Hey everybody. Happy Friday. Hope you had a great week and you have fun plans for the weekend. It’s all vacation time. So folks are kind of in and out. Markets typically get slower from a volume standpoint in July and August. So today I want to finish the week by talking about discipline. If you look at the four things that I’ve mentioned that a trader needs to, regardless of their asset class that they trade, regardless of the timeframe with which they trade it. Also regarding, regardless of the holding period in terms of discipline, you can really bifurcate that term and look at it from several perspectives because you need to have discipline in order to do your preparation, and you need to have prep discipline while you’re in the trade. And so that kind of functionality changes, right? Because the discipline is about preparation at the beginning so that you kind of have a game plan what you’re doing.
That takes a lot of time and sometimes, especially if you in a losing streaks, sometimes you feel like you’re doing all this stuff for nothing and that’s just part of the game. It’s one of the reasons too why people eventually just fold up and go home is because it requires a lot of time just on the preparation side. Nevermind on the trade execution side, once you’re in the trade, so I guess you need discipline to enter your orders. You put your orders in either on the screen or you call the trading desk. Either way is legit. Everyone has their process that they’re comfortable with, but that too takes discipline. You got to be up, you got to be alert, you got to read your orders in. Then once the trade’s on and you have risk on, you need to have the discipline to manage the trade.
And that typically, for me anyway, starts and ends with managing stops. That’s basically all I do is I know where I want to add risk. I know where I know I’m going to remove risk with what we call a protective stop. I don’t use stop loss. I don’t like using that word because if you say it enough, it’s what you get. You get what you think about. So I say protective stop. Also, if you buy something at 20 and it goes to 30 and your stop is at 28, why would you call it a stop loss when you’re making $8 on 20? So that’s, you’re up 40% on the trade, I guess you’re stop giving back the unrealized gains. So I just always say protective stop. You can use the language that you feel is best, but I put my consciousness to all of these things cause I think words have power.
And then as the markets move in my favor, I adjust my stops. If I’m long, I adjust, my stops higher. If I’m going to add, I have stops above so that they add more risk to things that are already working. I also have to adjust. If I get filled on a second, third, fourth, fifth, 10th risk unit, I have to obviously adjust the quantity because my philosophy is when the party’s over, everyone has to go. I might scale in, but I don’t scale out. I puke the whole thing out at once. That’s just my style. I probably give it, for
Some of you, I would give the thing more room than you might be comfortable with to kind of know for sure that the move is dead. That’s come from experience knowing that while I was in moves, if I cauterize the risk too soon, there was still room to go. I know how to analyze the different stages and the bases within the stages, so I’m comfortable with that. But that all takes discipline. So you need to kind of operationally define when you think about having discipline, there’s really different levels of discipline that you need throughout the life of a trade. There’s the discipline on the prep side because how good your prep is is going to oftentimes dictate do you miss trades? Do you miss ’em? Just straight out, not because you were there and you watched it and you didn’t have the guts to put the thing on for one reason or another, and I’ve been there.
I’m not judging you, I’m judging you. No, I’m, I’m not judging you. But ones that just aren’t even on your radar and the things up and you’re like, wow, that was kind of like my setup. That’s my kind of thing and I’m not in it. So look at your discipline across the entire lifestyle lifespan of a trade from the prep through the intrade management, adjusting your stops for example. I don’t like to enter on market for anything. And then what do you do on your post-mortem? Do you have the discipline to go back and review your trades and kind of see how did you handle it? How could you improve your behavior? Because behavior predicts where you end up. So I appreciate everyone being here. It’s been a holiday week, so it’s a little thin across the board. I would like to say though that these are the types of things that I thought about when I was starting out that meant the world of difference to me over time.
Because you have to remember, if it took me for something years to really hone my craft and it takes you a year, you’re still way ahead of where I was from a time constraint. Now I’m pretty successful guy. So you have to also be practical that unless you’re born with God-given skill and most people aren’t, you have an enormous amount of work to do and everyone’s talking about their winners and they’re survivors. But very few people will go on Twitter who are successful at say real estate sales and said, yeah, I worked for 5, 6, 7 years trying to make it as a trader and here’s my story because there’s nothing in it for them. The losers don’t show up, and I’m not saying that they’re losers as people, but they were losing traders for one reason or another. They don’t come back and tell their story. What are they going to do with it? Sell more real estate. Probably not. So you have to be careful who you’re listening to. Short term success is short term success. It doesn’t really speak to making it in the long run, in the short run. You have to be completely and very, very honest with yourself as to determine where your success is coming from. And I said, we’ll, we’ll speak ganja and I will do a lesson maybe next week about the episode
I did this time last week where I was saying, really look yourself in the eye and say, are you made cut out for this? Because there’s so much, so many answers that you want to, questions that you’re not going to find out until you actually do it. Meaning like you succeed and you can circle the wagons, and I wish there was a better answer for you. I wish it was academic where you could go study, be taught the principles of algebra, right? Then take the algebra and use it as a tool for calculus. But this is really experiential. You can learn all the academic stuff that you want, but until you try it on for size and see how it feels, it really doesn’t mean much intellectually. The intellectual value is very, very small. Yet that’s what people can sell you, right? We talked about that earlier this week I think on Monday was save your Money because you can probably try and take experimentation on any asset class in any timeframe and risk small bits of capital to see how it feels.
You’ll figure out the intellectual stuff after. I’ve always said, and I’m pretty sure it was in the book, if you don’t know who you are as a person, it doesn’t matter what you know because you’re not going to know what to do with it. You don’t know what makes you tick, and the industry has things bass backwards basically because they can’t sell you this, right? They can sell you my favorite advanced charting packages. They can sell you discords because they know the numbers. They’ve ab tested, they’re like, people pay 150 bucks a month for cable. They’ll pay 79 bucks for my discord.
There’s a whole game to it, you see? And when you start to be, I’m not saying be skeptical for the sake of being skeptical, but when you understand how marketing works and how this business is largely unregulated, there’s a whole industry of trading and it’s not about you making money. How can I separate you from your money? And I’m not talking about trading losses. It’s about subscriptions to papers. It’s about subscriptions to newsletters and discords, access to charting packages. The list goes on, and if there’s a clever language hook that they can use from a song that they can repeat, they can get you to feel that somehow you’re inadequate if you don’t have access to what they’re providing. Even though what they’re providing could be just raw data, which is data data’s data. It doesn’t mean that it’s valuable. It could be noise for all. And I know from God basically that I’m saving the world millions of dollars. I’m not spending it on all the bullshit that they don’t need. The best thing that you can do, and I’ll leave you with this, is to actually just try to do what you endeavor to do. Don’t worry about what it looks like. You’re going to feel like an idiot. I know because I do it all the time, but that’s what that feeling is when you know that you’re taking the right chances, because you can’t win if you don’t do it,
And thinking about it isn’t going to help you manifest it. You have to take the actions you see, and that’s true for the institutional folks that we consult to. That’s true for ourselves and the money that we are running. And it’s true for aspiring day traders. The best you can do is actually try it and do it, because that’s going to teach you more about the experience than reading about it or watching other people do it, which probably comes as no surprise to you that that’s true for in most things in life, what you fear, right? Probably isn’t as bad once you get there. So be bold because it’s your life, you know what I’m saying? Like carve it out of stone, carve it out, and manifest it exactly as the way that you want it, but you have to take action. Thinking about it isn’t going to help you. Any coach worth their salt is going to say that. Anyway, I, I’ll have more for you next week. Ganja will be here again Wednesday. Appreciate, please like and subscribe and click the little bell thingy. No, there’s no Lambos. You don’t need one and two, why would you have something like that with that would depreciate 50% within the first nine months? You want to lease assets like that, don’t buy ’em. Anyway, I appreciate y’all very much. Please keep the comments and everything coming and I’ll see you next week.

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Hey everybody. Happy Thursday. Hope you had a good Wednesday and you enjoyed yesterday’s episode with Ganja. So again, again, I want to come back to some of the comments, and that is what it is that you can control. You really can control your downside. That’s the key here, right? So you’re dealing with probabilistic outcomes where you know, have your entries and your exits and your position sizing so that sometimes you’re going to win, sometimes you’re going to lose, but at the end of the day, you have to take the thick with the thin. If you have positive expected value, you can, and you can figure out what you make on average per trade, even though more frequently than winning you lose. That should give you some type of solace in knowing what to expect going forward, because models don’t typically turn on a dime, for example.
Now, it’s interesting when you look at the personality types of people who manage risk in the markets from the ultra short term stuff, the intraday, the hold it for a couple of ticks, less than five minutes, I guess you could go to high frequency trading, but that’s more computer programming than trading to position traders who are inching their way into positions or they buy it and they try to hold it for several weeks, maybe even months. They want to let the market do the work and keep the power of the market working for them, putting the wind in the sails. And so what you can kind of do is start to categorize people by their willingness to hang onto risk, especially when you think about holding onto risk overnight or over the weekend. You see? So one of the things that I learned to do when stocks were trading in eighths, which was a long time ago, was read the tape.
And so that was very beneficial to kind of see how things were performing, where size was going through on the bid ask, but then also conjugate it with what day of the week, what time of the day, right? Because if you had things that were, we have eight or nine stocks that are driving the NASDAQ right now, and you can kind of see when those things sell off, how do they behave towards the end of the day? How do they open the next day? You can study that now, if you position size it right and you’re willing and you willing to deal with the uncertainty, you can increase your holding, holding period because for all the ups and downs, if you look back a month ago and see where the security was and where it is now, you could see everything that you didn’t capture, which is opportunity cost.
