worst marketer. I’m not necessarily looking to grow that stuff because I don’t find that I don’t necessarily need the money. I like the group the way it is. If someone can join it and add to it, then that’s a good thing.
And so I’ll talk a little bit more about that tomorrow, but I don’t want to blather on about it because that doesn’t necessarily help those of you who are here for looking more for the self-awareness stuff around trading that we talk about all the time. But anyway, I appreciate y’all being here, and I’ll see you tomorrow. I.

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This is an automated transcript

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

This is an automated transcript

Hey everybody, happy Tuesday. Thanks for being here. I’ll have ganja on tomorrow. We have a really good episode planned and he’s really great. He’s making great strides in his own endeavors and we have big plans for the show here. I appreciate everyone and their feedback. I it’s really quite remarkable to build a community here and give back to the community I wanted to address. Alexander left a message or comment on how I embraced the uncertainty around trading earlier in my career, and he said something that I can identify with. He said, I learned from my trading that if I watch trading psychology videos more than once a week, I needed to cut my trading size in half. And that’s kind of the truth, right? In the minute that you start to feel like you have those feeling tones in your body about maybe you’re position sizing or you’re feeling a little bit antsy, that you want to cut your risk a little bit and deal with it that way.
I think the world in the universe can give you a little feedback mechanism that way as it relates to your trading too, in that you can develop a sixth sense on and a feel for the market. I know I have that market feel that for me at least, came with lots of iteration, a lot of practice, a lot of making mistakes, a lot of going through the trades. That way over time you can develop a feel for things again, just from experience, right? So when you look at NVIDIA’s earnings last week, they had all time numbers. I’m not going to go over the specifics here. You can go read ’em for yourself, but if you watched the technicals didn’t necessarily align with how good the fundamentals were and something was awry. If you watched the previous earnings announcement in May, I think it caught a lot of folks off guard.
I can only say that in retrospect. And the stop jumped what? 26% overnight and into that following day, and I think folks might’ve been hoping for something similar. They in fact reported really, really good numbers, but the response was kind of muted when you think about the price move itself. And so when the thing starts to move like that and it’s muted, even though dollar wise, it might mean a lot to all of you from a percentage standpoint, it wasn’t that big of a percent move, at least the way I think you might feel differently, which of course makes for good horse racing and the markets seem to weaken almost right away. And so that’s why you have to be careful when you’re trying to trade these events. You need to keep in mind, okay, well where’s my uncle point? And I don’t mean uncles where someone has you in a financial or emotional headlock and you have to throw in the towel.
It just means where does it make sense for you to remove the risk for the risk that you were willing to take to be in the trade in the first place you see? And so when you don’t again see the follow through, which is something that seems to be somewhat of a theme in this type of market environment, even the darlings that put up all time great numbers from an earnings standpoint and increased the forward-looking numbers as well, you still see the thing sell off. What it went from over 500 to four 50, so it had a 10% pullback on record numbers, which doesn’t make sense when you think about it. Why would that happen? How could that happen? Sometimes that’s the way the world works as far as trading is concerned, and I remember more than one of the guys that I know who are like you would consider market wizards because they either have that ability or they were in the book itself, would say you’re looking for a spot if you’re trading stocks anyway, because a lot harder to get fundamental information on futures.
For most of you, where the fundamentals and the technicals are aligned, they do matter. Fundamentals matter. It’s harder to learn. So if most folks don’t do it like, Hey, I’m just going to be a chart reader, which okay, it’s a good way to start, but that’s a lazy man’s way of doing it. So I think after a while you have to understand some basic fundamentals because to be frank, if you don’t, you’re at a disadvantage. You’re at a disadvantage. And so sooner or later you want to fill in whatever you would consider your weakest link is, do some work towards that. It’s not going to get solved overnight, and I don’t think you need to go get the C F A because none of it really helps you with prediction. It just helps you understand the world as we are in the ever evolving moment of right now, and that could help you make better decisions.
I don’t think it helps you make any prediction, right? Seven out of eight managers, mutual fund managers don’t outperform the benchmark s and p, and they absolutely all have CFAs. That’s kind of part of having the job. They might have MBAs as well. So none of that is really necessarily a benefit until you know how to turn it into a benefit, and that’s the rub. And that to me is experience. That’s why I’ve said the best coach for you, I think in learning how to trade isn’t buying somebody else’s course. It’s you actually putting on the trades and learning how to become you as a trader.
That’s the quickest way to do it. It’s also the cheapest. And so you could consider all the money that you would pay in tuition, and I know this, I’m talking on deaf, I’m speaking to deaf ears because many of you just want to buy your way out of it, or maybe you want to get a headstart. And for as far as I’m concerned, there’s lots of videos that are available for free on YouTube that can give you a heads up on how to approach certain things, but buying somebody else’s system or buying somebody else’s work to me is precarious because there’s no guarantee that just because those rules worked for other people that they’re going to work for you just the same way. You might’ve gone on a date with somebody who was really good looking and successful, but the date was a dud. Why?
Well, there’s no chemistry, and I’ve mentioned that before. I think. So ultimately, just like your trading rules, you need to have chemistry with them. They could be really good rules and other people can be smashing it and creating outsized gains as the marketers like to say. But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be that way for you, and you don’t want to have to find that the hard way after spending hundreds to maybe thousands of dollars to buy somebody’s technical trading rules. Again, I know people are going to do it anyway because curious, and I know from studying the marketing language on these pages, they’ll jack ’em up with trading results of other professional managers who have resources that you’ll never have. They’ll have educations that you’ll never have. Then the sites will also load up the testimonials, which may or may not be valuable, but it’s one of the reasons why we don’t really get into the how to or sell the trading setups because it’s like I have your money, and even if I could teach you 12 trading setups that I’ve used in the past six to 12 months, I could teach it off the top of my head, but you’d have to tell me in writing that you’re sending me this money with the full understanding that none of these rules might work for you because ultimately, if you don’t have it in your emotional constitution to pull them off, they could have positive expected value, but you might not have it in you to pull them off.
