Hey everybody, it’s Michael. Happy Tuesday. Hope you’re doing well. A while back I also got a comment about struggling for a while and I kind of hinted upon it. A trader who watched the video talked about not getting the results that they had wanted to get despite the grind of doing it for three years and trading for several hours in the morning before they had to go to work. And so I think I can say a few things about that. And first of all, kudos for being a hustler. If you think about what your peer group is doing, you probably deserve a little bit of a pat on the back to try to do the trading and learn about yourself in the process despite the struggle. Typically, in my experience, people who are willing to do the work eventually get rewarded. They might not get the reward from the trading, but that type of mental attitude is actually a really good thing because it shows discipline, it shows direction. You have a goal, it shows commitment on some level. Again, we’re not speaking about the quality of the work, we’re just talking about the mindset to put yourself in the seat in the morning to try to make the attempts.
The thing is that you’d want to, that might be able to help you with the struggle is this. If you’re trying to trade in a two hour window, I think a person puts a lot of pressure on themselves to have to behave a certain way within that finite amount of time where your competition has all day. So you might find yourself forcing things because you only have a finite window of time and it probably wouldn’t occur to you. Well, I shouldn’t say that because who am I? It might not occur to you that sitting on your hands and not trading for a particular day might actually be a good thing because otherwise you could be thinking like you’re missing out on opportunity and that’s emphasized by the fact that you’re missing a good chunk of the trading day because you’re working your nine to five job.
So you might come in with that mindset. I know I’m already missing out, so I have the FOMO times too. I have to make up for the lost time that I can’t spend in front of the screen that some of the other traders are doing. So I would get rid of that thinking if that’s present in your mindset. And I would also start to think about coming up with a set of rules where at the open that there’s certain criteria that have to be met in order for you to put on the trade as opposed for you to be sitting there watching the screen in minute bars or whatever you might be. I think you mentioned like one three and 10 minute bars or something. And so I don’t know what that model would look like, but instead of trying to trade on the shorter term criteria, think of trading smaller and actually trading when while you’re not there. And by doing that you can look at the smallest possible risk unit that you can afford given your capital and trade that just based on prices from the previous day or the previous week or the previous month. The higher timeframes don’t say, I come to the market every day trying to trade just the einy or one of those micro contracts using convergences or divergences between smaller timeframes. The data are much too random. At least for me, I don’t care about 10 minute highs. There’s no point in it for me.
And this way you can have a position on that can stay on as long as it’s a winning trade while you’re nine to five. To me, that’s leverage. That’s using the two hour window to set yourself up to win as opposed to saying, I have to make it and take it in that two hour window. Then moves are probably not all that pronounced. Maybe you see a big pop at the open, but to the markets, from what I can see are kind of retracting. That slopes of the moving averages are down in the world we live in right now and the fundamentals are not terribly bullish. We’re coming into Q four. So what can you anticipate? Well, the window dressing is too generic an expression in any jackass who’s read a book about trading can say and speak to it, but a lot of you will see people repositioning themselves, maybe not in October, but certainly coming into the period between say Thanksgiving and the end of the year. And that might cause for some volatility. People might be protecting their profits and actually locking them in looking to kind of come back to the market in January after the 30 day wash sale rules go by.
So I think you could change your outlook and say, I’m going to look at my two hours in the morning as more research based rather than trading based and finding ways to buy whatever it might be, one risk unit or even a fraction of a risk unit. Then put your protective stop in, then go to work because most of these places have trading apps and you can take a bathroom break, look at your position, adjust your protective stop. You could probably do that without anybody looking. And if you’re working from home, it’s probably a lot easier. The thing is, you don’t want to become a stalker and start looking at your trades and obsessing about it. So I would encourage you to think in longer timeframes because this is the way that you really can leverage your efforts and then you let the market do the work for you when you’re sitting there trying to day trade in a two hour window. And again, from my point of view, I want to be a business owner, not a business manager. I want to own stuff and have everybody else do the work because then I could pay them. And then in the process, I’m not paying them for the labor. I’m paying them to buy back my time.
And it might be exciting for where a person is in their career to sit at the screen and to look at it and see things move in real time. That has kind of come and gone for me that window of time and that kind of came and went within my first year. I didn’t find it particularly exciting to sit and watch the tickers nor the scroll of the tape unless I was tape reading on a particular trade. Little harder to do now with decimalization and also the advent of the 8,000 algorithms that can be running at any given time along with high frequency trading.