That’s what it cost you for being unwilling to take the risk home overnight or over the weekend. You see, and I’m not pointing any fingers, I’m just helping you try to understand who you are and how you behave or why do you think it’s okay to cut a winning trade off at the end of the day or on a Friday, for example, when that information can actually be very, very valuable in terms of where the, where’s the market, right? Because what I learned from my mentors, especially Michael Marcus, is what do you think the crowd’s thinking? What do you think the
Crowd’s feeling? Now, I know there’s a group of short term people out there who like to fade bullish moves. That’s not who I am. I always kind of was much more humble and can kind of said, I’m not going to outsmart the market if the market’s making new highs. I might look for a reversal to take profits, but I’m not going to try to guess tops, right? I’m not going to try to say all these other people are stupid and therefore I’m going to go against the grain. I mean, that to me is pure ego. If you watch and look at volume tells you a lot too, because institutions leave footprints. So I’ve talked to Brian Shannon about that, and you can go back and look at that video we did on his book, which is this one, the Anchored V Wap. I’m not plugging it, I’m just saying he’s a good friend of mine.
This is a good book. I think this also is kind of misunderstood. So were ketner channels and basically any indicator they’re kind of worthless. But I wanted you to kind of investigate how do you feel about uncertainty? Because you have a couple of uncertainty. You have the uncertainty of when you put on the trade, you have uncertainty of managing the trade, right? That’s the second first. You put the trade on. So you have the pre-market stuff that you’re doing, which could be the night before me, and figure out how willing are you to deal with that uncertainty in order to seek the reward that you want? Because the, when you talk about risk, what we’re really talking about is the financial risk. But again, there’s two parts to every trade. So we’re talking about the financial risk, but then also what is your willingness to deal with the uncertainty of the outcome?
That’s also on the emotional payout. And so I’ve just learned to embrace that risk because anything, the more I’m willing to feel all of my feelings, the likelihood that I feel the ones that I want becomes much more probable. Cause. I learned the hard way that the feelings that I wanted to feel oftentimes were on the other side of feelings that were very uncomfortable, uncomfortable for me early on in my career. And that came from, it didn’t matter necessarily that I didn’t know what I was doing because in the short run, so many things were random. So you could make and lose money and think that you’re good, bad, stupid or what have you, but that neither, none of those situations were really true. I was panning for gold trying to find where the opportunity was and where could I exhibit skill that only came from the experience of putting those trades on. You can’t get any trading instincts or intuition from a book or from a chat room or a discord or whatever they’re called anymore. I don’t know. The young people have the most ridiculous things going on these days. But I will say the marketers are clever because if you have a continuity product, which is what marketers call behind the scenes,
Their membership programs, their continuity programs, it creates an annuity income for them. So regardless of how they trade, they still have you paying every month, which may or may not benefit you. Some people just like the feeling of belonging to something. Some people like the feeling of being moderators in these chat groups, even though their trading is circling the toilet. But everyone goes through their own learning experience. I read books, which was interesting, but I can’t say that they helped me trade. What they did do was get me thinking about strategies that I could go deploy and put the risk on. And we didn’t have paper trading then, so I had to do it with real money. And so that was the moral of my story, was to just go out and do it. So I realized the world is very different now than it was when I started.
But at the same time, I feel like I have to have integrity and tell you my story. I don’t know what it would be like if there was a discord back in the late eighties, early nineties, if I would’ve done it or not, because I don’t even know how to compare it to anything that existed. There were conference calls, maybe party lines on the dial phone. There was a party line or a conference call perhaps, but for the most part, that didn’t exist. So I was exempt from needing to know all that, which again gave me limited paths. I could either think about trading or I could trade. And so coming back to the moral of the story here, the thing that you can control is your downside. But what I have found is the people who made the most money were the people who were most comfortable with the uncertainty, and they trusted that the su forces of supply and demand, especially in the commodity markets, were what were in control.
And that just like birds, birds fly south, trends persist. Birds fly south for the winter. When you live in the northeast, I don’t know what day they’re going, but I know they’re going. And so I think it’s a fallacy to think that the day traders make the most money. You can investigate that for yourself if you’re open-minded and you look and see, but again, you have to find something that works for you. In my experience, over 35 years, the people that make the or made and make the most money are the people who have risk. You can’t get paid if you don’t have risk. And having risk means you have to be comfortable with the uncertainty of the outcome. The outcomes are probabilistic, right? So no one could take away success, make a couple million dollars day trading. Swing trading, that’s for sure. But if that’s a lot of money to you, that’s great. Maybe once you get there, you’ll kind of come to understand that there are easier ways to make a lot of money as well. And a lot of it’s going to come down to how do you process your feelings around the uncertainty that trading involves. So that’s all I have for you today. Please like and subscribe, appreciate y’all being here, and I will be back. Let’s see when I’m back. I’ll be back again tomorrow. So thanks so much, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Hi guys. Welcome back to another weekly segment where Mike and I go over your guys’ comments and questions. Give our 2 cents on the topic and just see what’s kind of going on today. We had a really interesting episode, but before we go over that, I wanted to talk about making sure that you guys and subscribe. If you haven’t already, make sure you guys and subscribe. Click the notifications bell, all comments help the algorithm. We really appreciate the comments and it’s like a direct line to you guys and we love answering your comments and questions, so keep ’em coming. Today our topic is on mental toughness. It’s the subject that you kind of went over towards the end of last week’s episodes, and you know, and I have spoken about it a good amount and it’s kind of a big driving factor in what you and I do. So let’s talk about mental toughness. What do you think? Give me your thoughts,
Man. I don’t know. Mental toughness is just one of those things that triggers me. So
If you tell me your favorite song, I’ll tell you how it triggers me. So yeah, so I titled it in a way that people, they didn’t get it. It’s like the difference between stocks and commodities because on some level it’s not about the instrument, it’s about the person, right? Because the soybean futures or soybean futures, they don’t care whether you trade ’em or not any different than Nvidia stock. It’s all very not personal. And so you tend to gravitate towards the things that resonate with you as a human being. They feel good, right? We’re pleasure seekers, so, so there was a couple of things there. The difference between stocks and commodities was really talking about the differences in people, but it also had a lot to do When I started, I had to cut away foreign exchange, I had to cut away the options, and then eventually I had two asset classes where I was making money.
But I realized again, if I was looking at, in my recent history, if I didn’t make it as trader, I could go back to doing blue collar despair, working for an hourly wage effectively. And I have some really interesting stories about that on how I even used the calculus to make sure that I was making a hundred bucks an hour. Even back then in the late eighties, mid to late eighties, before I went to Wall Street, because I was an operator, I knew if I was going to work, I needed to make the most amount of money, of course, legally, but then when it came to trading, I knew that I had to do it. I didn’t want to circle the wagons and wait for the right moment. There’s never the right time to make big change. You just have to do it. It’s planning for having children.
There’s never the right time to start a family, right? Because you can overthink things all the time. And so that was the moral of the story is more about the mental toughness. I think that was lost. I might have chosen a better title, but for the longer time listeners or viewers, I think they probably would’ve picked up on that. And the reason it makes a lot of sense, the more we talk about it, and it’s one of the reasons why we don’t have an online store where you can just come by and buy a bunch of shit. It’s because I don’t believe most, the majority of people who I speak with or I hear about via email, I don’t believe they have the mental toughness. And it doesn’t come from reading a book about trading. It comes from your upbringing and your environment. You were a competitive athlete.
We met in jujitsu. So we have a million different side stories to all of this stuff. And it’s not to dig on anybody. It does. Trading is not a higher form of life. It is what it is. It’s no different than running a backhoe as far as I’m concerned. I don’t judge people by what they do. This was just my foray into more white collar business as opposed to what I had done growing up, which was all blue collar was labor, which I was good at it. I worked hard. I had a great work, work ethic. I was reliable. I was highly competent at what I did. But at the end of the day, for that moment in time, that was as good as it was going to get. I wasn’t going to be able to go to 2, 3, 400 unless per hour, unless I hired people and had crews and this and that.
And then that was really choosing that almost as a profession to build companies around that. And I really wanted to leave my milieu and challenge myself in ways that I didn’t even know. And that means I had to leave everything behind, move to New York City and start basically from scratch and use that kind of pressure cooker place to take me to the next level or give me a different environment so that I could appreciate the tools and skills and the upbringing that I had. And then see how to, there’s a French expression in Quebec. Anyway, new vo deis means like new challenges, but the same tools, right? Because I am who I am, but now I’m going to face new challenges in a different environment and I have to see what I’m made of. When I was a very competitive college, my teachers are very difficult.
I was living in the city, it was not inexpensive. And we talk about all this college debt. I mean, I don’t know who these people think they are that they can just go borrow money and be like, it was oppression because I had to make conscious decisions about borrowing money and saying, what can I afford to pay back? And then I had to pay that money back. And I told the story about having a week left of the month and I had $25 in my pocket. That’s not a joke. And I think it’s irresponsible to be forgiven, all that stuff because my being able to pay back that those debts helped shape me too. It gave me great character. I made decisions and I had to keep my word. We don’t want to raise a country full of SSEs. You make decisions and you have to be very conscious of those.
And I do believe as this relates to me, I deliberately picked a profession where I could make a lot of money for the work that I was willing to do. Remember, I’ve been painting and doing art since 14. I could have studied art or art history. One of my uncles was, is an interpreter at the United Nations. I could have studied Serbo Croatian or Mandarin or Russian or anything like that. But it was the income prospects for those jobs. The income was very low compared to what I would’ve owed on the debt. And I appreciate all of that stuff. That’s important. I do believe knowledge for knowledge sake, but I also believe that there had to be practicality, at least for me. So I look at things like gender studies, art history, foreign languages, they’re all super interesting stuff. And I’ve read books on it.
I got books on my bookshelf on all of that stuff because I find it interesting. I just don’t know how to turn that into money and be a productive member of society. And I think that’s what this generation, gen Z is kind of coming to understand, is that if you make decisions to borrow money, doesn’t matter if you’re paying 5%, 2% or 12%, there are consequences to that. And if you can’t afford it, then you can’t borrow the money. You might have to change, set your sights on a different school, go to junior college for a couple years, take some AP AP classes in high school and go about it that way. So I had to make all those decisions and I was very vocal about it On this show, I make no bones. I didn’t make always the best decisions. But ultimately those life experience is gave me mental toughness.