It requires a certain emotional constitution that either you don’t have now or you’re never going to be able to kind of grow into because it doesn’t feel good for you. And there’s no dollar amount that we can exchange between the two of us or value coming from my side and dollar value coming from your side that is going to allay any of those fears until you go and you do it. So you might not like it when I say, just go trade. And you’re like, Michael, how? And it’s like, I don’t care how, have an opinion about something. Be decisive. That’s what the best traders are doing. And if you can’t look in the world and see what other people are doing or what companies are successful, just by observation yourself, this might not be the right profession for you because ultimately there has to be a catalyst that’s going to make the stock move.
People need to want to buy it and own it and hold it, creating imbalances in the short run that lead to higher prices. But at any rate, I feel like we’re talking about trader psychology, so it’s all kind of related because I do get comments about does the online program have any actionable trading setups? One guy wrote and he said, do you have any actionable trading setups in the online program? And I said, no, I don’t because I’m not going to get into selling that stuff. I don’t want to develop that type of reputation where people send you a lot of money, and I am sure I could make millions, but to me, it doesn’t feel right if I know that the majority of the people who go buy that stuff, one might not even have the courage to try, which is funny, right? They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on something, but they’re afraid to engage. I can’t coach that person.
I think Richard Dennis or someone along those lines had said that they could publish the rules of their trading in the Wall Street Journal and no one would follow ’em. And that’s right. I believe that. And so where we do talk about trade setups would be more in the group coaching or the mastermind because we’re there and we’re able to talk about the feelings of, okay, why wouldn’t you be able to pull this off? People would say like, oh, this doesn’t make sense. And what they’re really saying is they might understand it intellectually, but they do not have the inner strength to trade this type of style. So then we can investigate that. But I’m there to help conjugate the verbs, so to speak. If you sell someone a box of crap or just do it online, the only thing that I can do with any integrity is help you become a better version of yourself because I know how to ask those questions.
And then if you don’t do the homework, well then it’s on you, but at least there’s integrity in the system, you see. So of course those are higher price point services in the mastermind or in the group coaching, but those folks have already passed the interview, so to speak. I like to speak with everyone beforehand just to make sure we’re on the right page and just to make sure that they understand what the heck it is they’re getting into because they say you have to manage expectations. Expectations have built in disappointments, and I do not want to, I don’t need the money. I don’t need the heartache, and I don’t need people asking me for stuff where like, Hey, can we just go over this ticker symbol because I don’t, that means they’re looking to already trade it. You know what I’m saying? When someone asks you a question like, Hey, I got a quick question on Dallas Semiconductor doesn’t exist anymore, don’t bother looking it up,
Can you just go do a little review on that one? And I’m like, just buy it. Don’t wait for me to try to talk you into it. You see what I’m saying? So no one’s ever going to ask you a question about a stock that they want to avoid. You know what I’m saying? They never send in those emails. Hey, I was wondering what you think of Nvidia or that new SPAC that came out from, what was it, better.com, that was off 95%. It’s a dollar 15. And I’m not saying buy it or short it, but people don’t write in emails when they’re not of stocks that they’re not interested in. And since most people are biased long, it’s like, what’s the point of writing in the email? You’re just going to listen for what you want to hear anyway. So that’s why if you’ve written in and I didn’t get back to those emails, it’s because I know human nature and I know you’re just looking for more evidence of the four or the pro argument of why you should get into it. All that notwithstanding, this is like the psychology behind what it is that I do and what I can’t afford to give back to the community given the time that I have. Most of it’s here for free on the show, and I definitely make time to do that in a Think and grow rich kind of way, and to help people learn how to stay accountable. One guy wrote in about accountability. It’s important.
Some people allow themselves to just make bad decisions and without any, there’s no punitive damages because in the end, they really don’t care. But at the end of the day, I feel like I’m not going to develop that kind of reputation for someone who’s selling a newsletter or a watch list or do market breakdown videos because I just don’t find that they’re all that valuable. And all you get are comments and questions and more follow-up stuff that just take up more time, and no one’s really taking any action on it because they’re in their will and they’re going to do what they want to do anyway. So I would much rather create more of a premium community like we have in both the Mastermind or the groups, which really is what, two hours a week or so of my week, maybe a little bit more.
I don’t really watch the clock, but at least I know I’m with like-minded people who are out there facing the failure. They’re embracing the uncertainty, and that’s a big difference. That means the world of difference, in fact, because when I went to Wall Street, you got to remember, I tried to do a lot of different trading. I tried all the different asset classes and all the different timeframes, and it was a disaster, right? None of it worked well, some of it worked, some of it gave me evidence that there was some success, and then I still had to pan for the gold and figure that all out. But at the end of the day, you need to engage, and that’s really on you. There’s nothing that I can do to help you hold your hand with all of that. I don’t want to start down that path and develop a group of people who pay me a lot of money for handholding. Accountability is one thing, but handholding is a different ball of wax, and I really don’t want to get into all of that. But at any rate, appreciate everyone commenting and writing in and subscribing to the show. And that’s all I have for you today. I’ll be here tomorrow with Ganja, will have a good show and I’ll see you then. Take care.

