Quit the discords and cancel a good number of the funding accounts that you are part of. If you followed last Friday’s video on trader motivation, that all stems from being a confident person and being an independent thinker. If you’re involved in several discords, how is your head not spinning? It’s like trying to be a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian all at the same time, and if you’re trading more than three, I know of a guy who’s got I think over 20 funding challenge accounts that he’s trying to pass. To me, this is an act of desperation and the only way that you ultimately traders trade their personality, you are who you are. Now, you can work on that over time. Typically, you can’t change overnight. Some people can if they take a lot of drugs, but at the end of the day, you are who you are just like I am who I am.
I’m constantly going to school on myself to understand why I do what I do. The good news though is I don’t let outside forces be it the television, any Twitter channels, any telegrams, any slacks, any of this or that to infiltrate my own thinking. Trading is a lonely business. If you want a friend, get a dog, right? That’s the famous line from the movie. I think it was Wall St. I don’t really remember, but I think that’s it. So you can’t build a community to help you trade. You can build camaraderie. Maybe you can build fraternity, but the idea that you have to be part of something as a trader is false, and you’ve been misled. The best traders I know who are solo artists, they’re free climbers, solo climbers, however you want to call it, and they do their own thinking and they go to bed with one foot on the floor just like I do.
You can’t buy your way out of your emotional discomfort, right? That’s just not going to happen. And if you have several funding accounts, the hell’s the purpose of that. You’re going to try to trade 20 different strategies to see which one works. So that one particular one, which is probably going to be luck, gets funded and then how are you going to replicate it? You see what I’m saying? So save your money folks. You could save yourself hundreds of dollars that you could be putting into your account, right? Is after a while these things, your ship is leaking. And the best part about trading and doing it yourself, if you followed Friday’s video of trader motivation is that it builds your confidence, and that’s going to happen over time. When you start to rely on yourself. You can’t go through life as a trader relying on other people. There’s no one there to help you. They say they’re going to help you, but you have to understand the premium telegrams or discords that you’re paying for are called continuity products. In the eyes of the marketers, their subscriptions, and they know there’s a certain amount of churn, just like the New York Times has a sense of churn, they’re going to lose a certain amount of subscribers every month. They’ll gain a few new ones. So the net difference is the churn, but ultimately they can count on that income, no difference than some financial.
With a hundred million dollars at a wirehouse making 60 basis points a year, paid quarterly, their income becomes very, very predictable. Now, I have nothing against the people who are putting these things on. They’re trying to hustle and make a living right? It’s the greater fool theory, but at the end of the day, if I have a gripe, it’s with the people who subscribe to them. If you’re going there to learn one specific thing, again, set yourself a time limit, one, two, maybe three months. If you haven’t learned it in three months, guess what? It’s not resonating with you. It’s time to move on. You see what I’m saying? If you want market commentary, you could listen to any number of people. Brian Shannon does a market commentary and he puts it out on Twitter. By the way, Brian’s going to be on the show this week.
I don’t know if it’s going to be tomorrow the next day, but I had a good chat with him. We recorded it actually last Friday, and we talked about Anchored VWAP. We also talked about how to trade that both long-term and short-term setups. We talked about Nvidia and the short squeeze on Carvano. I used a couple of the examples of my own trades in there and we went over. It’s very, very enlightening. Very smart guy, but that’s the kind of stuff you can get that for free on Twitter. You don’t have to pay for it. So as you move forward in your journey as a trader and as you evolve as a human being, you are who you are. Ultimately, your personality is going to come out through your trading, and yes, trading’s a lonely business, but you can join groups. You can do stuff after the markets are closed, right?
You don’t have to pay to belong to anything, right? You can come and watch all the videos on this channel. There’s a million things that you can learn here. The goal is self-knowledge. If the trading tactic parts are one part of it, for sure, you need to have a tactic, but you only need to have one. I would sit and chat with Michael Marcus, and it was one simple strategy that I had, and he would remark on how I wasn’t head faked into trying to do 45 other things like most young guys are because they’re afraid to miss out on the action. And I was like, no, I’m staying in my lane, and I used to talk about the 405 in Los Angeles. It’s five or six lanes going in one direction, and you always have these guys trying to play Pole Position weaving through traffic, which is terribly dangerous because it increases the probability of you’re having an accident by threefold.
Nonetheless, they do it, and I’m like, for all the travesty that you can bring in from weaving through lanes, I’m just going to stick in my lane and enjoy the ride, and that’s what you really need to do as a trader. Find one strategy, one setup, and stick to it and just realize that there are winning periods and losing periods, and that’s the way it goes. And losing period doesn’t mean you have to change anything. You just need to learn how to thicken your skin and understand that that’s part of it. No one’s winning nine times out of 10 regularly. It just doesn’t happen. There’s winning streaks for sure and losing streaks, and if you have
One, by all means, my hat’s off to you. This isn’t about putting a stick in your eye. The point is that most people who are trying to do this are all over the place. They’re acting out of desperation and they’re kind of coping. They figure that all these resources are available to them, but it doesn’t really assu or delay any of their emotional problems. And at the end of the day, it really comes down to you. No matter how much money you’re spending, no matter how many funding challenges accounts that you have, I get the emails. There are people who have not just 20 different funding challenge accounts. They have several of them with several different platforms. They’re figuring, Hey, it’s like lottery one of them’s going to hit, but what ends up happening is if you don’t stick to your knitting and find that one strategy that really resonates with you as a person, you’re never going to be able to continue to do that day after day, week after week, month after month and become a consistently profitable trader, right?