When you’re knocking on your friend’s door at when you’re 12 years old and you’re saying, I’ll cut your grass for money, you face rejection from people that they weren’t telling me to go forth and procreate with myself. They would if you were cold calling them. But there’s, there’s rejection. Yeah, I knew if I didn’t go do that, I wasn’t going to have the fat wad cash in my pocket at the end of the day or the end of the week. And I figured, okay, well I have to take the thick with the thin. I want to go to the feeling of having all that money in my pocket because that meant liberty for me. And so as it relates to the trading world, I talk with a lot of people and I go back to, there’s an expression, eat it means what Effort. Let me try to remember.
It’s an acronym. Eat, eat, E A T, effort, attitude, and toughness. So I see a lot of folks putting in the effort, I’m doing the work, doing this and that, but at the end of the day, I don’t think they have the mental toughness to go through what they need to go through. They’re not standing on very unsure of themselves. They don’t stand on onshore footing. And I think people pick up on that too. And how they speak, the words that they use, instead of saying stuff, I would say where I’m doing it, which is in the, bless you, it’s in the, is a future tense. But I’m in the process right now of figuring it out. You know what I mean? I’m in the process of failure. I’m culturing the pearl, I’m in the game. And so my impulsiveness served me when I was younger because I didn’t have time to sit and wait and kind of hone, ready, aim, aim, aim, aim. It’s like, dude shit, to get off the pot, get in the game. You have to invite failure right away. You have a million examples of that from being a competitive athlete, being a gamer. And let me ask you this. We did, we don’t prepare for this show. We look at the comments like 10 or five or 10 minutes before the show goes on. We look for themes and we go, there’s nothing scripted here. I’m going to put you on the spot and tell me I’m lying. We met in jujitsu. True or false?
True.
And would come, how frequently would you say that you came to class
Originally? Probably, I think I was doing two or three times a week originally when I first started out.
And then
Every day.
Then every day. And who did you see there every day?
You
Right now, when professor would show the technique, he’d say, high belt, low belt, five times each side. Ready? 1, 2, 3. We’d clap. Yeah, what would I do? I’d immediately turn to you and say, let’s train. I didn’t even know you. Right? Why do you think I did that?
Well, I don’t know. But you, you’ve always, you’ve talked about giving back to people because you’ve had people help you out when you were new and you know, kind of said a similar thing. You were like, yeah, I wanted to help you out. You seemed like a good dude. But that was big for me because I had no, I was uncomfortable originally. As everyone is in Juujitsu, you’re like a fish out of water. It’s super strange. But why did you
Mental toughness. I saw you come in and take your beatings just like I did. And you kept coming back. And that’s the weird thing about Juujitsu was that you’re going to get beat up, not beat up and feel bullied, but you don’t have any techniques. So you’re going to kind of get beat up. And that doesn’t feel good. But you know, lose when you don’t show up, when you stay home because you don’t want to feel those feelings. To me that’s, that’s losing behavior. I’d rather go to class and get smashed. And this Saturday that I went in, I was with Little Steve and who else? Little Steve’s a black belt. And he is not little, he is my size. It’s just that we have a big Steve who’s six foot 5, 2 25. And then we have Nurse Steve, who’s now retired. He was a trauma nurse at one of the major hospitals here.
He’s kind of traveling the world as he should. But little Steve’s a black belt. His brother’s a black belt. And in the six minutes, I got choked at least twice, but I’m not going to get better trying to go hard against newer white belts who don’t know anything. So I tend to always train with people who are better than me. Cause I’m trying to grow. And oh, then I went with Paul Paul’s at my level, he’s a competitive athlete. He’s done MMA does tournaments. He is very hard. He has a different game than I do. So it’s a big challenge for me, even though I’m probably a little heavier, but we’re the same belt level. But it takes a lot for me to kind of say, whoa, what the hell’s he doing? Because he does moves that are outside of my core strengths. So you have to invite that failure because it’s not, it kind of helps you.
They have the saying about forging stealing this and that so it doesn’t change regardless of your belt level. But going back to you Brandon, it was like, I saw your work ethic. I saw that you kept coming to class. I also noticed who you were training with. And I said, well, if he’s going to put in the effort, then I’m going to help him the way Crystal and Sidney and Cameron and Bob for sure help me. You guys are probably going to meet Bob sooner or later. He is a black belt too. We might be doing this show out of some space that he has and kind of build it out a little bit more. We’re going to see how that works out. But it was because of the mental toughness, because I just feel, it’s like I’m willing to put everything, all those little tricks of the trade about grabbing the collar here or grabbing it higher behind the ear. You remember, there’s all those little nuances, which really makes for the technique. Then you got to learn to put your weight into the guy. Yeah, really, if you’re not putting your weight into the guy, and if you don’t have a base, you’re not doing, doing some kind of yoga looking thing in Agh. So Zumba, zumba’s, great.
So that’s a real life example of how, okay, I saw this guy coming to class and he’s showing up and he’s, that means he has a good attitude. You have to have a good attitude. Then you have to have the discipline. You take your beatings and you come back the next day. And that’s how it goes. There’s no easy path. There’s no easy path. And so when I speak with people, I thought it might make sense again, cause I’m not selling anything. If I was into selling things and creating revenue, I’d be like, sure man, go for it. This program’s really going to help you, this, that, and the other thing. But the truth is at least I can go to sleep with myself because I don’t know, if you don’t have the mental toughness, you can’t buy it in a box of stuff. It doesn’t show up there.
It’s not going to show up. In Brian Shannon’s book, and I had Brian on the show, it’s not going to show up in market wizards, somebody else’s mental toughness shows up there, but not yours. So you can identify with it all you want, but until you start to exhibit that in your own behavior to me, you have nothing. Yeah, you’re a trading enthusiast. And I don’t mean to sound that way because some of you are like, who are you to call me a trading enthusiast? I’m calling you a trading enthusiast. Because if you are sitting around trying to circle the wagons for four years and you’re not pulling the trigger, you’re not a trader. Traders trade trading enthusiasts joined Discords and they read books and they know about the trading community and this and that. But my impulsiveness served me well because I had no choice.
There wasn’t a choice, I had no choice. I had to engage, I had to jump in head first and take my beatings. And that’s how you learn your craft. And if you have any trepidation about that and that kind of goes on and on and on, you’re not going to make it as a trader. So I figure I owe it to everybody to help them save the money and the time. Because you don’t want to spend five hours in that mindset thinking that you can buy your way intellectually through buying shit online. And that’s going to give you mental toughness. It’s not save the time, save the money, and go find something that you’re really suitable for you. Right. Yeah. So I’m doing everybody a favor.
Yeah, no, for sure. And it’s funny, just to address something on, I have a couple of things I wanted to say, but one of them is I wasn’t originally always a very mentally tough kid. I grew up in some interesting circumstances, but I didn’t really develop that, that cutting edge toughness until I got a little bit older. And when I started getting into sports, I always had toughness from a psychological perspective. But when it came to sports and putting effort in, I wasn’t always there. I was very fortunate to be able to train with the former N F L guy when I was really young. Chris Thomas, he was fantastic. He did a lot of work with me and really taught me what it meant to be an athlete. And as I got older, I really, wait a minute down,
Chris Thomas, he was a wide receiver in the N F L. Yeah, I know him very well actually.
Yeah, he, so he trained me a lot as a kid. He had a program when I was younger. My dad did his website and
My oldest son graduated with his son. Yeah, they were. And he’s he right by the Mets. He got drafted by the Mets. Yeah.
Yeah.
So I know Chris Thomas very well. Good guy.
Yeah, he’s a fantastic guy. And really, like I said, he really taught me what it meant to be an athlete and gave me a lot of fantastic lessons about being mentally tough and how to overcome difficulties. And so as I got older and started getting into my own sports and applying that myself, I found a lot of roadblocks with toughness. And I noticed that I would crumble under a certain level of pressure. And you know, talk about the pressure cooker atmosphere of New York. And it’s funny you mentioned that because I found that the most I ever improved in my life was when I threw myself in the pressure cooker and really just turned into a diamond.
Some of my best moments ever in my athletic careers, whatever. It’s all from putting myself in the pressure cooker when I made the first step from advancing as a cyclist, from an enthusiast to a professional. So people who are out there listening to this, maybe they’re an enthusiast and they want to be a professional, you can make that transition, but it’s about putting yourself in the pressure cooker. And for me, my experience in that in cycling was I had a friend who was on the varsity team and I wasn’t yet on the varsity team, and he was nice to me and he was like, oh, come hang out with the varsity guys. And I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know what hangout with the varsity guys meant. But what it really meant was, Hey, you’re training with us before the race. You’re going to be eating the same stuff we’re eating.
You’re going to be doing all the same stuff we do. And that was sort of my induction into that whole world. They were like, Hey, welcome to the crew. And so they started torturing me because they really wanted me to do well. The varsity coach took me under his wing and he was like, he’s a fantastic guy, but he really put me through my paces a lot because he’s like, you’re hanging out with the varsity guys, you think you’re tough Shit, let’s find out buddy. And that pressure cooker atmosphere was really where I made huge improvements in everything. And it was really a test on my mental toughness. And there were times where when I was training with these guys and doing a hundred mile ride on a Saturday morning, having to wake up at four o’clock and go to Ojai and back, I felt like I was going to die.
When you do your first century ride, your first a hundred mile ride, you feel like you’re going to die. And it’s not even good. It’s not even a good ride either. Oh my God, no, it’s terrible. And the amount of times I thought I was getting hit by a car, and dude, it’s terrifying. So what was really funny is when we got to legs are tired, your brain starts getting all loopy, you’re not really sure where you’re at. And then there’s like, you know, still have another 50 miles to go. You’re at the halfway, you come back, you got to come home. And coming back for me was the easier part because I’m a flat guy rider, I’m a big power dude. And we don’t climb so well because we’re bigger, but it was supposed to be the easier part. But I felt like my life was melting every substance, everything, every texture, it just bothered me.
