Podcast appearances and mentions of Mark Douglas

In this episode of the Pastor to Pioneer podcast, Britton Smith interviews Mark Douglas, exploring his journey from a traditional pastoral role to a more transformative approach to ministry. Mark shares his experiences of feeling inadequate and frustrated within the prevailing church model, the challenges he faced in his ministry, and the realizations that led him to seek a different path. The conversation delves into the systemic issues within the church, the importance of evangelism, and the personal struggles that shaped Mark's faith journey. He discusses the challenges of resignation, the healing process through grace, and the importance of community. 

Mark Douglas, CEO at MNTN, talks about going public today and raising funds at the top of the marketed range. Ryan Reynolds’ Ad Firm MNTN, Holders Raise $187 Million in IPO as the company has a market value of about $1.24 billion and a fully diluted value of about $1.6 billion, with Founder and CEO Mark Douglas set to have 26% of the voting power after the offering. He joined Bloomberg's Tom Keene and Paul Sweeney from the floor of the NYSE.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The i Paper's Northern Football Correspondent, Mark Douglas, shares untold stories from his time covering NUFC, working with Pardew and Rafa, and the headlines he never thought he'd write.

Ste is back with your Redmen Weekly Podcast where we showcase the best parts from Redmen Plus this week! In a clip from the Deep Dive, Chris and Josh answer your questions, Dan speaks to Mark Douglas from the I Paper about the links regarding Bournemouth's Kerkez and Huijsen and Dan also speaks to Paul Gorst on the Trent Alexander-Arnold situation in our Journo Insight show!Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/redmentv. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dan spoke to the Northern Football Correspondent for The i paper Mark Douglas (@MsiDouglas) about Liverpool's reported interest in Dean Huijen and Milos Kerkez. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/redmentv. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

MNTN founder and CEO Mark Douglas talks about how Big Tech companies are spending their ad dollars and what's next in the streaming space. He speaks with hosts Sonali Basak and Vonnie Quinn.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, we sit down with Mark Douglas, CEO of Mountain, to explore how his innovative platform is revolutionizing television advertising. From his background as a coding engineer to his vision for "Performance TV," Mark shares how Mountain empowers small and mid-sized businesses to achieve measurable results on streaming platforms—breaking barriers traditionally reserved for big brands. Learn what performance marketing really means, why it's essential for today's advertisers, and how Mountain compares to platforms like Google and Meta. Tune in for actionable insights and a glimpse into the future of TV advertising.

Chapter 1: Summary of Trading In The Zone"Trading In The Zone" by Mark Douglas is a highly regarded book in the field of trading psychology. The book emphasizes the mental and emotional aspects of trading that can significantly impact a trader's performance. Here's a summary of its key concepts:1. Mindset and Psychology: Douglas argues that successful trading is primarily about one's mindset. A trader's beliefs, attitudes, and emotions play a pivotal role in their decision-making process. He emphasizes the importance of cultivating a disciplined and positive mindset.2. Understanding Uncertainty: The book stresses the nature of uncertainty in trading. Douglas teaches that markets are inherently unpredictable, and traders must learn to accept risk rather than trying to eliminate it. Embracing uncertainty leads to a more resilient trading approach.3. Developing a Consistent Approach: Douglas highlights the importance of consistency in trading. He suggests that traders should develop a set of rules and a trading plan and adhere to it. This consistency helps mitigate emotional reactions and fosters a systematic approach to trading.4. Emotional Discipline: The author discusses various emotions that traders encounter, such as fear and greed, and how these emotions can lead to poor decision-making. He provides strategies for maintaining emotional discipline and suggests that traders should strive to remain detached from their trades and outcomes.5. Beliefs and Marketplace Behaviour: Douglas emphasizes that traders often bring their personal beliefs into the market, which can skew their perception of reality and lead to self-sabotage. Understanding how beliefs shape trading behavior is crucial for achieving success.6. Visualization and Mental Rehearsal: The book discusses the power of visualization and mental rehearsal in trading. Douglas advocates for mentally preparing for trades and visualizing successful outcomes to enhance confidence and mental clarity.7. Accepting Losses: One of the key lessons is the importance of accepting losses as a part of trading. Successful traders view losses as opportunities for learning rather than as a reflection of their worth or skills.Overall, "Trading In The Zone" serves as a guide for traders to develop a strong psychological foundation, enabling them to navigate the challenges of trading more effectively. Douglas encourages readers to focus on their mindset and emotional regulation as essential components of successful trading.Chapter 2: The Theme of Trading In The Zone"Trading in the Zone" by Mark Douglas is a seminal book that focuses primarily on the psychology of trading, rather than the technical aspects of trading itself. Here are some key plot points, character development aspects (though it is more of a non-fiction work), and thematic ideas present in the book: Key Plot Points:1. Understanding Trading Psychology: The book emphasizes the importance of understanding one's own psychology and the mental challenges that traders face. Douglas argues that successful trading goes beyond technical skills and involves cultivating the right mindset.2. The Role of Fear and Greed: Douglas discusses how emotions like fear and greed can impact trading decisions, often leading to mistakes. His insights delve into the emotional highs and lows that traders experience.3. The Concept of "probability": The author stresses approaching trading as a game of probabilities rather than seeking absolute certainties. He encourages traders to accept that they will not win every trade but can still be successful through proper risk management and mindset.4. Developing a Trading Plan: Douglas emphasizes the necessity of having a well-defined trading plan, one that delineates clear rules for entry and exit points and prepares traders to react consistently in...

#MarkDouglas #NUFC #iPaper #TransferWindow #NewcastleUnited #PremierLeague #EPL #FLTS

Welcome to the OVTLYR Trading Room, where trading is made simple and effective. In today's session, we're diving deep into key market insights and breaking down how you can leverage OVTLYR data to save time, make money, and reduce risk. Let's start by walking through how OVTLYR works. It's a 4-step system that tracks how investors are reacting to market changes, price movements, news, and the broader economy. When irrational behaviors like fear and greed hit extremes, OVTLYR steps in with buy and sell signals, giving you the chance to jump into trades right before the big moves happen. Today, the SPY index is giving us a lot to think about. We're seeing a bullish trend with the 10-over-20 moving average, and the price is holding above the 50-day moving average. But here's where it gets interesting—while the trend is looking strong, OVTLYR is signaling a potential sell. There's also bearish market breadth, which means it's time to play it smart and keep an eye on those multiple signals: market trend, market breadth, and sector analysis. That's where the real trading edge lies. We also dive into the mindset side of things. One of the biggest lessons here is about trading psychology. The best traders know it's not just about having a strategy—it's about how you think. Approaching trades with a mindset of probabilities, avoiding emotional reactions, and always predefining your risk are key. By letting your winners run and knowing when to exit during extreme market conditions, you set yourself up for long-term success. For options traders, there's a great discussion on rolling up strikes to reduce delta risk. This is a super practical move that helps you take profits while staying in the trade. It's all about capturing gains without exposing yourself to unnecessary risk—making sure you stay ahead of the game. The session also highlights the importance of discipline in trading. Sticking to your plan, only taking trades that are fully set up, and ignoring market noise are what separate successful traders from the rest. It's about patience and discipline, both of which lead to more consistent results. Looking to sharpen your trading mindset? Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas is an essential read. It's a fantastic resource for understanding how to think like a professional trader and manage your mental approach to the market. And don't miss out—OVTLYR is offering its lowest pricing of the year until September 30th. For just $299 annually (that's 82 cents a day!), you can get full access to everything OVTLYR offers. Prices are going up soon, so now's the time to take advantage of this deal and master the market! Click here to get OVTLYR's Special Offer: https://www.ovtlyrdeal.com/start-here61800575 #StockTrading #Investing #DayTrading #MarketAnalysis #TradingPsychology #GoldenTicketStrategy #SPYAnalysis #MarketTrends #TechnicalAnalysis #TradingStrategies #Finance #InvestSmart #OVTLYR #MakeMoney #SaveTime #StartWinning #LessRisk #TradingMindset

Special Guest:Mark Douglas, Professor of Christian Ethics & Lead Professor of the Master of Theology Degree, Columbia Theological SeminaryQuestion of the Week:We hear a lot about the impacts of climate change on things like loss of biodiversity and weather changes, but are there more human impacts such as increased likelihood of conflict or violence?Christian Pacifism for an Environmental AgeModernity, the Environment, and the Christian Just War TraditionFor Listening Guides, click here!Got a question for us? Send them to faithpodcast@pcusa.org! A Matter of Faith website

When you start listening to this podcast you will hear the actual quote about rules and expectations. That quote actually comes from Mark Douglas, who is the author of the book called Trading in the Zone. But I want to expand on the discussion quite a bit because I feel it is at the heart of issues for new traders, and oftentimes for moderately developed traders. I am also going to start with my take on trading books and a couple of recommendations.Set up a free coaching session with Paul:https://calendly.com/dts-paul/coaching-session-w-paulThe DTS Free Stuff Page:https://disciplinedtradingstrategies.com/free-stuff/To learn more, visit:http://disciplinedtradingstrategies.comListen to more episodes on Mission Matters:https://missionmatters.com/author/paul-lange/

MeMeCherry! Viola! Snikki! Chris! The Chat Pack! Yes, sometimes the universe tests our patience, but we push through and have a ROCKIN' good time! In this episode we discuss Drag, alcoholism, boundaries, the Pope, internet cats, reality TV, impressions, acid, L.A., relationships, and pronouns! Episodes discussed: 36: Keepin' It Real 713: Quitter w/ Michael Mattera 1168: The Key of Awesome w/ Mark Douglas 1373: Triple Rush w/ JessNYC and Dillon Roberts 1766: Full of Gass w/ Craig Gass 2615: Acid Attack w/ Grant Lindahl 2851: MURDER w/ Paul Gilmartin 3064: Chemdawg w/ Max Cohen 3260: It Started As a Joke w/ Eugene Mirman 3658: Humans Being w/ MJ Knefel

Watch Alix and Paul LIVE every day on YouTube: http://bit.ly/3vTiACF.Drew Reading, Bloomberg Intelligence U.S Homebuilding Analyst, discusses existing home sales data. Dana Peterson, Chief Economist at the Conference Board, discusses the latest data from US Leading Economic Index. George Ferguson, Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Aerospace, Defense, and Airlines Analyst, discusses Alaska Air earnings. Mark Douglas, President and CEO of MNTN, previews Netflix earnings after the closing bell. Paul Gulberg, Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Equity Analyst, discusses Blackstone earnings.Hosts: Paul Sweeney and Alix SteelSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to episode 16 of the "Day Trading for Beginners Podcast." In today's episode, we review the definition of day trading and the critical role of trading psychology. Download my 6-Month Blueprint for becoming a full-time day trader:https://stokestrades.com/blueprintIn this episode, we cover:Understanding Day Trading: An exploration of what day trading truly entails, beyond the simplistic notion of buying and selling financial instruments within a single day. We discuss the speculative nature of day trading, focusing on profiting from short-term price fluctuations through technical analysis, news events, and market sentiment.Personality Traits for Successful Day Trading: Highlighting key personality traits such as discipline, independence, and decisiveness that align well with the demands of day trading. Understanding that the right mindset and characteristics can significantly impact your trading success.The Importance of Trading Psychology: Why mindset and psychological preparedness are paramount in day trading. We look into the insights offered by one of the leading books on trading psychology, "Trading in the Zone" by Mark Douglas, focusing on the first chapter's discussion on the psychological aspects that set successful traders apart.Key Takeaways:- Day trading is not merely about technical skills. Emotional intelligence, discipline, and a keen understanding of one's psychological responses play a crucial role.- Successful day traders possess a unique set of attitudes, allowing them to remain disciplined, focused, and confident amidst the market's volatility.- Embracing and managing risk, rather than fearing it, is essential for achieving consistency and success in trading.Resources Mentioned:Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas: A must-read for understanding the psychological foundations of successful trading. Available on Amazon as an audiobook and in other formats.Closing Thoughts:As we continue the journey into day trading, it's clear that mastering the market's technical aspects is just part of the equation. Cultivating the right mindset and overcoming psychological barriers are equally, if not more, important. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes where we'll cover options trading and further explore the mental fortitude required for day trading success.Read the full article and watch the video here:https://stokestrades.com/what-is-day-trading/Subscribe:Don't miss out on future insights and strategies to aid your day trading journey. Subscribe to the podcast for more educational content, and check out the resources and community at StokesTrades.com for a supportive learning experience.Website and Other Social Accounts:https://stokestrades.com/https://www.youtube.com/@StokesTrades

Sponsored by Darwinex Zero "Certify your track record without putting your capital at risk." Mark Douglas says you should not care about each trade you take. Which is true, to some extent… Let me explain… I believe we should not care about the outcome of an individual trade, from the perspective of P&L. We don't want to get caught up in emotional attachment to a trade. It's just one trade out of thousands we'll take in our career. However, if we are not careful we can take this too literally. What do I mean? Let's explore...

Lorenzo Simonelli, CEO of Baker Hughes, joins to discuss the company's earnings and outlook for 2024. Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Industrial Services Analyst Scott Levine joins to discuss the earnings as well. Anna Rathbun, CIO at CBIZ Investment Advisory Services, gives her market outlook. Mark Douglas, Founder and CEO at MNTN, discusses the latest news and earnings from Netflix. And Andrea Auerbach, Head of Private Investments at Cambridge Associates, joins to discuss her view on the markets and current investment opportunities. Hosts: Paul Sweeney and Alix Steel See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stocks moving lower today, but our market guests both say the bulls have the upper hand. Plus, the U.S. expanding strikes in Yemen. We have the latest and a look at the retail group most exposed to Red Sea disruptions. And Netflix is on deck to report earnings. The company may have won the streaming wars, but what about the ad wars? Ad executive Mark Douglas will weigh in.

Ed Ludlow, host of Bloomberg Technology, joins to discuss the latest developments at CE, AI pitches from companies at CES, and job cuts at Twitch. George Ferguson, Senior Analyst: Defense/Aerospace and Airlines, joins to discuss the latest on Boeing and previews airline earnings. Mark Douglas, CEO of MNTN, joins from CES to discuss the latest tech developments in the advertising space, outlook for ads, and what he's seeing at CES. He is joined by Mark Penn of Stagwell to discuss the MNTN partnership with Stagwell. Greg Taylor, CIO at Purpose Investments, joins to discuss the SEC expected to clear the Bitcoin spot ETF, and managing the first Bitcoin ETF as part of Purpose Investments. Woo Jin Ho, Senior Hardware Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, joins us from CES to discuss the HPE-Juniper deal and other tech/hardware news out of Las Vegas. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Lisa Mateo.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jacob is a young trader from Denmark who discovered a passion for investing, then trading, in his mid-teens. He has since dived into trading with gusto learning the basics of trading, developing his trading skills, learning technical analysis, developing systematic trading capabilities, reading influential writers on trading, in particular the works of Mark Douglas. In addition, he worked on developing himself, learning and applying stoic attitudes, and gaining a sense of how markets work and how to best work with them, and the uncertainty that is part of their structure.

On today's episode on the Digital Social Hour, Mark Douglas talks about partnering with Ryan Reynolds, Building a billion dollar brand with MNTN and how he is using artificial intelligence. BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: Jenna@DigitalSocialHour.com APPLY TO BE ON THE POD: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH HelloFresh: https://www.hellofresh.com/50dsh Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today's episode on the Digital Social Hour, Mark Douglas talks about partnering with Ryan Reynolds, Building a billion dollar brand with MNTN and how he is using artificial intelligence. BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: Jenna@DigitalSocialHour.com APPLY TO BE ON THE POD: https://forms.gle/qXvENTeurx7Xn8Ci9 SPONSORS: Opus Pro: https://www.opus.pro/?via=DSH HelloFresh: https://www.hellofresh.com/50dsh Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude" by Mark Douglas is an indispensable guide for every trader seeking to conquer the mental game of trading. Brimming with actionable insights and real-world scenarios, the book delves into five core truths about the unpredictable nature of trading. Douglas enlightens traders on how to cultivate a disciplined mindset, navigate the markets with confidence, and harness the power of probabilistic thinking. By teaching readers how to shift their focus from prediction to risk management, this book is a roadmap to trading success, helping traders of all levels to thrive in the dynamic world of financial markets.

Frank Sorrentino, CEO of ConnectOne Bank, joins to discuss his outlook for the economy and Fed, what ConnectOne is seeing in construction lending, as well as other pressures on regional banks. Thomas Majewski, CEO at Eagle Point, joins to talk about collateralized loan obligations, and new managers betting on the market. Dina Ting, Head of the Global Index Portfolio Management Team at Franklin Templeton ETFs, joins to discuss ETF flows and ETF investing strategies. Mark Douglas, CEO at MNTN, joins to discuss the Disney CFO change and preview Disney earnings. Hosted by Matt Miller, Emily Graffeo, Katie Greifeld, and Scarlet Fu.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"The Disciplined Trader" by Mark Douglas is a powerful trading guide that has transformed the approach of countless traders in their pursuit of financial success. Filled with insightful advice and compelling examples, the book delves into the critical principles of trading psychology, emotional detachment, and overcoming fear. Douglas instructs readers on how to develop mental discipline, maintain objectivity in decision-making, and confidently navigate the unpredictable world of trading. With its profound understanding of the trader's mindset, "The Disciplined Trader" serves as an essential resource for those seeking to master their emotions and achieve enduring success in the markets.

