All right, baby, let’s rock and roll. You’re rock stars. You almost be in Cleveland at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. You’re such rock stars. So today and tomorrow I want to talk a little bit about tactical stuff, although I’m not going to show charts. I can do that eventually in the future, but I mean, let’s face it, watching some jack ass go over charts such a snooze. I know you know that inherently you think you like it, but you really don’t. So someone talked about, can you talk about your options trading? Again, what I do, I don’t know how it would be relevant for you.
When I look at options trades, so let’s say that you’re bullish on something. What is it that you’re supposed to look at? Some of you probably first thing you look at is the premium. How much is the premium? Because your account balance is only a certain size, so can you afford it? Right? How much of your capital you going to put to work do you take say one half of 1%. Say you have a hundred K, you have $500 as one half of 1%. Do you try to buy as many contracts as you can within that $500 number and then let the thing go to zero? Or do you put say 2% of your capital, buy $2,000 worth of options, as many contracts as $2,000 would allow you to buy and then risk 75% of that, I mean one fourth of that, 25% being the $500.
That’s all a field play. You’re only going to know the math works out the same, which is better. You’re only going to know by doing it. Just like I said in so many other things too. If you look at how options are priced, the lower strike prices go in the money first obviously. So therefore you have to look at delta may be gamma. You can go to town on the Greeks, but typically what happens is when you look to see what options you can afford, I don’t like using cheap and expensive and what you can afford, but if you look at something that’s in the money, those are going to have higher premium. You have intrinsic value.
So then you look at something that’s maybe out of the money, those are going to have smaller deltas. So for what you can anticipate, I particularly don’t use price targets. Maybe you do. You have to figure for if you buy an at the money option that has say a delta of 50 for every dollar move, right? The theory is that the option price is only going to move 50 cents. Then what’s the spread? So what’s your holding period? How can you avoid or not neutralize, but how can you minimize to the best of your ability, the decay part? So all of that becomes a function of what it is that you’re able to tolerate based on your account. And to me, I’ve seen people do it so many different ways that I can’t say that there’s one best way.

I typically don’t buy things that are way out of the money and look for these fantastic situations to come up and to endow me. I might’ve done that once thinking I had the inside line on a company 35 years ago, and if the thing moved 20%, all these options that were very cheap, low price, I don’t want to say cheap again because cheap speaks to value. You buy a bunch of low priced options and then have the thing surge. Maybe there’s a takeover candidate. Maybe there’s people do this around earning surprises. They want a big payday. To me, that’s a real gamble because you really don’t know what the odds are. Odds are probabilities, and so then you don’t really know how to handicap the trade or figure out the bet size. You could have always just pick a number, but you need to figure out for the risk that you’re willing to take, what kind of rate of return that you want to make both on the trade and then what is that going to do to move the needle of your account balance? So the first thing to look at then is what can you afford from an option premium standpoint? And then if you look at the delta, how much do you think you want to participate? It’s not always an exact science, but it’s pretty reliable. So if something moves $10, right? Because the delta of any underlying security is one.
So if you’re looking at doing options, you know that you’re not going to participate a hundred percent in that move, even though the derivative is based on the underlying that is actually making the move. Why wouldn’t you just own the underlying? Is it the leverage? Can you figure out based on the number of shares you could afford to buy with a delta of one versus the number of contracts, right? What’s your rule of thumb? Because again, I’ve seen it if I have 20 people who are really good at options trading, there’s 20 different ways they position size. I gave you one at the top of the show. Do you invest more money into taking on more contracts and risk 25% of your two K, or do you just buy the 500 and say if it goes to zero, I know my max loss.
Sometimes the underlying can move so sharply that the option prices get smashed and there’s not an opportunity for you to get out at where you would have your stop, nevermind the bid ask spread. So I don’t know that there’s an exact science on how to do that other than to go and experiment with what you think is best for you. I have mixed emotions about stuff, but I’ve really learned to kind of culture my own system around it over the years, over long periods of time. There was a time when I used them as a surrogate because I was looking at shares that if I bought as much as I needed from an outright standpoint,

It would tie up a lot of buying power, you see? And so I used the options, not leaps, but I used the options as a surrogate to have the exposure. So you might consider the same thing, but again, if you’re doing it because your account is small, I’d say save your money and contribute to your account from your savings and build up your corpus pros. Typically like the leverage and the loss limiting aspect of it too. Oftentimes you can find something, you can create spreads, you can get very creative, excuse me, with options because you can buy and sell different expirations and different strike prices against, but spread trading is a whole other beast, so I don’t want to get into that and spread trading in options is very different from spread trading in futures kind of cover that in the mastermind because it’s just too much to do here and I don’t feel like doing three hour videos for free, so you can go study that on your own and figure out, but I would definitely look at how do you want to manage the risk?