So it might not be the answer that you want to hear, but I have to think in terms of productivity. And if you were working for a bigger company and your boss hired me, what would I say to help you become more productive? It might be to reevaluate your time and the quality of your time, what you’re doing within that time window, because it’s awfully difficult to put that kind of pressure on yourself to say, I have two hours and I have to make money in that two hour window. You’d almost want to use high frequency trading or something like that in that type of a situation. Otherwise, I would program the computer to look across who knows, 60 to a hundred different instruments to see what could move as opposed to maybe looking at one. I’m going to guess you’re looking at indices or one in particular in the timeframes that you stated.
And I’m not judging you, I’m just saying if you want to give yourself a bigger or a better chance, higher probability of winning, you might have to change your mindset and your whole approach to things because you admitted to having a grind for three years. You said it, not me. And so under those circumstances, again, I started giving you a compliment saying kudos for having the mindset to stick with it. That’s a huge part of success because you lose when you quit, that’s when you lose. When I go to Jiujitsu early on I was getting smashed because I didn’t have any technique and I didn’t have any experience. So the combination of those two things put me at a disadvantage every single time. But I knew that going to class and getting beat was still a because I was there, right? I only lose when I quit and I quit on myself, and you didn’t do that. So to me, that’s a big win. If you’re willing and you’re open-minded to say, well, what I’ve been trying to do here to for isn’t working, I need to pivot because the answer might be right. Remember I said the feelings that you want to feel about being a winning traitor, they might be on the other side of feelings that you don’t want to feel. The feelings that you might not want to feel is abandoning what you’ve been doing because although it’s frustrating, it’s still bearable, otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it.
So that would be my 2 cents, is to try to think about reshaping your day and how to use that two hours to put yourself in a winning position so that the whole rest of the day could be levered to your advantage, which might mean increasing your holding period for the time being, especially if you’re working nine to five. So I appreciate the situation that you’re in and kudos for keep kicking it. If there’s more to the story that I’m missing, please add a comment here and I’ll address it if I can say anything intelligent about it. But otherwise, I appreciate everybody being here. Please like and subscribe. I’ll be here tomorrow with Ganja. We’ll have a great episode. So I’ll see you then.

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Hey everybody. Happy Monday. Hope you’re doing well. Thanks very much for being here. I wanted to say thanks also for leaving all the comments and sending in the suggestions. It’s really good because then I know at least what I’m speaking about on camera here, it resonates with you, or at least this thematic for a good chunk of you, so I appreciate that. Saves everybody time. One of the questions came in around goal setting and being a trend follower. I think I don’t have the question in front of me, but I’ll get to the meat and potatoes of it was like, I can’t just sit and set a goal and say, I want to make 40% a year and then have it just show up. So I would debate you on that. I think you can manifest exactly what it is that you want in life, but then you have to act intentionally.
If you, for example, don’t know what the expected value of your trading rules are, there might be a bit of a disconnect, but I would still argue that you’re better off having 40% as a dream or as a goal because then over time you get to conjugate your behavior with the results that you’re getting. Of course, if you backtest the system, you’ll have the data to know, has it happened before? Of course you can say, well, just because it hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. But you typically need to know what type of risk unit you need, right? On a risk unit means what’s your R, what is your per trade risk of your overall capital, and then you have to figure out the number of winners and losers. So then you can use Kelly criterion and also try to figure out what are the sheer number of trades that you would have to put on with your winning and losing percent and your expected value in order to put yourself in the neighborhood where you could earn 40%.
A lot of folks have dreams of making big money, but their bed sizes are too small, so they would have to put on 10,000 trades in a year in order to get where they want to go. So it’s not terribly practical and there’s no real fault there. It’s just that they’re ignorant as to what the rules are. Also, if you’re very shortsighted or myopic in your trading where you’re constantly taking smaller winners or cauterizing everyone at say, plus three R, good for you. I’m not going to hit you over the head for making money. But when you lock yourself into those types of rates and rates of return mathematically, you put higher rates of return out of possibility. So you really need to think first, where is it that you want to go? What do you want your trading to do for you? Is it to give you a lot of busy work during the day or are you at the stage of your career where you’re just excited to be in the business in the first place? Nothing wrong with it, but ultimately you kind of have to have a vision for where you want to go. So to answer the question that came in
In the YouTube channel, the goal necessarily wouldn’t be to say, I want to make 40% a year and manifest it a better way at the beginning might be to say, I want to make 40% a year and my goal is to find the process that I can follow that I’m compatible with, that I could trade day after day, which might mean certain days there aren’t any trades and I’m still following my system so that ultimately I put myself in the neighborhood of having 40% a year pre-tax net rate of return, and then the goal would be to follow that, right? So you could say, my goal is to follow a set of rules with which I’m compatible. That puts me in the neighborhood of 40, 50% net trading gains on the year, and do that every day and then pray for the discipline or develop the discipline that can get you there as opposed to just saying, I want to pick a random number out of a hat.