In this podcast episode, host Agnieszka Wood interviews Jermaine McGruder, known as The Strat Soldier, about the art of cutting losses in trading. Jermaine, a former army soldier with 20 years of experience, shares his journey in trading, emphasizing the importance of protecting capital and following a disciplined approach. He advises traders to focus on their setups, set proper stop losses, and prioritize capital protection. Jermaine also discusses the recent passing of Rob Smith, the creator of The Strat, and how he and the trading community are continuing his legacy by trading The Strat and sharing their knowledge with others. The episode provides different perspectives that traders can use to shift the way of experiencing the market.Furthermore, Jermaine and Agnieszka delve into various aspects of trading, including the significance of recognizing trends, understanding price action, and analyzing multiple time frames. They stress the importance of discipline, following trading rules, and avoiding emotional reactions to losses. The conversation also touches on the challenges of trading. It provides valuable insights into the emotional and psychological aspects of trading, managing emotions and emphasize the importance of accountability and vulnerability. About Jermaine McGruderJermaine McGruder, also known as The Strat Soldier, is a passionate trader and experienced educator. Jermaine embarked on his journey with The STRAT in 2019 and quickly honed his skills, becoming adept at both trading and teaching this methodology. His guidance has empowered seasoned traders to curb significant losses and has equipped newcomers with the ability to identify buy and sell signals confidently.Jermaine's teaching philosophy centers on enabling individuals to trade based on their convictions and take actionable signals without succumbing to significant losses. Drawing from his extensive 20-year military background, Jermaine brings a wealth of leadership and training experience to his teaching approach. Whether on the battlefield or in the world of trading, he excels in leading and educating individuals, making him a valuable asset in The STRAT community. Contact Agnieszka Wood | Ahead Coach: Website: aheadcoach.comTwitter: @Ahead_CoachYouTube: @aheadcoachFacebook: Agnieszka WoodInstagram: ahead.coachLinkedIn: Agnieszka Wood Contact Jermaine McGruder:Podcast: InForceThe Weekend Show: The Weekend ShiftTwitter: @Cyberdog2Website: http://TheStratSoldier.com—Transcript[00:00:02] - AgnieszkaI am Agnieszka Wood. Welcome to the Confidence in Trading podcast. Let me introduce my special guest on today's show, Jermaine McGruder, aka The Strat Soldier. You might recognize Jermaine from his very popular Strat webinar with Benzinga that has gained over 70,000 views, or his appearance on first trade show with Rohan Makhecka in June 2021. And if you are a podcast fan, you might know Jermaine from his show In Force, where he looks at the markets through the eyes of The Strat and his weekly Saturday show, The Weekend Shift. As you might have already figured out from his nickname, The Strat Soldier, Jermaine has been in the army for 20 years and has worked with hundreds of soldiers in various environments. And as he puts it, leading and training is what I do. I invited Jermaine to my show to talk about the one aspect of trading that hurts traders and their bottom line the most. Welcome to episode number 14, the Art of Cutting Losses. Hi, Jermaine. Welcome to my podcast, and thank you so much for making the time for joining me today.[00:01:18] - JermaineThanks for having me. Thank you so much, Agnieszka. This is awesome. This is really cool. I love meeting new people and also, of course, talking about The Strat and then the whole idea of cutting losses. Perfect idea. I love it. I love it.[00:01:31] - AgnieszkaFantastic. Jermaine, you have been trading The Strat since 2019, and you have been a leader at Sepia Group with Rob Smith since September 2021. May he rest in peace. His sudden departure must have been pretty hard for you, and I cannot even begin to imagine the impact on the trading community.[00:01:51] - JermaineYeah, it's been tough. It's been real tough. Rob was always a character. That's what we loved about Rob. So when are, you know, I'm not feeling well. I'm not doing this or that. We all were. You know, rob's going through his own little inside know to use some trading. You know, we're like, he's going inside bar right now. He's going to be okay, and he'll reverse back to the upside. He'll be fine. It was a little bit of a shock that he didn't pull through because he was such a character, so funny, and he always found a way to figure it out. So, yeah, very sad. But we are going to keep Rob alive by continuing to trade The Strat and continuing to do what he said to do, which is create those winning positions. Then after you understand what you're doing, show the next person. And that's been my motivation since the beginning of all of it, is to show other people how to not get killed in here and not blow out accounts, not all these things. 30 years on CBOE, you know what I mean? 30 years on the floor and doing what he does.[00:03:02] - JermaineAnd it's amazing for him to just talk to regular people and teach regular people how to do I say regular people, but we're all regular people. I'm just saying to talk to an average person and say, okay, this is how stocks work. It was an amazing skill to learn, and I hope to keep passing it on to other people.[00:03:23] - AgnieszkaThat's amazing and really wonderful that you're passing on the legacy. And I really regret I never had a chance to meet him personally, but I've heard so much good about him and about his strategy. I actually interviewed few months ago, Ben Okopnik, who is also trading the strategy. That's how I actually heard about Rob. So, yeah, big loss. So you have been trading the Strat for a relatively short time, and you managed to become not only proficient in it, but also good at teaching it. Can you tell us a little bit more about your trading experience and what's your secret?[00:04:05] - JermaineOh, the secret is there are no secrets now.[00:04:09] - AgnieszkaThat's the best one.[00:04:11] - JermaineThat's the best one. The secret is just trading what's actually happening on the charts. And that can be difficult because you have to be able to tell yourself the truth. Like, you can draw as many lines on your charts as you want. You can have all the indicators and all the squawk boxes and community leaders and people telling you what you need to do, but you're still the one that has to hit the button, right? You're still the one that has to go, okay, we're going. This is my entry, this is my exit. This is what I'm going to do. And I think that's when trading kind of really clicks for most people when they go, okay, I know what everybody's saying, but what do I really see on the charts? I know what the news is saying, but what do I really see on the charts? What do I see really happening? Are they really buying it or are they really selling it? And some people don't know at all. Some people are like, Well, I don't know, how did you figure it out.[00:05:12] - AgnieszkaIn such a short time?[00:05:13] - JermaineYeah, I'm trying to get into that. When I first started trading back in 2019, way before the Strat, I was working with a buddy and I was like, man, I want to get into stocks. It sounds like something I'd want to do. And so he introduced me to Robinhood and he's like, yeah, it's easy. There's no account minimums. You just put your money in here, and then once you get your money in there, I'll show you how to start doing it. So he starts showing me how to find stocks, how to buy stocks, and I'm thinking, I'm doing pretty good, I'm doing all right. And for the first few months, I was doing really well. Of course, things were all trending to the highs, so I didn't realize how easy it really was. And then he starts talking about options because I'm like, well, I want to make more money. I'm doing pretty good. I want to make more. So he starts talking about options, and then that was a whole nother ballgame. That with only a few months experience, I shouldn't have been messing with. But I didn't know that at the time.[00:06:08] - JermaineI just had my buddy saying, hey, this is how you do it.[00:06:11] - AgnieszkaThat's how you become millionaire in a short time.[00:06:14] - JermaineYeah, that's how you do it. Yeah, that's how you make millions. And then he showed me buying options into earnings reports. I'm like, okay, so that was not a good deal. That was not a good idea to do. But he told me, you know what I mean? So the one example I always talk about is Twitter. I bought all these calls into Twitter because Twitter has never missed an earnings. And this is all the way before, back in 2019. So I read all this yahoo news. I read all these articles. I read all this stuff. And so I buy calls because they never miss. Well, this is first quarter of 2020. Yeah, they missed last quarter. They missed big, and boom. And I lost half my account at that time, and honestly, it was around $500. But me being a brand new trader, that's a big deal. That's a huge deal for me. Wait a minute. Hold on a second. Now, this is not why I wanted to start trading. And so, you know what I mean? I had to deal with that with myself, and I had to deal with that with because I had to talk to my wife, too.[00:07:23] - JermaineI'm like, I told you, I'm not getting in this to gamble. I'm not getting in to just throw away money. But this loss happened, and I stopped trading. I didn't quit. I just stopped, like, let me find a coach. Let me find somebody that can help me out. 2019. And that's when I found Rob in October of 2019. So I apologize for the timeline there, but that's when I found Rob, and I found some articles on Instagram talking about these scenarios. Scenario one, scenario two, scenario three. And this is how we know when to get in and when to get out. So I read his article. What do we know to be true about Price action? And that was a great article, and I learned more in that one article than all the YouTube videos I was watching about how to trade. And then that's when I joined his live room, and that's when, okay, things started clicking for me, because I knew when to get in, because Rob was helping. Of course rob's helping me. He's coaching me. But I got to a point where I started to know, okay, this is when I need to get in, and this is when the trade is not going well.[00:08:25] - JermaineI need to get out. The system is telling me to cut it. Once I started knowing where to put my entries and where to put my stops, things started moving in the right direction, and then I started gaining confidence in my trading because I knew, like you said, when it started clicking for me is when I started trusting, okay, this is where my stop is at. And if it goes below this, I need to cut it. I need to get out, but if it sets back up, I can get right back in. But I'm protecting my capital. That was big for me, just protecting my capital. That's when it started clicking. You know what I mean? I don't need to throw a whole bunch on. I don't need to rush in the stuff. What are my actual setups? What is telling me to get in.[00:09:18] - AgnieszkaWas that the impact of that first big loss which was a lucky loss in this case if the impact was I need to protect my capital because from experience, from my own experience. And also what I see from other traders, it's not that easy just to stick to your stop loss and actually even putting a stop loss right, because most traders think, how much am I going to make on it? And not so much I need to protect my capital in the first place. So how was that for you that you actually were so disciplined and you say, okay, I know I need to do it, and I'm just going to do it.[00:09:53] - JermaineYeah, the military definitely helps because there's a certain set of rules. Like, if you want to be effective in this, here's steps one through whatever this is. How one through five, for example, of a conversation. Here's the steps on how to do this event or how to be good at this training event. And you got to do it a certain way. And so when I sat down, I started, okay, what are my losses really coming in at? What's not working for me, and anytime it wasn't working for me is when I moved my stops down, not putting in a stop. And then another thing for me was knowing that options were not where I wouldn't needed to be at. Trading options was or is still a lot. It's not as easy as people say it is. And like you said, I've only been trading since 2019, and so I stick to common shares. And so the people that I work with, I tell them, stick to common shares. Why? Because you can put in a hard stop. I can put in a hard stop and go, okay, I'm taking this hammer on a weekly signal to the upside.[00:11:02] - JermaineBut here's where I'm getting out at. If it drops down too far and sometimes you get stopped out and you're like, I wish I would have stayed in because it went right back up the next day. But how many times have we also had experiences where you had no stop and it gapped way down, you know what I mean? Or you're shorting something and you had no stops, and it's gapping way up on you and you don't know.[00:11:29] - AgnieszkaYeah, you cannot trust the situation, what the market does. But the worst part, I think, in that is also when you don't have a stop and then it goes lower than your price and then your imaginary stop. Then the way you start talking to yourself and saying, yeah, but last time it did go back, so I'm just going to wait, right? Okay, it didn't happen today. Maybe tomorrow. And then before you know, you're just too late.[00:11:56] - JermaineYeah, you're too late. And you're just staring at it. It's like the deer in the headlights look. You're just do I when do I need to get in? When do I get out? Like, for example, today on Roku, I know we're not looking at charts, but today on Roku I got stopped out on Roku yesterday on a signal to the downside. I'm like, okay, I'm getting puts. And yesterday we all seen the market just kind of rally slowly back up on the 60 Minutes charts. And I'm like, what is this? And I got a job. I got a full time job, just like a lot of other traders. And I'm like, I got to get out, so I cut my losses. And then today this thing goes engulfing bar. Scenario three to the I'm trying really hard not to talk about Jargon, but.[00:12:40] - AgnieszkaScenario no, don't worry, this is for traders. So I assume that a lot of people who listening, they will understand what you're talking about.[00:12:48] - JermaineYeah, so they got this big engulfing bar on the day on Roku to the downside, and I didn't get back in. I'm working other then there's that situation again, I should have just held it. I should have just held through. So again, that's that discipline. Because I tell people, if you break your rules on this trade right now, you just take the trade. Because you know there's really not an entry. You're just taking it, or you're just going to jump in. I'm not putting any stops or you over leverage. You're just doing whatever you need to, and it's a winner. Okay, let's just say it's a winning trade, and we'll go with the positive side. First it's a winning trade, but then the next time you take a trade, you say to yourself, you automatically create that doubt. You go, okay, am I going to break my rules this time? Is this time going to be the time that works? This is where I'm supposed to get in at, and this is where I'm supposed to put my stops. But last time I just jumped in, so I just jump in and then it doesn't work.[00:13:54] - JermaineYeah, and now you have this cycle of trusting yourself, not trusting yourself, following your rules, not following your rules. I just got to the point where I was like, I'm putting my stops here. I'm going to trust the system, and if I have to get out, I will get out.[00:14:09] - AgnieszkaThat's so true, because it creates a ripple effect. Right. And I think a lot of people don't realize is that once you break the rule, it's not just this time you're breaking the rule. There is so much more that is going to happen afterwards, the internal dialog, and especially when you win that trade, right. Then it's just going to be more consequences than just this one that connected to this one trade directly. It will be much more. And I think that impact of that, that people are just not always aware or maybe don't want to think about.[00:14:43] - JermaineRight. And it's hard to that's the temptation of, okay, well, I broke my rules, I made a lot of money. I broke my rules, now I lost a lot of money. So I just say, just follow your rules. Okay. You know what I mean? Because if you don't, that's when another conversation starts in your head is, okay, well, maybe this system is not working. Well, maybe I need to put in an RSI, or maybe I need to work on MACD, or maybe I need to get in before my two SMAs cross. Maybe if I get in before they cross, it'll just it never stops.[00:15:21] - AgnieszkaRight?[00:15:22] - JermaineIt never stops. So then that came to the next thing is what Rob always talked about, and we talk about in the straddle, the time, what's actually happening, in the price, what's actually happening. Are they actually buying it or are they actually selling it? And to do that, we look at four different time frames. We look at the month, the week, the daily, and the 60. I'm going to say that a little slower because I say it all the time, but we look at the monthly chart, the weekly chart, the daily chart, and the 60 minutes chart, and we gage participants by price and time. So we're looking at all these time frames as like a multi analysis on these time frames to go. Okay, for example, right now, spy. I'm looking at a chart of spy, and it's inside on the month, and it's red. We look at the week, it's trading below last week's lows. It's two down. We call that scenario two down on the week. Two two continuation down. There's more selling happening on the week, which was reconfirming what we're seeing on the month that they're selling. And then on my daily chart, in my 60 minutes charts, it's red, they're selling it.[00:16:32] - AgnieszkaRight.[00:16:32] - JermaineOkay. So I don't need to be getting in here and going, maybe it's time to buy.[00:16:38] - AgnieszkaYeah. They say that when the blood is on the street, I need to buy.[00:16:41] - JermaineYeah, exactly. Buy. When everybody is afraid. Yeah. So then you buy. And I talked to a trade about this yesterday. Again, I'm looking at my charts. I talked about a trader yesterday because I was frustrated. There's a couple of traders that are frustrated. They were like, okay, well, we had a reversal on the 60 Minutes charts, but we still made a lower low and we made another lower low today we got all the way down to 445 on the 60 minutes charts. And that can be very I'm going to say annoying. But again, that's where our stops come in at. Because if I have that hard stop and I can say if things go wrong, I'm out, right? I'm getting out. And if you're good at options or you're good at shorting stocks, then you can say, okay, this is where I'm going to short stuff. But this whole week has been just like a yoyo effect. It's been going up, going up, it's been going down, going up. We had Fed talk, we had Energies, we got all kinds of weird stuff going. Post consumer price index and then PPI, a production price index.[00:17:51] - JermainePeople always say CPI, PPI. They never know what it means.[00:17:55] - AgnieszkaSorry, I guess I'm so used to using acronyms.[00:17:59] - JermaineNo, that's great. I I love, love it. It and I tell people all the time, we don't trade the news, we trade the price. So they could say inflation, it's going terrible. Inflation is still going on the highs. Everything costs more. Producing things cost more and things go to the lows. We've also seen these reports come out and the market goes, yes, we know. And it goes back to the highs anyway, right? What is the price actually doing? Is it green or is it red? Red means sell, green means buy. And I know that's a really simple way of saying it, but once I started putting that stuff together, then things clicked. Then things were going I was looking at my trades different, going, okay, I got in here. Are they buying it right now? Are they still buying it? Do I need to push my stop up? Do I need to figure out a way to get out of this?[00:18:55] - AgnieszkaRight? Yeah. The bottom line is that you have to act on what is happening and not what you're wishing that would happen.[00:19:04] - JermaineYes.[00:19:05] - AgnieszkaBecause trading, let's be fair, it is based a lot on our dreams, on our hopes, on what we want. And it's just so very easy to fall into the trap that if things are not exactly going the way you want it, that you are trying to control it and bend the reality to what just feels much better for you and that you keep that hope. Right. It's very normal. What we also do in our daily life, we try to control things in market. We just simply cannot. The only thing we need to try to control at least is ourselves and what we do. And when you have a system that you know it works and you can trust, then you don't have to even control the system. It's just you. That's the most difficult part.[00:19:52] - JermaineYes. And as I've been trading the strat and learning other systems along with that, you can do that same type of that you can have that same mentality. You should have that same mentality using indicators because you definitely want the price and the indicator to be going in the same direction. You want the indicator to be reconfirming. Yes, we're going to the highs, right? Yes, I need to stay in this thing, even the whole RSI overbought and oversold thing, you know what I mean? You still want the price and the direction of your indicator to reconfirm each other. Because once you start talking about divergences and I'm going to short it, when this thing is at the highs without any signals and it keeps going to the highs, you're not acknowledging that, yes, they're selling it right now, you know what I mean? And like I said, I want to say heartache. I don't know if that's the right word, but that's been the frustration and frustration on trading in the last couple of days. Last few days of this week, anyway, because the price is just gapping up and gapping down and then just kind of moving in a direction that's hard to stay in.[00:21:05] - JermaineAnd you could ignore the price, stay in your position and go, it's not telling me to get out yet, but you have to know your system.[00:21:14] - AgnieszkaExactly. And I appreciate that you're actually acknowledging sometimes it's just hard to trade and to look what this price is doing and try to figure it out, what it's going to do, right? Because the indicators sometimes, okay, the stock is overbought or oversold, and now you're saying to yourself, yeah, it should come down, right? So let me short it. It should come down. It's enough. It went up so much. Now I think it should come down and then you start fighting the trend. So it's just not always or most of the time not what we think. Because we have wishful thinking a lot of times.[00:22:01] - JermaineYes. I was talking to some traders, and I guess we're all talking about Nvidia. I think Nvidia is a good example of what you're saying because once Nvidia had that great earnings and everybody can go look at your charts at home around June 14, no, around May 26. We got May 30. May 30. It got all up to 420. It got all up to 420 and it was like, there's no way it can go any higher. This is it. It's at all time highs, it can't go any higher. So people are like, well, I'm going to short it now. And I'm like, well, don't do that without actionable signals, you know what I mean? You want to know like a shooting star, we call them shooters or reversal on a daily time frame or weekly time frame that lets you know this is going down. And you did have a reversal from May 26 to may 30. Let me see here. Let me say that, right? May 30 and May 31, you had a reversal to the downside. It went all the way down to 378. I'm sure these people are like, yes. Told you.[00:23:09] - JermaineSee, start shortening it's over, right? Yeah, I was right. It did good. And that is true. It did do great. But then the very next day went right back up and you had a reversal right back up and it got all the way back up to 401. So now you're thinking, okay, I started shorting this thing below 400. It went all the way down to 378. I didn't take any profits. The very next day it gets all the way back up to 400. You have to look at it and go, what is it really doing? They're buying. And then you're like, well, my indicator is still saying it's overbought. It has to come back down. And to hold through all that pain and frustration and doubt, it's really hard. I'd rather you take your profits on that one trade, take a victory awesome and just cut it and then move on. And if it sets back up again and starts moving down again, then you can get back in. But now Nvidia got all the way back up to 483. There's a trader, I'm sure there are some traders out there that says, I'm just going to keep shorting it no matter what.[00:24:18] - JermaineI know it's going to the highs, but it's overbought. I'm just going to keep shorting it. And have they been holding since 390 all the way up back up to 482?[00:24:27] - AgnieszkaI hope not.[00:24:29] - JermaineAnd now it's at 429. They're hoping that they get their money back.[00:24:33] - AgnieszkaYeah.[00:24:36] - JermaineI always speak to the average person as well on these trades because you got to know, I tell people like, you're not Kathy Wood, you can't just keep averaging down on your stuff. Nothing against Kathy Woods, but you can't keep averaging down on your trades until it means nothing. Like, I don't have that type of capital and some other people don't either. But some people do and they can keep doing that. But I'm like only losers, average losers. So if you just keep averaging down thinking it's going to go to zero, I'd rather you just cut this trade. It went well. I didn't take profits. It's going back up. I'm acknowledging what the price is doing and I need to get out of this thing because that's also going to give you confidence as well when you have a winning position. I got in here, it went exactly where I said it was going to go. I need to move my stops toward the direction of the price, and I want to hold my winners keeps going in the direction I want it to go, but I'm going to push my stops up toward the price so that if it starts going the other way, I take some profits.[00:25:45] - AgnieszkaExactly. And it's a very simple principle. If you want to be a winner, stick to the winners, right. Stick to the people that represent who you want to be and where you want to get to. So sticking to the loser is never a really good idea if you want to be successful.[00:26:00] - JermaineTrader yeah, here's a good analogy, analogy I have on trading. Let's just say you want to have five winning positions. Five winning positions. And here's my entries, 12345. They're in there and so far they're going great. And it's kind of like inviting people over for a party. You got five people come over, you got the drinks, you got the music, you got the right atmosphere, everybody's having a good time. And then all of a sudden two of these guests start having they started having a little argument about, I don't know, maybe the music. They don't like the music because this artist has politics. Sale I'm not going to talk politics here, but they start having a conversation. They're not having a good time. Now these two guests have an attitude now and they're kind of bringing down the mood of the party. They're not dancing now. They're like now they're complaining about the drinks, they're complaining about the food and let's just say the party. But the other three guests, they're having a great time. They're engaging, they're telling jokes, they're having fun. And let's say by the end of the night, you're like, I have a house big enough, everybody gets their own room.[00:27:15] - JermaineWe're going to spend the night. Are you going to let these other two people that are not having a good time spend the night?[00:27:21] - AgnieszkaIt's such a great metaphor.[00:27:25] - JermaineHow much confidence that you have that they're just going to sleep it off and in the morning they're going to do better. So you let everybody spend the night. Everybody's got their own separate rooms. They spend the night, all the blankets, everything's great, temperatures are great. They wake up in the next morning and you're hoping that these two come out of their rooms having a good time. You know what I mean? They're happy. They got over whatever was going on, and you feed them pancakes and everything is great. But in reality, what's probably going to happen is the three people that are having a good time, they're going to come out and continue to have good breakfast and then have a good day. And the other two are going to be worse. They're going to be worse than they were before. That's a metaphor I use for trading. Like, I got three positions, I got five positions. They're doing great. Three are winners. Two of them are going red, okay? Two of them are red. And I'm looking at the charts and there's no evidence that I need to be holding these positions. I need to cut them because if you let them stay at the party long enough, they're.[00:28:27] - JermaineGoing to ruin the profits that you're gaining from these other three trades. Yes. And what a lot of people do is they'll say, okay, well, these three trades, they're doing great. I'm going to go ahead and take profits on these three. They were great. And then I'm going to hold these losers, and hopefully they'll come back. All right, go back to the analogy here. The three people that were having fun, they were dancing. You got to a certain part of the party, you're like, okay, guys, have a good night. You guys can leave. And then the other two that are having a bad time, you guys can spend the night, and hopefully tomorrow you'll have a good right. I'll make breakfast, we'll go to the movies. It'll be fun.[00:29:09] - AgnieszkaNo, it's not going to happen. And you have to put so much more energy into it, which would, in trading, it would translate. Most likely, you would come up with this idea, I'm just going to add to it. Right? I will put just more capital into it so I can average down, make things better. They never become better.[00:29:27] - JermaineNo. Yeah. Now, your guests that spent the night, they complained that you put too many blankets on them. That the music that you put on for them to sleep, too, they weren't really into it. And then the breakfast that you made for them is terrible.[00:29:40] - AgnieszkaYeah. And I remember years ago, what I used to do, I was lying to myself that, you know what? Maybe I just get rid of one, then the other one will come around. So I would sell half of my losing position and then kept the other half, hoping that when it comes down even more, I had those strategies all thought out in my head. When it would come down even lower, then I can add back the half I'm selling now, and then this will become profitable. No, because I was taking on that half. The loss, that was like, twice as much than the original loss. It was just once you start, it just never ends. Just gets worse.[00:30:19] - JermaineYes, it does just get worse, I would say. But I also say it starts the cycle. When it does work, sometimes when you're like, okay, I'll sell half. And then you get an actual signal, and it goes back up, and you're like, then you buy, and it does work. So you're like, okay, well, this worked.[00:30:37] - AgnieszkaAll right, this worked. I'm just going to start averaging down.[00:30:40] - JermaineWhat I'm doing now. But then when it doesn't work, you're just like, oh, my goodness. At the beginning of the year, the beginning of the year, you look at Spy, it was really tough. Everybody's like, I'm going to keep shorting the market. I'm just going to keep shortening it. But we just kept creeping back up. Right. And then actually, from November of 2022 to March of was just trading sideways. If you look at the monthly chart, just trading sideways. So nobody knew what to do. Everybody's just like, what are we doing here? And that's in the strat. We were just like, okay, until we get a reversal on, we're going to go for the things that are taken out last month's highs. We're going to go where the buyers are. When Spy was red, we were like, okay, let's look at things are taking out yesterday's lows or last month's lows. Let's short those and to try to stay with the trend. You know what I mean? Always acknowledge what the trend is actually doing. But then April comes in. We actually get a reversal back up on Spy above March's highs. Two two reversal back up.