Do you want to put more money to work and then have a protective stop where you would offset the options trade and retain some of that money? Right? In the example at the top of the show, I talked about investing as much as say 2% of a hundred thousand dollars account. Not looking for that to go to zero I, but risking only one fourth of that position, $500, which would be one half or 1% of the overall account. You’d have to figure out if that’s a good fit for you or would that make you nervous having that much exposure knowing that if the name tanked because of earnings or because of whatever, you might not be able to get out, you might take a thousand dollars hit. Would that be okay? How do you know it’s hopefully hard to back test with options? Or are you better off just buying whatever it is your R and just putting that amount to work and if it goes to zero, it can’t get any worse. That only comes from trial and error. It’s the only way to do it.
I know some options guys who are really good and so I’m just thinking about actually for this thing, maybe have them on as guests and do a deeper dive in getting their insight. I’ll see about doing that. They’re easy enough. I don’t want to put the message out there. Then you have every jackass sending, you’re like, so-and-so is an expert and has these strong opinions and they’d love to help your audience this way and that way, and I’m not interested. That’s why I feel, look at the contact page. It says very clearly, I’m not interested in interviewing people.

It’s not that kind of show. I do have friends, people that I’ve known for 20 years. It’s a different type of guest. They’re not strangers to me. We’re friends. They’re pros. They have a long track record, so they also have my trust if I was affiliate sales or if I had some other type of marketing thing or I did like there’s some podcast, there’s the guy from Australia, I think you got to pay to be on that show. That’s a different business model right here. I fund everything. I do this all largely myself. I pay for some post production. I’m trying to work better on getting thumbnails that actually mean something to you. So it’s evolving, but I largely do it myself and I’d get a lot of help obviously from ganja. So that’s going to evolve. So maybe I’ll have some guests on the way.
I had Brian Shannon on for example. It wasn’t just like a random, Hey, I know you’ve watched your show. I have all your books. I really like your message. Would you please consider? That’s not the kind of outreach that I do. I can call my friends who are all kind of branded brand names. They’re all excellent people, and so I can do that in the option space. Maybe I’ll reach out and I’ll do something along those lines for you, but I’m hesitant to turn this into an interview style show. I’ll rethink it. I’ll have all of December to meditate on that, but it would have to kind of be conjugated with all the spiritual stuff, the emotional intelligence, the traitor psychology. Otherwise, we get more of these people talking about the economy, and you can get a bunch of that for free on tv. I don’t need to do that.
It’s kind of a gigantic snooze to be frank, because no matter what’s going on in the world, no matter what’s going on in the economy, if you’re doing enough research, you should be able to find four or five names a year that meet your criteria, and that’s really all you need. You see? You don’t need to find something every day. You just need to catch what are the biggest moves and be there options can certainly help you do that because of the loss limiting methodology that’s built in, especially if you have debits, right? We’re talking about if you have a debit balance or a net debit balance in the case that you’re doing bull call spreads or bare put spreads, just to keep it super simple. There’s all kinds of broken wind strategies. Don’t want to get into it and go from there. But anyway, those are some things to ponder. We’ll go from there. Maybe I’ll have a guest on whatever. Thanks for being here, and I will see you tomorrow with another episode where we’re going to talk about how do you handle taking profits. It’s an interesting concept. Thanks for being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. It’s Tuesday. At least for you watching this. It’s not Tuesday. Today, I wanted to kind of develop a little bit more the idea about learning to trade on the fly, especially for those of you who have been working with some of these funding trading challenges and this and that, or those of you who are thinking about doing it. My take is, as you heard yesterday, is that you should first figure out how to trade then approach the funding process. I wanted to dig a little deeper onto that and explain why every trader has his or her own way of doing things and because of the emotions that come with it and who you are as a human being, you’ll find that your trading style is as unique to you as is your fingerprint. Mine isn’t better. It’s just good for me. Winning traders have that skill.
Yours might actually get better results. I might not be able to pull it off the way that you do. I might not be able to pull it off at all, but it works for you, and that’s what’s important when you skip the step of trying to figure that out. You put yourself not in harm’s way, but inadvertently something’s happened that you might not be aware of, and that is you’re out 500 bucks over the course of the year because you’ve been paying $40 into a program where you’re trying to learn how to trade with the upside call option being like, well, I might get funded. The issue there though is that the entities typically have set up the trading rules for you. So then the question is, can you overlay your temperament and your personality with those trading rules? For the majority of people, like 96% of them, the answer is no. You can’t. You have to set up the rules that work for you. Otherwise, you put yourself in a coping situation, and I know it’s like, well, I have to do something. I don’t have any money. Well, that’s kind of like the necessary evil that no one really talks about. It’s like a dollar and a dream. If you don’t have any money, you really can’t trade. These aren’t really solutions long-term for you to kind of make it and make big money.