I don’t know what it was. Like I, I’d touch my handlebars and be like, this is horrible. I just want to go to bed. And just, everything was awful. But once I got back, I did something I never did before and I went to Chick-Fil-A allergic to chicken, just so people know I’m allergic to poultry, every kind of bird. And I went to Chick-fil-A and I spent $45 on Chick-fil-A. I ate it all. And I passed out for, I don’t know, I think 14 hours. But the moral of that is when I woke up the next day, I felt fantastic because I was like, man, I just put myself through hell. That was incredible. The things that you can do to yourself and the mental toughness you can forge, you can make that stuff. It’s just about where you do it and the fact that you have to put yourself in there. You can’t just say, well aim, aim, aim, aim. Okay, maybe shoot.
Well that says a lot about you too because you have to be likable in order for the other older guys to bring you under their wing. They have to be like they see promise in you have to be projectable. I had a similar experience. I started ice skating when I was three and a half years old, almost four. So by the time I got to be 7, 8, 9, 10, I was a really good skate. So much so that I became center iceman. By the time I got to high school, I was really, well, I had played club, so I played on the varsity team as well as a freshman. And dude, I was getting my ass kicked by my own teammates. And the team played slightly above 500, but nothing to really write home about that first year. Whereas the freshmen and JV teams did very, very well.
And I remember saying to myself, wow, my peer group, in terms of age, they were having so much fun. But no one really cares what you do in freshmen, right? It’s kind of like minor league stuff in some level. It’s good, it’s good for mental toughness, it’s good for discipline and you can attain some skills. But I guess the coach had seen something in me and wanted eventually to have me be, so I was the fourth line center as a freshman, these, and there’s a big difference between an 18 year old who’s fully developed. I was started shaving when I was in eighth grade, so I was very athletic and mature as far as males are concerned. But I didn’t have the four years of growth to come into my body physically. So trying to clear the slot as a 14 year old was kind of hilarious to watch me kind of do it.
I was kind of like a little fly flying around other people’s head trying to clear the slot on defense. And I can remember not necessarily crying, but being like, this is not fun anymore. I used to skate and I could skate really fast. I was good. I had good eye hand coordination. So I was pretty good at taking face-offs, but I just didn’t have the physical stature and I was getting smashed. I’d go into the corner to find loose pucks, boom, didn’t matter whether the guy was a winger center, a defenseman. I was getting crushed and that didn’t feel good. I could remember saying, we’re going to have a competition now. Everything matters. I had a good mental game. I knew how to play positional hockey. So that saved me in many ways as knowing one, the rules. But it also helped shape me. Just in my trading, you find that there’s little fractals in life where they start to repeat themselves.
I realized that being in the game and playing at that level meant so much more for me developing as a player later. I had years where I was M V P, I was captain of the team by the time I was a junior. So that was very meaningful for me at the end. But I can sure share with you at the beginning, there was nothing fun about it really. Also, I was a good student cause I didn’t want to stay in my hometown. Nothing against my hometown. People are amazing. Salt of the earth. I’m just thinking from economic opportunity. I knew I had to go and travel and so I was trying to be a good student. So there were times where my God, I can remember junior year we’d have football season in the fall practice right after school. I’d get home by six.
Hockey practice would be eight o’clock at night. So I’d have to choke down some food, shower, get cleaned up, do as much homework as I possibly could, go to hockey practice from eight to 10, then come home, shower again and try to get more homework. Usually falling asleep with the lights on and my face in the book to get up. Maybe even having to finish some things early in the morning. First period started at seven 30. So luckily I had money because for all my working, I could afford a car. So I would drive myself to school. There’s student parking lot so I could always get there just in the nick of time where everybody else was kind of getting there from the bus system at seven. It really, that really, like you said, making diamonds, all that pressure helped me develop character. And I got to see and live the full experience.
So I had this me memory as I was going through high school, going through college, knowing that I put a lot of work into things and that I had a model for success and that if I didn’t worry about today and I just kept saying, okay, all I have to do this Monday. And then if I did it Monday, I’d just have to repeat it Tuesday. And then if I did that through Friday, I’d have a whole week behind me. I didn’t care about the results. I had to measure myself on effort at first. And in order to do that, I had to have a really good attitude.
And what I didn’t know at the time was that it was really forging the game of mental toughness. I had a lot of grit. My parents had grit. They were depression era kids. So we had that work ethic. You add that all up so that by the time I get to Wall Street, I know what the model looks like. I’m a 14 year old kid who’s on varsity hockey. I’m getting my head kicked in, but I know if I quit, that’s when I lose. If I don’t engage and use the gifts that God’s given me, that’s when I’m a loser. And I can say that about myself. So then I persisted through all of that stuff. But that’s why when people say you need to be disciplined, you need to have a good attitude first. If you don’t have a good attitude, that’s when you give yourself permission to be a loser and to quit because it’s not going to be fun.
And trading at the beginning isn’t going to be fun either because you don’t know what you’re doing. Well Mike, I study a class then and figure it all out. No, because that’s not going to give you the mental toughness. You have to be forged in the battle of it all. That’s why I say buy one, share risk, $10 because the, it’s not in the beginning, it’s not about the money. And if you played freshman sports and then you went to jv, then you went to varsity, no one really puts up the banners for all the freshmen team wins. No one cares. So that’s kind of scrimmage. And even though you have a regular season, it’s very much like a scrimmage. Yeah, it’s really for your development. It’s developmental hockey. It’s developmental football.
Yeah. And you mentioned that and it’s like you can’t see yourself at that level. We talked about it just before this. Cause I told you about one of the scrims that I just had or scrimmage. And it was like, if I did that when I first started trying to play the game again professionally playing valor professionally, if I joined that scrim that I had yesterday, when I started playing, it would’ve meant nothing to me. But it was an education. What I learned last night was a legitimate education. I got to play against some very, very high level players last night who were contracted by one of the biggest organizations in the world. And it was an education on just the way the mental games. And if I had done that when I first started, without throwing myself into the fire and without trying to learn the game myself, I would’ve learned nothing. I would’ve learned literally nothing. But cause I had that baseline, I learned,
I understand. I don’t mean to cut you off. Are they mostly guys in this?
Yeah, it’s mostly guys that there is a female scene. I’m actually a coach for a female team. But yeah, it’s mostly guys.
Okay. Yeah. So when I look back, I don’t speak enough about it because, well I do, actually that’s a mistake. Lemme take that back. The show that we do and the episodes that I do that kind of bookend the two before Ganja and the two after. So there’s life, he’s the Alpha and the Omega, because the before and the after ganja, the show really speaks to the emotional intelligence of it all. And the trader psychology, which really is about the mental toughness in that we know trading puts you in a fight or flight mechanism. And because of what millions of years of evolution, survival of the fittest, it’s a very unnatural process to put yourself deliberately into some type of danger. So it shouldn’t come as a big shock to you that it could freak you out. When you put risk on deliberately, it takes a special type of mindset.
Now we can’t box that up and sell it to you in a flagship program or in a how to penny stock or how to swing trade or how to position trade. So that’s, but people are so used to buying solutions. If I have a flat tire shit, I just got to fix a flat. I know it’s not optimal, but it’ll get the ship back to the port, right? Then I could change the tire. I got a clog in my sink. I can use liquid draino. I know that’s also not a good solution, but we’re used to trying to buy solutions, you see? And so my whole thing is I don’t want to be in that consumerism. And for all the books that I read, it was certainly interesting, but very little of it shaped me and my trading. I can’t, in fact, you know, got to remember.
So there was Market Wizards and there was Jack Sch Swagger’s Complete Guide to Futures, which then there was the futures game, who Wins, who loses In Wild By Tools and Jones. And that was the crown jewel of the books. If you were into equities, you had the Edwards and McGee. I have over here, Edwards and McGee, I think I’ve showed this one. This is one that even Victorio had technical analysis of stock trends by Robert Edwards and John McGee. Then we had, this actually was Michael Marcus’s favorite book, how to Make Money in Commodities by Chester Keltner Che Guy from Ke Ketner channels. So I read those because I wanted to kind of see, okay, well what inflection point did they bring in to the folks that were big figures and our big figures in my life? But there was very little takeaway in terms of the practical aspects of it.
When you’re thinking about having sex with your girlfriend, did you go buy a book on how to have sex or did you just jump in the sack? So I don’t know why people make this intellectual when it’s all experiential for the most part. You see what I mean? Yeah. I dunno why people are so afraid to fail. Cause I want to invite that failure. So that’s why when I go to class, I go to train with black belts, I go to train with Rodrigo, right? He’s fifth degree black belt. I know I’m never going to win. It’s never, I’m never going to win. But it puts me where in into a spot where I have to be sharp. I have to learn how to not make mistakes. So again, that was the reason one of I got, was to develop my, keep me humble again.
I have a high degree of success in my profession. I’m pretty well known person. I’m out there in the public eye. I get to exercise my discipline muscle from another angle. And so how do you get mental toughness? That’s a tricky question, right? I, I think it’s a personality type on some level. I don’t know the literature on it because I’m, again, I think if you need a psychologist, if you need to talk to Wendy from billions, unless you’re already making that kind of money and there are bigger business decisions, if you’re a rookie starting out, there’s probably better things to do with your time. This should not give you the type of duress where you need some kind of psychological diagnosis. So that’s why we are very, very effective because I don’t care what the archetype is. Yeah, we could just give you the solution. So one of the things that you can do is take a look in your life was where did you have to exhibit mental toughness in other areas of your life? Can you remember what that felt like? What steps did you have to take? So last night you were playing against a pro athlete who you knew had a great reputation, didn’t all of a sudden feign illness and say, I got to get off the call guys going to have to go, I’m not going to be able to hang here.
It was the opposite actually.
And then what’d you find out when you watched this guy play?