[00:31:52] - JermaineWe call that two two reversal back up. It's been going well since then. And we used AI to say, yes, this is why we're buying. Because of AI. I don't think it's because of AI. The institutional buyers got sick of the downside. They got sick of, we need to pick a direction. And they chose. And things started going to the highs.[00:32:14] - AgnieszkaThe new buzzword, AI. Like, whoever drops AI, the stock pops.[00:32:22] - JermaineThis podcast uses AI and 10,000 more viewers for you.[00:32:29] - AgnieszkaIt's so funny because I saw this also in earnings, like conference calls, everyone drops the word AI.[00:32:37] - JermaineWow.[00:32:38] - AgnieszkaOh, my God. This is going to be the next big thing.[00:32:41] - JermaineKroger, the grocery store. Kroger was talking about AI. And you're just like, what? I hope there's not AI picking my groceries out for me or whatever they're talking about. It's crazy. So what I'm saying with all of that is you have to be able to acknowledge the trend no matter what trading system you're using. I use time frames. I look at the month, the week, the daily, and the 60. And I'm looking at, okay, where the buyers are. Where is this price actually going? For a person that uses indicators, you have to be able to look at it and go, okay, what's the actual trend? I know what my indicator says, but what's the price actually doing? Like, for example, right now, SPY starting to reverse back up to the highs after a lot of selling this morning. Okay, I don't know if you've talked about prices on your show, so I don't want to confuse anybody.[00:33:34] - AgnieszkaIt doesn't matter. Okay, now we do.[00:33:37] - JermaineSo the price got taken all the way down to 454 nine. And now currently, did it hit 50 day?[00:33:46] - AgnieszkaNo.[00:33:47] - JermaineWell, I'd have to turn on the 50 day to see that, but it's definitely below the 14. SMA. I kind of looked at that stuff before the show just to give you guys that do. Look at that. Some indication of what's going on with the price. But everything went low. Everything went to the lows for the first 2 hours, and now it's reversing back up. So again, that's a situation where you go, okay, what's the trend actually doing? I bought these puts. I started shorting the stock, and it went great for the first 2 hours. But what's it doing right now, right now in this moment, it's starting to reverse back up to the highs. So if I had a winning position, I need to push my stops toward the price, and I need to figure out a way to get out so I don't lose that profit. And then on the other side of that is if I was shorting something and I'm not taking profits and I haven't taken profits, and I'm not moving my stops, you need to acknowledge, okay, this is what the trend is actually doing. What evidence do you have that the trend is continuing to go down?[00:34:50] - JermaineYou know what I mean?[00:34:51] - AgnieszkaYeah. And from what you're saying, I assume and I actually haven't asked, which probably I should have is you swing trade, not day trade?[00:35:01] - JermaineYes, I'm a swing trader. I have a full time job. I tell people all the time. I have a wife. I have kids. I have a cat. I have two cats. Now, like, I'm busy. I don't have time to look at the charts all the time. But when I do, like today, when I do have time to sit in front of the charts, that's when, okay, you can look at everything that way. You can look at options and things like that if that's what you do. But I am a swing trader. I want to get into a winning position, and I want to stay in that position as long as possible. So I do want to look at those weekly time frames. I like to trade weekly and monthly time frames, and hopefully I get into a position where it continues to go up. And then through the days and through the weeks, I can just keep pushing my stops up, my stop market orders up on my common shares until I get stopped out, because how many times as well you're like, okay, I'm going to go ahead and just take this position and I got a meeting in three minutes.[00:36:03] - JermaineSo then I go ahead and just buy this stuff, and you go to the meeting, and the meeting is like, meeting. Then you have a meeting after the meeting, and you're like, you can't look at your phone, because that's rude. You can't do that. And you get out of the meetings, and you're looking at this thing, you're like, what the heck? What is that?[00:36:21] - AgnieszkaThat was not the idea. I'm supposed to make money.[00:36:24] - JermaineExactly. So that's why I like those hard stops. Again, I use stop market sell orders just to get out. That way, if something silly happens, I'm out. I don't have to man, why didn't I do this?[00:36:41] - AgnieszkaYeah, I know. Do you check also throughout the day your positions at work?[00:36:47] - JermaineYes, I do. Again, that's the strat. We're always looking at the very next 60 minutes bar that opens up. The market opens at 930. So we're looking at 930, 10 30, 11 30, 12 30 at the bottom of the hour. Because we know that's when the next participation group comes in, we want to know, are they still buying or are they selling? Was it last week when AMD was just like, they are just buying AMD. And it went great for like three, maybe 4 hours, and then they said, okay, sell. And again, that's when we push our stops up and we go, okay, this is where I'm getting out at, you know what I mean? So, yes, I would rather swing trade again with those common shares and be in something and be great and have that confidence in, okay, now it's reversing to the lows. The trend is now reversing. I need to go ahead and push my stops up, and if it continues down, I'm out. I get stopped out in profit, and.[00:37:42] - AgnieszkaI go do something else. Because if the price goes back to your buy price, or hopefully not, but I'm there. It's not just that you didn't make anything, okay? You can tell to yourself, I haven't had anything in the first place, but then everything was for nothing, and you're just frustrated. You lose your confidence in yourself, and it's like, why did I do that? And then the whole revenge trading dynamics comes in, right? Okay, then I'm just going to get in and try it again. So I would really recommend everyone to check the Strat because I know that there are day traders who actually have full time jobs. And swing trading is not something that a lot of day traders see as something sexy. For some reason. It's very different. But swing trading is good. You can make money swing trading.[00:38:34] - JermaineYeah, exactly. So again, looking at participation groups, okay, so again, I gage participants by price and time. So if I'm trading in the month, I got four weeks. That's why I like weekly trades. If this thing goes great for two weeks, maybe three weeks, of course I want it all month. But if I got two weeks that are great, and then it starts reversing the lows, that's two good weeks of trading, you know what I mean?[00:38:59] - AgnieszkaRight.[00:38:59] - JermaineSo, like, well, that's too much. I want to go day trade. So now you have, what, 20 days of actual trading? And now you have 20 different bars to deal with, okay? And then they're like, well, people just keep reducing their time frames. And then all of a sudden they're like, well, I'm just going to trade 15 minutes bars. But now you have our ten minute bars. If you trade ten minute bars, that gives you, was it 39 different bars to deal with during the day, right? I ain't talking about the week yet. I'm talking about during the day. And that's a whole another participation group. Every time that next bar opens, they have to keep reconfirming the trend or your position, you know what I mean? If they're buying each next ten minute bar opens, they have to keep buying for your position to be going well. And you're like, once it starts going down, once it starts reversing down, you have to deal with that. You know what I mean?[00:39:53] - AgnieszkaYeah. And the lower the time frame, you open up much more to the dynamics of getting triggered and your emotions and being over trading and being triggered by those swings from up and down. Right? Because then your hopes, your fears, the greed, and everything just comes into play. When you swing trading, you don't see that, right? Especially if you just look at the 1 hour chart from time to time. It's very different.[00:40:24] - JermaineYes, it's very different.[00:40:25] - AgnieszkaIt also depends on your, I think, personality, because I day trade. I also have a swing trade account. But day trading is just something that I feel much more comfortable with. But I trade only until 11:00.[00:40:41] - JermaineOkay.[00:40:41] - AgnieszkaAnd then I closed my charts. That's why I didn't know if Spy actually reached it's.[00:40:45] - JermaineMoving back up, leveled it's at 446. Right now. 446, 55. But no, I love it. That's great. But that's why I look at the 60 Minutes bars as well, and I tell day traders, you least want to know what's going on with the 60 Minutes bar, because 60 Minutes tells you, this is what's happening right now, right? Then look at your daily chart and go, okay, what's happening today? So in the strat, I always tell people, especially for day trading, you want to look at those 60s you want to look at the 60 Minutes bar, go, are they buying or they're selling? And then on the day, is it green or is it red? You know what I mean? Because that's going to let you know. So I tell day traders, look at the 60 Minutes charts. 60 Minutes charts, because that's telling you what's happening right now. And then the daily charts, what's happening today. If it's green on the day and green on the 60 Minutes bars and you want to go do something crazy on the 15 minutes, you have all the evidence that you need to go, okay, this will continue to the highs because they're buying it right now, and they're buying it today.[00:41:50] - JermaineAnd then you can start working those smaller time frames if that's what you like. But for you to only look at one time frame and go ten minute charts is all I do. You are not seeing all the other you'll see all these crazy. You could look at it later on, you're like, yeah, this was the head and shoulders, and here's the cup, and here's the lip and the handle, and this is where the breakout was. But if you just go to the 60 Minutes chart, you'll go, oh, man, they sold it down for two days. They sold it down for 2 hours and then in the third hour, here it comes. You know what? I may reverse back to the highs or at least the daily chart and go, okay, yeah, I shouldn't have did any of that because they were selling it all day. This was just some fluctuation of yeah, definitely.[00:42:34] - AgnieszkaIt gives you a context, right, a perspective. And I think trading is a lot about different perspectives. Whether you're talking about the price or you're talking about yourself, to putting yourself in perspective. Right. What you do, your emotions and everything that you're doing really needs to kind of everything that's personal, you have to put in perspectives to kind of get yourself out of it. Step back and look at what is actually happening here. What am I telling to myself? What am I feeling? What is happening here? So that you don't project it onto the market? Like your dreams, your fears, your losses that you just took because it all doesn't matter.[00:43:21] - JermaineYes, I like to tell people the things that you are the one that determines what things mean. You know what I mean? So if you're just like you take some losses and you're like, I'm a bad trader. Every time I get in, it goes to the lows. And you keep telling yourself all these negative things. It's going to create a process. It's going to create a loop, a habit. It's going to create a habit. And then, so I tell people when you're trading and you do get stopped out, you trade your system no matter what it is. I like the strat, so I say the strat, but I get that reversal against me and I get stopped out. The first thing, I'm protecting my capital. Okay? There's a participation group in there that's doing something I'm not aware of. And I thought it was going to go to the highs, but they started selling it. I got out, okay? Stopped me out.[00:44:11] - AgnieszkaRight.[00:44:11] - JermaineOne thing I tell people is don't cuss real loud. Don't bang on the desk, don't yell, don't say a bunch of negative things when you get stopped out. Because again, that's going to create a system that's going to create a habit. And now you're creating a habit. So every time you get stopped out, maybe your trading platform has a little sound, like a little tweet or a little sound. You hear that sound, you're like the very first thing you do is say a curse word and you're like power.[00:44:42] - AgnieszkaOff instinct.[00:44:42] - JermaineYeah, off instinct. But what if it was a good trade? What if that was the same sound that you pushed your stops up and that's the same sound that it makes when you get stopped out with profit. Right now you're confusing yourself because you're like, oh, I got stopped out. And you say this word and you're like that's what you do when you're mad. But you just made some money on this because of habits, right?[00:45:08] - AgnieszkaAnd your body reacts to it emotionally because our mind and our body is connected, right? So when you start cursing, you start also or like, throwing your hands up or keyboard. Some people throw computers out. That's probably not very handy thing to do for the business, but it creates a stress response simply in your body. And then now you have much more work to do to calm yourself down, to be actually able to be objective and to get back into trading. If you are, like, all over the place inside of your head and stressed out and your body is switching on to the survival mode, you can trade in that condition.[00:46:00] - JermaineNo, it's too stressed. Yeah, it just feeds can't was it Trading in the Zone with Mark Douglas? I love that book. It's a great book. I'm sure everybody says that, but it's great because he talks about getting stopped out. And if you have all these negative emotions, you got it all built up. You're not looking at what's actually happening right now. You're not looking at this going, okay, I was shorting this, but now it's going to the highs. Your brain is not going, I need to be looking at anything that was taken out yesterday's. Highs. I need to look at stocks that had you know what I mean? There's got to be winners in there. Somebody's buying stocks. Where are they at? You know what I mean? So we can go to I know they were buying energies this morning. I'm using this as an example. I know they're buying energies this morning. Let me go right back to energies. Let me go see what they're buying. You know what I mean? What are they really in? But you can't think that.[00:46:54] - AgnieszkaSo just look for opportunities, basically, instead of ruminating on what just happened and calling yourself a loser and stupid and all kinds of things, right?[00:47:05] - JermaineLet's just say it takes you 20 minutes to calm down. That's 20 minutes of you not seeing any new positions. Now the day is over. Or let's just say stick to the timeline. 20 minutes later, you're seeing where you missed, where you could have got in at. So then the whole cycle starts all over again because you're like, Well, I didn't see these things. And now you know what? Don't.[00:47:25] - AgnieszkaRight? What's wrong with me?[00:47:27] - JermaineYeah. Self talk is very important. I tell people to say a little mantra. Rob did create this one, but I kind of pushed the idea of it being a mantra of I create winning positions, add to them, and defend them with tight stops. So that's what I tell people. Say that stuff when you're trading. Because I create winning positions. Okay, I see where I need to get in. Boom, I'm in. And then I add to it. Can I add to this position? We like to scale in? That's what we teach scaling in, and then I defend them with tight stops as the price is moving, people use them, they say trailing stops, but I call them progressive stops, continuously pushing those stops toward the price. And because I like that mantra, creating winning positions, add to them and defend them with tight stops. Because those three phrases turn into questions. They can be questions. Okay, you can look at your charts and go, okay, I create winning positions. Is this a winning position? Is my position positive or negative? You know what I mean?[00:48:34] - AgnieszkaVery easy to answer, right?[00:48:35] - JermaineYeah, same thing. Can I add to this? Well, if it's positive, is there any way I can add to this? Yes or no? If it's a loser, no, I'm not adding to this loser. And then I defend it with tight stops. So then the next question is, okay, where are my stops at? If this is a winner, do I need to push it up now or should I just put my stops even? What should I do? Let's look at the charts, and then if it's bad, where are my stops? And if you don't have a stop, there's a bunch of other stuff that you need to be working on. So I like to use that I create winning positions because the trading psychology of the strat is already built into it, you know what I mean? That positiveness of I create winning positions is already there because you're going to have those times when you do get stopped out, and you're going to have those times when it's not I don't want to say losing streak, but you get to a point where you're like, okay, something's not working here.[00:49:36] - AgnieszkaIt might happen.[00:49:37] - JermaineRight, I'm not following the trend.[00:49:39] - AgnieszkaYeah, exactly. And most traders do not reach consistency because not of their inability to make money, but the fact they give it back. And most of the time, it's not just the profits they give back, but much more than that. Have you ever experienced it on your own?[00:49:59] - JermaineYes, yes, I've experienced some drawdowns. I've had a tough trade on CrowdStrike earlier, back in June of this year. And you see all these people on Twitter and being a little vulnerable here, but you see all these people on.[00:50:17] - AgnieszkaTwitter and they're like, thank you, I appreciate that. That's very important for trader vulnerability. And it's a strength, not weaknesses. A lot of people think.[00:50:24] - JermaineTrue. I agree. You see all these people talking about made 3000% on this option. I bought this, I bought that making so much money. And I had calls on CrowdStrike. It did hit my target, but I thought to myself, nah, I'm going to keep holding it because of the monthly charts telling me it should go to the highs and I have time on this contract. Well, this thing went a little bit higher on the next day, Friday, and then they started selling it started selling down. Okay, I didn't take profits. Now I know what I'm doing. I'm the strat soldier. I got all these things. I'm doing the stuff and I know what I'm doing. And it continued to trade lower and lower and lower and I had to stop what I'm doing. And I had to get to a point where I'm like is this a winning position? No. Is this a winning position? No. What am I telling everybody else as traders? Cut your losers.[00:51:25] - AgnieszkaRight.[00:51:25] - JermaineYou know what I mean? So this is me driving to work. This is me thinking to myself, this is me looking at my position. I'm going, this is not showing any evidence on the weekly, the monthly or the 60 Minutes charts that they want to buy this. They are selling it. And I had to sell it for a loss. Every once in a while you get those little wake up calls. So you have to be able to acknowledge that stuff. And again it all starts with being able to look at what's actually happening and tell yourself the truth. Am I holding a losing position? So yes, I have experienced it. I'm not perfect. I'm not a perfect trader.[00:52:13] - AgnieszkaI don't think that exists. Right. And I think that's the problem that a lot of traders think that they will at some point be perfect. But I always say to my students, it's like there is no that one day. Then when you get there, then everything is just honey because you will be making mistakes, you will be taking losses, but it will be just very different than it will be more controlled losses and maybe you'll be making mistakes more rare than not every day. Right?[00:52:47] - JermaineRight. At least I would say, you know what's happening, you know? Exactly. Okay, I know I got in this thing I didn't take we call it magnitude, but I didn't take the profit at the target. This thing's going to the lows. It went further than I wanted it to or I thought it would go. But to be able to tell yourself the truth and go this is loser.[00:53:08] - AgnieszkaExactly.[00:53:08] - JermaineI need to cut that. That's the difference. I think that's the difference of being.[00:53:13] - AgnieszkaHonest with yourself, integrity and just minimizing the impact of that by being honest and by stopping yourself in tracks at some point. Because what was the catalyst for you to on that CrowdStrike trade to say, okay, now I have to be honest with myself. How do you know when is that moment to hold them and when to fold them?[00:53:38] - JermaineYeah, I like it. I like it a lot. For me, I'm going to tell you how it should be and then I'm going to tell you what happened.[00:53:47] - AgnieszkaAll right[00:53:48] - JermaineSo again, I look at four different timeframes right now on XLE. So I want to see if there's buyers on the month. Is it green on the month? Okay. And then I'm looking for the week to reconfirm what I'm seeing on the month, and then I'm looking for the daily and the 60 minutes charts to reconfirm what I'm seeing on the week and then the month, of course. So let's just say I got a stock, they're buying it this month. It's going great. Here's my weeks, it's continuing to the highs for you at home. You can look at XLE if you don't know what stock you could even look at right now. You can look at XLE because it's green on the month. It's green on the week right now. And then your days know as the days are reconfirming what we've seen on the week, what we want, an ideal stock, an ideal trade is I'm getting something that there's buyers in the month that I get in a reversal on the week and then continue to buy it all day, every day. And every 60 minutes chart, it's amazing. It goes back to the high.[00:54:46] - JermaineEvery day continues the highs, of course, that's the dream, right? But it's not going to happen every day. So as those days trend, are they continuing to move up? Or is the trend slowing down and now they're taking profits? Then you move your stops in a direction. So that's how we do that. That's the ideal way in that crowd strike trade. I had a scenario two on the month, meaning the month was trading higher than the previous month. I did hit my target on the week. I hit my target on the day. And then on the 60 minutes charts here, it starts moving down. I'm like, okay, all right, I can hold through some of this because we know people are taking profits. We know other people. Again, I just said we like to add to our winners. And we know not everybody trades the strat. Some trading systems say always be selling. So we know people are going to here it is. Now they start selling you're like, okay, like I said, I'm the strat soldier. I know they're taking profits on the 60 minutes charts. Okay, fine. Then the daily chart, there's a reversal on the daily, okay, now it's a two two reversal down, meaning the current day was trading lower than the previous day.[00:56:04] - JermaineAll right, now we have reversal back down on the daily chart. I got the 60 minutes charts that are red, the daily charts that are red. And then when I finally had to make a decision, like, I have no evidence to keep holding, this was when it started reversing on the week, because now I have again, I'm looking at all four time frames. I got red on the week, red on the day, red on the 60 minutes charts, and they're selling this thing. I need to get out of this. I need to follow my own rules again. I need to follow my rules and go, is this a winning position? And I need to cut this. Thing. Like I said, I ended up selling it for a loss. And it's always important to know when to tell you. I said tell the truth. No, this is a loser. You didn't take profits, whatever. Deal with it. Just cut it. Because if you just keep holding it and you're like, it's going to come back. It's going to come back.[00:57:00] - AgnieszkaWhat if it doesn't?[00:57:02] - JermaineYeah, what if it doesn't? You're like, well, it's an option, you know what I mean? Do you really want to lose all you don't want to lose some people say, Well, I don't care, so I don't want to say that. I want to say you don't ever want to have the mindset of it's okay for me to lose everything in this option, or it's okay for me to lose everything in this stock and for the whole thing to go so negative. You know what I mean? You never want to have that type of mindset, not if your goal is.[00:57:28] - AgnieszkaTo make money anyway, correct?[00:57:30] - JermaineYeah. Not if your goal is to make money. But I'd say the hardest times when that happens is when things have been going well. Things have been going well. You've had a good run, things have been going well, and you have that one trade that's just not working right, and you don't want to sell it. That's when you have to, like you said, be vulnerable with yourself, be vulnerable with the people that you're trading with and go, okay, I'm in a losing position. I need to cut this thing.[00:58:00] - AgnieszkaYeah, thank you for sharing that experience. I really appreciate it. And I think that there is a lot to say about accountability, which is very different in trading, because in our daily life, we always have someone else who holds us accountable for the things we need to do, right? Whether it's in your job, you have colleagues, you have a boss, maybe you have employees at home, you have your wife, you have your children. There's always someone watching you, right? In trading, it's just you and a computer. Nobody's watching you. You can do whatever you want. So now you have to be the person who has to kind of hold yourself accountable and say, come on, what the heck are you doing?[00:58:43] - JermaineYes, and I wanted to say this earlier, so I'm glad you said that, because in sports, in the military, in any kind of profession, doctor, lawyer, all that stuff, any kind of profession that you have, you have other people that you're working with to achieve a goal, you know what I mean? So even if you're the manager, you need all the people around you to make that stuff happen, and you have to work with them. And you're using a lot of stuff to a lot of your personality, a lot of your skill set, a lot of influence that you have to make things go in a direction that you want especially in the military, I say, get your stuff and get on the truck. You can raise your voice, but at home, you can't do that. Or wherever you're trading, you can yell at the screens all day long, but that price is going to do whatever that price is going to do. So you can't really influence the market so much with your yelling and your personality at all.[00:59:48] - AgnieszkaMaybe there will be a chance with AI, who knows?[00:59:52] - JermaineI told you to get up there. I told you to keep going up. Okay. Oh, no.[00:59:59] - AgnieszkaCan you imagine?[01:00:01] - JermaineOh, that's going to be great. But then the reality of things is it's going to be a lot of people. There will be millions of people screaming in the microphones, and then the market will come right back to what it was before, where it's going to do what it's doing, because we got millions. Me and you see this thing as going to the highs. These other people over here see this thing as going to the lows. So they're selling, and everybody people say the market doesn't care about you and all this other stuff. The market doesn't even know who you are because the market is not a thing. The market exactly. The only responsibility the market has is showing you what the price is right now. That's it. That's the only responsibility. Anybody. You know what I mean? I hope you're paying for real market data for that, because then it doesn't have that either.[01:00:51] - AgnieszkaThen it's just a game you're playing with the right data.[01:00:55] - JermaineExactly. All it's doing is showing you what the price is right now. And again, no matter what trading system you use, we are trying to identify the trend and identify it early enough that we can profit from it. That's what we're doing. And we use historical data to do that. Like I said, the spies continue to the highs at 447 16. It's moving. Hammer enforce on the 60 Minutes chart. It's moving up. And if you're still shorting something, you got to be telling the truth. This thing I'm shorting is the thing I'm shorting, is it still going to the lows? No, this thing started moving back up. So that's my whole thing. And in the art of cutting losers, that's what I say, you got to be able to tell the truth. Put your set, your stops, and what's the price actually doing? Is it going against you, or are you trading with the trend? You know what I mean? Even if you're in the trend, is your position good? You know what I mean? Because we talk about that. That's a whole other conversation. You want to talk about bills and all this other stuff.[01:02:05] - AgnieszkaIt's so interesting because we people, human beings, we generally know what's good for us, right? We can figure it out. Like, deep down, you we really know what's good for us. And in a lot of cases, in our life. We do like driving. I mean, most people do obey the rules. Like when they see the red light, they will stop. Well, not always. Where I live, I know Florida is known from really bad driving, but in general, right, we know what's good for us. And for some reason a lot of times we do choose to do the opposite. Like look, for example, diet, right, or not exercising. There's a lot of stuff that we do that are not in our best interest in trading. Making these decisions, whether you choose to act in your best interest or not, can be a little bit tricky because with regard to taking losses, taking a loss does not seem rationally to be in our best interest, just the wood itself, taking a loss, right? So it kind of messes up in our head, our emotions. It messes us up because who wants to take the loss? I don't want to lose, right?[01:03:24] - AgnieszkaI'm supposed to make money. I don't want to lose. So what is your take on emotions in trading in general? Especially the emotions with regard to cutting losses? Because small loss, it doesn't matter, right? It's like a little cut, no big deal, but when it gets out of hand, it's a different story.[01:03:43] - JermaineI like it. That was good. It kind of makes me like we should have like a think take and come up with a different word than loss. Like the psychology of the word. That's great. I say taking small losses is what we want to do because again, that's when things kind of clicked for me. Taking small losses because we want to protect our capital, we want to keep trading. And if you break the rules, let's say you're driving analogy, you don't really stop at that stop sign. You just kind of pause a little bit and coast on through. Like everything's fine.[01:04:18] - AgnieszkaJust look around. Is there police?[01:04:21] - JermaineYeah, there's no police. I don't see a school bus. There's nobody. But what's that one time that you just kind of tap on the brakes on that stop sign and then now you're in a crash, right? You know what I mean? You know what I mean? Because you're like, I didn't see that car because you didn't see that car coming. You didn't see you just thought it was okay to cut this person off. In trading, in driving, I like that driving. In your driving analogy, you can get away with stuff and then by the time somebody catches it, you're gone. It's fine. In trading, there are times, l