History might prove me wrong, but they’re too new to go out and make any big wild bets. So if you’re in the spot of wanting to experiment with this stuff, by all means my information here is going to fall on deaf ears. But the idea that it’s actually going to give you an opportunity for the hours that you have to put in, and then you figure out what your hourly wages, the biggest part though, to me again, is that they set up monthly trading rules about how much you need to make as the achieved level, but then the draw down level is too small. The number of trades too is problematic in that you might have a set of rules that you could eventually develop on your own that only require you to put on four or five trades

Because of the nature of the setup that you have. But if you have to be part of some type of a program where you have to put on 10 or 20 trades on the month, that for your own natural system for who you are could be construed as overtrading, it might not feel good. And you already have people who are coping, right? They’re trying to go from make their money, minimize the drawdown, so then they change to the mini contract, the micro, and now the whole thing’s a soap opera. So it’s clever that they figured that out, but to me, it looks like desperation at the end of the day. So my advice is save your money at the beginning, fund it into your account even if you have to wait and be patient, feel the feelings that you have to feel around being patient and then really learn how to trade because then you set up the criteria that you need. Winning traders never act out of desperation.

You set up the criteria that are best for you. Some of you’re going to be like, I’d rather do it this way. So it’s your money. Do what you want. But I don’t know a single person. Two, I’ll be frank with you, I don’t want to mention any names. I’m not here to call anyone’s girlfriend ugly, but at the end of the day, if I looked at some of the rules that were around those, what they call challenges, they want to gamify it. They’re like, let’s see if you could do it. It’s only 40 bucks. Well, that’s great, but that’s the annuity income for the platform is your monthly service fees. But I’m looking you all in the eye saying some of the rules are so stringent, I wouldn’t be able to pass the damn challenge. I wouldn’t be able to get funded or whatever the language is.
So be careful of what you ask for because you don’t really fully understand what it is that you’re doing to yourself. From the people that I do hear from, they’re sometimes involved with these things for several years. They’re out the money and they haven’t made any damn progress because there’s no education. The education is here’s how you have to trade in order to follow these rules. So the education is more like it’s really the criteria that you need to operate within in order to get funded, I suppose is the language. But what I would rather do, and I was lucky I didn’t have these types of distractions, so what I was able to do was just to develop it on my own risk, my own money. Some of you don’t have the money, I understand, but my opinion is you should save your money and build up your grub steak. Find ways to save money. Put it in the account. And I know this doesn’t really resonate with the folks who are at the pro level, but there’s a whole community of folks who are up and coming or they want to be up and coming, and they’re not just there yet.

So they’re tryin to find their entry spot into the business with the promise of getting funded, per se. I don’t really think, I don’t know enough about it because I haven’t studied each and every one of the companies, but from what I can see and what I’ve been told from the people who were is that you don’t actually get funded, right? You’re just getting paid out on paper gains and those gains, that money is coming from other people’s monthly fees. So it’s not really prop trading, right? Prop trading is when you’re so good, you get a desk that the company pays for and they give you a credit line and you make money and you split it with the house. Of course, there might be certain things that you do have to pay for after those are all negotiated though there’s no one size fits all. The really, really good traders don’t pay for anything, so that’s just the way that it goes.
If you don’t ask, you’re not going to get it. But any rate, that’s my 2 cents, is that if you skip the harder part of not wanting to figure it out, but kind of jumping in and trying to figure out trading along somebody else’s rules, it’s for the majority of people listening, it’s not going to happen. And if you want, Michael Marcus speaks about it in the chapter in Market Wizards about system hopping and getting the worst of it. So you might want to go read that and hear it from him.

The advantages that winning traders have is multi-fold. Here are a few of them…

Winning traders trade their own rules – not rules that have been imposed upon them.

Winning traders do their own homework – they put the work in. They take chances.

Winning traders know that losing is part of the business.

Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Happy Monday. Hope you’re doing well. So let’s do some housekeeping. Got a lot of great feedback this past week on the episodes, especially the one on Wednesday that we do with Ganja regarding your health and preparation. So I’m going to speak about that in a bit, maybe a few times this week because it all adds up. Also, we’re in the process of continuing to kind of build out where we shoot that episode. So eventually the goal is for me to go shoot over there just because it’ll be higher quality. Even though I’m not that fussy about production, I do think I have to work on the lighting just because I’m trying to find pockets of time to shoot this show, and it happens basically on varying days. For example, today isn’t Monday, so I had to find time last week to bang this out and get it done in the appropriate way given the lighting that I actually have here. So I’ll probably get back lighting and all that other kind of fancy stuff. I think if I was actually trying to sell something, I’d put a lot more effort into it. Right now it’s really just about communicating with all of you, getting the word out there. If you’re here for the production value, it’s probably not the right show, but everyone has their opinion, so I always appreciate you being here and I say so.