Well, when I watched him play, I fell victim to a couple of traps. It, it’s kind of chest in the sense that positionally, you can have really, really good spots that are really hard to do anything about. And this guy would just put himself in these spots and it’s not like, oh, just stay in this spot on the map every time and it works. It’s like he would know where I was. He would read me 15 steps ahead. He would know exactly where I was, and he would position himself to be in the perfect counter to where I was at. I mean, this guy was so good and it wasn’t even that I wasn’t capable of rising up to that level. I mean, I’d been playing three hours before and I was kind of tired. And so I didn’t realize that if I just reset and stopped getting focused on, damn, how did he do that? I could have done better. But still this guy had mind blowing positional awareness. He was call, he’s the in-game leader. So he was calling strategies for the other team. He was insanely good. And I was very surprised.
And that brings up a good point. I had, the hockey coach that I had was an amazing human being because he didn’t, he never let me off the hook. And he put me into challenging situations so that I was always seemed to be matched up against the same guys. And they weren’t bullies, they just played their game. And they’re like, this is how it works and this is what we had to go through. And he said something to me, I later looked it up. It, it’s a quote by, I just want to get the guy’s name right?
We don’t rise to the level of our expectations. You fall to the level of your training. And I was like, damn, that’s some deep, deep shit right there. Because people are like, dude, yeah man, I’m going to be all Goggins and just stay hard motherfucker. And that’s all great for rah R and going on Twitter, the guys who quote market wizards, you don’t win or lose. Everyone gets what they want from the market, that’s great. But have you lived it, right? Yeah. Because otherwise it’s this way. You flacid, right? Yeah. You have to be in the game to actually know what that means. You have to actually do it to understand. So that’s one of the funny things about, you can tell who’s the trading enthusiast is. They’re the ones who are quoting all the proverbial stuff on Twitter being helpful. I’m going to moderate, moderate my community, which is great, but that’s beta mail shit.
You have to be in the game. You have to go right for the brawl. This is a bare knuckle, bare, bare knuckle brawl. Not with you against the opponent. It’s you against yourself. And if you want to give yourself permission to not engage, that’s great. But the reality is, is that you’re not a trader. You’re a trading enthusiast. And there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just that you’re never going to make trading kind of returns. You’re always going to be around the periphery. So I love that quote because that man, this teacher was amazing. And I’ll never forget when he said it because what do I know about Greek philosophies and stoic stoicism, right? Too, if you study stoicism, you can’t just read Mark Marcus Aurelius or Seneca and be like, oh yeah, of course I got it now I’m going to practice it next week.
You start to have to practice it. But it takes years to kind of get there. You can’t just become a stoic overnight because you read Ryan Holiday’s book or whatever. That’s great, I appreciate it. Good book and everything, but you have to live it. Anything in life to get really, really good. And the thing was, the thing that I meditate on, and I still do it to this day, is where it talks to be, you rise to the levels of expectations. I learned the hard way that expectations have built in disappointments. And I started to think about this on a very deep level. And I really do it several times a month. Okay? Expectations have built in disappointments. We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall back to the level of training. So we have to keep training. There’s never a time when you’re not training for your mental acuity, your mental toughness, and for all the stuff that you do with the aiming and the mouse stuff.
And to prepare for your scrims and this and that. You still make your money in the competitions. You see what I’m saying? So no one is exempt. It doesn’t really matter what you do. You have to engage, you have to be in. So I say, okay, well what’s my training? Cause I’ve been through every, I’ve stayed with that mental model of always putting myself in difficult situations to see what I’m made of, to see how I’m going to respond emotionally. Cause I don’t want to ever go on tilt. I don’t want to ever get angry and harm myself by doing something stupid. And I don’t really do that. That was never my model. But it’s never too late to start.
No, and that’s a good point is, you know, can just get triggered. Being triggered is a real thing. It is actually. But it’s not in the same way that everyone recognizes it. It’s different for each person. So for me, if I, my, I don’t really have triggering where I get so angry, I just have a thing where it’ll happen and I’ll be like hyper fixated on it. Cause I want to fix it. And a lot of people will have that too. And they just don’t necessarily realize it. And that’s like kind of like what you just said, it’s never too late to start, you know, could just have something happen. You fixate on it a little too long, it becomes psychological imprinting. And then, you know, end up having an issue where it’s like, damn, I can’t move past that barrier because I created it myself.
And then eventually you can develop anger with that. You can develop all sorts of feelings, whether it’s sadness or depression or whatever. And it’s just about being able to move beyond that. And I think, you know, said something earlier about, yeah, you’re not sure on the literature of building mental toughness. I know the literature on it. And I’ll tell you what, it’s not different from my personal experience. I was in the medical industry for quite a while, so I have a good amount of understanding on this stuff. And I read a lot on this mental toughness thing because I believe psych, I believe in psychology. I think it’s a really useful tool to use to improve your own outcomes. But for me, when I was putting myself in the pressure cooker, taking ice bath, it didn’t matter what I was doing, cycling, eSports, all this stuff, it was the same thing.
I was doing the same stuff. I was waking up early, training hard, really hard, digging myself a deep hole and just throwing myself into it. And I was taking ice baths, I was doing this sauna, I was doing all this stuff every day just to build that toughness and build that routine. And then eventually everything else didn’t seem that bad. You know, get into an ice bath for five minutes, you’re in freezing cold water, you feel like you’re going to die. Every primal urge is telling you, get out, get out. And you’re saying, no, bro, I’m doing what I want to do. All of that stuff, telling recon, convincing yourself that you’re in control, not your primal urges. That’s all you need to know. Just do that. Do the ice bath, rewire your dopaminergic habits. It’s like, it’s all of that stuff. Putting yourself into discomfort and eventually those high level stressors that you see now, whether it’s your boss or work or whatever, they’re not going to seem that bad.
True enough. True enough. So let’s talk about getting the feedback. So the feedback mechanism is you go to class on the weekend before 4th of July holiday, everybody’s out of town4th of July was this week. So a lot of folks are out of town. So go to class last weekend on Saturday, our gym is open Monday through Saturday. I go every day Sunday it’s closed. You can still go in and train. I need a day of rest for my body just to give it a day off. And so you go into that class on that Saturday before 4th of July, and who’s there? It’s the lifers. It’s the class full of black belts. There’s no easy role. And so you’re like, oh man, it would’ve been so easy to just go to the beach, go for a hike, go do insert X, Y, Z here. So you force yourself to go and you realize a lot of things in life when you put yourself into that environment, it’s not like you’re going to lose.
I’d rather go to the mats and get beat up and go, oh for three, oh for four, oh for five, whatever it turns out to be for that particular day than to not engage, than to not show up. You see what I’m saying? Because at least going and losing, I learned something about myself and I’ll be completely humble and frank, I rolled with Steve again, who’s phenomenal. He’s as good a guard player as we have. He got me first with a choke that he’s gotten me with about a million other times. And I can see it coming on some level, but I can’t stop it. And so yes, it’s frustrating. I have to get better. I have, I’m very technically proficient, but some people are just always going to be better than you. We have the same teacher and we train. He doesn’t come every day, but he comes enough that it’s going to be super hard for me to close the gap.
And that’s just part of life. So all I can do is be the best me that I can be. You see what I’m saying? I can’t judge myself against somebody else who has superior skills. I can strive, I can use him as a role model. And we’re very, very close actually as people. But you know, learn more from your failures. You’re going to learn more from your losses. It makes no sense. If you looked at all the winning trades that I had over the years, not one of them made it into inner voice trading because that doesn’t help you with mental toughness. That’s all about glory stuff and gloating. And I don’t feel like it’s, I don’t, knowing that most people are absent mental toughness, I feel like personally that’s unethical to sell you shit on the internet because I know you can’t buy mental toughness through most of the how-to stuff. So our course, the one that we have, there’s an online version and there’s the in-person version, which it again requires my time. So there’s a comma in the price point. I’m not doing it for 97 bucks. You can go to Linda and find all that if you want it, but if you want me, it’s going to cost you.
The whole class is about emotional intelligence, traitor psychology, and where did you have it in your life? And then how can you take those lessons and help apply it to what you want to do. Now if you’ve never had mental toughness really behind the eight ball, because it’s really difficult to develop that unless of course you’re willing to spend five years to do it. If you have that burning desire, that’s awesome. But I promise you this, it’s not in anybody’s book. It’s really not even in my book and my book is how I developed my mental toughness. So you can steal from that as well as you can steal from the daily episodes that we do. But the only way to really get the mental toughness is by doing the very thing that you want to do. You can’t overthink it. You can’t meditate your way into mental toughness.
You can’t read stoicism and get into mental toughness not anytime soon. You really have to engage. And even the stoics will say it’s how to help you deal with the things that happen while you are living your life. You don’t take a timeout and be like, I’m going to sit over here and disengage and then become a stoic. You have to live your life. You have to be out there playing in traffic. You see, and invite those challenges because it’s in that process that you get to learn a lot about yourself. You say, but Mike, I don’t know what I’m doing. You don’t have to know what you’re doing. You’ll figure it out along the way. Most of you are afraid to do that. And that’s why I think you’re going to be in, if I could look at your growth as a person, again, I always apply this to myself.
You’re in a trading range. You’re not necessarily going to crash because you’re not engaging, but you’re not going to break out either because you’re not engaging. So keep playing it safe. You’ll be in a trading range personally for the rest of your life. I didn’t want to do that because I knew where I came from and it was great. It helped shape who I am and my hometown is very important to me. I love everybody there, but I wanted different challenges for myself and I wasn’t going to be able to find those in my hometown. So the best thing that you can do is what I’ve been saying all along. Engage, manage, risk, figure out, talk to your financial advisor, figure out what’s appropriate risk for you and risk five or 10 bucks a day at least you’ll be in the game getting smashed by the upperclassmen in the corners, trying to find loose pucks, clearing the slot, getting elbowed in the face and having the guy go, it’s life in the big leagues buddy. Freshman team’s looking for a first line center. You can go apply if you want.
Yeah, and the great thing about that,
Remember Jerry Maguire, she walks by rest her soul.