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This is an automated transcript

Everybody. Happy Monday. Hope you’re doing well. Heck of a week, right? You’re watching Nvidia. I’m sure everyone in the world’s been watching. I wanted to, I’ll talk about that at some part. This week I want to talk about, I’m a little bit behind in viewer comments on the YouTube channel, so I want to address a few of those. This one comes from name 3 1 3 9. That’s not someone’s real name. There’s no reason to use an alias. Folks, you can just use your real name. No one really caress. It says Sometimes I get small losses and I’m waiting for the big wins, but when I get a big win, I already got a lot of small losses, so then I’m breakeven account doesn’t get bigger, only treading water. So I mean, this is kind of how the market is for everybody, even the pros right now. So I don’t find that that’s terribly dissimilar from what other folks are experiencing.
It’s certainly very frustrating for me and my own sake. I tend to trade super small on my initial entries, so when there’s no follow through in this style of make it and take it market that we’re in, yeah, your p and l looks, it’s just kind of humming along there. But the key is, as you remember, is to play superior defense. And so as far as that’s concerned, if you’re not losing big chunks of cash, to me that’s a good thing because treading water in choppy markets, again, if you don’t have professional training, is really, really good. If you’re kind of a retail trader, do it yourselfer trade from home, that kind of thing. Give yourself a pat on the back because the goal here is to kind of sit and wait for the bigger moves and endure those market environments that aren’t really amenable to your trading, where your current trading is, right?
Because we’ll all evolve, but if you’re not losing a lot of money, that’s a good thing. I would also think about what your goal might be because there could be, the psychological side of it is that you might be taking your winners too quickly, and that is something that’s the dirty secret that no one likes to talk about because everyone wants to make it and take it when they can, but one day the markets will definitely change, and I saw it even in Nvidia too. A couple of folks reached out and they said they had made money coming into the report, but then they missed the whole next day, and that’s tough to miss those types of opportunities when you’re in the winning trade itself, of course, you don’t know what’s going to happen, so you have to live and embrace the uncertainty when you’re in the trade, which I think comes with experience. I don’t really listen to anybody or accept anyone else’s wisdom blindly because I’ve kind of had to learn the hard
Way that the best way to learn how to trade is to just do it yourself and then figure out what if it feels good for you, what can you get used to over time? What can you practice emotionally, right? That’s a big part of trading too, is the emotional practice that goes with it. If discipline equals freedom, that’s not going to come typically overnight. For newer traders, you may have extreme amounts of discipline in your life that you can borrow from, but just remember that in the beginning. If you’re struggling and you’re like, man, I’ve been doing this for six months, you really don’t have enough time, and I know that’s like you want immediate results. There might be other things if you’re on a diet or if you quit drinking or if you go to the gym in those types of endeavors, you can see results maybe perhaps much more quickly than you can if you were just trying to trade.
That’s the way it goes. Unfortunately, there might not be the types of results that you want within the timeframe that you hope to get them, so you have to kind of say it’s life on life’s terms. All you have to do is persist even in the face of not knowing what’s coming forward. But going back to the original question, it’s good to have small losses. The big wins will come. I’ve been in all different types of markets over 35 years, and we’re just in that type of market right now. There’s a lot of noise coming from the Fed, and people are afraid, and when they’re afraid, they typically don’t act in their own best interest. They make themselves feel good, and sometimes doing the right financial decision doesn’t actually feel good. Now, it is true. I know some traders who are on the shorter term, who are naturally kind of make it and take it type of people, and they’re thriving in this type of environment if you can catch the right events.