So that’s it. As you can see, it’s getting wintery here. It’s hoodie weather. So I’m dressed up today, my winter apparel. So I wanted to talk about in the ganja video. First of all, the thing about the secret sauce is a joke, right? There is no, if you’ve watched the show, it’s like what are your trading secrets or what’s the inside baseball here? There’s really you making attempts to figure out what works for you, and that’s the secret sauce, right? It’s unique for everybody. There is no one trading system or one model or one measurement or one ATR or one, whatever it might be that would help you.
So we got a few comments on that video. One being around alcohol, one of the social accepted drugs, socially accepted drugs, go out, have some cocktails, be social, and what would people say if you didn’t drink one time as an experiment, I kind of made, it wasn’t a New Year’s resolution. I find those things kind of flacid, but around that time I remember saying, I’m just going to stop drinking for the year, and I didn’t have any problem with drinking. I always try to test myself to see how can I exercise my discipline muscle. Now I’m using jiujitsu as the vehicle and I’m getting a lot out of the practice itself. So I would test myself in these different ways to just exercise my discipline muscle. So I remember saying, no matter what, I’m not going to have a drink for the entire year. I don’t care if I’m going to a wedding. And again, it wasn’t a big stretch. I was maybe having one drink a month anyway, so it wasn’t that difficult, but you’d be surprised how other people perceive you like you and a hey is something wrong. Now that was ended up being so easy for me to do. I just decided to keep going for eight more years. And then on my 40th birthday, I had this big, big ass pint of Guinness.
Again, not because I had any problem with booze, but because I was investing time in my career, I was trying to perform better, and I did tell you in the video with ganja that I would feel it. So you never know where these things can kind of take you. One guy wrote that he would be viewed maybe in Japan as being antisocial as a friend of mine would say, you could take that as an entry point into a tribe meeting. And why would you care what other people think about you? Or if you are antisocial, can’t you just go and have a good time? How do alcoholics in Japan feel about that? Do they deal with the stigma of being antisocial? Is there a scarlet letter A? So I’m not making fun of you. I’m just saying you can always let go of caring about what other people think because it might tie into other things that you’re doing as well, not just around drinking socially in Japan or being anywhere.
You can just be yourself and you’re probably great at it. So speaking of all of that, I think self-image is really important for being a successful trader. When I used my imagination to envision the future that I wanted for myself, when I first got to Wall Street, I had to invent a guy, a version of Michael Martin that didn’t exist before and would’ve needed certain resources to kind of get to that spot that Michael Martin didn’t even know how to get. But I knew that if I kept doing the same thing, I was going to get the same results, kind of true of anything in life. So I had to invent a vision for myself and then act as if I was that new version of myself and I was excited. But with that, right on the edge of that feeling is a feeling of insecurity. You kind of feel like a fraud because you don’t have anything to justify it. People are like, well, why do you do this and how can you teach there and you need credentials and this, that, and the other thing. And the truth is you really don’t. You need what you decide you need. So I decided to be a success. I decided to invent my own intellectual property and then use that not for greed, but for my own financial abundance.
And so I think one thing as you’re coming into Q four, we’re in Q four, excuse me, and you’re reviewing 23, you’re getting ready for 24. One assignment that I’m kind of working on with clients is to look at when you set up your goals, where were they? In fact, limiting beliefs on some level or where did you shoot too low? Where did you set the trajectory for your growth? The growth comes from your behavior. It’s not some rate of return, right? You don’t want to say, I want to earn 24% a year. That’s not the goal. That’s what you think it is, because then you could figure out you want to have those feelings. I’ll give you that much. But what you want of course is something tied to a process that you could actually follow every day because coming up with a number off the top of your head, why 24? Why not 124? So again, limiting beliefs. What are you willing to do?
Do you feel you deserve the wealth? And that’s a deep question. I think inherently when I first start to speak with people, they’re a little timid and so they come up with lower goals because they think they’re easier to hit. But I think if you work intentionally, you can really hit whatever goal you set out to hit, but you have to do the work. I just started, some of you might’ve gotten an email, some of you might be in the group, but we just started a group last week and I looked everyone in the eye and I said, I’m guaranteeing you results, but if you don’t do the work, just get your money back because it’s not going to come osmotically. It’s not going to happen from you listening to me speak about certain things. It doesn’t work that way. You have to do the work.