Yeah, yeah. No, I mean the great thing about that though is that could be the key to your game as a player. You never realize you getting punished could help you find that opening. And I’ve definitely been there. That was my opening was I would get punished by these guys on the climbs as the cyclist and I be like, damn, I’m not going to be able to ever compete with that. These guys are 93 pounds soaking wet and they’re just absolute cardio machines going up a hill. But then I was like, wait a minute. But when they get to the flats, they suck. And then that’s where I’m good. So it’s about developing that your own game. And also, it’s funny you talk about Marcus Aurelius because I have his book right next to me, but I like to read him every now and one of the quotes that I really like, I don’t know the exact quote, but it’s something where it’s like, if nothing need bother you unless you choose to let it bother you. True. And that’s one of my favorite things ever. And I think my generation could really learn a lot from that quote. And I started applying it in my daily life too, because it’s like, why do I even care about this? A lot of the stuff people are, you know, just shouldn’t care about.
Agreed.
And that you’re right though. You can’t just think a stoic and then become a stoic all the time. You have to really apply those lessons. And I think that’s one of the great things about what you and I do and about some of the stuff that I read. It’s like I really put it into practical application. I hear these lessons and I draw parallels with my own life. And then I think about, okay, well how can I make this apply generally and it about developing principles and having principles. And that’s one of the things that’s really helped me excel. And I think everybody could learn a lot from drawing these parallels from the rest of the things that you do.
Yeah. So let me close by saying this, cause I know a few folks have written in. Would you be willing without giving away your secret sauce and do go over trades as the channel grows and as we take on new courses, new locations, it’s likely that ganja and I are going to be in the same room kind of doing it face-to-face because we have the technology where he’s going to sit there and be able to switch cameras depending on who’s speaking. We’ll have to make another investment. So I am thinking about, for those of you that want to see, I don’t know about doing interviews, I just don’t have the time for the preparation and I don’t want to just invite somebody on and have a general chat for three hours can’t. That’s why I don’t listen to guys who have very, very popular shows, whether it’s Jocko Willink or who’s the guy from, get him to the Greek.
He’s got a great show under the skin. I think Russell Brant like I appreciate and Tim Ferriss, I just don’t have three hours of my day to listen to other people and his, it’s no dig on them. Obviously they’re gigantically successful. I just don’t have the time for it because I’m actually trading and I’m very busy and I’ve got Victor in my back pocket, so to speak. So I have a lot of work to do. This is my way of giving back to the community. I think it’s the most important work that you can do. And that’s why I’m willing to give that away for free. If I have the time to ganja sitting here. I don’t get ganja for free folks. He’s not sitting here because he likes me or I helped him in Juujitsu, right? And so that all costs money. The gear’s going to cost money, and as the show becomes more and more expensive, I am going to investigate ways to monetize it.
So there may be a premium aspect to the channel in the near future where we do do not how-to videos, but how do you conjugate your emotional constitution, mental toughness, emotional intelligence, trader psychology with the prevailing themes of the day, how to enter the markets, what are the trade-offs from different types of entries? For example, emotional trade-offs, right? Because that’s where if you’re not mentally tough, you can sit there and be stunned and not figure out what to do. So that’s the unique type of training that we have. But I’m not doing that for free. So there might be that dev that development sometime before the end of the summer, maybe into the fall. I have to think about it because again, it’s going to come at a time constraint. I’m going to have to make some trade-offs here in my life, which right now are here to for I haven’t been willing to do.
Cause I want to have balance. And so before the naysayers kind of speak up and say, well, you ought to do this. Well what are you doing to help the community? I’m doing this for free. I got 35 years experience. I don’t have to do it. I do it because it feeds me spiritually. It makes me feel good about myself that it can help anybody else is great. I’m putting it out there. As far as followers, I’m not that type. I’m not really that vain. So whether I have 2000 or 2 million subscribers, that’s all great to me, those are vanity metrics because when the student is ready, the teacher’s really right there and the teacher’s been under the person’s nose all along so that people can find this channel with ganja and we can talk about things that help you be a better version of yourself.
That’s kind of what it’s there for. But there’s a certain boundary where there’s going to be too much value for no money and that’s where I have to step in and draw a good boundary. I say good fences make good neighbors, and so I’m giving away what I think is the most valuable aspect of it. If we take it into a more premium level, then there has to be an exchange of value. There’ll be probably a trade off between a tier or two in the membership aspect of the YouTube channel. There might be a pay one price off the YouTube channel if you wanted to do the psychological and the emotional trading training, because I think we have a really good process in and around that. It’s basically all the things that I’ve learned in my life, how I put it all together, systematically, discretionary trading and all.
A lot of the things that I picked up from the folks who you would read about in Market Wizards, of course, as I interpreted it and made it my own. I can’t give away secrets that aren’t mine because that’s unethical, but I know what I learned and I know how I made it mine. So anything that I talk about is mine. It’s my interpretation. And I have the lessons and the hard knocks and the battle scars to walk everybody through it. But what I don’t have is time to go through charts for two hours. Because if you don’t have mental toughness, it’s a waste of my time. I don’t care if you’re willing to pay me 500 bucks a month, it’s a waste of time because all that stuff is not going to help you have mental toughness, which was the theme for today.
Yeah, and then also there was a question that kind of came in about, can you go over some examples of I, I’m get going to get the question wrong and then we can let it go. How I customized the one-on-one, well, I got thousands of examples because just like if you were going to make a custom made suit, I can’t make one custom made suit that’s going to fit everybody. So, and two, I don’t want to turn the channel into, and here’s little Johnny from Merced and here’s how I helped that person and here’s Barbara from outside of Orlando, Florida and here’s how I helped her. That kind of crosses a boundary into too much marketing. This show is more like give somebody fish or teach ’em how to fish. It’s much more of the latter. And of course I have testimonials, but it’s better if you have questions and you want to know how I could help you if I have the time.
Then the question becomes, what is it that you’re working on? And you could really say that in one or two sentences. I don’t need the backdrop. You can reach out through the blog and then we could figure out are you better or do you do need one-on-one? Cause if I’m going to do a custom program, I’m going to have to spend 3, 4, 5 hours per week behind the scenes customizing everything for what it is that you want to do and who you are. That’s why the price point isn’t, is it higher? It’s because it’s not the hour that we spend on Zoom every week or so, one or two hours. Cause I don’t really watch the clock. It’s more what preparation do I have to do? That’s where my time is very valuable cause I really don’t have it. I always have to rob from Peter to pay Paul as far as I’m my time is concerned because I have things that I’m doing outside of trading that are important to me, like my artwork, like Jiujitsu, and I’m not going to compromise on those because I need the an asset allocation.
I need all of those things to keep me from climbing to the roof of the building and jumping, jumping all over in many ways. So I’ll leave it at that. I appreciate everybody being here. I appreciate the comments, the likes, the subscribes. I know what we get comments with this channel is, tragically and I, they put in a lot of adverbs, unsubscribed. I mean I don’t really look at that, that I can help one or two people and then you can go help other people. To me, that’s how it’s going to grow. If you feel very, very strongly about it, then share the link with your friends or what have you. If you think it’s that tragically unsubscribed, because if I can help two people, then I’ve done my job. You see what I’m saying? Because I think though, one of those two people can go out and change the world, it can certainly change your world. So with that, thank you Ganja. You’re amazing. I’m glad that you’re always here. I like this. I’d like to do more of these because I think we have a lot more to say on the specific little facets of the diamond. Time will tell what the audience would like, but I’ll be back tomorrow and Friday and then we’ll have ganja here again next week and keep the comments, keep the comments and the questions coming because that’s where we get our best content.
With that said, thank you guys so much. We really appreciate all the support. Make sure you guys like and subscribe. All comments, help the algorithm and I will see you guys in the next one.

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This is an automated transcript

Everybody happy Monday. Hope you have good plans for the fourth. I’m going to do his videos this week. I’ll probably won’t have anything for tomorrow being the fourth and you’ll be here Wednesday and then I’ll have something Thursday and Friday. Maybe just do a couple of short ones cause I think everyone’s away. This is that kind of week. Getting great feedback of course in the comments. I appreciate that very much. Keeps the conversation going. We’re also seeing some engagement between the viewers and the subscribers, which is always good too cause it’s really a community as best we can have it. We also found out that Jessica was in the pilot seat. I have a sense that she’s in the pilot seat even when it’s not the co, it’s a co-pilot seat. Good for you Jess. We also learned that she’s taken, sorry Ramo, but every, there’s someone perfect for everybody.
I suppose Ramo left a good comment on the AI bots of the new newsletter. I also received some stuff privately from of course the people who were trying to promote that and said, you know, should have us on your show and this and that. And my feelings about why pod podcasters and folks like this have guests on. It’s largely either the host doesn’t have a lot to say for him or herself or they’re trying to hijack, hijack that other person’s audience. So it’s much more difficult to look into the camera and be informative and entertaining. The good news for me is I’m hedged cause I’m only looking to do five or 10 minutes. And if I can’t say something intelligent in five minutes, man, after 35 years, I should probably think of another career. But the comments that I, I’m not going to portray anyone’s trust because that’s not really spiritual and I don’t begrudge people making a living. But the problem with trading is trading. And what I mean by that is I was kind of blessed I guess in retrospect when that’s a foul ball, the game is on mute.
There wasn’t the environment for me to get sidetracked by the 4,500 things that you are getting bombarded with. Doesn’t matter what social media platform you’re on, it could be YouTube here, it could be Spotify and Stitcher and Apple and Google where we do the audio only version of the show. Ganja handles all of that. And so I didn’t have those distractions that could take away my brain power and my most valuable asset, well not my most valuable asset, but an asset that I can control, which is my time. So being that, again, I was slightly impulsive and I knew that right over my shoulder was all the other industries that I had come from.
