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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