But in my experience, the right events are kind of all over the place, and those are like short squeezes earnings announcements, fading, opening reactions. It’s very difficult for a newer trader who doesn’t have any experience to come in and think they’re going to be a Swiss Army knife of trading skills. It takes months, if not years to develop sometimes just one skill. So you can’t compare yourself to the people who have five or 10 years of experience and who are making money in this market or the folks who just have a lot of natural ability. There are those people here too, and you need to support them and applaud them, and they’ll have their day in the sun and you’ll have yours. It might not come for a while, but you’re still entitled to it. As long as you do the work, those opportunities will come for you. So you just have to be persistent and determined. What I wouldn’t do is to try to trade bigger,
Because you want to let the move make the win, not your position size. And what I mean by that is I feel like as traders, we live and die by our position sizing. That’s where we make and lose our money, and so we don’t want to be in a position where I need to make more, therefore I need to trade up or scale up. The scaling up part should be very gradual, almost like one contract or 50 shares at a time or something like that. It should not be something that you do where you go from ones to fives and then or fives to twenties. It doesn’t work that way. Those are, it’s much too large of a jump in position sizing to try to trade that way. I’ll talk more about that perhaps in another episode, but at any rate, I appreciate everybody writing in and leaving comments. I’m going to catch up on a lot of these ganja, and I’ve been working on a few things, and so there’s just a lot happening behind the scenes.
There was another comment on, so that comment came in, if you want to go read it on Michael Martin show, episode 24, everything is going to change. And then there was a comment that just came in today from Stephen Morgan, 9, 5, 4 9 on your evolution as a trader. Take time episode. Do you have a Twitter handle? That way your listeners can repost you there. People can benefit from your page. Thank you, Steven. Appreciate it. I’m not a big Twitter guy and it might be surprising to hear, I don’t really want to engage with people on Twitter. I don’t like it really as an environment.
I’m mostly on listen only mode, and even then I have about 7,500 words that are blocked. I just don’t want to see other people’s bullshit, especially about politics come through my feed. So if there’s a member of the house or the Senate or in the White House, they’re blocked and their names are blocked. I just don’t want to hear anything about politics and people’s opinions about anything for the most part. And two, the YouTube channel is a community unto itself here that we’re kind of building. Obviously, it’s going to take time, but if there are comments or concerns or questions or this and that, I’d prefer it to happen here on the channel. This way we can all engage naturally here in the YouTube environment. I don’t really want to develop a Twitter following. I use it as I’ve mentioned, maybe on the even going as far back as the audio only version of the show, that it’s really there to help syndicate the episodes so that the folks who are more active on Twitter maybe can pick it up, but I’m not really there engaged in conversations on Reddit or Twitter or anything like that for a simple reason.
One, well, there’s two that are very closely related. One, I just don’t like the environment. I didn’t like it when, what’s his name with the funny looking beard ran it, and I don’t care for what Elon’s
Evolution is either. I just don’t like Twitter, and two, I don’t have the time. I don’t to sit around and have conversations with folks anytime I want to respond to something, I kind of do it for everyone’s benefit looking you all kind of in the eye on the camera and saying what I have to say and then leaving it that way. So for the time being, at least that’s going to be my ethos as it relates to responding to comments in this and that. I’d prefer to just do it and keep it within the environment where we all are and develop this as opposed to Twitter’s platform. But at any rate, folks, keep the comments coming. I appreciate your feedback on everything. I hope you’re all doing well. If you have any questions, you can reach out through the blog or you could leave something here. It’s better if you use your real name and I’ll see you all tomorrow. I.

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This is an automated transcript