And so that’s where I figure why does it happen? Why do people fall short? Why do they not deliver for themselves? Why do they take the easy way out? Is it low? Do they feel like they actually don’t deserve the wealth and abundance? Is it because they feel like they really don’t have it in them to do the work? They would much rather get an alert service. So I think you have to put yourself, make yourself the star of the show. And if you’re going to do this, be very, very bold. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to think about, I’m going to put all these hours in and here’s how I’m going to time block my day and make sure I have my hourly requirement every day. That makes me feel good. Well, you know what I’m going to say to that? That’s a blue collar way of looking at it.
You have to work hard, but I would rather say work intentionally because then to me, it gets easier when you work intentionally. This isn’t a game about putting hours in. Again, that’s a rookie retail way of looking at stuff. You have to put time in to understand your craft, but the craft is going to come from actually doing of the trading. Trading is what teaches you how to trade. There is no book. Yes, there’s clever books. I’ve even talked about them on the show that help explain things so that you can get the intellectual understanding, but all of it doesn’t mean anything if you’re not going to ever put it to use. And if you’re sitting there trying to make sense out of things, you’re always going to be timid and timid. People don’t make the bold discoveries in the world. They have to be brazen.
You have to be ready, willing and able to risk your capital to get what you want. Paper trading accounts and these funding accounts don’t really help. You can’t learn to trade around a funding account. You need to come into that situation knowing already what you’re doing rather than going and paying every month and just winging it and see how it’s going to come about. It’s a waste of money. I might’ve mentioned that before. Many of you’ll be like, well, Mike, I don’t have any money. Well, you’re not going to have more money if you keep pissing money away on stuff that doesn’t serve you. You think it’s helping you, but you don’t know what you’re doing. So whatcha going to do? Open up 10 accounts and wing it and figure out you’re going to try 10 different strategies and go with the one that works.
You have no emotional connection to it. The better thing to do is to, again, what’s your self-image? Learn how to trade, be a trader, and then worry about getting funded. That’s how I would do it. I wouldn’t spend money on things that aren’t proven. And if they’re making awarding people, if that’s the right word, or allocating the person the trader’s profit allocation to the tune of several hundred thousand, it’s only because making 1.5, they’re not doing this at a generosity. This isn’t 5 0 1 C, it’s a for-profit, profit entity. So I would say save your money. We talked about that in a previous episode. Where can you find money to put back into your trading account? Well turn off Disney plus, stop buying $10 lattes. Don’t get the new iPhone.
Find ways to find a hundred bucks every week that’s slipping out of your pocket because of lack of discipline. You’ll have 400 bucks at the end of your account, and if you’re a more established trader, when you make a lot of money, your quality of life is pretty high. There’s probably most things that you can’t afford. But I would still do some belt tightening. And in the program we have, we do look at where does the money go and what’s the motivation? Because sometimes one of the goals for the person is to have the ability to go anywhere, anytime, and have that type of money to be able to go do that. That can run amuck and your expenses can add up because you like to exercise that muscle. So there’s the other side of it. When you have so much money that everything just becomes a free for all because there’s nothing you really can’t afford, want to go away for the holidays, take your family 50 K, no problem.
But then you find reasons to do that, and it becomes super easy to spend that money. So again, we go on budgets. What’s your self-image? What’s the self-image? Do you deserve that? Why? It’s also important to have goals so that your spending doesn’t become a muck because there’s always a new goal that you could hit. There’s always a new thing that you can reinvest in to build your assets. Not saying don’t have fun, but without a clear goal, you can find yourself doing almost anything, right? You can fall into any kind of habit, and that’s kind of what I mean when we talk about paradigm. The paradigm to me is the sum total of all the habits. So you want to be aware of how you fall into these things. Some of them could come from your subconscious. When I first started making money, I know I had money.
I worked really, really hard. It was a new experience for me once I figured it out on Wall Street to coming into financial abundance. So that new version of me came with other things too. You need custom made shirts, no problem. Go get ’em. You need whatever. So I didn’t become a spend thrift, but when I did have the money, I did start looking at things that I could acquire, which is consumption. And so I did come up with a goal, and basically I created an allowance for myself to say, okay, this is what I’m going to do. This is what I’m going to reinvest in my business. This is how I’m going to grow.
I didn’t pay for those. If you go to some of these events, the people speaking are oftentimes the sponsors. They come up with the money, and that’s why they’re allowed to speak. That’s why you don’t really see me speak at these places, not paying. I give my money to things that are important to me that mostly have nothing to do with trading conventions or those types of speaking types of deals. So if you see me speak, it’s probably because they were interested in hearing what I had to say more than would I or could I cut a check? I give plenty of money away. It’s not just trading junkets.