Mike McGlone, Senior Macro Strategist with Bloomberg Intelligence, discusses the US losing the corn export battle and his call on gold. Greg Taylor, CIO at Purpose Investments, joins to talk about ETF flows and spot based Bitcoin ETFs. Joel Levington, Director of Credit Research at Bloomberg Intelligence, joins to discuss his note on Tesla. Mark Douglas, CEO at MNTN, joins to discuss streaming wars, outlook for the ad and streaming industries, and the Messi Effect. Barry Ritholtz, Founder of Ritholtz Wealth Management and Host of “Masters in Business,” discusses his recent column on investing, “Mind the Gap.” Anna Wong, Chief US Economist with Bloomberg Economics, discusses Core PCE inflation and other eco data from this week. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Simone Foxman.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

True Faith hosted a live podcast event in front of nearly 300 people as we welcomed George Caulkin, Craig Hope, Keith Downie and Mark Douglas to The Stand to talk about Newcastle United's upcoming season. We talked through: What success looks like for NUFC this season and why How the club's pre-season has been different to others covered by our guests NUFC's summer transfer window so far and what's to come The Champions League and what that challenges it brings for Newcastle United Part two of the show is live on our Patreon platform which is available for £8 per month. Get the Q&A from this show and many other pods by signing up here: www.patreon.com/tfpodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mark Douglas, CEO at MNTN, joins to discuss Disney earnings and outlook for streaming. Kriti Gupta, host of Bloomberg Surveillance: Early Edition and markets correspondent for Blomberg News, joins to discuss Tapestry buying Capri. Lydia Boussour, EY Parthenon Senior Economist, joins to discuss CPI and outlook for inflation in the US as well as rate hikes. Aadil Zaman, Partner at Wall Street Alliance Group, joins to discuss investing and gives his market outlook. Hannah Elliott, Staff Writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, joins to talk about the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance car auction and Monterey Car Week. Janet Lorin, Higher Education reporter with Bloomberg News, joins to discuss her story this morning on university endowment gains getting eaten up by inflation. Ian Whittaker, Managing Director and Owner at Liberty Sky Advisors, joins to discuss Disney, media and tech earnings, plus Netflix and the streamers and advertising agency space. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Gina Martin Adams, Chief US Equity Analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, joins to discuss her research note on the new S&P bull market and what to make of earnings season thus far. Ann Hynes, Mizuho Americas Managing Director and Senior Healthcare Services Equity Analyst, joins to talk about her healthcare services earnings preview and outlook for earnings season. Jonathan Maxwell, CEO at Sustainable Development Capital, joins to discuss the outlook for oil and the renewable energy market, and his new book “The Edge.” Joe Mathieu, host of Bloomberg Radio's “Sound On” and Bloomberg TV's “Balance of Power,” joins to discuss the interview he and Annmarie Hordern had with 2024 presidential hopeful and former NJ governor Chris Christie.  Mark Douglas, CEO at MNTN, joins to discuss Netflix earnings. Kevin Tynan, Senior Automotive Analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, joins us to wrap Tesla and Carvana earnings. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Jess Menton.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas is a MUST-READ trading book but what does it actually mean to Trade in the Zone? Let me explain & more importantly, walk you through the steps that you should take RIGHT NOW to start trading in the zone as well. Check out the 14-day RISK-FREE Trial Membership available at https://tieronetrading.com/ if you're interested in taking your trading to the next level Your Trading Coach - Akil --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/thetradingcoachpodcast/support

