Hey everybody. Michael Martin here. Thanks for joining the show today. As always, I hope you’ve gotten a lot out of it this week. I know I’ve gotten a lot of comments and emails from folks. Appreciate it. Always trying to be of service to you because it’s good for me too. I also want to say love yourself enough in and around all this work to understand that you’re not necessarily going to get the answers that you want overnight, right? Evolution takes a bit of time, especially since when you think of the things that have been from your environment that have been imprinted in your subconscious where maybe years and years in the undertaking, and those things don’t unwind overnight. They don’t unwind. In the coaching program, we spend 12 weeks where we’re not looking at the subconscious each and every week, but we kind of are because a lot of behavior comes from that.
And so you have to love yourself to understand that your own evolution in and of itself is a biological process that you’re kind of powerless over. Yes, you can have a good diet, you can have supplements. You can not drink alcohol or have sugar, this and that, but ultimately, I always look at this in my default response is life on life’s terms. I can basically be as self-aware as it can possibly be. I can look at the work, but then the wisdom that comes to me doesn’t always come to me from when I’m sitting down here at the desk or painting or in jiujitsu or something. I’d be washing my hair, like washing my hair. I could be in the shower, and that’s when the light bulb goes off. The self-awareness game is really an ongoing process that you start, but you never really stop. There is no destination. It’s evolution.
Now, I want to also encourage you to not sit back and wait. This comes also straight from the coaching. We never sit and worry about creating the full plan start to finish. Here’s step A, here’s step Z, here’s A, here’s Z. Don’t start until you can fill everything again, because that deals with security. You want to embrace the uncertainty. If there’s something that you want to endeavor to do, just start it. Don’t worry about what step number two is. You’ll figure it out along the way because in the end, your intentions will carry the day. If your intention is to be a better trader, you’re going to figure out a way to become a better trader. Obviously, you have to have a strong goal. We spent a lot of time on goal setting, but ultimately your intentions will carry the day. That was my kind of sixth sense that I used. That is my personal alpha. It helps me achieve all my goals, both in and around the markets, but also in my personal life.
You see it in real life. Look at the new production place where we’re at. It’s nowhere near being done, but we started. We’ll figure out the rest along the way. I don’t care what it looks like. I mean from a cosmetic standpoint, it does matter. If we’re going to scale the show and have guests and this and that, it has to have a professional look because it’s not just the mom and pop. But at the end of the day, if I’m honest and I’m on a witness stand, the cosmetic thing for me is more of a concern for you. I don’t really care. I’m not that fussy because again, in my mind’s eye, if you’re there because of the cosmetics, you’re missing the point of the show, but your intentions will carry the day. So spend a lot of time thinking about what it is that you want from your trading. How do you want it to serve you financially and emotionally? Because you get both whether you like it or not. And I was just, again, I was very, very lucky to know and to understand that that was the way that it worked
Because of the environment that I was in. I couldn’t afford the commissions, but I could not afford them. So I had to find a way to make the whole process work for me, knowing that if I overt traded, it was super punitive. Think about it, you start with 10 k round turn commissions, 125 bucks. If you did less than one junk trade a month, say you did 10 of those the year you’re already down. Well, yeah, if you did 10 trades, your account is down 10%. So
You have to look at that and say, well, what is my real goal? Here is my goal here is to worry about commission so much so that I don’t trade. I have to be mindful of it, but I also have to make it work and find something that works for me. So I had to think about really, I never have really used price targets, but in the futures we talked about I needed two or 3 cents to kind of pay for the trade. I was never interested in anything that didn’t have the propensity to move 20 cents plus as far as the grains were concerned, because I didn’t want to just make money. If you focus on putting on trades for the purpose of covering costs in the way my mind works, that’s what you’re going to get. You’re going to find trades that cover your costs.
And if you think like a small trader, you’ll always be a small trader. That’s something that I also believe. So I didn’t know where the world of trading was going to take me, but I knew I needed to be open to possibilities that I hadn’t experienced, and I had to be open to feeling feelings that I hadn’t felt before because you got to remember, all the money I had ever accumulated at that point had come from blue collar despair. I was working right, and it was either tips or gratuities from weight and tables. It was something similar in caddying. It was a flat rate for a particular size of your lawn, whether or not you wanted other types of cosmetic work done on your property, and then what did you want us to do for each visit?
What did they want us to do for the fall? So all those things were negotiated, but the point is is that I was willing to look at all of that. Why? Well, because I wanted to become a different person. Most parents who come from, who are immigrants, who are coming out of the working class and then wanted to leave the city and move upstate, the mantra was, I want my kids to do better than I’ve done. I heard that a million times growing up from my friends, from my friends’ parents, from my own parents. And so when you hear that and you try to put it into work, you really have to come up with a game plan. Like, well, if that’s what they think, and that’s what they mean for a lot of people, that meant just going to school and getting a college degree again, because coming out of that environment from 19 30, 19 40 or so, those people had jobs.
They were working class and they had jobs. They were happy to have jobs because there was a great sense of security. You could have the American dream, which have your own house and start a family, raise the family and all this and that. When your parents said they wanted you to do better, that brought in a lot of unanswered questions. What do you mean better? Have a better job, have a profession, get a terminal degree, make more money, live in a better neighborhood. So what do you mean by that? You have to operationally define, we want my kids to do better. A lot of times they just meant make more money. Inflation tends to cost of living tends to take care of that whether you like it or not. So then you have to figure if you put all that to work, where’s that going to take you and what are your own dreams for yourself? Do you want to do better than your parents? Do you even care about that?
That’s why I don’t judge people and their trading style because likely a function of the environment. But I do try to be very, very pluralistic here and think and speak to a lot of strategies, a lot of asset classes and a lot of different holding periods because there isn’t one best way. You can’t fall in love with the marketing language just because that’s what you want to hear. You have to challenge everything just for yourself, not to call somebody out and throw shade at them. When have you ever seen me do that? I don’t really do that. I make some jokes here and there, but ultimately there’s the best way for you. But the best way for you has a lot to do with how you’ve already been programmed, and that comes from your environment. So my job here as far as I concern, is just share with you all my failures and my successes. Where did I have strength? Where did I have good luck? Where do I have to persist? And then where are you likely to see that in your own life, given what your endeavors are and where you want to be? But you constantly have to ask yourself good, open-ended questions. If you don’t, you’re not going to get the good answers. And if you’re afraid to get those answers, you’re holding yourself back.
You see, which again, nothing with it. It doesn’t make you a bad person, but don’t walk around thinking like, well, my goal is to do this in my trading world, but yet I’m afraid to go look over here. Because in my mind’s eye, the folks that I know who were super successful in this were very, very inquisitive. They had fear, but they didn’t let the fear stunt their growth. And sometimes it would take ’em a day or two, maybe a week to process certain things, but they were always willing to go to that place to talk about the things that people don’t like to talk about, especially guys, because not typically sitting around talking about their feelings. Women are much better at that, this and that. So embrace the uncertainty is the theme of the week. And don’t be afraid to ask yourself good questions.
If you have trouble doing that and you don’t know where to start, well reach out to me. If I listen to you, I’m a good listener. I can help you understand that. Maybe put a few questions, not to fire shots over your bow, but just to get you in that mindset, and then you can kind of take it over and go, and that’s that. So look, I hope you had a great week. Please keep the comments coming. I appreciate everybody and it’s good to give back to the community and help everybody with the stuff that I really think matters in terms of your becoming a pro trader and behaving better because your behavior predicts your profitability or not. So have a great weekend, folks, and I’ll see you Monday.
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