That typically doesn’t work, and if it does work, it takes a long time because it’s only through constant iteration and lots of experimentation, which I think a lot of folks have trouble with because they’re afraid to lose money. Now, on that, I’m not necessarily afraid to lose money because you can’t, as the lottery says, you can’t win it if you’re not in it, and trading is very much the same except you are the casino. You know that period over the traders who trade against you might win more frequently, but you’re going to make more money by following your rules, having positive expected value. Again, I’ve gone on and on about simulators and how they can help you and what it is that you can learn from them about your trading. Of course, if you could marry your behavior with the actual rules that you were back testing, I always was excited about it.
I came from being more of a data scientist, an at-home data scientist, not professionally, but I just got into the habit as a young kid of looking at data and putting it into spreadsheets and then manipulating that data to see all kinds of discoveries. So then as I learned more and more math, it opens your brain and the data can tell you a different story than what’s on the chart, and so that’s a really great spot to be. I always encourage folks to do that because you can learn a lot about yourself, and self-knowledge to me is more important than reading charts, but learning charts easy. Call up any website. You don’t even have to pay for it anymore. You could just start adding overlays and changing timeframes, and so that’s kind of a lazy person’s way of doing it. As far as I’m concerned, if I teach class on this stuff, it’s not to hold a person’s feet to the fire because that doesn’t serve a purpose, but there comes a point where you have to be accountable, and one of the bigger issues for traders is that if they’re only accountable to themselves, they can run into issues because no one is there as the voice of reason to say, do you really want to do this?
Or What do you think you’re getting out of this? You think you’re seeking trading gains, but what you get out of the trade might be something very, very different. Or your subconscious could be running the show and you might be doing it for some very deep seated emotional and psychological reasons, but I think that’s how I would approach the concept of picking out a certain rate of return, 40%, which is what was mentioned in the comment in YouTube, it’s a number, maybe it’s good, maybe it’s bad. It’s very subjective. You have to figure out what’s best for you. I always just try to think about a good default for those of you who are just starting is to think like, here’s your starting capital, and then think of what we call the rule of 72. Whatever rate of return you’re seeking, divide that into 72, and that should give you, again, a pre-tax number of years that it would take you to double your money.
So if you’re looking at 24%, 2% a month, basically take you three years to double your money. Now, if you could do that consistently, you can see how your money could compound again before taxes depending on the type of account you’re in, but that would at least give you, put you in the neighborhood of how to pick that number and have more relevance or have it have more meaning for you based on the time that you have and what you’re willing to do in order to develop your craft. I don’t feel, I can’t put a comment on 40% because it’s personal. It might be good. It might be too understated for what the person’s risk tolerance is, but in a long-winded way, I would just say that the goal wouldn’t be to state that number. It would be to state intentionally that your goal is to have a set of rules that you can follow day after day, that if you did that over time, because it’s not based on a calendar year, you’re going to have drawdowns of a certain magnitude for a certain amount of time.
You can kind of demystify the whole process and say, Hey, could I live with this if this was what I was willing to put together? So I think backtesting is very valuable because you really don’t think of what the drawdowns going to do to you. Now, generally speaking, if you’re looking for 40% rate of return, you would have to think that 20% drawdown is reasonable, right? In fact, some buy and hold managers, even some larger CTAs are almost one-to-one, which means they may have 40%, but they may regularly have 40% drawdowns with a 40% compounded annual growth rate. To me, if you were going to look to do this, and especially if you wanted to run client money, or what I always say is outside money, the closer you can get to two to one in terms of compounded annual growth rate is the two, and then the one would be, say, 20% of a drawdown.
If the lower you can go on the drawdown and make the rate of return of the compounded annual growth rate several multiples of what your drawdown is, especially when the drawdown is low, then you’re really onto something because you’ll attract a lot of money in that regard. And that’s one of the benefits of doing the back test is to see not just what can you get, but what are you going to have to live through as far as drawdowns concerned, because that’s a huge part of becoming compatible with the system is how do you handle losses? And if all you’re looking for is the upside and what that’s going to do for your life, that’s great, but you have to also take the thick with the thin, and so when you’re in drawdown, how do you behave? Because the drawdowns, they might last several months, in which case you still have to act the same as if you were up 30%.