I knew I could work hard and make money and I wanted to try something differently. You see, I wanted to find a path where I could create some intellectual property, if you will. And I think traders, if they have their own trading style and it has positive expected value that an in and of itself is an asset and it’s intellectual property, it’s even better if you could learn to code it and then replace yourself so that you start to think more like a business owner, not a business manager. Because I see a lot of people who are, especially in the short term trading, they have to be glued to their machines. And if they’re not there trying to read charts in any type of timeframe, it’s hard to make money. So they’ve taken blue collar work and kind of assimilated it back into white collar Wall Street stuff.
So I try to be conscious on all these things. Obviously my committee’s in session all the time, but I feel like when you look at all those services that are marketed to you to kind of help you teach, you can’t help but feel bitter over time in that for all the promises of what they want to teach you, it doesn’t necessarily help you see because 80% of what goes on at the trader’s desk is psychological and emotional. And if you buy somebody’s swing trading process and how they did all this, you have to read the small print. They say results are not typical. You might experience something very, very different and usually you do. But they are clever enough in writing marketing copy and are big fans of Eugene Schwartz who was probably the best copywriter ever and they know how to push your buttons and play on your insecurities.
But that’s why I say there’s not an intellectual solution for that. You can go learn somebody else’s system, you could learn how I do things, but the only way you’re going to get comfortable doing anything like that is by actually putting the trades on. So I try to say save your money because if you want to try to overcome that feeling of insecurity is you have to go towards the fear or that insecurity or the feeling of uncertainty of the probabilistic outcome of when you put on trades. That’s the cheapest and fastest way to get to success. But people are like, oh no, I can’t do that. This is scary stuff I might lose.
And of the mindset on any particular trade, I just don’t care anymore. I don’t get emotionally invested in probabilistic outcomes. I just kind of know that you win some, you lose some. And that the funny thing is as great intuition as I have, the things that I thought would work and bring in big bucks was not necessarily what eventually worked to make the money in the first place. So I can have good instincts about what I think will move and I sort of do, but I never can predict typically what is going to be the trade of the year or the trade of the week or the trade of the month. And
Now it’s like I would never have guessed here we are in early July, so we’re going into two H of 23 and the majority of the gains, if I look at the barometer of where the games are coming from, it’s from short term stuff, day trading and swing trading. And that’s not really what I do. But this is a make it and take it kind of market. And so you have to adapt. What else are you left with bitching and belly aching and complaining about how the markets aren’t fair. That’s not a winning attitude. Anyway, back to the show. I would ask you to hesitate before you start spending any kind of money to buy somebody else’s system. Because ultimately once you understand it intellectually, you still have to be able to have the inner fortitude to put that on. And here’s the reason why.
If you don’t understand why it works, you’ll never put the trades on and you’ll be out hundreds to thousands of dollars. I had a friend, I’m not going to mention his or her name, send me some screen grabs from a discord and some of the language that they’re using and some of the questions. And to be frank, it’s pathetic. Is this price a good time to get into the E mini? Now, I’ve always said even to my own students that if I’m doing my job and I’m doing it well, if I’m doing my job, I should make myself obsolete post haste, which means fucking fast.
Because you have to be able to stand on your own two feet and do this. What I help people do is I push them out of the nest faster. And with the one-on-ones, I do a lot of listening to find out what it is they’re trying to achieve with what tools do they have, what skills are they absent of? And then also what’s their sense of urgency. You see what’s their relative strength to try to figure this out? And that’s a big part of the questions that I ask to see if it makes sense for us to work. Because if they just want to binge watch videos, that’s just another form of what I don’t agree with. It’s not going to help you take action. So that’s why in the beginning we set goals and you start to hit those goals. Even if you don’t know what steps 3, 4, 5 are.
If basic rich risk management entries, exits, position sizing, what is it that you wanted risk portrayed, you need to get into the experience of it that’s going to be your best teacher. If you want to know the academic or the intellectual stuff, reach out via email because there’s already a video on it somewhere. So you can kind of build your own kind of Franken strategy if you will and figure it all out. But the key to doing it is doing it the way I did, which was to jump in the game. Even when you feel like you don’t know your, what’s this here is in Portuguese they call it Aha you bunda from a hole in the ground. You’ll have to figure out step two once you’re there, if you’re looking for that sense
Of security, it’s not going to be there. Hence the Discords, the newsletter services, now they’ve got AI bots. I mean marketers are incredibly creative people. There’s no stopping them on how they’ll spin this. And you have to remember it’s an unregulated market, you see? So there’s no one there to kind of shut ’em down. And so you have to, a good sense of street smarts about you to call ’em on the BS factor, you see. And that’s kind of what I see. It’s too new. I’m also always, I’m not one of these conspiracy theorist people, but at the end of the day, if something was so good, why would I teach that to you? Right? Because I teach you how to be a better version of you. I don’t teach you how to be me, I don’t teach you how to trade like Michael Marcus, right?
I know what they did. And even in my book I said, I don’t want to trade like Michael Marcus, but I want to feel the feelings that he felt when he was trading his best. And that’s what we had in common in many ways. So at the end of the day, I just hate to see people who are naive. So that’s kind of what I’m saying in is the point of this episode is don’t be naive. If something is so great, it probably wouldn’t be for sale. And the people would be very reluctant to talk to you. If I’m at a party or a cocktail party and the word has gotten out and I’m around people that I don’t know and one of my friends has mentioned in the past that I work with Victor or I do something like this and that and people start thinking, someone asked me the other day like, bonds, what do you think of bonds?
And I was like, captain America, everyone you buy is a bullet and your best buddy’s gun, the man with the plan. So I would say, I don’t like talking to people about that kind of stuff cause they start pumping you for free information. Two, they don’t really know how to interpret it. If they’re laypeople, they kind of conjugate it with all the marketing stuff out there. And so they don’t appreciate what it’s like to be an independent thinker. Cause they’re not an independent thinker themselves. They’re followers. So remember, traders have to be leaders. And leaders aren’t, Pepsi isn’t trying to be Coke, they’re trying to be Pepsi. And so again, maybe you can find a way to figure some of this stuff out and then make it your own. That’s typically not the thrust of the programs though. They’re usually saying, here’s what you can do in if you did this, just little Johnny over here in Culver City did. You would’ve made 23 K last month. And I’m like, I don’t think so. So I’d rather see you save your money. The best thing you can do, people say yoga, meditation. I don’t know if that really works because it depends on where your mindfulness is and what your intentions are. If you don’t have clear intentions, I think you could sit and try to meditate for years and sure
You can slow your heart rate down and all this and that, but it’s not really going to help your trading all that much. Lower cortisol levels. There’s benefits to all that kind of stuff. Having flexibility is probably good as you get older. But I just don’t like seeing people, people because I get the emails, I get people like, man, I should have listened to you. I wish I found this channel days, weeks, months, years ago after 30 k that I dropped into my education or this and that. And yeah, I’m not really talking at a both sides of my mouth because I really help people become a better version of the person that they already are. But sometimes you can’t see the smoke when you’re standing on top of the fire. So I, I used the analogy of Michelangelo said David was already in the marble.
All I did was set them free. I know what questions to ask, I know what I had to go through so I can steer someone through and help them accelerate. But they have to be able to process their sense of fear and dealing with the uncertainty. And until they’re willing to do that, then any solution is not going to work. So save your money. Okay. Appreciate y’all being here. Have a good 4th of July. I will see you next on Wednesday with Ganja. And then I’ll do, I’ll have episodes for Thursday and Friday. Okay, take it easy.

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This is an automated transcript

Hey everybody. Happy Friday. Appreciate everyone’s comments and sending me emails and this and that, reaching out through Twitter. I’m really not on Twitter. I’m mostly on listen only mode. Anyway, I thought what I would do today is be a bit reflective because I know we have some time coming up for the holidays where the markets are going to be closed. Let’s see, yeah, fourth is next Tuesday. So what I thought I would do is speak to speak from the heart on something, and that is whenever I speak with somebody, I listen obviously for the words that they’re saying, but I also try to figure out why. What’s the emotion behind it? Why are they asking or why are they saying what they’re saying? And it’s occurred to me after doing a lot of these videos that many of you are uncomfortable feeling uncertainty or feeling the feelings that you have to feel when you have to, don’t have to.
But when you’re involved in a process where the outcome is uncertain, and that to me is where trading happens. The best traders are the ones who can deal with living in that space of uncertainty. When you put on a trade of course, or if you play poker or anything where there’s a type of chance, you’re a baseball player, you’re an athlete, you have a probabilistic outcome and you need to learn how to become comfortable with all the poss, all the variations. Right? Now, if you study yourself long enough where the probabilities are going to lie, you probably have an i a good idea of what your average win is. You have the expected value. For those of you who are just starting, it might be a little bit harder because you might trading like you would other things in your life where you get training because a lot of things in life are at fact, academic trading is not one of those though, and I want to kind of nip this once in the bud because I get a lot of emails about continuing ed and this and that, and I don’t want to have to keep repeating myself.
There are themes that I’m going to repeat having goals, for example, and look at them from different angles to see if I can help get the message across. But when it comes to trading, ultimately you have to trade. Trading is not about circling the wagons and waiting to get ready to me, you’re either ready to trade on day one or you’re not because it’s how you’re built. It’s who you are as a human being. I do think there’s a little nature and there’s a little nurture, but I’ll give you, for example, when I got to Wall Street, I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground and the first thing I did was fund an account and I started trading. Why? Because the best teacher is to do it. You have to figure it out along the way. Now, I know some of you are like, well, wait a second, I’m not comfortable with that. Here’s my response. You might not be cut
Out for trading if you’re afraid to take on the uncertainty that goes with trading, whether it’s year one or year 30, okay? It’s time to hang up the cleats. Too many of you are spending too much time on this and you’re wasting a lot of money on services that aren’t going to help you but appeal to you emotionally because you want to spend money to relieve yourself from having to feel the strong feelings that you have to feel that heretofore you might be unwilling to feel. So with the time that we have off this upcoming weekend coming into 4th of July weekend, I’d like you to not trade even, take the whole of next week off and get some perspective on yourself because there are so many other opportunities out in the world, so many other opportunities where you can actually go and be a success. It’s not worth it to beat your head against the wall for something that’s just not working, and it’s not that you’re inadequate as a human being to be a traitor.