In this episode, Ben Okopnik, an experienced trader, talks with Agnieszka about the importance of balancing emotions and rational thinking in trading. Ben emphasizes the need for a clear evaluation of risk and potential outcomes before making a trade. He also stresses the importance of learning to think rationally and developing a trading plan with clear risk parameters to avoid emotional decision-making. The conversation also touches on the difficulty of finding the right path to learning trading, given the noise and nonsense in the market. Ben recommends finding trustworthy professionals to learn from and emphasizes the importance of hands-on experience in addition to academic knowledge. The conversation highlights the importance of education, discipline, and a focus on the process in trading.About Ben OkopnikBen has managed to pack several lifetimes into one so far, with a broad range of experiences. After emigrating to the US in the 1970s, he's been a soldier in the US Army, an electronics technician, a taxi driver in New York City, a Blue Water sailor, a teacher. He's held a number of highly lucrative positions and ran a couple of successful businesses. His trading experience has been mostly in options, surfing the line between quant and discretionary - but includes futures, FX, crypto, DeFi, and passive investment. Recently, he's been concentrating almost exclusively on learning directional stock trading via the Strat.Contact Agnieszka Wood | Ahead Coach: Website: aheadcoach.comTwitter: @Ahead_CoachYouTube: @aheadcoachFacebook: Agnieszka WoodInstagram: ahead.coachLinkedIn: Agnieszka WoodContact Ben Okopnik:Twitter: @https://twitter.com/okopnik?s=20Mentioned References:https://www.turtletrader.com/it/http://sepiagroup.com--Transcript[00:00:00] - AgnieszkaI am Agnieszka Wood, and on today's show, I'm very excited to introduce my special guest, Ben Okopnik. Ben has managed to pack several lifetimes into one so far with a broad range of experiences. After emigrating to the US. In the 70s, he has been a soldier in the US. Army, an electronics technician, a taxi driver in New York City, a Blue Water sailor, a teacher on mostly computing-related topics, and a large variety of other things. One of them, he just told me he was also a Hollywood star.[00:00:36] - Ben[chuckles] I don't know if I'd call it that.[00:00:38] - AgnieszkaVery nice having you here. Welcome![00:00:41] - BenIt's a pleasure to be here, Agnieszka. Thank you.[00:00:43] - AgnieszkaBen has been trading for about a decade, and his trading experience has been mostly in options, surfing the line between quant and discretionary but includes futures, forex, crypto, DeFi, and passive investments. And recently, he has been concentrating almost exclusively on learning directional stock trading via the Strat. I met Ben on Twitter recently, actually, where we had a very interesting exchange about what you should focus on first when you get into trading in order to be successful, getting your skin in the game, or the psychology of trading. And since our belief seems to differ on this topic, I ask Ben to join us today to have this conversation here on my podcast and hopefully shine some light on this intriguing and quite controversial topic. Welcome to episode number six, A Chicken and Egg. Hi, Ben. Again, welcome to my podcast, and thank you for being open to discussing your beliefs in this open forum.[00:01:42] - BenMy pleasure, Agnieszka. I think that putting it as the chicken and the egg, this very much parallels what we're discussing because I don't think either one of us is saying, no, no, only this piece is necessary. Both are necessary. Of course, the question is, where should most of the focus be? And that's a great discussion in itself. So looking forward to it.[00:02:06] - AgnieszkaThat's awesome. Ben, when we had our initial conversation, what became very clear to me at first was your rational approach. Considering that trading, as you said, is an intensely human activity, one that engages our strongest emotions, we have to learn to approach it rationally, almost mechanically. For me, as a mindset coach, there is so much to unpack here. But let's begin with this. Could you elaborate a little bit more on what you mean by the mechanical approach to trading and how that can help traders with controlling their emotions during trading sessions?[00:02:47] - BenOkay, so as I'm sure you know, a lot of clinical psychology, right? As a coach, I'm sure you know about this, right? Comes down to correcting irrational thinking, right? If somebody says, oh, everybody always hates me, generalization, right? Everybody. There we go. There we go. So you have to learn to think rationally, because if your perception is not correct, then the outcome of your thoughts and actions is very unlikely to be anything other than random.[00:03:20] - AgnieszkaRight.[00:03:21] - BenTo me, that is the basis, because if you go in and trade, trading particularly focuses that any mistakes of rationality, any mistakes in perception, you're going to pay for those directly.[00:03:34] - AgnieszkaVery directly.[00:03:35] - BenYeah. There is no softening layer, there's no buffer between you and the money.[00:03:41] - AgnieszkaRight.[00:03:41] - BenIf you make a mistake, you're going to pay for it 100% of the time. So to me, that is the classic foundation of everything else. On top of that, and to me, the layer that has to come next is you could theoretically say that it's a psychological layer, but also a half and half, I would say, perception of risk. You have to have a rational evaluation of risk. Right.[00:04:07] - AgnieszkaAnd I think that's a lot where it goes wrong.[00:04:09] - BenRight, absolutely. Now, in order to do that, you have to have a clear evaluation of what your perception of risk is. How do you establish that? By actually trading. By actually going in and trading. Throwing yourself into an environment where you are at risk. Otherwise, you can think about it ahead of time all you want, but until you've done it.[00:04:34] - AgnieszkaYeah. So you have to feel it. You mean you have to feel the risk in order to establish your perception of risk. I mean, you can feel how it feels, but you think there is no way to protect yourself upfront before you throw yourself to the fire.[00:04:52] - BenOf course, you definitely must risk limiting your trades. There's no way out of that. You don't just go in, throw your money in and go, well, I'll just sit here and see what happens. No, put in your stop, put in your limit, and sit there and watch what happens as the price moves between the two of them, whichever one of them it hits, whether you win, whether you lose, preferably and this is interesting, you should lose preferably first off. You know what I'm talking about.[00:05:20] - AgnieszkaYes, absolutely. Especially that very first trade. Everyone says lucky trade. I always say this is the unlucky trade because you win that first trade with completely bad expectations.[00:05:34] - BenWorse.[00:05:35] - AgnieszkaYes.[00:05:35] - BenThe worst thing, the worst thing that could possibly happen to you is you win your first trade, then you're so excited and your estimation of risk becomes incorrect. It's the one thing you can't afford.[00:05:48] - AgnieszkaRight. I think the dilemma of many traders is because you say you have to put your parameters, you have to put the risk. And that's where I see a lot of times going exactly wrong, because they don't, and I didn't, and nobody does. I mean, most of the traders who are getting into trading, I mean, they open an account and they just put a trade. They don't even think there isn't, you know, that they can lose. They only think about they can make money.[00:06:20] - BenYou may be right. And this, to me, again, comes down to rational estimation of what's, you know, what's true. You have to look at it rationally. When you put your money into a trade, the chances of you losing versus winning are exactly the same as we put it. In the options world where we do a lot of calculations, the expected value of any trade at entry is zero.[00:06:49] - AgnieszkaRight.[00:06:50] - BenThat is, if you do 100,000 trades, if you go strictly by chances with nothing else influencing it, if you don't have any definite alpha, as we call it, 50,000 of those trades are going to go to the good, 50,000 of them are going to go to the bad. The outcome is zero.[00:07:11] - AgnieszkaYes. And in general, rationally speaking, you should note it before placing a trade.[00:07:18] - BenAbsolutely.[00:07:19] - AgnieszkaBut somehow there is this difference between when you go, let's say to a casino and when you're trading. Because when you go to a casino, I always say the difference is when you want to play the slot machine, you first have to put the money in. Right. So you kind of accept the risk and you're actually assuming, well, I might lose it. And that's where you rationally accept the risk with trading because you don't have to pay upfront, you have to pay after. Deep inside. A lot of traders do not accept that risk.[00:07:55] - BenYou may be right to some degree. To me, as soon as you click that button, whether you buy or whether you sell, you always have some definite. Every single trading platform I know of shows you risk versus reward. And so the moment you click that button, you are at risk. You know that you have an open risk. You may be right in that it is not as clear how should I say this does not have the same exact emotional impact as actually taking money out of your pocket and shoving it into a machine.[00:08:35] - AgnieszkaExactly.[00:08:35] - BenSo you're right to that degree. People don't see those numbers on the screen as being quite as meaningful as taking actual cash out of their pockets and plunking it down. So I would agree with you there.[00:08:47] - AgnieszkaThat's why a lot of times they say, oh, I have a loss, but I haven't taken it. A lot of traders believe that not taking a loss is not hurting them. And I tell you, I have learned the hard way and I have waited years for the price to come back on my very first trade. And I can tell you at some point it was a souvenir I was like I have this at that point, after all those splits, I think it was like I had three shares left for the price. The price of that stock was just incredibly high, while this whole stock just never really came back. And I thought this is such a good warning that the price does not have to come back. No, that was the untaken loss. So when I hear people saying that, I'm like, oh, well, you might learn the hard way. I know I did.[00:09:41] - BenAgain, from the calculated perspective, I'm coming from the perspective of options. There's a kind of a saying that every options trader basically memorizes from the beginning, and that is volatility is mean, reverting price is not. There is no means by which the price has to come back. In fact, it almost never does. If you look at the general trend of prices in, let's say, SPX, it's an upward trend. It never reverts. Okay.[00:10:12] - AgnieszkaYes. From a rational point of view, if you put those facts on paper, you will agree with them. The moment that traders get into trades, even if they know that they make decisions completely irrationally right, based on emotions.[00:10:30] - BenAnd this is exactly why I say that you have to actually do some trading. Because then you can sit back, look at your actions, and say, wait, why did I do this? The rational thing to do was X, Y, and Z. But I did A, B, and C. Why in the world did I do this? And now you have perceptions that are much more aligned, or that you can drive back toward rationality because you see yourself acting emotionally beforehand. You could say to yourself, oh, I'm going to be cool, calm, and collected. I'm always going to do the right thing. If the price goes against me, I'll just exit. No, you won't.[00:11:09] - AgnieszkaRight?[00:11:10] - BenNo, you will not. Stop lying.[00:11:13] - AgnieszkaThat's the two emotions that are completely switching the moment that you enter a trade, fear, and hope, right? They completely go upside down.[00:11:22] - BenExactly, right? I absolutely agreed.[00:11:27] - AgnieszkaYeah. So let's say for people who are already in trading, right, and they have made so many irrational decisions, and now they're like, okay, I do want to think rationally, but I'm still struggling because those emotions are just simply taking over. How do you do that? Because you have a very rational approach. What are the best ways to control your emotions during trading? Do you have any emotions because you're thinking rationally, right? Of course. How do you deal with it?[00:11:55] - BenSo there are two things when you're already trading and again, you look over your past trades and you say, you know, I'm acting emotionally and I can't stop myself. If you're a self-starter like myself, then you look for ways to correct the impact of those emotions, to set them aside. If you're not, and many people aren't, and there's nothing positive or negative about this, then the best thing to do is to look for a coach like yourself who has actually thought about this and who can help you. Redirect your whether redirect your emotions into a more rational channel or find a mechanical approach to your strategy where your emotions simply can't get involved. No matter what you think, no matter how you feel, as an example, again, let's say that you decide that you're going to always trade with a stop and a limit, but as soon as you get into it, oh, my God, the price is moving in the wrong direction. Well, if I move the stop away a little bit, you understand exactly what I'm talking about, right? Of course, yeah. And people will do that. And then the limit oh, well, maybe the price yes, price is going in my direction, but if I move the limit down, I can at least take some profit.[00:13:11] - BenRight. Wrong thought patterns. Right. What do you do about those? Well, you have to correct those misperceptions. You have to have a hard set of rules. Like, I'm going to do my best to compute what is a reasonable stop and what is a proper limit for this trade. I'm going to set those and I'm going to walk away from the computer. If need be, I'm going to switch it off.[00:13:36] - AgnieszkaRight, right.[00:13:36] - BenIf that's what it takes for you, then do that.[00:13:39] - AgnieszkaYes.[00:13:40] - BenRight.[00:13:40] - AgnieszkaI totally agree with you. It's funny because you're talking about those perspectives, I call it, in my coaching mindset, shifts, because you have to shift your perspective and start thinking about what works in the environment of the market, which is very different than how we normally think, how we do things, how we achieve success in our daily life. They're so different. And I think the biggest problem is that we just take our perspectives of what we know and we just bring it to the market and we think.[00:14:16] - BenThis is going to work. I'm going to take that and run with it. Actually, one of the emotions and the perspectives that we bring in from daily life into the market are not just a little wrong, they're literally 180 degrees away.[00:14:30] - AgnieszkaCorrect.[00:14:31] - BenI'm not going to say the market is designed because I don't believe that there's anyone sitting there pulling strings, but the market is perfectly configured, and perfectly structured to take money away from you. If you think as a let's call it a civilian, absolutely. 100%. Look, the price is trending this way, therefore I should get into it. Oh, the price is trending down, therefore I should shirt the stock. Too late. Yes, you are too late. And if you get in at those times, someone will take your money. Guaranteed. Yeah, guaranteed.[00:15:08] - AgnieszkaIt's almost like advertising is playing on our emotions and they know exactly how we react.[00:15:12] - BenRight, yes.[00:15:13] - AgnieszkaThe same way the market is constructed, because it's a business model and I think everyone has to understand it. Just like in a casino, the house always wins. So it is not like you have to trick the market. No, you have to trick yourself into not thinking that whoever you think you are, you're nobody there. Right. And you're really lucky if you will be able to pull money out of the market, out of that huge machine that is designed for you to fail, basically.[00:15:47] - BenRight, yeah. Again, if you come in with those emotions of a civilian. Yes, it is. Absolutely. A model that will make you fail. It will take your money, as I call it. All you will do is provide liquidity to professionals. Yeah.[00:16:06] - AgnieszkaIt's funny. I love to call it. You have to take yourself out of the equation. You are in your own way, because when you're talking about designing a process that will help you to do those things mechanically so basically for you, I don't know, sometimes it might mean placing bracket orders. Right. And just walking away. Because the moment you sit there and you're watching and you see all these price movements, your mind is simply going to play with you. It is. I mean, there is no other way. And yes, I always say, like, yes, you can make it very difficult for yourself and sit there and watch it and say, no, but I want to be disciplined. I have to be. I'm like, if this is really so difficult for you, why would you do that? Trading is difficult enough. Design the process that will make it easier if you lose money after eleven, and stop trading after eleven.[00:17:02] - BenRight, yeah. To me, that's actually I like to take a kind of an outside perspective of myself whenever I see myself getting emote. And this isn't just about trading. This is something I've learned from sources as disparate as Zambudism and yoga and so on. There is a concept of the watcher which is you understand what I'm talking about, sort of an abstraction of yourself that sits in your head. Does not judge the awareness. Right, yeah. Does not judge, but just sits there. And it was absolutely fascinating to me when I started trading to have that, to look down onto myself and go, look at the emotions you're experiencing, all you're doing, you just bought one share. The most I can lose is maybe a dollar. But look at you. Look at your heartbeat. Look at your breathing. This is amazing that this is happening to you. How is this? As you've mentioned, I'm a sailor. I've sailed the ocean. I've been in hurricanes as a soldier. I've been in scenarios where I've been shot at. I've been in some really amazing stuff in my life. And the emotions brought forth by trading, by risking nothing more than a dollar, were so outrageous, were so huge that I just had to sit there, look at it, and go, what in the world is happening to you?[00:18:36] - BenIt's fascinating.[00:18:38] - AgnieszkaFascinating. And why do you think that is? Is it the scenarios we make in our heads that we are scared of? Which absolutely, I think what is it? 90% of which does never happen.[00:18:49] - BenOf course, there are the scenarios, there are the average person's concepts of what money is and what it means. Right. Money affects us at the deepest level. Normally, we don't think about it. Money comes in, we spend it, big deal. But as a trader, you are again faced with direct gains and losses with nothing between you and the market. And I think those things hit you directly in emotions, in ways that most people can't even predict. They don't know what it is.[00:19:22] - AgnieszkaYeah. I think that part of it is that a lot of people value themselves through money, right? Through their success, what they have, and what they can present to others. So the moment that you are losing money or that you are not having success, you take several losses after each other, even though it can be the most rational thing right? Because it's probability. So yeah, it's very probable you're going to be experiencing it still. It hits so much so deep that the whole confidence and everything about you, you start just doubting yourself as a person, which I find the trading experience is just so much more than just trading. Just because of that.[00:20:08] - BenI agree.[00:20:09] - AgnieszkaAdditional emotional side. Right.[00:20:10] - BenI agree. I lost a dollar. I must be worthless as a human being. What in the world? So this is one of the things that makes trading fascinating to me now. One of the things that and again, of course, I have had to learn enough relevant psychology, trading psychology, in order to trade well, you basically have no choice once you have learned, once you've established something that will produce alpha for you, something that does have a positive return overall. Now the only thing you can work on is improving your execution, obviously, but really mainly yourself. Right?[00:20:52] - AgnieszkaYeah.[00:20:52] - BenAnd so one of my favorite things that I ever saw was Mark Douglas. Of course, I'm sure you've heard of Mark Douglas, right? Mark Douglas wrote this wonderful book, Trading in the Zone, and he said something in there that to me is absolutely key. He said, once you have defined how you're going to trade, and what your trading strategy is, do 20 trades. It doesn't matter whether you win or lose, you do not pay attention to that. You are committed to doing 20 trades, win or lose.[00:21:24] - AgnieszkaYes.[00:21:25] - BenAt the end of those 20 trades. Now sit back and evaluate. Do you need to change your strategy or do you keep going forward? And I love that concept. That's another version of what we've been talking about.[00:21:36] - AgnieszkaYeah. And that's a very rational approach. Right. And if you manage to stay within that rational area while you're evaluating it, you're actually learning from it and moving forward. Right. A lot of traders that I talk to that come to me with a problem, they don't even journal or they don't even evaluate because they're so fed up with the losses that they go like, I don't even want to look at this. So that brings me actually to our second topic. So most traders that come to me for help, struggle with accepting the risk we talked about a little bit already. And technically, yes, they can place the stop, but because of various emotional reasons, they don't accept it. So they don't place the stop. Right. And they will keep lowering it or simply remove it. Now, in one of your tweets, you mentioned that there is nothing anyone can do for them. I'm sure the audience does not want to hear that, but basically, they need basic education. Right. This has nothing to do with mindset. You also mentioned that some people aren't suited for trading, just like some aren't suited for truck driving.[00:22:57] - BenRight.[00:22:57] - AgnieszkaI, on the other hand, believe that you can do anything if you put your mind to it. And throughout my life, I kept proving it to myself every time again. So while you're saying focusing on the mindset before experience in dealing with problems that needed doesn't make sense to you? In my mind, if you deal with your mindset first, you can prevent the problems so that you don't have to deal with them, or at least you can be prepared for how to handle them. Right. So I would love to understand where you're coming from. Would you like to elaborate on your point of view?[00:23:41] - BenSure. A lot of people come to trade. The thing that drives them into trading is purely emotional. I don't think there's ever someone unless you go to school and you get a degree in finance and you go to work for Susquehanna or whoever, one of these big trading houses or market makers.[00:24:05] - AgnieszkaRight.[00:24:05] - BenThat's a rational path. And that's something that takes years and years of tremendous effort.[00:24:11] - AgnieszkaJust like a career. Right. You learn it like you would want to be a doctor. Pretty much.[00:24:16] - BenThat's exactly what it is. Yeah. And by that point, you're not really dealing with emotions or any of that stuff that you have worked through so much. It is such a rational, structured discipline. Frankly, professionals can't afford to have this emotional, irrational approach. That's just not going to happen. Let's set that aside because that's a completely different area. So let's talk about retail traders. Retail traders are, I would say, always driven by emotion to start trading.[00:24:53] - AgnieszkaYeah.[00:24:54] - BenOh, I heard of this guy that made, you know, $10 million in GME in three days from starting from $100. I want that too.[00:25:04] - AgnieszkaGME. Oh my God. They just had earnings last night. This morning, I texted my or I put in a chat room to my students, like, are there any GameStop wannabes oh, dear? You guys keep focus. Just make sure you're not biased because you can really get biased by it. Right.[00:25:31] - BenI've actually made very good money in GME, but certainly not by buying or selling stock, by shorting Volatility, basically by saying around earnings, around events like that, people are going to get crazy about price, they're going to overpay. And so I'm willing to take the other side of the trade. This is where options come in handy. And so shorting volatility in something like GME, around events that's proven quite profitable.[00:25:58] - AgnieszkaYeah. But you see, you trade the market. You don't trade the stock, the price. I want to make money. You know what I mean? It's very different. It's the distance that you take the distance approach and say, okay, what is the real opportunity here?[00:26:16] - BenExactly.[00:26:16] - AgnieszkaInstead of getting sucked into that swirl sorry, you were talking.[00:26:22] - BenYeah, no, it's fine. I'm sorry. I also get diverted. To me, this trading is absolutely fascinating. All aspects of it, including the psychology of it. As I said, most traders begin trading from an emotional perspective.[00:26:36] - AgnieszkaRight.[00:26:37] - BenAnd as long as they stay with that purely emotional perspective, they're never going to make it. All they're going to do is contribute liquidity to the market, put money in professionals' pockets, and that's the end of that. I think that, again, for those people, if they are stuck, the only next step they can take is either go to someone like yourself or learn about how the psychology of trading works and change it themselves. But again, most people are not well suited to that.[00:27:08.360] - AgnieszkaYeah. It takes a lot of work, and it takes a different perspective. So if you cannot stand outside of yourself, like you were saying, and I call it leader position.[00:27:19] - BenI like it.[00:27:20] - AgnieszkaYes. During my program, I review sessions, and trading sessions of my students, so I also pay very much attention to their body language because I can tell whether you are in a leadership position or if you are in an operator mode. Right. And most traders begin in the operator mode with 90% time spent on clicking the buttons.[00:27:47] - BenThey're hunched over all the classic signals.[00:27:53] - AgnieszkaYour hand over that mouse.[00:27:57] - BenYeah. Warren Buffett actually has this thing that he tells people once in a while, and I think it's a wonderful idea. He said if you had a card with ten spots on it where you could only every time you took a trade for the rest of your life, you had to punch one of those things out. If you could only take ten trades for the rest of your life, how careful would you be entering those trades?[00:28:21] - AgnieszkaYeah, I think waiting for the opportunity is the most difficult thing for people to do because that means pretty much doing nothing or distracting yourself from trading. But if you're so you're saying basically, when people are focused on the emotions, I call it to focus on the money.[00:28:47] - BenYeah. You can't afford to do that.[00:28:50] - AgnieszkaYeah. Switching the focus to the process, that's just such a significant change of perspective or mindset shift, and then just work out what your process is and what you were saying. Like, if you do those 20 trades right, and they don't work, or they work now, you can work on the process. What do most traders do? They ask themselves, what's wrong with me?[00:29:19] - BenYes. What did I do wrong?[00:29:22] - AgnieszkaSo tell me about your journey, about your trading journey. How do you tackle the challenges? Because since you were in the military, there's a lot of former military people who are trading, and they're doing great because of the discipline. Right. Do you see it, how it contributed to your trading?[00:29:43] - BenYes, I do. It's somewhat indirect. My military experience is quite a while back. It's interesting. I was actually at a veteran's meet-up this morning, which happens every two weeks, just so happens. But yes, mission orientation, working out the structure of the mission and executing it, you not only learn those things, you sort of inculcate them into your life process in the military is just something that you learn to do. And yeah, that definitely does relate to trading.[00:30:20] - AgnieszkaSo how do you deal with distractions that take your focus away from that mission?[00:30:28] - BenYou don't let them distract you.[00:30:31] - AgnieszkaYou just reject the thoughts.[00:30:33] - BenNo, there's a thing called mission focus. All right? This is the primary thing. You got to keep your eye on the ball. If something happens that is distracting, you have to give it some weight because some distractions are actually threatening to the mission or whatever it happens to be. And that's the only evaluation that you do. Is it a threat to the mission? If so, how much of the mission effort do I have to devote to it? If so but other than that, no. You judge it again from a rational perspective, even though the impact is emotional.[00:31:09] - AgnieszkaI see. That is so interesting. So basically what you do is you evaluate it, but looking at your mission has this impact on my mission. So you basically just look at it pretty much like when you have a trading strategy, right? And you have all these opportunities coming at you, all you have to do is evaluate, if this fits into my strategy. Is this fitting into my strategy? Is this what I want? Is this what I said I want?[00:31:43] - BenYeah. And you have to learn, as a great coping skill in trading, you have to learn to stop making deals with yourself.[00:31:54] - AgnieszkaNo negotiations.[00:31:56] - BenNo negotiation. But this is really close. Okay, maybe I haven't seen the exact trade that I want, but, you know, this is really close, and maybe I should risk a little. No, don't do that. Do not do that.[00:32:11] - AgnieszkaYeah, I have a few extra punch cards.[00:32:18] - BenThat's a bad idea.[00:32:19] - AgnieszkaYeah, definitely a bad idea. If you have to convince yourself, I always say, well, if you don't see a setup, if it doesn't jump out at you, it's probably not there. If you really try to see and you have to turn your computer upside down to convince yourself this is actually a flag. It's probably not a flag. Oh, that's fascinating. In one of your messages, you mentioned that you are still going for basic competence in trading. Right. And that's what I'm talking about. Sounds good. The things that I. Am talking about sound like a good next-level things and stuff to aspire to once you get those basics ironed out. And in this case, I was talking about being present a the moment. Now I understand that you are also actually talking about being that observer. So we are actually talking about the same thing which I consider a basic competence for every trader to be present in the moment. Simply because if your mind wanders into the past and brings pain from previous losses, right, or it runs into the future and triggers this high expectation of yourself, all the money you're going to make or fears all the money you're going to lose, this will impact your decision-making process.[00:33:42] - AgnieszkaRight? So then you basically let the emotions decide about your trade. So this brings us to the question of what comes first, a chicken or an egg?[00:33:53] - BenI was just thinking that that's a very exact parallel to the whole chicken or the egg. And so again, to me, you have to at least experience how trading impacts you. And going from there forward, how much of the emotional basis can you shift to the rational? How much do you need help with? How much can you do by yourself? So possibly again, chicken versus egg. Maybe both. Maybe both coming up at the same time via ramping process. You can do so much of one, then a little more of the other, then a little more of one, then a little more of the other. And so perhaps it's that sort of ramp-up process.[00:34:42] - AgnieszkaYeah. And actually when you were talking about it, what I notice is, or what I notice how we are being impacted, our decisions are because of our experiences from the past, right? And a lot of times people would say, yeah, but I am just like this because of all the things that happened to me. And in fact, those are all irrational thoughts because you're taking something that happened maybe 20 years ago and now you're bringing it into your trading that those thoughts have nothing to do or even those experiences have nothing to do with your trading. Right. So that is a pretty irrational thing to do, right? Even though people are trying to make it rational because they say, yeah, but this is the way I am.[00:35:29] - BenNo, the reality is the market does not care about your story.[00:35:33] - AgnieszkaThat's a good point.[00:35:34] - BenIt absolutely does not care. Either you did the right thing or you're going to lose.[00:35:42] - AgnieszkaSo it's really about doing the right thing.[00:35:46] - BenOne of my favorites, I don't know if you've ever heard of Nassim Nicholas Taleb.[00:35:52] - AgnieszkaI have not.[00:35:53] - BenSo he's the guy who came up with the Black Swan theory.[00:35:56] - AgnieszkaOh yeah. I have actually read the book, so I'm not so good at names. So maybe was this the Outer then? I have heard of him, yeah.[00:36:05] - BenTaleb. Absolutely. Fascinating guy. Good thinker. Really good thinker. And many years ago, he wrote a white paper with a guy named Espin Hogg about how market makers evaluate risk in options. And there's a wonderful quote from it that I just love. He said Trading is neither philosophy nor mathematics. It is a rich craft with traders learning from traders or copying other traders, and tricks developed under evolutionary pressures. In a bottom-up matter, it is techne, not episteme, meaning that is craft rather than academic knowledge.[00:36:50] - AgnieszkaWow.[00:36:51] - BenAcademic knowledge.[00:36:52] - AgnieszkaThat's amazing.[00:36:53] - BenYou can sit and study as long as you want. It will not help you until you actually experience it. It's like wood carving, for example. You can sit and read about wood carving for the rest of your life, but until you put that knife to the wood right. You will not know what it is to actually carve wood.[00:37:16] - AgnieszkaYes. So that's about the experience and then the risk that goes with the experience, you can also read about it, and you should read about it, and you should learn about it so that you know what to expect. But if you do not trade, you will never experience it. So you will actually never know what your reaction will be.[00:37:37] - BenAnd that is exactly my point. Yes.[00:37:39] - AgnieszkaSo, yeah, the circle around the mindset is important, and the experience is important.[00:37:47] - BenI agree.[00:37:48] - AgnieszkaThat's wonderful.[00:37:49] - BenNow, okay, so here's something else. Have you ever heard of "Turtle Traders"?[00:37:55] - AgnieszkaNo.[00:37:56] - BenSo this is fascinating. There's a book, I believe it was called "The Turtle Trading Method" or something (Official Title: Way of the Turtle: The Secret Methods that Turned Ordinary People into Legendary Traders). But this was an experiment that came from a bet between two very successful Chicago futures traders, William Eckhart, and Richard Dennis. Okay. And Eckhart believed that you had to be born with the right emotional makeup and could not trade successfully without it.[00:38:21] - AgnieszkaOh, wow.[00:38:22] - BenYeah. Dennis, on the other hand, believed the opposite, that he could grow traders like they grow turtles in Singapore, was his exact statement. He had just been to Singapore, and he saw how they grow turtles in these ponds, and he said, we can do this. And so Dennis put out this ad that I think a lot of people simply didn't believe that they could just go to work for one of the most successful traders in the world, and he would teach them how to trade. Good God. And so he assembled a group of people who had either never traded before or did some trading and perhaps were unsuccessful, didn't really matter much. And he taught them a very simple strategy. And the key was, as long as they stuck to that strategy, they would make money. And as it turned out, Dennis was right. Every "Turtle Trader" who was able to follow his rules became a successful trader. Some went on to make fortunes and create hedge funds on their own.[00:39:24] - AgnieszkaBut when you say were able to follow the rules, how were they able? Because that's where the emotions come in.[00:39:33] - BenRight, right.[00:39:35] - AgnieszkaOr where did they all have this special makeup?[00:39:38] - BenNo. And this was exactly the difference between the two sides of the bet. They did not have to have a special emotional makeup. The rules were clear-cut. They were simply when the market has been and I don't remember exactly what the rules were. Yeah, they're not particularly applicable today, by the way, with computer trading systems and so on. But it was something like if the market dips below a certain percentage for X number of days you enter if it stays above, you exit, whatever it happened to be. But they were purely rational, mechanistic rules. Now comes the point that you're talking about, which is they started following these rules, and now you have to remember they were not using their own money. They were trading specifically for this firm. Right.[00:40:29] - AgnieszkaYes.[00:40:30] - BenIt's different, but still, when you trade money, especially large amounts of money in the market, those emotions are still going to hit you. Right. Now, in the second part of the book, once these folks started trading and were able to execute the rules and so on, now the emotions hit them.[00:40:47] - AgnieszkaOh, that's so interesting, isn't it?[00:40:50] - BenI think you would really enjoy this book.[00:40:53] - AgnieszkaYeah, I should definitely look at that.[00:40:54] - BenHurdle Traders. So a fascinating study of how that worked. And a lot of people actually dropped out of the program for the specifically stated reasons of, I just can't do this. I can see it being successful.[00:41:08] - AgnieszkaSo what was it? Was the money getting into their head?[00:41:10] - BenYes. When you imagine yourself trading $10 million, or $100 million, having that at risk at any one time, some people simply can't handle it.[00:41:21] - AgnieszkaYeah, there's something that I call emotional immunity that I work with my students on to develop emotional immunity, and just exactly for that reason. And that's not just on the profit side, but also on the risk side. To start with, what is the level that you are immune to? And you can always grow that immunity. You can always increase that resistance and teach yourself. It's a sort of muscle memory that touches you less and less, and then once you go too high, you will feel it. Right. I can always go back. The problem is that a lot of traders, they just want to make big steps. Yeah, I want to make a leap, and I want to make a million dollars.[00:42:04] - BenYeah, that's a guaranteed way to lose.[00:42:06] - AgnieszkaYeah. Because you hurt yourself, the wounds are deep, and then it's very hard to heal them. Right. The last thing that I wanted to touch upon with you is what is that learning process. What would you recommend? Like, how to learn to trade? Because learning by doing costs money, time, and money. And is there any way to shorten the curve? Because there's so much help out there. There are courses, chat rooms, and YouTube videos, and it seems like everyone makes money, but it somehow it doesn't seem like the success rate is growing among retail traders. I think it's still over 90% failing. Right. So what would be that perfect process?[00:43:01] - BenSo I agree with you completely. I actually think that given the huge influx of traders into retail traders into the market, I saw a graph probably about a year ago. The number of retail traders has increased more than 1000 fold in the last six or seven years, which is incredible.[00:43:25] - AgnieszkaHence the good earnings from brokerages.[00:43:28] - BenOh, yes. This is why all the brokerages can now give us free stock trading and all of that. Here's what I'm going to say. I think it is incredibly difficult, it is almost impossible to find the right path on your own unless you get lucky. There's so much noise, there's so much nonsense by so many quote gurus who are simply out to squeeze a buck from you, that it's almost impossible to find anything. I was incredibly lucky. Okay, maybe this is worth boasting about a little. Maybe because of my personality, maybe because of how I speak to people. I was lucky enough to connect with some old-time professional traders, some people who are actually retired from CBOE, and several people of that sort who helped me along. Now, again, none of them would simply come out and say, do this, this, and this, and you'll make money. That's not how it works.[00:44:37] - AgnieszkaIsn't it interesting that actually people who you can trust, will never promise you that you will make money or that you will make million or 100,000 a month because they know they cannot promise it? So maybe that's the first warning for everyone.[00:44:51] - BenExactly.[00:44:52] - AgnieszkaIf anyone makes this kind of claim, that's a red flag for sure.[00:44:57] - BenRight, I agree. And this is what is out there. 99.99% of everything that is out there is literally that.[00:45:05] - AgnieszkaI wish when I was learning that there would be someone I could completely trust and that they would take my hand and help me. But still, till this point, I feel that there are not really many people in the market that can do that for you. And because of that, still, the path is people losing accounts many times and losing their confidence and end up in that failing cycle and stuck.[00:45:33] - BenNow, I actually do have a positive recommendation.[00:45:36] - AgnieszkaGood. Oh, thank God.[00:45:39] - BenOne of the incredibly few. And this, I must admit, I was lucky to run across this myself. And it's free.[00:45:46] - AgnieszkaAll right, bring it on.[00:45:48] - BenI will. Now, again, nobody gives away Alpha. Nobody tells you how to just go in and make money and that's it. No, that does not happen. You can just throw that completely out of your head. It simply does not happen. Simply because if someone can actually make money in the market, why would they want to charge you money?[00:46:09] - AgnieszkaRight?[00:46:10] - BenWhy would they need to why do they need to take that counterparty risk and deal with you and charge you and go through setting all that up when they can simply go into the market and make money? Okay? So that's an absolute rationale. Someone who sets out to charge you money to teach you. That should be the biggest red flag there is. And that's, as I said, 99.99% of the market. Okay. I happen to be lucky to connect on a personal level with professionals and learn enough of the right thinking from them to actually build that into myself and start learning how to make money. So it's a very indirect, very difficult approach, certainly not for everyone.[00:46:59] - AgnieszkaGot you.[00:46:59] - BenAnd again, involved quite a bit of luck, that is from the options trading side of the house, if you will. It's difficult on the stock trading side of the house. This is actually something that I ran across in a Futures Forum talking to an old-style trader, a guy named Daniel Bones, a wonderful guy to follow on Twitter. And Dan mentioned this strategy put together by a guy named Rob Smith called The Strat. And after seeing a million gurus advertising this stuff, I was incredibly skeptical, and I sort of kept that at the back of my mind, but I kept running across it on Twitter, and other places, and I thought, I don't really believe in directional trading, as most options traders don't. We trade volatility. Directionality, that's a really questionable thing. How the hell can you possibly predict which way the stock is going to move? But I decided at one point, and with the market being varying in volatility as much as it did, there was a point during last year when I said, you know, I need to back off because very few good trades are coming down the pike, and I don't want to take an extreme risk.[00:48:23] - BenLet me put some time into finding out if this is real in the first place. And Rob Smith, he's also a retired trader. I seem to run across a lot of these people really quickly. Rob has put together the strategy from all of his experience in the market called "The Strat", and it is directional trading. And this is what I'm trying to learn. A lot of it, again, goes against what I always thought that directional trading. Is it really possible? Well, it is. And in my experience, and with the tremendously helpful community around "The Strat", I have been gaining some measure of success around directional trading, which has been amazing to me. Yeah.[00:49:10] - AgnieszkaWow, that's amazing. Thank you for sharing that.[00:49:12] - BenAbsolutely.[00:49:13] - AgnieszkaIf you have any links, we can post them. So if anyone wants to check it out or just probably Google the name and they will find it. Right?[00:49:23] - BenYeah. "The Strat" is at the site called sepiagroup.com. Sepia, as in the collar sepiagroup.com. There's a lot of tremendous amount of free material on YouTube from him and from people who work with him, but also sepiagroup.com check him out.[00:49:47] - AgnieszkaAwesome. Thank you for that recommendation. And that brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you so much, Ben, for joining us and for this candid conversation today.[00:49:59] - BenAgnieszka, it's been a pleasure talking to you. A pleasure to be here.[00:50:03] - AgnieszkaI hope it will help traders who are listening to this to gain some perspective and understand that, first of all, learning trading is a process. And since this is one of the most challenging and demanding jobs out there with a huge amount of risk, it requires more learning and preparation than any other occupation. And to survive, you must know your weak sides and address them as soon as possible, whether it is a strategy, technical knowledge, or the emotional and mindset side of it. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you enjoy my show, please rate it, review it on Apple Podcasts, and be sure to subscribe so you can come back for a real-life conversation in the next episode. Until then, this is Agnieszka Wood from Ahead Coach. And don't forget, you too can realize your dream without losing yourself and your confidence in the process. Thank you so much, Ben, for being here.[00:51:03] - BenMy pleasure. Contact Agnieszka Wood | Ahead Coach: Website: aheadcoach.comTwitter: @Ahead_CoachYouTube: @aheadcoachFacebook: Agnieszka WoodInstagram: ahead.coachLinkedIn: Agnieszka WoodYou can email me at launchyourlife@aheadcoach.com