So I can get more into that if you’d want to, but I’d have to see it in the comments and see which direction to take this, because I’ve been backtest my whole life just to experiment, just to kind of see and get my brain going, because you get the data, then you kind of go through the rules and say, okay, where’s my blind spot here? What am I not considering? I always use 10, 20 years too. You have to look through the times when the markets were more challenging. So if you were thinking about making 40% a year ongoing, how did your rules do in oh 7, 0 8 when we were in the middle of the subprime oas? How did things go for you during nine 11? Those types of stress tests. So anyway, good question. I think I’ve answered it very thoroughly. I appreciate you’ll be in here. Please like and subscribe, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

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Talk to me, goose. A famous line from Top Gun anyway, it’s actually actually the name of someone who left a comment. Talk to me, goose five 50 on the video. What is your flight plan from a bit back when was that? About two weeks ago. You always seem to have nuggets of information that stick with me and others. I’m sure the challenge oftentimes can be the lack of sticktoitiveness before we see results. I find that the incredible indicator appears to be the solution when in fact something like support and resistance was the answer all along. I’m rambling, but I just wanted to say nice work, keeping us informed. Thank you. Talk to me Goose five 50, appreciate you being here and subscribing. It means a lot to me. I like to try to keep as much of a relationship with everybody as I can, even though it’s kind of through the cyber land here.
What is your flight plan? So we’ve been speaking all week about mental toughness basically, and understanding our behavior from a conscious and subconscious standpoint. And when I think of sticktoitiveness, it has to do with the relative strength, right? That’s what sticktoitiveness is to me. It’s R s i. It’s whatever other type of indicator that you look at for relative strength and the emotional connection that I actually have to my goals. You see, you are dealing with a situation in trading where the outcomes are probabilistic. And so I had a great chat with my friend Carter the other day on Thursday. I was driving in the car, which is kind of what we do here in la and we were talking about processing feelings around trades and how do you know? And the answer is you don’t really know. You only know up to the point of the expected value of your trade.
So for an example, if you want to put some math here, say that your rules, whether you’re following discretionary chart reading rules or whether you’ve crunched data like I do, or whether you use a trading simulator where you’re pumping information into a trading engine and it’s giving you backtested results, that’s certainly another way. Or whether you’re just going on hunches, like there’s all legitimate ways to do it. And let’s say that whatever your process is, you are accurate 40% of the time and that your winners are three times the size of your loser. So you can calculate the math in your head and figure out that you have positive expected value and that you should be following those rules accordingly. Now, there’s probably a few other things to say, but for simplicity’s sake, let’s just start with that. Your average winner is three times the size of your average loser and you have 40% accuracy in terms of your correctness. So the first thing you want to consider is becoming emotionally comfortable with being correct, right? If you have that academic thing where
You’re to being super bright, you were a great student, you have to calibrate your system to become a new you, which goes back, I think to Monday and Tuesday’s episodes of this week that I had to do for myself. I was a pretty good student. I went to Ivy League school, but you have to figure out that when you have 40% accuracy in any other type of lifestyle, that’s failure. There’s no ever passing grade where 40% even because you don’t get graded on a curve here, you see, so 40% is epic failure basically from an accuracy standpoint. If the goal is accuracy, 40% isn’t close to success. Even if you doubled that, you’re still a B minus kind of student. You see what I’m saying? Some people are fine coasting at B minus. I myself am not. So you have to recalibrate your emotional constitution to become comfortable with 40% accuracy, fully understanding that and justifying it by saying, well, for sure I’m not winning a hundred percent of the time I thought I would when I went to the street, but because my winners are so much larger than my losers, I’m still able to make money and I take solace in the overall process with of course the big proviso being that I’m going to take small consistent losses, paper cuts, small attrition of your capital, your equity goes up, small attrition of losses, you make some money, small attrition of losses, and you also learn to trade your equity curve.
You don’t become emotionally invested in the outcome of any one particular trade because it doesn’t really matter for you which one you’re in. I could go on and on about this past week or actually last week because you’re listening to this video now, which was recorded last week today for me, which was last week for you now, and you never really know what’s going to work. I had four or five trades on and one, two, I had 1, 2, 3 that lost me small bits of capital and I think so I either had four or five trades on, I can’t remember coming into this week, which was last week for you, and I lost on all of them. And the one big one was I was short Nvidia and that paid for all the losers. And then some, my account was up, equity was up not substantially, but up a couple hundred basis points for the week. And that’s coming from a guy who’s a pro who knows what he’s doing. The number of losses that you have, you have to let go of that, it’s irrelevant. There’re es in the poker game. You have to pay to see the cards. That’s the way that it goes. And so do I care about the losses? No, because my account’s
Up. So I don’t have any emotional investment in the outcome of any one particular trade. I know the outcome of any number of them is probabilistic to begin with. So I surrender, right? That’s chapter two of the book. I surrender to that. I don’t care which one works to the extent that at least one of them does work, right? Again, I’m also not offsetting at three R and all that kind of stuff. I want to let the winners run. I want to surf that wave for as long as I possibly can. So I guess the question I would ask you is like, well, what evidence do you need? What evidence is there? Hint, there isn’t any. You only will know it after the fact. So then of course you can do a postmortem and then kind of again, conjugate, what was your anti expectation versus your ex-post realization?