So another thing too that I wanted to hit upon is when you’re looking at developing your trading strategy, folks are still kind of hung up on trying to buy pullbacks because they feel like a lower price is cheaper. Cheaper means more value. Oftentimes, you’re missing out when you do that though on the momentum that you need to bring your account higher because the momentum and the direction of the trades going the wrong way. So I used to have a tongue in cheek kind of joke that I would say to people, again, if your goal and your self-image is to be a successful trader, if the instruments chart isn’t in the top right corner, it’s not a trade for you. The trajectory isn’t up because it really matter where it’s been. If something’s going to go up a hundred percent, it has to have been up 20 or 30% before it gets there.
So you could almost use that as a filter. Don’t buy anything until it’s up 20% off its lows. Don’t buy anything unless it’s making a two year high. You can set those rules up for yourself. So just kind of like a smorgasbord of feedback today based on everything mostly around Ganjas video and then I mean ganjas concepts on health and wellness and overall preparedness. The next step with all of that is to kind of conjugate that with your self image. When you envision yourself as a successful traitor, you have the spiritual and the mental and the self-awareness, the traitor psychology, the emotional intelligence. That’s one side. Then you’ve got the physical side. You need to have the stamina in the near term, but you also want to have healthy lifestyles so that you can enjoy the fruits of your labor. Then you want to make sure that you’re working smartly when you’re doing your analysis system. Traders don’t have to spend a lot of time because the system’s built data comes in. They push a button, they get their orders for the next day, no problem.
So think about the things that we spoke about last Wednesday in and around the moving parts of preparation, and then conjugate your behavior around all three of those things with your self-image. That can kind of help you see, okay, here’s a point B of where I want to be. What does that person have to behave like today in small incremental ways in order to get there? That’s at least how I did it. There’s probably other paths as well, but I always knew that I kind of had a mental and spiritual game. I had a physical game, and then I had my professional game, and all of those three things have to be congruent with one another and this and that. So appreciate you being here. We’re going to have a good follow-up episode with Kja, obviously Wednesday, and I have a great week of concepts and things to speak about with you here. Thanks very much for being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Happy Monday. Hope you’re doing well. So let’s do some housekeeping. Got a lot of great feedback this past week on the episodes, especially the one on Wednesday that we do with Ganja regarding your health and preparation. So I’m going to speak about that in a bit, maybe a few times this week because it all adds up. Also, we’re in the process of continuing to kind of build out where we shoot that episode. So eventually the goal is for me to go shoot over there just because it’ll be higher quality. Even though I’m not that fussy about production, I do think I have to work on the lighting just because I’m trying to find pockets of time to shoot this show, and it happens basically on varying days. For example, today isn’t Monday, so I had to find time last week to bang this out and get it done in the appropriate way given the lighting that I actually have here. So I’ll probably get back lighting and all that other kind of fancy stuff. I think if I was actually trying to sell something, I’d put a lot more effort into it. Right now it’s really just about communicating with all of you, getting the word out there. If you’re here for the production value, it’s probably not the right show, but everyone has their opinion, so I always appreciate you being here and I say so.
So that’s it. As you can see, it’s getting wintery here. It’s hoodie weather. So I’m dressed up today, my winter apparel. So I wanted to talk about in the ganja video. First of all, the thing about the secret sauce is a joke, right? There is no, if you’ve watched the show, it’s like what are your trading secrets or what’s the inside baseball here? There’s really you making attempts to figure out what works for you, and that’s the secret sauce, right? It’s unique for everybody. There is no one trading system or one model or one measurement or one ATR or one, whatever it might be that would help you.
So we got a few comments on that video. One being around alcohol, one of the social accepted drugs, socially accepted drugs, go out, have some cocktails, be social, and what would people say if you didn’t drink one time as an experiment, I kind of made, it wasn’t a New Year’s resolution. I find those things kind of flacid, but around that time I remember saying, I’m just going to stop drinking for the year, and I didn’t have any problem with drinking. I always try to test myself to see how can I exercise my discipline muscle. Now I’m using jiujitsu as the vehicle and I’m getting a lot out of the practice itself. So I would test myself in these different ways to just exercise my discipline muscle. So I remember saying, no matter what, I’m not going to have a drink for the entire year. I don’t care if I’m going to a wedding. And again, it wasn’t a big stretch. I was maybe having one drink a month anyway, so it wasn’t that difficult, but you’d be surprised how other people perceive you like you and a hey is something wrong. Now that was ended up being so easy for me to do. I just decided to keep going for eight more years. And then on my 40th birthday, I had this big, big ass pint of Guinness.