You have to have a certain emotional makeup or you have to develop it, and it’s very hard to develop it. That’s the truth. The truth is it’s very hard to develop the inner workings, the psychological and the emotional makeup that it takes to deal with the stress and the pressure of managing risk, the living with the uncertainty, the idea that you can study your craft and learn certain techniques but still not be able to execute. There’s a whole ocean of people out there who know a lot about trading, but who can’t execute. What I don’t want to see, and I might be the only person who’s doing videos on this, is you kill a lot of time having an interest or being a trading enthusiast, but not actually doing it because we don’t have as much time on planet earth that we think we do.
You see, and this occurred to me the other day when I was speaking with somebody who was like, well, why would you study martial arts? Why would you do anything? And I remember when I had gotten into, I found out that I was accepted into Columbia and some of the kids that I was around with at the time I was 18 years old for whatever reason, they weren’t exactly happy about it. And I thought to myself, I don’t understand why someone would talk smack to me when I’m just chasing my dreams. And so one of the things that I did, and I remember it, it was yesterday, I literally took out a spiral bound notebook from that year, and I wrote down the people that I spent the most amount of time with, and I said, well, who among these people are really going to go out and chase their dreams?
And then if they weren’t clear on what their dreams were, I said, I thought who had it in them to really go for it? Or who was really kind of talking smack because they wanted to fit in? Which let’s face it, everyone wants to fit in. I know that sounds like political language, but everybody wants to. I had the Yankee game on mute over here, so I’m going to turn it off. Everybody wanted to fit in on some level, they want to feel like they’re part of something, but in the trading world, that’s where the discords don’t serve. You could spend a lot of time trying to be a moderator and start giving other people advice but not actually be able to execute yourself. So you have to think about where are the feelings? What are the feelings that you’re going towards? Do you want to be helpful because you want to be more liked?
I guess there’s some virtue in that, but it’s not going to help you trade better. The only thing that’s going to help you trade better is actually putting on the trades. I want to say something, it might seem controversial, but I think it is an absolute truth, and I’ll you send somebody to me and I will debate them on air live with trading, the best you can do is have an idea or a theory about what you think is going to work and then go try it. The best you can do. Of course, you want to keep your losses small, and we talked about attitude, discipline, persistence, determination, but those things are kind of true for every endeavor. The next step though, you got to figure it out along the way, and I think one of the reasons why there’s so many people who aren’t really succeeding in trading and who aren’t going to is because they’re looking for surety.
They’re looking for an intellectual solution that would give them a peace of mind so that they can go outside into the world, put on trades and live in that space of uncertainty, and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. You actually have to be in the game and invite that into your world. You have to learn how to feel uncomfortable when you don’t want to. Remember when I said the feelings that you want to feel are sometimes on the other side of the feelings that you, no, how did I say it? I said, sorry. Sometimes I get confused. The feelings that you want to feel are on the other side of the ones you don’t want to feel. This is exactly what I’m talking about.
You need to be in the game. Does it matter if you risk 50 cents, literally 50 cents, not 50 cents a share, just 50 cents. You’re going to learn from the experience, and the only way that you can do it is to be in the game. Simulators kind of help. They give you an idea, but it’s still not real money, and I can’t stress enough. If you want to start making progress, you have to start doing it right now, of course, I don’t know who you are specifically, so talk with your financial advisor like that person has a clue, but you have to say that from a risk standpoint and figure out if this is appropriate for you, but then get in the game. Doesn’t matter if you
Don’t know your backside from a hole in the ground, you’re going to learn along the way, and that’s the process that you want to get into and repeat that to yourself. Now, the next week, while you’re not trading or you’re not stalking the markets, trying to figure out what to do because that’s not going to help you. You’ve been stalking the markets for three weeks, maybe three months, maybe three years. That’s not helping you put trades on up, timing and down timing not going to help you either. The only thing that’s going to help you is the actual experience of it. You see, this will help you fail fast, and that’s a good thing because at that point, you’ll know how to make a pivot and try something differently or you’ll say, this isn’t for me. And either way, you win because then you save time, you get your life back, and then you can go put your efforts into something that you’ll be a great success on.
There’s too many marketing things, and this just kind of hit me. I want to give you, I want to be completely frank with you. This is a re-recording of today’s episode. I have to go back to Ganja and tell him that I want to replace what I had already recorded. And the reason is is because you, I’m inundated with offers 26 year old guys who don’t know shit about the markets have found the new thing that’s going to help you, and they’re going to for a small down payment or a small monthly fee, going to help you along the way. And it’s the same thing. It just changes year after year. There’s a new thing that they’re trying to sell you to help you deal with these feelings of insecurity and they don’t work. If they worked, guess what would happen? They’d be so dominant that we wouldn’t see other advertisements, and if we did, they wouldn’t last because they wouldn’t convert. Why will? Because the solution was already out there and people bought in and they were working it, and that was that. And so I can’t stop you from being bullied by these idiots.
I am going to start doing some consumer reports kind of stuff and call people out on what their claims are and give you another perspective of what they might not be saying. Because again, language is powerful, and some of these folks have studied marketing in college and they’re pretty clever and they know how to put together an argument. But just because somebody did very well, penny, stocking long or short doesn’t mean it just means there’s evidence that someone can do it. And just because someone can swing trade, right or day trade doesn’t mean anything for you. It just means that someone else did it successfully. It’s possible. And just because someone can do trend following doesn’t mean you can. And just because you can understand any of these things intellectually, that doesn’t mean that you can execute on it.
So there’s a big disconnect between be being able to understand something intellectually and then being able to do it. Why? It’s because 80% of it is psychological and emotional, and so I’m trying to help all of you for free. I don’t have anything to sell. I mean, yeah, I do have a course that helps you marry the ins and the outs of trading with your own behavior, but the course is about human behavior. The trading part is kind of incidental. Most of the folks who study with me say that it’s changed their lives because they have a fresh outlook on their own behavior. That’s not the point of this video though. If I wanted to get to the PO this and make it marketing, this is what the 12 minute mark, I would’ve been trying to capture your attention within the first 15 seconds if I was trying to sell you something.
So understand this, you can’t buy your way out of it. There are a few books that might give you insight, and that’s great, but ultimately you have to get into the practical aspect of the execution, and that means putting money to work when you don’t know what you’re doing right and learning on along the way. A lot of folks don’t want to do that because they don’t want to lose the money. They don’t have it to lose, which tells you something about you and why you should be trading in the first place. You see, and for the folks who are more established, it’s the same type of a deal. What’s the motivation? What is it? Why do you do what you do? Right? Because you don’t want to spend your life in this turmoil because you’re creating it for yourself. This is self-imposed, and there’s a lot of folks who ping me and I can tell they’re just not cut out for trading, and I don’t want to be a dream killer, but I can tell from their temperament and their personality and their timidness that they’re either afraid to fail internally, they’re afraid to fail and have other people comment on it, and they have shut themselves down already.
So this whole thing of mind fing themselves in and around trading. I don’t fully understand it. Why? Well, because traders trade, I couldn’t wait to become a success right? Now, let me give you some more context. I consider myself a success in this field. You may disagree 35 years doesn’t really lie. It took me four years. So if you were able to learn how to succeed and marry what you thought about the markets and your behavior and you were able to execute, make money, but lose less so that net you made and you did that within one year, you will have come to the conclusion that you’re a success in 25% of the time that it took me. And people are like, I don’t have a year. I I need results now. And that’s just not the way it works. There is no fast solution. There is no external solution to your internal problems. There’s no intellectual solution for your emotional problems, but that’s the marketing world that we live
In. I kind of joke, advanced charting packages, no such thing. There are certain entitlements, like with your cable company, you want to stream hbo. We used to be HBO Max. I don’t know what it’s called anymore. I don’t have it. You want MLB tv? Perfect. Just click the button and pay. You can a la carte everything. But all of that stuff is not going to remove the insecurity that you feel in yourself. And so I want to be here to help you with that and help you save time, help you save your brain cells, and encourage you to either stop or go find something else because until you’re willing to step into the war of it, all right, you’re not really going to learn anything because so much of this is psychological, right? In fact, if someone came to me and said, I’m having trouble trading because the psychological and the emotional is 80% of it, it’s a four to one favorite that I would bet that that’s the issue.
It’s not the how-to. You don’t really need to know a lot of the how-to. It’s super interesting and you can study it, but as you probably know by now, the more these courses that you buy or the things that you subscribe to, it doesn’t remove your insecurity. It’s time. We had a chat about that and had a frank discussion, and I’m sorry for not bringing it up more directly like this with you. I kind of hinted around it with some of these unique sayings that I have, but I don’t want to see people waste a lot of time trying to figure it out. The fastest way to figure it out, if you want to hear it in one sentence, is to open up an account and start trading. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you’re doing because you’re going to figure it out along the way.
That’s the way it works. You have to do it. You can’t sit and circle the wagons and study for 17 years and then figure out you got it all figured out because it will have done nothing for you. To help you understand how you are going to behave in conditions of uncertainty. That’s not intellectual. You understand? It’s experiential. So figure out what you can lose. Figure out what you’re willing to lose and start learning your craft by doing it. There’s no other way. There is no other way. Don’t be stupid. Don’t give away your money. That’s all I got for you today. I hope you have a good time. I’m probably going to publish next week. I might not have anything on July 4th just because let’s face it, you shouldn’t be watching videos of me on July 4th. Okay? Anyway, thanks very much for being here. Keep your comments and your suggestions coming, and if you want to ask me something on the qt, fine, I tend to prefer to speak to people who use their real names. If you use some kind of an alias and you don’t want to use your real name, I understand that, but this is a show that’s about empowering people, so don’t use an alias. Use your real name. All right? I appreciate you all being here. I hope you have a great weekend and I’ll see you next week.

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