Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Thanks for being here. Happy Friday. So a question came in on what do I do to prepare for Monday, being that it’s the end of the week and everything. So it’s interesting, I tend to think of Sunday night, start my prep, prepare my preparation for Monday day, right? And then when I get to Friday night, you always do like what we call a checkout. Make sure all the orders are either filled or canceled and that if you did get filled, how much do you have at what prices, right? And then if there’s anything left in the portfolio, you have to bring that to the trader’s attention because someone might have fat fingered something and someone else’s trade ended up in your account. That’s a pain in the ass. So you got to get that fixed quickly. So we call that the checkout here.
So you do that and then I review the orders, see what happened, why didn’t they get filled this and that. Sometimes it’s just simple that the price never traded at or through the stop. So the order never got done. So what I try to do just right then and there is I spend not a lot of time, but probably 10 or 15 minutes going through everything because of whatever didn’t get done. Friday is likely going to be the same order I enter on Monday or Sunday night, depending on whether I’m calling it into the desk. Sometimes I do that, but I very rarely execute things like on the keyboard, so then I don’t have to do a lot of modulation. I’ll think of creating the same list. If the prices are in the neighborhood of where my levels are at likely whatever, the orders that were entered on Friday and weren’t filled, we’ll also get entered again Monday.
Not all the time, but very close to it, close to all the time. Then what I’ll do is very quickly Sunday night is I will come back and do some review and see if there was any movement in things that where I didn’t have orders and then harvest more or by orders or moving my protective stops. So that way come Monday morning, I’ll have everything that carried forward from Friday as well as the new developments all on one piece of paper. Double check the math on everything. And then again, depending on how busy we are, call the orders in the night before for outcry only or just wait until very early Monday morning and call them in that way. That’s just my style. It’s how I do it. I’ve been used to doing it the same way for a long time. It works for me and that’s part of my ecology. Same thing for you is I just tend to try to be as prepared as possible because when I think of preparedness, right, we talked about that all wars are won before the battles are fought. Victorious warrior first wins and then seeks battle. My whole thing is to try to be as prepared as possible so that my instincts are as sharp as possible so that I can see things that I otherwise wouldn’t miss, that
I would’ve missed. And that includes stuff like being hydrated eating very healthy, having good energy that way, not jacking up on sugar or Coke or C, caffeine. I was going to say cocaine not during the week. Then there’s rest and sleep. I’m in la local stock market opens regular opening bells at six 30. Cocoa opens at five in the morning. So the idea is is that when you’re up that early, you got to be sharp. That means you got to sleep well. It also means I can’t and I don’t drink, right? I don’t drink at all. I don’t never really had a taste for it. Certainly in LA we’re all in cars driving around back in New York where pedestrians ha hailing cabs and going in subway trains. So you could drink then and not necessarily worry about it. But now even with Uber and Lyft, you’re still in a car.
But I just found that maybe I’m a lightweight, but I can still feel like if I have one drink, I can feel the effect of it the next day. And since that doesn’t help me trade better, I just have to make the decision that the night before doesn’t work for me. So I just try to keep all my faculties. Some of you going to sit back and say, what I need my beer at the end of the day, I need whatever, this and that. And so those are choices that you make. I can’t judge you based on that. I just know for me, it doesn’t parlay into excellent performance cause I feel sluggish, and that’s kind of how I build out my routine is I try to get some of the work done actually Friday so that I know I’ve wrapped up the week as best I could.
Leave it behind me, do a little preparation for Monday, and then enjoy some downtime with virtually no exposure to the markets or the data or anything. Say for a brief little window Sunday night to round out the research and the prep for Monday morning and then it’s all systems go and I have solace and I have self-esteem and I have the confidence that I did everything that I could for the time that I had to be prepared. And that’s the best you can do. That’s how you win the day. Then the second part of that is consistent behavior. So you just repeat that process over and over and over again over weeks and weeks and weeks, and you’ll develop a really good track record because behavior predicts where you end up. Anyway, it’s been a long week. I hope you had a good one. Hope you have fun plans for the weekend. Please like and subscribe to the show. I enjoy doing it. Happy to help you. Please leave a comment or suggest a topic. I’ll be happy to cover it. Have a great weekend, folks. I’ll see you Monday.
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