Alex and Charlotte hosted a live podcast at a 280 sell out Stand Comedy Club in Newcastle to celebrate a remarkable season for Newcastle United. Alex hosted a panel featuring Craig Hope, Keith Downie, Mark Douglas, George Caulkin and Luke Edwards to talk through a fine season. After this chat Darren Eales (CEO) and Peter Silverstone (COO) of Newcastle United spoke briefly on stage at the event and took questions from Alex. You can listen to part 2 of this live show on our Patreon Podcast feed for £8 per month. If you sign up you will get access to the 20-30 additional podcasts we do per month. Sign up: www.patreon.com/tfpodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mandeep Singh, Senior Tech Analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, joins to discuss the new Twitter CEO. Bloomberg's Bailey Lipschultz also joins. Jane Foley, Managing Director and Head of FX Strategy at Rabobank, joins to discuss dollar strength and the impact of inflation and a potential debt default on US currency. Robert Teeter, Head of Investment Policy & Strategy Group at Silvercrest Asset Management, joins in studio to discuss sectors and stocks on the move and what could outperform the market amid various economic headwinds. Dan Ives, Senior Equity Analyst at WedBush Securities, explains why he thinks Linda Yaccarino potentially becoming the next CEO of Twitter would be a “home run.” Mark Douglas, CEO at MNTN, also joins to talk about the NBC shakeup and streaming wars. He can also discuss its impact on Peacock and streaming, as well as Tesla. Shaheen Contractor, ESG Research Analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, joins to discuss the backlash causing ESG ETF closing. Hosted by Paul Sweeney, Kriti Gupta, and Madison Mills.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark Douglas, CEO at MNTN and David Trainer, CEO at New Constructs, discuss Disney posting a drop in subscribers to its namesake streaming service and predicting a wider loss in that business this quarter. Dr. Carrie Nieman, Core Faculty Member for the Cochlear Center for Hearing and Public Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, talks about providing equal access to hearing aids for older Americans. Yancey Spruill, CEO at DigitalOcean, discusses providing cloud services for small businesses and startups. Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Joel Weber and Businessweek Technology Reporter Drake Bennett share the details of Drake's Businessweek Magazine cover story The Plot to Steal the Other Secret Inside a Can of Coca-Cola. And We Drive to the Close with Katy Kaminski, Chief Research Strategist at AlphaSimplex. Hosts: Carol Massar and Matt Miller. Producer: Paul Brennan. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Wendy Schiller, Brown University professor of Politics, joins to talk about President Biden's re-election campaign and the political fallout of the firing of Tucker Carlson. Mark Douglas, CEO at MNTN, also joins in a roundtable, to discuss the advertising and financial impact of the cable news shakeup. Randy Frederick, Managing Director of Trading Derivatives, Schwab Center for Financial Research, joins the program to give his market and economic outlooks. Ali Ben Lmadani, CEO at ABL Aviation, joins in studio to discuss aviation investing and airline earnings. Liz Young, Head of Investment Strategy at SoFi, joins to discuss markets, investing, and housing. Brooke Sutherland, Bloomberg Opinion Columnist, joins to talk GE earnings and 3M layoffs. Brian Stelter, author and Walter Shortenstein Fellow at Harvard University, joins to talk about the shake up that rocked cable news yesterday and its impact on Fox News. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Geetha Ranganathan, US Media Analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, joins to discuss Disney layoffs and Netflix earnings. David Mann, Franklin Templeton head of global ETF product and capital markets, joins to discuss ETF flows and investing strategies. Dr. Vania Stavrakeva, economics professor at London Business School, joins to break down the surprising UK CPI reading, a Bank of England rate hike, and gives her outlook for European economies. Herman Chan, Senior US Regional Banks analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, joins to break down the recent regional bank earnings. Steve Center, COO of Kia Motors America, joins to discuss the latest company, product, and EV developments post-NY Auto Show. Matt Schettenhelm, Senior Litigation Analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, joins to discuss the Fox News-Dominion settlement. Mark Douglas, CEO of MNTN, joins to break down Netflix earnings. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Herman Chan, Senior Analyst: US Regional Banks with Bloomberg Intelligence, joins the program to discuss Silicon Valley Bank, a potential bank run, and what it all means for regional banks and the broader economy. Arnold Kakuda, Senior Financials Credit Analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, joins to talk bank balance sheets and credit. Joe Weisenthal, host of “Odd Lots” podcast, joins to discuss Silicon Valley Bank and why he's calling it a bailout. Aoifinn Devitt, CEO at Moneta, joins the program to discuss the market reaction to the SVB collapse and government intervention. Dr. Richard Portes, Professor of Economics at London Business School, joins to discuss HSBC acquiring SVB's UK arm, what the fallout means for the UK economy, and gives his take on the SVB and Signature collapses. Mark Douglas, CEO at MNTN, joins to discuss his company's ties to SVB, outlook for the bank, and how he believes it will/won't affect other regionals. John Authers, columnist with Bloomberg Opinion, joins to discuss his column on renewed interest in a Fed pivot after the SVB bank run. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mick Mulroy, co-founder of the Lobo Institute and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East at US Department of Defense, discusses the China balloon incident, the latest on the US shooting objects out of the sky, and outlook for US-China relations. Mark Douglas, CEO of MNTN, joins the program in studio to discuss Super Bowl ads after the big game, which companies won, and which missed out. Campbell Harvey, Finance Professor at Duke University at co-author of DeFi & the Future of Finance,” joins the show to discuss why his legendary yield curve model may be flashing a false signal and the recent yield curve inversion. Matt Winkler, editor-in-chief emeritus with Bloomberg News, joins to talk about recent ESG bans and the winners and losers of the ESG battle. Donna Borak, Senior Reporter with Bloomberg Industry Group, joins the show to discuss her Big Take story on NYC's struggling financial position amid work-from-home. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jacob is a young trader from Denmark who is still going through the relative early stages of his trading career. As you will hear in this interview, Jacob has a wise head on young shoulders. Jacob discovered a passion for investing, then trading, in his mid-teens. He has since dived into trading with gusto learning the basics of trading, developing his trading skills, learning technical analysis, developing systematic trading capabilities, reading influential writers on trading, in particular the works of Mark Douglas. In addition, he worked on developing himself, learning and applying stoic attitudes, and gaining a sense of how markets work and how to best work with them, and the uncertainty that is part of their structure.This is a terrific interview which gets into the early stage development of a trader, with someone still going through these early stage experiences. However, it will be of interest to traders at all levels, as they reflect on their own journey, and perhaps considers some of the ways they could have done it differently, in ways which are still impacting how they work. Jacob, and his colleague at Statera Trading, also design and build automated trading EAs that performs various actions on the Metastock trading platform, that other traders can subscribe too. You can find out more about Jacob, and his business Statera Trading at these links: Website: stateratrading.comInstagram: InstagramYouTube: YouTubeFacebook: Facebook ________________________________________________________________________________________AlphaMind Podcast Sponsor: The Society of Technical Analysts (The STA):The Society of Technical Analysts provide world beating technical analysis education programmes and offer outstanding membership services with regular talks and meetings. Their Home Study Course is based on the Diploma Programme they deliver to students at the London School of Economics and has been created by many of the leading minds in the field of technical analysis.AlphaMind Podcast listeners can obtain a 10% discount on the Society of Technical Analysts world-beating Home Study Course at this link: bit.ly/3r3TawOAlphaMind LinksTwitter: Steve Goldstein - Mark RandallTo know more: https://linktr.ee/AlphaMind101Our Newsletter: https://alphamind101.substack.com/Powering Performance in Global Markets AlphaMind brings powerful change, growth and development to people and businesses within global markets. Driven by a deep understanding of how markets work, and how people and businesses function within them, we partner with clients to create personal performance improvements that elevate returns across their trading activities.Go to the AlphaMind website to know more.