Sorry for the tough love here, but I’ve seen it before. I’ve seen every damn gimmick out there, and while I appreciate the younger folks hustling and trying to come up with great marketing schemes to separate you from your money, those people are both, they’re untested in both their lives and in their trading strategy. I don’t care about something that’s worked for two years. It’s irrelevant to me. I need something that has 20, 30 years. When you run a back test, they don’t change on a dime. I think blazen a long time viewer. Thanks for that. Blazen wrote in about when do you know if it’s time to change? Well, if you’ve back tested a set of rules, they don’t turn on a dime. They don’t go from having a positive expectancy of +0.8 to -0.7 overnight. They will need to be tweaked. And don’t forget, the expected value is a weighted average for the time period that you’re testing.
If you segment that, you might find that the same model over a certain window of time might have an expectancy of 1.2. There are other times if you took out the worst periods, you could see the expectancy might be 0.2, but you have to look at it over longer periods of time. That’s why if you’re going to back test to build your confidence in what it is that you’re doing, you want to include the periods of time that were tougher, right? I knew guys coming and showing me back tests between ’95 and 2000 where if the buying strategy was this, anything that had four or five letters in the ticker was a buy signal. That was, it didn’t matter. The price quantity industry didn’t matter because we were in a bubble. We were in a raging bull market. Didn’t matter. It was all about eyeballs. Internet was a new thing. It was like an emerging class of investor Now. So when you do those back tests, you learn to be able to say like, look, I don’t know a lot about a lot of things, but I know I can follow my rules and I just have to do that day after day after day. It’s a lot like parenthood. So much of
It is showing up in many ways. You can’t look at the results of any one particular trade or any one particular day and say, I’ve made it, or I’m a complete failure. It’s not a misnomer, but that’s a misconception of what’s going on in the business is you start to result. That’s called resulting. You look at the outcome of a trade, then you backtrack it and say, okay, here’s where I started. Here’s where I ended up. The result was good. Therefore, the system or the rules that I followed were good. So that’s why I don’t mean to sound like a cranky old guy here, but I’m telling you, when you look at the results of these funding challenges in the short run, you can’t look at a positive result as being good because in the short run, you don’t know. You don’t know if it’s luck, but you’re spending hundreds of dollars every month to be part of something that you could very well figure out on your own.
You just have to have the confidence to do it. I know you can do it. You have to make up your mind that that’s what you want to do. That’s the difference. It’s not like you can be me or I did it. You can do it. I don’t believe that. But what I do believe is that if you make up your mind and say, I’m doing this, then you’re going to do it. I don’t know how and neither do you, but that doesn’t matter. All you need to do is take the first step. You’ll figure out step two on the way. If you’re sitting back trying to let everybody bring their trading game to you, you’re already a failure. It’s not a question of you’re becoming a success at that point because traders are independent thinkers, right? Again, I’m trying to save you money here.
No one else is doing the voice of reason, but I’ve seen it happen a million times. Every year there’s a new thing that comes up. One year it was SOES Bandits. I’m not going to get into that. The next year, it was this and that, and then it was like, well, now you can mine crypto, so don’t get psyched out. Keep your blinders on. Focus on the one thing that you know can execute. There’s going to be a million distractions. It’s your job to filter those out and to block them. That’s one reason why I’m not active on social media, and I appreciate those people. I’m on StockTwits. I know Howard pretty well. I know everybody on TV because I’ve been around for a long time, but I don’t need them in my life. Trying to infiltrate my mindset. Trader mindset is the number one thing going for you, and you have to have enormous amount of discipline to trim the fat and cut the bullshit. If you’re relying on other people, that’s a failed strategy. It doesn’t get better either, so the only thing that you can do in playing that game of negative expectation is to stop doing it. It’s like, well, I don’t really miss the money. It’s only $40. I got 20 of ’em, so $800 a month, and the two Discords are a$100 each. So you’re in the hole $1,000 a month. What would it do for you if you saved $12,000 and put it into your account?
What makes that so scary? I don’t understand that. What’s out there? You can see the goods andThat other people are using. You can go to Barchart or any of these places, Yahoo Finance, they give you free charts. You can see things that are in Uptrends. If it’s not going up, don’t buy it. I’ve done lessons on position sizing, and if you don’t know, reach out through the blog and email me. It’s very easy to do. You have to become self-reliant. At the end of the day, save your money. Don’t think for any way that you have to. There’s no team. There’s no team. You’re not part of a trading desk. If you’re on a Discord or a Telegram, that’s you fantasizing that. You’re on a trading desk. You’re not. You’re with a group of people who are paying. That’s the truth to it, and I want to see you succeed, and long-term success comes on self-reliance. At the end of the day, everything else is bullshit.