Again, not because I had any problem with booze, but because I was investing time in my career, I was trying to perform better, and I did tell you in the video with ganja that I would feel it. So you never know where these things can kind of take you. One guy wrote that he would be viewed maybe in Japan as being antisocial as a friend of mine would say, you could take that as an entry point into a tribe meeting. And why would you care what other people think about you? Or if you are antisocial, can’t you just go and have a good time? How do alcoholics in Japan feel about that? Do they deal with the stigma of being antisocial? Is there a scarlet letter A? So I’m not making fun of you. I’m just saying you can always let go of caring about what other people think because it might tie into other things that you’re doing as well, not just around drinking socially in Japan or being anywhere.
You can just be yourself and you’re probably great at it. So speaking of all of that, I think self-image is really important for being a successful trader. When I used my imagination to envision the future that I wanted for myself, when I first got to Wall Street, I had to invent a guy, a version of Michael Martin that didn’t exist before and would’ve needed certain resources to kind of get to that spot that Michael Martin didn’t even know how to get. But I knew that if I kept doing the same thing, I was going to get the same results, kind of true of anything in life. So I had to invent a vision for myself and then act as if I was that new version of myself and I was excited. But with that, right on the edge of that feeling is a feeling of insecurity. You kind of feel like a fraud because you don’t have anything to justify it. People are like, well, why do you do this and how can you teach there and you need credentials and this, that, and the other thing. And the truth is you really don’t. You need what you decide you need. So I decided to be a success. I decided to invent my own intellectual property and then use that not for greed, but for my own financial abundance.

And so I think one thing as you’re coming into Q four, we’re in Q four, excuse me, and you’re reviewing 23, you’re getting ready for 24. One assignment that I’m kind of working on with clients is to look at when you set up your goals, where were they? In fact, limiting beliefs on some level or where did you shoot too low? Where did you set the trajectory for your growth? The growth comes from your behavior. It’s not some rate of return, right? You don’t want to say, I want to earn 24% a year. That’s not the goal. That’s what you think it is, because then you could figure out you want to have those feelings. I’ll give you that much. But what you want of course is something tied to a process that you could actually follow every day because coming up with a number off the top of your head, why 24? Why not 124? So again, limiting beliefs. What are you willing to do?
Do you feel you deserve the wealth? And that’s a deep question. I think inherently when I first start to speak with people, they’re a little timid and so they come up with lower goals because they think they’re easier to hit. But I think if you work intentionally, you can really hit whatever goal you set out to hit, but you have to do the work. I just started, some of you might’ve gotten an email, some of you might be in the group, but we just started a group last week and I looked everyone in the eye and I said, I’m guaranteeing you results, but if you don’t do the work, just get your money back because it’s not going to come osmotically. It’s not going to happen from you listening to me speak about certain things. It doesn’t work that way. You have to do the work.
And so that’s where I figure why does it happen? Why do people fall short? Why do they not deliver for themselves? Why do they take the easy way out? Is it low? Do they feel like they actually don’t deserve the wealth and abundance? Is it because they feel like they really don’t have it in them to do the work? They would much rather get an alert service. So I think you have to put yourself, make yourself the star of the show. And if you’re going to do this, be very, very bold. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to think about, I’m going to put all these hours in and here’s how I’m going to time block my day and make sure I have my hourly requirement every day. That makes me feel good. Well, you know what I’m going to say to that? That’s a blue collar way of looking at it.
You have to work hard, but I would rather say work intentionally because then to me, it gets easier when you work intentionally. This isn’t a game about putting hours in. Again, that’s a rookie retail way of looking at stuff. You have to put time in to understand your craft, but the craft is going to come from actually doing of the trading. Trading is what teaches you how to trade. There is no book. Yes, there’s clever books. I’ve even talked about them on the show that help explain things so that you can get the intellectual understanding, but all of it doesn’t mean anything if you’re not going to ever put it to use. And if you’re sitting there trying to make sense out of things, you’re always going to be timid and timid. People don’t make the bold discoveries in the world. They have to be brazen.
You have to be ready, willing and able to risk your capital to get what you want. Paper trading accounts and these funding accounts don’t really help. You can’t learn to trade around a funding account. You need to come into that situation knowing already what you’re doing rather than going and paying every month and just winging it and see how it’s going to come about. It’s a waste of money. I might’ve mentioned that before. Many of you’ll be like, well, Mike, I don’t have any money. Well, you’re not going to have more money if you keep pissing money away on stuff that doesn’t serve you. You think it’s helping you, but you don’t know what you’re doing. So whatcha going to do? Open up 10 accounts and wing it and figure out you’re going to try 10 different strategies and go with the one that works.