Mark Douglas, CEO of MNTN, joins the program to discuss Netflix's recent earnings and leadership change and other trends in ad and streaming services. Quincy Krosby, Chief Global Strategist for LPL Financial (NASDAQ: LPLA), joins the show to discuss markets and sectors she likes as economic pressures continue. Ted Oakley, founder and managing partner at Oxbow Advisors, joins to discuss sectors he thinks can outperform the market in 2023. Lyle Himebaugh, Partner at Granite Group Advisors, talks about markets, valuations, and makes sector picks while giving his outlook for 2023. Keith Naughton, Bloomberg auto reporter joins to talk about the EV market and Ford's decision to slash the price of its Mustang Mach-E. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark: Well, look, it's really it's a, it's a long journey. I've read your book, I've read many books, I've been in this game for a long time. It's very difficult to sum it up in literally minutes, I suppose. But after reading a book just recently, and listening to all your podcasts a lot lately, I've delved into a lot of it and taken many, many things out of each person's story, which I can resonate wholeheartedly with. But I probably got into Options back in 2006. And I've probably come and gone with it a lot. I've started and stopped, due to various reasons, obviously, life, I've got kids and family and work commitments and stuff like that. But it's always been, I suppose, a hobby. But trying to make that jump or trying to get into it. Full time is obviously difficult for lack of funds or lack of time and effort. I don't know, there's always seems to be something that comes up that stops me from progressing. Having said that, I'm a pretty committed person. I'm pretty disciplined. I've been doing it now for a long time. But like, if you look through him on the table here, I've got trading stuff sitting everywhere, notes. Mark: I've crunched the wheel so many times I've done the shiny diamond thing. I've gone from one program to another. I've spent numerous amounts of funds on various programs and different services such as yourself. I don't know this Option Genius has been around in my life, I suppose, on and off. So I don't know like I've all I'm a big advocate for what you say and what you do. I've wholeheartedly believe that I've been selling options for a long time I've done credit spreads, I've done strangles I've done butterflies, I've done covered calls, I've done a lot of those strategies, or centered around selling options. And I've been doing it for a long time. But for some reason, I just can't seem to break through the ceiling, I just cannot seem to be there to go from this hobby, like training interest that I seem to be involved with, to getting to that next level. I suppose I when I found out that we're going to do this call. Set last night I sat down I tried to write out things that would be good to discuss or to ask you. And I've got like all this paper sitting you have all these notes that I've made, as you would have seen in my email, it was quite lengthy. I think one of the assistants said all that email is probably the longest one I've ever received, that I really okay then.  Allen: Like, you know, because we get, we get lots of emails every day and some people, right? Some people write two paragraphs, but when somebody goes in deep, and they really share their, you know, their soul pretty much. It's like, Hey, I've been doing this and this and this, and this, and I don't know what's going on, then, like we you can feel it when somebody is really, really wanting to make it work. And so those most of those get passed on to me. And when I read it, I was like, alright, you know, we need to we need to talk about this. Because if you've been doing this for years, then like, I have not doing my job. I've let you down in some way that because you know, you shouldn't still be feeling that way. I know. But it's not uncommon. You know, we come across many, many people that come to us and say, hey, you know, I've been doing this for a long time. But you know, it never clicked for me. But you will.. Mark: Yeah, I can see that. So many people that you talk to, you know, have the same they're trying and trying to trying to find the right system, the right setup the right, whatever it is just can't seem like I feel to break through that ceiling. Like you're stuck underneath the water. You're swimming hard. You're learning this, you're watching that you're reading this you're researching. You're looking at the charts to pair with analysis, paralysis, all that stuff. And I've made lots of trades. I've done lots of trading. I've been I've been I won't say successful because clearly we wouldn't be on this call otherwise, but I've made money, but I've also lost money. I've got scars, I've got all that stuff I've had I've had losses, but still here I am battling looking at all that stuff that you talked about in the book in that book really resonated with me there's a lot of stuff in there that I thought I can do this. I know I can do it. Why am I doing it? Why it's just what why does it elude me so much? Is it just a pipe dream and more and more just a duck on the water swimming and just never gonna get there? I don't know. Allen: So you know, when we when we got the email, when they forwarded to me, they asked me like, hey, what do you think the problem is here? Does he not know enough? And my answer to them was No, I think he knows too much. He knows too much. That's part of the problem. I'm just guessing here and I wanted to try to get to the root of it. But you know a lot of the times when so there's there's different things that you need. Everybody needs different things to in order to succeed in anything. Obviously, you know, you need to know what to do you need to how to do it. You know, you have to practice you have to put in the time. You need somebody Do that can actually has doing it like coach that's teaching you, you need a team or a teammate or somebody to do it with. These are all different things that that can help. But a lot of times we come across people that have been, you know, bouncing around from program to program, like you said, they know all the different strategies, they know everything, they know how it works. Some people come and they know it better than I do. You know, so they're, they're telling me that, oh, the Vega this is this and the Gamma and the theta and the row and all this other, you know, they're touching on the Greeks, and they're managing by the Greeks, and they're doing all these complicated stuff. But they're like, it's still not working, why is it not working? So I think, if it can work for somebody else, it can work for you. And I firmly believe that in just about anything, except maybe sports, you know, should somebody else could dunk the ball, maybe I can't dunk the ball. But in trading, a lot of it is I think, 80 to 90% of it is menta. Mark: I've totally, totally, totally. Allen: So there might be something that is holding you back, or, you know, maybe like I don't know, so let's get into it. So now you've mentioned a couple of times that you haven't gotten to the next level. So tell me what is the next level? What is the goal that you're trying to get to? Mark: Well, I think the goal is the same for everybody's, you know, everyone's trying to make income, like, right, I have a I mean, I'm in I'm a cop. So I work in a profession that I see myself coming to a fork in the road. I've been doing this job now for over 14 years, for 10 years. And before that I was in a private industry, we had a family business. So I understand all the dynamics of running a business, how it operates. We had a family business for over 30 years. And long story short, we got out of that for various reasons. And then I got into the government sector, which is a totally different psyche altogether, which took me some time to try and come to terms with. Having said that, I've forever in my wife, and I've come from a family that has been heavily invested in property, shares, businesses, and stuff like that. So I've always had this belief that I can do something with my life that will be able to produce constant income money have investments, like I've had investment properties, and I've done the share thing now on the option things for a long time. And I'm not destitute, I'm not desperate, I have a house, I have three beautiful children and family sort of stuff. But I want to go to the next level I want to be able to provide, I want to be able to teach my kids trading, I want to be able to show them how to invest all the money stuff, like all that sort of thing. I feel as if I'm promoting this stuff, yet, I haven't really truly succeeded myself. I haven't got to the level where they can say okay, Mark, look at you've got all this great stuff, and that show me how to do it. And when they do ask me, I'm sort of thinking so I will not really, I can talk about it. I've read about it, and I'm doing it, but I really haven't got what you think I have. Having said that. Getting back to the trading side of it. I think I want to have this as a business, I can see the potential in it as you can do from home. It's all in front of you in the net. I don't have to go out I don't have to be injured tree. I understand that. I do know a lot about it. I understand all those things you just mentioned with the Greeks and what not right? And I probably do, I probably do know too much. And I do want to keep it simple. I do say to myself, when I'm doing it, just keep it simple. Why do you need to have this indicator? Why do we need to be having that? I totally agree with what you've promoted and talked about for so long. And I think I was probably watching on Option Genius probably before you even started doing podcasts. But over the years, I've come and gone. I've been involved with and I've been with other things. And I've on and off as we mentioned before, right? All right. Does that help answer the question? Allen: No. So what what what do you mean by the next level? Is it an income? Is it is it a certain amount of money in the account is a certain amount of money every month? Where it is it that you say okay, now I've arrived now I have achieved my goal? What what is that number so that you would be able to be like, Yes, I feel happy though. Mark: Okay, so I've sort of thought about that. And I've put a number down to 10k. Now that's a pie in the sky dream. That's a pie in the sky dream. I know. And that's a long way off being achieved. I would just like to be able to see some consistency, all that stuff that you promote consistent, being profitable, and I can do that. But then as you know, you get one or two trades that wipe you out, wipe it back to zero and then it got to start again. Right? So just not we're just not getting that constant. Right? What do they call it.. Allen: Okay, so 10k is the goal. Now, it's not a it's not a it's not a pipe dream. It's so 10k is the goal. If you got 10k every month, you'd be happy. You'd be like okay, I've made it you know I'm accomplishing And that this stuff is actually working. Finally, this stuff is actually working if you were making 10k a month. So tell me, what is it that you think is keeping you from doing that? Mark: Well, clearly a lack of funds at this stage. But I have had numerous accounts where they've had a substantial amount of money in there, but I've just brought it right back down to just doing one lots, until I can see the consistency and seeing that, the, that my trading works, it's consistent, well, then we can scale up. So I'd rather than that, so I'm happy to do just one month a month, which means I'm not gonna make 10 grand in the near future, right, those types of trades, but we can scale that up at a later date. Allen: But what do you so if you were to say, hey, Alan, give me this one thing, and I know I can make tons of money. What is that one thing? Mark: Well, I suppose it's like a business plan, isn't it, like a franchise to follow a step by step thing, do this, do this, do this, do that put it on, obviously, there's a little bit of, there's gonna have to be a little bit of a thought process and feel for the market. But I suppose I need a plan. Like I know how to put the trade on, I know how to do a credit spin on it, for example, but I suppose I need a set of rules or business plan or like something to follow. So that way, I can just follow the recipe for a particular day, not particular strategy, but it's very hard to identify it or pinpoint it down to one thing. Like I've written all these notes in the book and pages and pages of all these things that you're discussing the iPad and whatnot, and try to answer those questions myself. Like, what am I looking for? What's stopping me I've written here a recipe, a plan, a template to follow rules to follow or to abide by tools, treat it like a franchise, for instance. So that way, I'm not deviating to another thing. So I have it on my wall and write down Am I following those particular plans? Does that is that sort of answer the question?  Allen: So do you not have any trading plans right now? I mean, you said you were in different programs and everything so did you do you have any that you've been using as a guideline as a framework? Mark: The cover I've written things down in the past but I suppose sticking to it, or having it visible is difficult. I suppose someone to write one with me or for me to say right this is a trading plan. This is what you need to have in it to follow I suppose I haven't really been given a choice like if it says write a trading plan, write down this stuff, write it down, but I suppose I just want to try it like this is what's going on my head just put the trades on just put the trades on work with the probabilities. Yeah, it should work out. Allen: Okay, and are you conservative or aggressive? Mark: I believe I'm conservative in the sense where at the moment like with the one loss, so like, if I was aggressive, I'd be going right I'm pretty positive this trades gonna work of two or five, or 10 lot but at the moment, it's like let's just hold back and do one more being conservative. I think I can be aggressive if I need to be but on how Allen: And how much percentage return are you looking to make? Mark: I knew you're gonna ask me that question. And I don't actually have a percentage. I've just I suppose a bad way of saying it but I just keep putting the trades on and hope that the probabilities work out so I don't have a particular percentage amount that I've got Okay. When you ask that question Allen: obviously so obviously you know, just putting the trades on hoping they work out that's not working. So we're gonna have we're have to refine this What strategy do you think most appeals to you? Mark: Well, obviously I've been working on the credit spread that's probably the one thing that I've done the most of the credit spreads like I've done in many others, but that's the one that I've probably done the most so in the last few years. Allen: Okay, and are you keeping track record of all the trades that you've been doing? Mark: No, I don't. I have written them down in the past. I do try to follow that put it in a journal, but over time, it just becomes cumbersome I suppose like it's writing it all down. I don't I don't stick to it. It's probably the kind of problem there. Allen: So what you said is you want to franchise, and in the franchise are going to tell you the first thing is to document everything you're doing. Because we cannot tell what's going wrong if we don't know what you already did. So having a firm plan that says okay, I'm gonna put this trade on and writing down why, why am I putting this trade on? Because it's moving higher because it's got news coming out because it's high. It's, you know, very volatile right now or the IV is off or whatever their reasoning is, you put the rig, you put it there, you write the trade, you record what happened, why or why did not work out. And then after you do a whole bunch of these, you can go back and look at it and say, okay, every time I do a trade that's at, you know, 35 Delta, it works wonderfully. But every time I do any other Delta, it doesn't work. So I'm just going to do that 35 delta. So if you want to find your own trading plan, then this is how you do it. Now, this is a long way to do it, it's going to take a long time, because you're going to have to test different things and try different things and see what's working, what's not working. But it would be one way for you to create your own plan based on what you find you're more comfortable in, because some people they come in and they tell me, hey, you know what I want to do Credit spreads, and I want to do 2025 Delta spreads, some people don't want to do five Delta spreads, you know, so everybody's comfortable with different things. And then based on the amount of credit they get, then we can figure out okay, how do we how do we manage the trade, some people should be not managing the trade at all, they should just be getting in and getting out at a certain amount. Some people, they can go ahead and say, hey, my trade is going bad, I'm going to, you know, adjust it or do something else with it. So depending on what we're thinking, when we get in will dictate what we do when we're in the trade. Mark: So now that I know what I do for trades, there are particular entry signals that I looked for, like I don't just go and find a stock and then look up a chain and then play delta and put it on. I do have, like, for example, I think there's market volume, I use volume. So obviously, when volume is increasing, I'll have them put on a put trade, obviously, when the stocks turning or progressing. And obviously over the three averages, like you say, things like that. So there are particular indicators, and not too many I do try and keep it fairly simple, I believe, before I put anything on, so I do try and put the weight in my favor. And the advocate of that, of course, by using those some small indicators to try and get it on sideways or progressing in the in the direction that we think it's going. So I do look at that I'm not a big person, I'm gonna use a 35, Delta, or 45, or whatever. Right? Okay, I understand the Delta side of things. But it's more about volume, I suppose at this stage and what. Allen: Okay, so that that's good to know. Right? So I mean, what I would do is, I probably have a sheet, kind of like a checklist, you know, so get it out of your head, and onto an actual piece of paper, where every single trade you have to mark it off, you know, the volume is high, yes, you know, movement is this way or whatever, whatever your your things are, you check it off. One, two, three.. Mark: I actually have done that I can attest that I have done that I've written down, like when the bar gets lower than the level of bar, it's time to get in or when a turn when it points up. It's getting. So I have written most things down in the past. Yes. Allen: So that'll be your trade law right there. That's if you do if you have the discipline to do that, before you put in the trade, you'll you'll know at the end, okay. You know, just go back to that journal and be like, Okay, what worked and what didn't work? What are the patterns. And that's kind of the stuff that I was doing originally, when I was first starting to figure this stuff out, is look at every single one. And now I have my my checklist, where if there are two or three things that I cannot mark off, I don't put the trade on, because I know that hey, there's not enough, you know, these things are really important. I want them, I don't want to put a trade on without everything checked off. Allen: Now, that doesn't mean that I'm not going to lose, like you still lose on the trade with everything checked off. But like you said, you know, we're putting the odds in our favor. As many times if you have a checklist, like you said you did. That's your journal right there. And so before you put on the trade, you just mark it off, you know, check, check, check, check, oh, I can't check this one. Then later on, after the trades are done, you do 2030 trades, at least, then you can go back and look at and say okay, I lost on these three trades. What is the pattern I lost on these five trades? What is the pattern? And you might find a pattern, you don't have to but you might find something that say okay, these indicators, you know, they're not working or they are working. The other thing is, I mean, it's, it's really simple, right? You find the strategy that you want. And you said, Hey, I found the strategy. Second step is to find the trading plan, that you think you think will work and then is just test it and trade it and do it over and over over again. But the important part is that you have to stick to the plan. Do you think you stick to the plan, or is it? Is it a discipline? Mark: Tell me, tell me, what got you out? I've read your book or listen to your story. What part got you through that ceiling? Obviously, we're doing the same thing as we all do for such a long period of time. But there must have been something that clicked or something that you did or something did you get into? Was it a program for you? Was it someone that you got? Hold on What, what got you to that next level that we all tried to get to? Allen: It took time, it took discipline, there were a few things that really helped me. One was really sticking to the rules that I had set up. And really, it's about, you know, when it comes down to it, it's about putting the trades on with the odds in your favor as many ways as you can. And I learned about that later on, you know, having different different levels. But what I started to do, and the ones that I really started doing well on, and in the beginning, were iron condors. For some reason, that strategy really, really clicked with me. And I was like, Oh, my God, I gotta work. No, no, it doesn't work right now. But he's like, you know, that strategy really worked. And it was like, Oh, I can adjust it. So I might never lose money in the trades. It's just really awesome. But I still was having trouble following the rules. Because, you know, you have to work that. So there were there were a few ways. Number one is my wife got involved. Allen: So every day, she would, like I would have a list of all of my trades, and I would have all the rules, like when I needed to do what, so every day at a certain time, she would come upstairs because I was working from home and she wasn't she wasn't working. So she would come upstairs. And she would ask me, Okay, let's go through every single trade one by one by one. And so she'd be she'd have her notes. And she's, okay, this trade on Russell. Where is it now? And they go, Okay, this, it's up this much money, or it's down this much money? Okay. When are you going to adjust? Well, when this happens? And they said, where is it now? Say, Oh, it's right here. So do you have to adjust it? No, not yet. Okay, cool. Next one. All right. I did this. Okay. Why did you do this trade? And when are you going to adjust it? Should you have adjusted it? Yeah, I should have adjusted already. Why didn't you adjust it? Ah, I don't know. She's like, Oh, what the hell are you doing?  Mark: All that is basically you got your wife involved? Allen: I mean, not just involved, but she was holding me accountable. So I had to answer because she doesn't need to know anything about trading. But she just needs to look at my rules and ask me the questions like, hey, what's the trade doing? Is it up or down? Why have you not? What are you going to do about it? And if there is something to do about it, what are you going to do? So it's just asking yourself those questions every single day. And it helped. I used to do that on my own. But I would always ignore the answers. Because I didn't have anybody to answer to. It's like, oh, I'm a trader, I'm the boss, I make my I'll make the decisions. But when she came in, I knew I had to answer to her. And if I don't have a good reason, then I'm putting her money on the line as well. Right? I'm putting her future on the line as well. So we would have a discussion about that. So I knew in advance, I knew, Okay, she's coming at one o'clock, I need to make sure I got everything right. I'm doing everything right. Otherwise, we're gonna have an argument. And so I needed her. Like, in the beginning, I wasn't, I was I lost a lot of money. And so the only reason that I didn't have to go out and get a job was because she was patient with me. But it was part of it was like, she's going to be the boss, right? Until I turn it around. And until I break the ceiling, she's the boss. She's going to tell me what I can do what I cannot do based on how I'm doing. And so I call that my one o'clock, you know, fire drill. It's like every day at one o'clock, I still do it. I go through every single trade and I look at it and say okay, is this trade up or down? It's up. Okay, good. Allen: What happens if it goes down a little bit? Am I still going to be okay? Yes. Okay, move on to the next one. And so I don't have time to do that on 100 trades. So that's why I limit the number of trades I have. But every day I go in and I look at it and I monitor it I know where each trade stands. So that before it starts to get into trouble, I know and I can look at it and be like okay, this one I need to monitor this one I need to adjust early or this one I need to maybe just exit it because it's not acting right. It's not acting properly. So It kind of gives me you know, so having that while you go in every day and look at each trade, and everybody does that. But in order to you ask yourself the right questions, and then you have to do what you need to do. So just monitoring the trades, and just checking on them is not enough. You have to know, okay, this is my plan, and I have to do this, then you have to stick to it. And then if you have an accountability partner, or if you have a wife or a child, or whatever, if somebody comes in and asks you, hey, you were supposed to do this, well, why didn't you do it? And then you have to answer to them. So when you have somebody else there, that automatically, I mean, that instantly made me better, like instantly, the first day, second day she came in, you know, I just I just started following the rules, because I knew I had to, I had to give her an answer. So that was one of the things that did it. Allen: The other thing was that I realized that this is a long term game. And so you've read the passive Trading Book. So I wrote that book, because I saw that if you're only selling options, eventually, you don't like the options can go against you. So what I mean by that is, in the financial crisis, when we had the financial crisis in 2008, there was everything was just going up and down. And so if I had options on if I trades on those trades lost, and then I could never get that money back. That's when I realized that, okay, you know, if I want to play the long game, if I want to be in this forever, I cannot let something else knock me out. I cannot let a COVID 19 pandemic knock me out, I can't let the financial crisis I can't let you know, the President making some decision and sending the stocks down, knocked me out. And so I started building up the foundation of stocks, and using those to generate capital on those. And the idea is, hey, I want to own the stocks as my foundation. But I want to use options as basically like a rocket ship, you know, so I wanted to boost the returns. So I'm gonna have conservative stuff in the in the main portfolio, you know, where I have the stocks, and I'm making money. Mark: I totally agree with all right. Yeah. Allen: So, you know, that was now Mark: I totally agree with all that, definitely. Allen: So you can't start off that way. Because it takes a lot of money to own that stocks. So in the beginning, you do have to get good at picking one strategy, getting good at it, just following it and being disciplined, and saying, Hey, I'm going to do this, and I'm going to follow it along. Now, again, long term, picture wise, every month, you're not going to make money, every trade is not going to make money. So you have to have that in your in your mindset that, hey, sometimes it's gonna work, and sometimes it's not. So there's lots of lots of little little things that you can improve on it. But the biggest thing that I'm seeing is that you have to follow the plan. Mark: So Allen, do you think that I would benefit? Like I know you're selling plenty of courses, promote what you promote in the book. And I totally agree with all that, I get it on one side. But if I was to do another course, such as yours, I my fear is, and we're just going down that same rabbit holes, as I've done before, hence why I'm confused as to why I can't seem to break that ceiling. If I was to go into a course such as yours, this one that you're the passive trading and whatnot, I worry that I really fear that a year I am going into it again, I'm doing another course. But I understand the strategy. I think now I need more of a coach, maybe I need maybe that one on one, maybe maybe that's what I need. Or maybe there are things that I'm not happy to admit to that I do that I need to be changed. I need to be molded stead of going down this direction on to be heading over in this little bit direction over here with my trading. I understand the why thing. That's a great thing in my voice. She's a great supporter of me. I am trying to I'm trying to get out of work. She works. I'm trying to get her out, keep trying and trying and time is your course gonna sit me on that path to freedom. Allen: So it's like, you know, I mean, I'll give you an example. Like when people go to college, right? They everybody's told go to college, go to college, some people they go to college, and they just they just party the whole time and they don't get anything out of it. Some people go and they study, study, study, study, study, and they get a good job. Some people go and they make lots of contacts, you know, they they meet, they make lots of friends. They meet lots of teachers so that when they get out, they know a lot of people and they have a good network and then that helps them so it's really up to each person individually. Now I would love to say that yes, every single person that takes my course makes them million dollars. But that's not the reality. You know, people come in, life happens, they take it seriously, they don't take it seriously. And, you know, that's, that's one part I cannot control. So I cannot tell you that, yeah, you know what, it's going to work for you just because it's, I'm amazing. And I'm a wonderful person, and it's just gonna work. 90% of it is on you, I can give you everything I know, I can do it with you. But again, the markets have to cooperate. Number one, and then number two, it has to click for you, you have to do it, and you have to practice it. And you have to stick to the plan. A lot of times when people come into my programs, and they tell me Oh, hey, you know, I'm doing XYZ, I'm like, but that's not what I have in the plan. Allen: That's not what I have in the program. They're like, yeah, no, but I'm changing. I'm like, okay, but have you done it my way? No, not yet. But then why did you join my program, you could do your own way. Without my program, you don't need to pay for my program, right? If you're going to pay for something. And if you believe that, hey, yeah, this guy knows what he's talking about this thing works, I think it works. If you're going to pay for it, then just follow that step by step by step and don't change it. Unless it works.  Allen: When it starts working, then only then would you say, Okay, now I'm going to, you know, change it up, because I think I can, I can be a little bit more aggressive, or, hey, I want to be a little bit more conservative, or I want to change it up a little bit. But you don't do that until it's always working. So the problem is that people that have been doing this for a long time, they know all the strategies, they've listened to many other coaches, you know, they come in, and they're like, Well, you know, I don't like that one thing, I'm going to change, I don't like that thing, I'm going to change. And so they start doing it their own way and they don't listen. And so you can't take stuff from this course and this course and this course and mash it into a Frankenstein, and then tell me "Oh, it didn't work?" Well, because I don't know why that guy told you to do that. And I don't know why that other guy told you to do that. Or the only thing I know is if you do it this way, you'll get the similar results that what I'm doing. Now, if you add and change it, then I can't help. So, you know, like you're saying that we have, I think there's like four pillars that I tell people that people need. So if you want to learn how to do something, you need these four pillars. Number one is you need the right strategy, which you've already said is, hey, that's the credit spread, right? Number two, you need the trading plan that works. So number three, is you need other people to do it with because you're doing it all alone, like you said, you know, you might need a wife, if you don't have a wife or partner like that, then you can have a community or other students that are doing it the same way. Allen: And then number four, you need a coach that can actually show you what he's doing, because he's still doing it. And he's actually doing it right now, instead of somebody that said, oh, yeah, I was a market maker 30 years ago, and I don't trade anymore. So I think those are the four things and depends on which everybody needs. So the coaching part is the one that takes the most time. And that's why those coaching programs are the most expensive. Allen: In my passive trading course. You know, we give you the trading plan. It's like okay, here, this is the plan, these are the rules, you follow it and, you know, good luck. But there's no one on one coaching. There's no group, you know, where we are, where we're doing and looking at the trades. And so when we have that passive trading course, it's a cheaper course. And so people would join it, and they would go through the modules. And some people would have a lot of success, some people wouldn't. So I said, What, what's the problem? Why are they not? Why is it not working? And I realized that it would help if they could just spend a lot more time with me. And so we created that credit spread mastery course, where every week, we get on the call, and we're just looking for trades, we're managing trades, we're adjusting trades, doing it together. So the point of that is, here's the rules. Here's the trading plan. Now let's do it together, over and over and over and over and over and over. And so once you have that habit of doing it the same way over and over and over the other, the other ideas, the other habits kind of die off. So I've seen that that program does deliver results. So we back it up and we say hey, look, if you're in our program, and the program doesn't work, like you don't if you're not profitable in our program, then we keep you in the program. We keep working with you. We keep you in the class until you become profitable. And so even if the markets not cooperating That's fine, we'll learn how to manage it together. And then we'll stay longer in the program, if you'd have to be.. Mark:  So with your target trading alum, obviously, it does take a type of market. And obviously, that's why through the last six months with Covid whatnot, it would be easy Earth to do that type of training, because obviously, it just went straight up didn't keep they're still on put, credit spreads the load of was money for Jim, in a market such as what we're in now, which is up and down, up and down. It's far more difficult, isn't it? Allen: Currently it is more difficult, doesn't mean it's impossible. So we do have to dial back our, we have to dial back our expectations. So last year, the year before, you know, making 10% a month, 7-8% a month, not a big deal, it was pretty simple. You know, put the trades on most of them work out in anybody, and everybody was making money. Like any you know, you could buy anything, and it was going up any everyone is making money. This is a market where you have to be really good at selection, trade selection, and management. So you have to know when things are turning around, and when to get out before they get really bad. Allen: So the trade management, sticking to your stop loss is very important right now. And those are things that most people get afraid of, you know, so it's like, okay, I put the trade on, it should work. And then oh, no, the stocks turning around, what do I do what I do, and they don't do anything. So if your thing is part of, if you're doing as part of a group or in a program, then be like, hey, we need to get out, we need to get out, get out, get out. Some people let people know, Mark: There's that mental component, that's the biggest part. And as I've gone along this journey, if all these years, I've realized more so in the latest year, it's not about the strategy. It's not about all that stuff. That mental side of it, it's 80-20, Mark Douglas, the book, the trading zone, I listened to that over and over and over again, and various other podcasts and whatever other things, but trying to pull the trigger when you're in a loss is it wasn't so hard, we put this trade on, it was gonna work a met the probabilities, it was all looking good, it was under the over the top of the averages. I had volume, blah, blah. But all of a sudden, now I'm underwater again. And here we go again, and then I've got to pull a trigger to get out to take that loss. Mark: And I have taken some big losses in the past, I've had to pull the trigger, just recently with the weekly trading system. And when that I mean, there's Solomon says, I've been there for a couple of weeks, again, I've been on and off over the over many years. And all of a sudden, now I'm having to pull the trigger again to get out because we lose money. Like it's hard. It's another scar, isn't it another scar, not a scar, it's another get back down there. You know, I don't want to see you do any good. It's difficult, you know, and that's that mental side of it is arguments or trading? Allen: Yep. The emotions, you know, the emotions have to be kept in check. So there's different ways that you could do that, you know, one, one of the ways is people say that you divorce or divorce yourself from the outcome. So whether you win or lose, doesn't matter make a Mark: ..difference? Exactly what I totally agree with that. And that skill is very difficult. Allen: Yeah, your job is to just follow the plan and stick to the plan. And if you can do that, eventually, over the long run, it'll work out, you know, maybe you have losing trades, that's fine. But over the long run, it should work out. So too much of it, like you said, you know, like, oh my god, I'm, I'm going to be negative again, oh, my God, I'm gonna have to pull the trigger. And oh, my God, you know, when you have that kind of reaction, that compounds and it just makes it all, it makes it much harder to get out of the trade when there is a loss. The other there's one lady, she told me something that really worked for her. She goes, You know what, this is not my money. This is God's money. And what what are you talking about as God's money? She goes, Well, I use this money. And I use the gains from the money to do good. Because they use it for charity work. So she's like, I don't need the money to live. Because I have enough income I have enough. You know, I have I have money coming in that I live off of. But this is my trading money. And so I take the money that I make, and I give it away to charity, and I do good things with it. So it's really God's money, and I cannot lose God's money. There's no way I can lose money. And so if I'm if I'm going negative, that the trade is losing, I get out right away because I don't want God mad at me because it's not my money. So that's another way you could look at it. That you know, again, it's it's taking yourself out of the outcome, you know, and it's not like okay, it's not under my control. So you've got the wife coming in and asking you what you're doing and why it's working or why it's not working and being accountable. You have you know, not looking at the outcome just getting better as a trader, just hey, I need to do my skills, whether it wins or not, that's not up to me. That's up to the market, I can't control that. But I can follow my plan. That's up to me. The other thing is, you know, not looking at it in emotional point of view, like, Hey, this is not my, maybe this is my kid's mind. Maybe this is, you know, God's money, however you want to look at it, but it's not yours. So if you lose it, it's bad. Like, that's the worst thing to happen. You know. So there's, there's three different ways that you can mentally overcome the different obstacles. But again, I think one thing that we haven't talked about yet is to simplify, right? So you've done all the different strategies, and I'm sure, you know, some of it is creeping in. And, you know, it's like, oh, you know, I got to do this, or I'm going to, I'm going to wait for this indicator, or I'm going to wait for these Bollinger Bands, or the Fibonacci, or the technicals, or any of that stuff, the more you simplify it, the easier it becomes to actually follow through with it. And so I think, you know, just one strategy, not chasing after the shiny object, you know, it's like, Hey, make a decision. If it's spread, spreads, and that's the only thing you focus on, and you get rid of everything else, you stopped listening to everything else, you unsubscribe from all the emails, you know, whatever, whatever service that you choose, like, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to follow this plan, I'm going to, you know, if you've taken a course, maybe you've already taken a course, you have a course that you've tak`en and be like, Okay, I like this course, I'm going to follow this course, we'll get rid of everything else. Just go through it. Master that and don't do anything else until you know what that is, until you get the results that you're supposed to get it. In the beginning, when I started screwing up, like I would learn something, and then I would do good for a little bit and then I would mess up. And then I would do good, then I would mess up. So I was like, What the hell do I do? Well, I would always go back to the basics. I would imagine that I don't know anything. And I would go back to step one. Okay. What is a call? What is the put? What am I doing here? What is the strategy? How am I supposed to put it on? What are the rules and I gotta follow them step by step by step, not like, oh, you know, I'm gonna, I think this stock is gonna go down or or, you know, there's a Fibonacci retracement level, and there's some support here. So I don't have to adjust. No, forget all that stuff. I don't know any of that stuff. All I know, is the strategy and my trading plan. And that's it. And so that was, you know, you go back to the basics. And that will change your mentality of it, like, Okay, how do I manage the trade? How do I deal with this? Allen: Again, if there's other things involved, like stress, you know, if you're under a lot of stress, you're going to make the wrong decisions. If it has to work. If I have to make money this month, from my trades, you're going to make the wrong decisions. It's not going to work out in the long term. So there was a there was something another trick that one of our one of our students taught me. And now everybody can't do this. Most people can't do this. But what he does, is that he takes whatever money he makes trading this year. He will live off that next year. So when he's trading next year, he doesn't have to live off that money. Because he already has the money set aside from the last year. If that makes sense. Mark: You need a big bankroll sounds like a real estate agent. Allen: Yeah, you need Yeah, he was. Yeah, he was. He was a politician. But, um, he has obviously, other people's money then. So I mean, he did have, you know, he had, he had a large account to do that. But eventually, that would be the best thing to do. You know, you have you already know your expenses are covered. Right? Now, you're only focusing on the plan and focusing on on just winning and just trading properly. It's not it takes the emotion out of so whatever you can do, whatever trick you can use to get that emotion out of it, that will make you a better trader. One, one more thing that that that that I've seen is happening to me is, the more you do it, the more of a habit it becomes. So if you do, you know, 50 trades, that's a lot better than five trades, but 500 trades is a lot better than 50 trips, if you do them properly with the right practice. So eventually, you get to the point where Oh, it's just another trade. It's not a big deal. It's just another trade. There's another one coming. So if I get if I hit my stop loss, yeah, it hurts. I hate it. But it's Just another trait, you know, I'm going to move on, move on to the next one, move on to the next one, because every month is a different ballgame. So you start over, you get to start over again and again and again. And so that is another trick that you would help in the long run. But again, you know, you have to, in before all of that happens, you have to have the confidence that this actually works. Mark: So what do I truly do believe in? Allen: Yes, you say that you say that. But then you also say that, you know, I can't do it. It's not working. It's not working. But you, you you've heard it that it works, you want to believe that it works. But I don't think you have that conviction yet that it works. And so the only way to get that conviction is to get it done for yourself. Right? And so it might be that you take a maybe you take a step back, and you go even simpler. And you say you don't want not the credit spreads, how about I do something like maybe a naked put, right, in a naked put, I'm going to make money if the stock doesn't go down. And it'll expire. And then I'll sell another one. And I'll sell another one. And I'm going to sell it far out of the money. So that I just when I just make that 20 bucks, or that $30 or whatever it is that small amount I'm just going to make month after month after month trade after trade I'm going to make and if the stock drops, okay, no fine, I can buy the stock, no big deal, I'll buy the stock. And then I'll sell covered calls on that stock. And so the covered call will expire, and I'll make something the covered call was expired, the next month will expire, and I'll make something so you build up that confidence that you know what, there is a way to do this. That's another option, you know, if you want to go that route, so you really got to figure out like, okay, you know, it's a, it's a personal thing, I wish I could just tell you that, hey, this is the one thing you need to do. But for everybody, it's different. And unless I spent a lot more time with you, unless I see all of your trades, unless I see you know, your emotion, how you handle the emotions, I won't be able to tell you. So that's kind of like in our in our program, what we do is we tell we give everybody a spreadsheet, and we say, hey, look, you have to fill out the spreadsheet, you have to put every single trade on the spreadsheet. And then they shared with me so that I can go in and I can look at them. You know, I could look at the tray. And I'll go in I'll see like, why did he do this trade? This doesn't make any sense to me. And I'm calling this Hey, John, why did you do this tray? Allen: And he goes, well, no, that's not gonna work. And he goes, okay, okay, fine, I'll do it. All right, done. You know, and if they're doing all the trades, right, then it's probably working. And most of the time, it's not working, like if they're not making money, then we can identify, Okay, what are what is not going right? You know, there was one of our current students, he was doing several trades, and he was still negative. So I looked at his spreadsheet, and I'm like, Okay, what's going on? What do I see, and his trade entries were great. You know, he was picking the right stocks, he was doing it properly. But whenever he lost, he would lose a lot more than he should have. He just wasn't getting out early on time. And so that was the biggest thing is like, you're not getting out. This is it, you know, your losses are too big. Doesn't matter how many trades, you win, your losses are still too big, you're still going to be negative. And so we worked on that. And then over time, he got better at getting out earlier and earlier and earlier. But he had, you know, he had somebody to look at that and to point it out, and to hold him to it. So that eventually he did it over and over and over again. And then by the end of the class, he was positive. He was like, Yeah, I fixed it. Again, that's all you need to do. That was he needed that one thing, everything else is simple. The training plan I could give you, you know, you could go do it on your own. But the discipline part of it, that's sometimes where we need help from somebody else. And so whether you know, it might be a wife might be somebody else, it might be a trading partner, somebody you work with, it might be a coach. So I think that might be one thing that you could implement. Mark: So just quickly, what what's the key points in a trading plan make like entry criteria, stop losses or that sort of stuff. Is there anything else that I can many points or rules should be in a trading plan? Like what I try and put a trading plan together, that is doable and simple to follow. To look at rather a complicated bloody list of all this crap, what would be a good trading plan? Allen: So, you want it to be simple and easy to implement. But you don't want it to be too simple, where it's just broad, like anything can happen. So, you know, I've seen people that have a trading plan that says, I'm going to do an iron condor on this stock 45 days to expiration, I'm going to sell a 10 Delta calls and sending out the puts. And that's it. That's my whole plan, and I'm just gonna sit and let it expire. That's a trading plan. It's very simple, right? You know, what you're going to do you know, what you're going to how you're going to do it, you know, what you're going to trade it on. And you know, when. And so now that pretty good plan doesn't work. So whoever's listening don't don't do that one. We've back tested that, and it didn't work. But there are, there are times there are several months where it does work, just because it has, you know, 80% probability, but over time, it doesn't. So that's the basics, you got to know what you want to trade, you need to know the strategy, you got to know what you want to trade. And then you have to know what constitutes a good setup. So when it comes to credit spreads, you mentioned credit spreads. So I like to do that, depending on the size of the of the trade, if it's a you know, maybe a $5000 $10,000 trade, then I'll go into I can go into a stock, or I'll go into an index ETFs are good, too. But they're their strikes are a little bit smaller. So you got to do a lot more contracts. But if I can go into a stock that has, you know, five point spreads, and I do 10 of them. That's a $5,000 trade. That'll work. Allen: So you can, what do you want to trade? And then what's the proper setup? So for me, again, I like to keep it simple. So if I see a stock that's trending, as moving up, or moving down, then I'm happy to trade it. Because I'm, I'm more of a trend follower, you know, so there's people that think, okay, if the stock is gonna go up, it's going up, it's going to keep going up until something big changes, there are other people that think the opposite. They're like, Oh, if it's going up, they just kind of come back down, because it's gonna do reversion to the mean. And sometimes that works. And sometimes it doesn't. So I don't really buy that I just like, hey, if it's going up, then it's telling me that it wants to go higher. So that's basically what I'm looking for. In a setup, I'm looking for the stock to tell me what it wants to do. So if I see a stock that's jumping up and down, no, I don't know what it's doing. I don't know what it's telling me, I can't understand the language, I'm not going to trade it. If it's going up, then I'm going to play it bullish. If it's going down, I'm going to play bearish. And sometimes, you know, it turns around and you get banked, but most of the time it's going to work out. So that's the kind of setup I'm looking for. And then over the years, you know, we've added other things to look at, you know, how do you make sure that all of your trades are not in the same sector? Right now, you know, right now, oil has been doing well. So all of the oil companies were doing great. But then they all turned around and went down all together. So if you have 10 trades on in different oil companies, that's not that's not diversification. That's the same trade. And so if they turn around, I'm going to turn on together. So that would be one way of putting the odds in your favor by having you know, only a small portion of your account in one sector. So you have to separate that. How do you diversify by time? You know, so not putting all your trades on on the same day. That's another way to do it. So you diversify by time. So there's so many different ways that you can do it, some of them might make sense to you some might not. And then, you know, we have other students that come in and say, Well, I do it, you know, I look for this also in my trade, like, Okay, if that's what you want to add to it, then add it. Don't subtract things that I've given you. But if you want to add to it, one student said that he likes to look at the weekly chart, I usually look at the daily chart, see how the stock is doing. He likes to look at the weekly chart as well. Allen: So I'm like, Okay, fine, you can add to it, you know, if it doesn't hit your criteria on the weekly chart, then just means you'll have less trades that qualify, but it's not gonna it's not going to put you into a trade that's going to hurt. So when you're basically you just have to figure out what you think is going to work. And then you have to test it. So back testing, and paper trading are really really, really helpful. Especially back tests, Mark: I find paper trading useless. To be honest. You lose interest very quickly. It's very easy to lose in that type of trading. Yeah, go ahead. I've done a little bit of paper trading and I've just found that I find okay, it's gone the wrong way. But I got it wrong. You just let it go. Because it doesn't mean anything. It has no significance, does it? Start with money trading? Yeah. You've got a connection heavenly with the with the live trading, because actually, it's not your money tied to it. Allen: It's not your money. It doesn't matter what the style of the trade does, you're only focusing on becoming a better trader, the goal is not to make more money, the goal is to become a better trader. Right? It's kind of like playing poker. It's like when you when people go to play poker, right? They'll professionals, they'll tell you that if they play their hand perfectly, and they lose, they're okay with it. Right? If they play, if they mess up, and they still win, they're still mad at themselves. Because I didn't play it right. I didn't play my cards, right? Even though I won, I don't care, because long run, it's going to hurt them. If they keep playing incorrectly in the long term, it's going to hurt them. So that's the goal to become the better trader. And the end results, the profits will take care of themselves. So paper trading is practice. That's all it is. Right? If you didn't need to take that on board. It's slow practice. Back testing, I prefer back testing way better than paper trading. Because you can go really quick. You know, if you if you come up with a plan, like okay, these are my criteria, I got these seven criteria on my trading plan. I'm going to enter when I see this, this and this. I'm going to exit when this happens. I'm going to adjust it this way If this happens, okay, I got that right and down, and that you can even just come up with your you can just guess No, I think this one's good. This one's good. That's my plan. Okay. You pick. You pick a stock, spy. Great, perfect. You go back to yours in time. January 1, put the trade on. How does it do? Oh, it made money. Awesome. Cool. February, how do you do made money? Great. March. Oh, we lost a lot of money. Doing it, huh? Okay. APR, how do you do? And then just do it month by month, I want back testing one month or one trade, you know, might take you five or 10 minutes. And so you can get years worth of practice in just a few days by back testing. And you'll find that Mark: It's something that I've never done is back testing. Is there a particular software that's adequate for that sort of stuff? I've never really looked down that line. I've heard about it. I've listened to it, but I've never actually really done it myself. Is there anyone ticular that would be worthy. Allen: The one that I use, the one that I use is called the option net explore. option that explore? Yeah, and I think I think they're based out of Great Britain. And so basically, it's, it's an options selling platform, you know, so it looks like your broker's platform, you put the trade on, and you go through it day by day by day. And it doesn't do it all for you, you actually have to look at it every single day. And if you want to make changes, you can make changes to it. That's what I like about it. There are other software's that you just put in the strategy, you press a button and it'll tell you "Oh, you made money or you lost money". That's not the point. We want to get better as a trader. Right. And so this one is like, Okay, I put the trade on, click a button. Oh, stock is down today. Do I need to do anything? No. Okay, next stage. Oh, stock is back up again. I don't have to do anything. Next stage. Oh, stock is down again. Oh, no, I'm at an adjustment point. Okay, what adjustment am I going to make? I'm going to do this adjust. Okay, cool. Let's see, did it work out? Go there forward today forward a day forward a day. Oh, expiration day stop. It worked. So it's, it's just, you know, there's no money, right? It's just about becoming a better trader. It's just about getting the practice doing it over and over and over again. So that I think would definitely help you as well. Mark: Okay, so one of the things obviously, we talked about discipline and the mental game, what's probably the best thing to follow, or to train your mental strength, like, as you said, like a paper trade or a live trade, you should be able to make that same decision, then in there without any emotional war. What's the best way to get to that level of trading where you whether you win or lose, it's just business as usual? Allen: Yeah, I've done to you have to divorce yourself from the outcome, whatever, whatever that takes for you. For me, in the beginning, it was getting my wife because I knew how I would have to answer to her. Mark: And scary Allen: I didn't have it. Exactly. It has to be scary. Because if you do it properly, she cannot get managed. Right? It's like, Hey, I followed the rules, babe. I did everything I was supposed to do. It still didn't work out and she'll be like, Okay, fine. That's no problem. But if you do not follow the rules, that's when she gets manage. And that's when it gets scary. So yes, you have to make it scary for you not to follow your rules, because a lot of us a lot of US traders, like, if we lose money, yeah, we don't we get mad about it, we're like, oh, man, I lost money, we feel bad about ourselves. But it doesn't hurt enough. You know, it's kind of like these people that say, Hey, I want to lose some weight. You know, so they make a goal, I'm gonna lose some weight, I'm gonna lose some weight, they tell everybody, and they do it for a few days, and then they give up. But then there's this website, that what, what this website, basically what it does is, you have to pick a, maybe a political party, or a person or some organization that you hate, you actually hate them. And you have to put up a lot of money and say, Okay, if I don't stick to my goal, this organization is going to get $5,000 or $10,000. So that makes you because it's now becomes a different level. It's not about just the money, or about doing the thing. It's like, okay, you know, let's say, for example, I don't want to give my money to anybody like the Save the whale Foundation, right? I don't want to, I don't want to give my money to the whales, I hate whales, I want them all to die. I don't want anybody to save the whales. So if I don't lose 10 pounds, they're gonna charge my credit card $5,000 and give it to the whales, and I hate whales. So I want to do whatever I have to do to lose that money to lose that weight. You know, because I don't want that well to be saved. You have to want something more than what you have. So there's, that's another psychological trick. No, in trading? We sometimes we get used to it, you know, it's like, oh, last? Oh, well, you know, we get used to it. And it just, we gotta it's just the mental part of it. Mark: Definitely, definitely, it's a huge part of it. Something I didn't I didn't realize, until much later down the track of trading, how big a part of mental side of it really is. Allen: I mean, if you find trying to avoid is difficult. Yeah. So if you find yourself having a problem with discipline, make it simpler, cut it down, make it as simple as possible. Find the trade that you know will like you know, the naked call or the naked put the covered call, these are very simple trades, they're really hard to mess it up. Right? On the naked put, if you get assigned the stock, hey, that's great. I just bought the stock much cheaper than it was before. And I'm going to own it. So you want to you want to do it on companies that you're going to own you want to own for a long period of time. That's the only way it really works. You can't you can't be selling naked puts on stocks that are just, you know, going crazy. That's the wrong way to do it. So you know, if you can simplify it, if you can find some way to have somebody else monitor you, and hold you to your fire, you know, hold your feet to the fire like, hey, you need to follow this, why aren't you doing this? Or, hey, it's not my money. Right? I'm doing it for somebody else. This is my kids inheritance, right? I cannot mess it up. So I have to follow the rules. One guy, when I was in, just after high school, I became an agent, a real estate agent. And as an agent, as a brand new agent, they tell you that you have to do a lot of things that you don't want to do. You have to talk to hundreds of people all the time, you have to cold call, people say Oh, Hi, are you doing? Do you want to sell your house? Oh, hi, do you wanna say, Well, you know, they have to keep doing things that you don't want to do. So it was like, okay, in the guy, the guy is like, hey, most of you guys are not going to do it. But if you want to be really, really, really motivated, what you need to do is go out and buy a fancy sports car. Sounds like what you're talking about, what do you do a fancy sports car? Because yeah, you need to go out and buy an expensive sports car so that you have that payment that you have to make at the end of the month. And so that is going to make you work your butt off because you have to make the payment. And as I go I mean, I understand what he was saying. I was like, No, I'm not doing that. But then eventually I didn't make it as a realtor. Maybe if I did do that, maybe I just didn't do the work that he told you to do. I just didn't do it. It wasn't the reward wasn't worth it for me. Mark: It was up to risk, I suppose. Yeah, Allen: I mean, you know, so with your training, you got to figure it out. Is it really worth it? Is the goal that hey, I want to quit my job. Is it I want my wife to quit her job. I want the kids to have this vacation or whatever it is. You have to burning. Yes, just eat you up every single day. You have to really really, really want it Mark: Explain to me how and it's burning me. Allen: Then the discipline has to stick. Because if you want it, but you're not disciplined, and your losses are too big, then it's it's not there yet. So I think, you know, if you don't have a trading plan, I'll just give you the training. You know, I mean, it's not that hard. It's not it's, it's the training plan helps. But it's up here. And it's the practice just doing it over and over and over again and having confidence in the plan. Because then if you have confidence, you'll stick to it. If you don't have confidence, you're going to change it, you're going to you're going to add things to it, you're not going to follow it, you're going to forget about it. Like with the paper trading, that's exactly what that is, you know, so it's not real. So, oh, well, I'm gonna ignore it. I'm gonna forget about I'm gonna do that.  Allen: That really resonated with me Allen's that that point, like, go back to the paper trading, treat it like it's somebody else's money, and then make it work. Don't look at it as just as being as a fake account, that doesn't matter. Allen: I mean, I wouldn't Yeah, I would prefer you do back testing, it'll be much faster. Mark: To look at that I'll get, I'll get onto that particular site that you've made. Yeah, Allen: That'll give you years of experience in just a few days. And so, to me,