You have no emotional connection to it. The better thing to do is to, again, what’s your self-image? Learn how to trade, be a trader, and then worry about getting funded. That’s how I would do it. I wouldn’t spend money on things that aren’t proven. And if they’re making awarding people, if that’s the right word, or allocating the person the trader’s profit allocation to the tune of several hundred thousand, it’s only because making 1.5, they’re not doing this at a generosity. This isn’t 5 0 1 C, it’s a for-profit, profit entity. So I would say save your money. We talked about that in a previous episode. Where can you find money to put back into your trading account? Well turn off Disney plus, stop buying $10 lattes. Don’t get the new iPhone.
Find ways to find a hundred bucks every week that’s slipping out of your pocket because of lack of discipline. You’ll have 400 bucks at the end of your account, and if you’re a more established trader, when you make a lot of money, your quality of life is pretty high. There’s probably most things that you can’t afford. But I would still do some belt tightening. And in the program we have, we do look at where does the money go and what’s the motivation? Because sometimes one of the goals for the person is to have the ability to go anywhere, anytime, and have that type of money to be able to go do that. That can run amuck and your expenses can add up because you like to exercise that muscle. So there’s the other side of it. When you have so much money that everything just becomes a free for all because there’s nothing you really can’t afford, want to go away for the holidays, take your family 50 K, no problem.
But then you find reasons to do that, and it becomes super easy to spend that money. So again, we go on budgets. What’s your self-image? What’s the self-image? Do you deserve that? Why? It’s also important to have goals so that your spending doesn’t become a muck because there’s always a new goal that you could hit. There’s always a new thing that you can reinvest in to build your assets. Not saying don’t have fun, but without a clear goal, you can find yourself doing almost anything, right? You can fall into any kind of habit, and that’s kind of what I mean when we talk about paradigm. The paradigm to me is the sum total of all the habits. So you want to be aware of how you fall into these things. Some of them could come from your subconscious. When I first started making money, I know I had money.
I worked really, really hard. It was a new experience for me once I figured it out on Wall Street to coming into financial abundance. So that new version of me came with other things too. You need custom made shirts, no problem. Go get ’em. You need whatever. So I didn’t become a spend thrift, but when I did have the money, I did start looking at things that I could acquire, which is consumption. And so I did come up with a goal, and basically I created an allowance for myself to say, okay, this is what I’m going to do. This is what I’m going to reinvest in my business. This is how I’m going to grow.
I didn’t pay for those. If you go to some of these events, the people speaking are oftentimes the sponsors. They come up with the money, and that’s why they’re allowed to speak. That’s why you don’t really see me speak at these places, not paying. I give my money to things that are important to me that mostly have nothing to do with trading conventions or those types of speaking types of deals. So if you see me speak, it’s probably because they were interested in hearing what I had to say more than would I or could I cut a check? I give plenty of money away. It’s not just trading junkets.
So another thing too that I wanted to hit upon is when you’re looking at developing your trading strategy, folks are still kind of hung up on trying to buy pullbacks because they feel like a lower price is cheaper. Cheaper means more value. Oftentimes, you’re missing out when you do that though on the momentum that you need to bring your account higher because the momentum and the direction of the trades going the wrong way. So I used to have a tongue in cheek kind of joke that I would say to people, again, if your goal and your self-image is to be a successful trader, if the instruments chart isn’t in the top right corner, it’s not a trade for you. The trajectory isn’t up because it really matter where it’s been. If something’s going to go up a hundred percent, it has to have been up 20 or 30% before it gets there.
So you could almost use that as a filter. Don’t buy anything until it’s up 20% off its lows. Don’t buy anything unless it’s making a two year high. You can set those rules up for yourself. So just kind of like a smorgasbord of feedback today based on everything mostly around Ganjas video and then I mean ganjas concepts on health and wellness and overall preparedness. The next step with all of that is to kind of conjugate that with your self image. When you envision yourself as a successful traitor, you have the spiritual and the mental and the self-awareness, the traitor psychology, the emotional intelligence. That’s one side. Then you’ve got the physical side. You need to have the stamina in the near term, but you also want to have healthy lifestyles so that you can enjoy the fruits of your labor. Then you want to make sure that you’re working smartly when you’re doing your analysis system. Traders don’t have to spend a lot of time because the system’s built data comes in. They push a button, they get their orders for the next day, no problem.
So think about the things that we spoke about last Wednesday in and around the moving parts of preparation, and then conjugate your behavior around all three of those things with your self-image. That can kind of help you see, okay, here’s a point B of where I want to be. What does that person have to behave like today in small incremental ways in order to get there? That’s at least how I did it. There’s probably other paths as well, but I always knew that I kind of had a mental and spiritual game. I had a physical game, and then I had my professional game, and all of those three things have to be congruent with one another and this and that. So appreciate you being here. We’re going to have a good follow-up episode with Kja, obviously Wednesday, and I have a great week of concepts and things to speak about with you here. Thanks very much for being here, folks. I’ll see you tomorrow.