Geetha Ranganathan, US Media Analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, joins the show to talk about outlook for Disney+. And Sonali Basak, Bloomberg Wall Street reporter, discusses Trian, Disney, and Bob Iger. Mandeep Singh, Senior Tech Analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, joins the show to discuss the latest turmoil at Twitter. Mark Douglas, CEO at MNTN, joins to discuss the outlook for Disney+ and advertising revenue stream. Michael Nathanson, founding partner and Senior Research Analyst at MoffettNathanson, join the show to break down Bob Iger taking over as Disney's CEO and what it means for Disney + and the company. Katie Greifeld, cross asset reporter with Bloomberg News, joins the show to discuss Riot Blockchain and Coinbase stocks dropping today. Wes Kosova, host of The Big Take podcast for Bloomberg, joins us to talk about this week's lineup. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ira Jersey, Chief US interest rate strategist for Bloomberg Intelligence, joins us from our London offices to discuss the Treasury yield curve flattening and the Fed. Abhay Deshpande, founder and CIO at Centerstone Investors, joins the show to discuss the equity market and some stocks and sectors he likes in the face of economic headwinds. Mark Douglas, CEO at MNTN, joins the show to preview Netflix earnings and outlook for streaming services. Matt Miller and Guy Johnson interview the CEO of Rolls Royce. Anurag Rana, Senior Software and IT Services analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, joins the show to preview big tech earnings next week and discusses his latest tech research. Scott Levine, analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence, and Emily Wilkins, Congressional reporter with Bloomberg Government, joins the show to talk about the Biden admin tapping the oil reserves, what it means for gas prices and oil companies, and the political implications of the move. Steve Lee, Marketing Manager for the Ford 2023 F-Series Super joins to talk about Ford's latest vehicle, sustainable options for expanding its fleet, and outlook for Ford stock and the company. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 2008, Simon Ree lost a "life changing sum of money" in the global financial crisis. While devastating to his financial security, this experience was later utilized to develop a better way of navigating financial markets. Today on The Prosperity Perspective, Simon joins host Liam Leonard to share some of his findings–particularly, the myths that Wall Street tells us. The first myth: a 10% return per annum is a fantastic return. Simon argues that this is not the case, and that depending on where you are in your wealth journey, 10% per year is not likely to be life-changing. Another key tenet of Simon's teachings is the importance of compounding. By compounding on a monthly basis, you can create life-changing returns well within a ten year period. Understand that if you are thinking about engaging in trading, it is best to start small. As a trader, it's important to reduce the emotional impact that losses can have on your mindset and trading decisions. Simon shows how to begin with a sum of money that if lost, wouldn't affect your ability to pay the rent or put food on the table. Hear his breakdown on these topics and more as Simon shares his passion for helping others with his knowledge, and discover how his unique system for trading options that he teaches through his online course, The Tao of Trading, can help you. 3 Key TakeawaysAlways start trading with a sum small enough where if lost, it wouldn't take away the ability to pay for the roof over your head. This will remove unwanted emotional attachment to trading.  You should expect to lose on some trades as a business expense. If you win more than you lose and your winners are bigger than your losers, you will come out ahead in the end.It is just as important to assess your trading performance at the right time than it is to make the assessment. Working with probability will take time; assessing your performance after one trade is pointless.ResourcesTrading in the Zone by Mark Douglas et alVisit taooftrading.com/prosperity to access the first chapter of his book and training courses at a heavy discount!About Simon ReeSimon has three decades of experience as an active trader, investor, and financial markets professional. He previously held senior positions with Goldman Sachs in Australia and Citibank in Singapore before deciding to focus on trading full-time in 2017.His vision is to help people live more creative, joyful, and inspired lives by alleviating the burden of financial stress that weighs so many people down.His mission is to revolutionize the way finance is taught by shattering long-held myths that have been perpetuated by Wall Street.He is the founder of taooftrading.com, an online education company that has helped hundreds of aspiring wealth-builders learn how to use the financial markets to generate the prosperity they desire.Simon is the author of the Amazon #1 best-selling book The Tao Of Trading – How To Build Abundant Wealth In Any Market Condition.In addition to trading, Simon is a certified Jeet Kune Do instructor. He lives in Singapore with his family.

Known worldwide as “The First Lady of Trading Psychology”, alongside the ‘father' of Trading Psychology, Mark Douglas. Former floor trader; today as an investment trader she coaches all levels of traders, and is co-author of 15 books including the award-winning book “The disciplined trader”, the first book written on the subject of trading psychology. Confessions of a Market Maker Present Paula Webb---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Paula's Twitter: https://twitter.com/_MarkDouglas_ Websites: www.markdouglas.com & www.paulatwebb.com---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------If you'd like to join a supportive and professional community of traders, join JJ & Ray at microefutures.com

Mark Douglas, CEO at MTN, joins the show to discuss streaming and big tech earnings and how results affect the outlook for ad strategies. James McCann, deputy chief economist at abrdn, discusses the economy and interest rates. Emily Wilkins, reporter with Bloomberg Government, discusses Nancy Pelosi landing in Taiwan. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi speaks with Bloomberg TV to discuss the company's performance in the recent quarter. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Luca Paolini, Chief Strategist at Pictet Asset Management, talks about investment strategies in the second half of the year. Jennifer Lee, Senior Economist and Managing Director at BMO Capital Markets, joins the show to discuss Jay Powell, the US economy, and the outlook for a recession. Mark Douglas, CEO at MNTN, talks about Netflix subscriber losses and other streaming-related topics. Mike McGlone, Senior Commodity Strategist with Bloomberg Intelligence, discusses Bitcoin and crypto's plunge. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ross Mayfield, Chief Investment Strategist at Baird Private Wealth Management, talks about markets and investing strategies. Katie Greifeld, cross asset reporter with Bloomberg News, discusses her recent piece on the ETF boom being fueled by the existential crisis in bonds. Alisha Kapur, Senior Industry Manager at Similarweb, talks about travel in 2022 and ahead of July 4th weekend. Mark Douglas, CEO of MNTN, talks about Top Gun's big box office earnings and streaming. Hosted by Paul Sweeney and Matt Miller. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.