What did you think was going to happen versus what did happen? Now, if you know the probabilities, you can start to calculate what’s the probability of you having a streak, either a winning streak or a losing streak, because probabilities are odds, right? You can convert them back and forth. So now you can kind of again, go back to your emotional system, look at your subconscious and say, if these are the numbers, either actual or via a back test, I can emotionally get comfortable with this system before I’ve put on a single trade with live money because I know what the numbers are. And if you’ve looked over many, many instruments and the model is therefore robust, the rules are simple, they’re not data mining or cherry picking, and you’re using 10 plus 10 to 20 years worth of data, you can kind of take solace that if that model stops working, it’s not going to stop working the day that you decide to use it.
You see those models can change and your trading has to evolve because the markets evolve whether you like it or not. But in my experience, models don’t typically go from having positive expected value to all of a sudden not having positive expected value overnight. There is an asterisk of course in oh 7, 0 8. The government said you can’t short bank stocks. So if that was an integral part of your system that might’ve disrupted things, but that’s because of faulty government regulation that disrupts the market. So all of these things can be learned behaviors that you can really work on ahead of time because again, what’s the goal? Is the goal to be accurate and take the W or is the goal to make money? And if you want to make money and bigger money in a shorter amount of time, in my opinion, you need to have a longer holding period where the winner is many, many multiples the size of your loser. And that again, kind of speaks to this whole question of intentions, equal results, what’s happening in your subconscious? That could be what’s really managing your system, you see? And so you want to
Be super mindful of all of that stuff. This isn’t easy. A lot of folks don’t want to look at this because it’s easier not to, right? Personal growth comes at a bit of an emotional expense because you have to look at yourself in the mirror and say, I’ve been doing this the way I’ve been doing it and it doesn’t serve me anymore, and I need to shed that skin. I need to change and it has to start with me and it’s doable and I did it by myself. If you want some help, reach out. There’s probably a few places where you can get some help and you could still do it yourself. That’s what I did. And so that’s really all I have. I hope this week has been valuable for you. I try to think thematically because a lot of times it’s hard to just say thing that’s say one thing or one day of material that’s definitive.
There’s lots of angles to this. It’s multifaceted and psychology and emotional intelligence is a complicated subject matter, especially when we’re all taught from our environments how to behave. We have to be very mindful of our behavior and what our motivations are. So I hope that this week has shed some light on everything for you. Please like and subscribe, go to Martin Chronicle, get your free copy of The Inner Voice Trading. It can help you and in better describe the journey that I went through. It’s not a book on how to trade. It’s more of a memoir of what I had to go through and how I did it and what I thought with a lot of great feedback from some of the best traders that have ever lived, including Eds Coda, Micah Marcus, bill Dunn, who’s now retired, Victor sios in there. There’s a lot of great wisdom. You can get the audio book version for free because I own the rights to it and I can give it away. Anyway, I hope you all have a great weekend and I’ll see you Monday.

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Hey everybody. Happy Thursday. So I want to clarify a few points that I made about smaller accounts and trading that I kind of answered on the YouTube channel, but someone had asked about why is it so small or why do I recommend say 25 k? And Roman had answered an answer, which on some level is true, but it wasn’t the point that I was making. Apparently there’s a thing at the $25,000 level where firms are trying to protect you from harming yourself and they limit the number of trades that you can do and all this and that. I can’t tell you I’m an expert on what those rules actually are. It has to do with the number three and pattern day trading, and I don’t even know what the hell that means, to be honest with you. Don’t care to. But I do know that at that point in time when you have to think about what is your bed size, when your bed size is a number that you can live with, that’s okay financially for you, but it’s okay.
It’s also okay for you emotionally. And so you have to figure, and I know that there’s many in micro contracts that kind of help the smaller person. And by all means, if you’re out there hustling and you’re trying to knock it out of the park, by all means, I would be like, do what you can. So this is not me picking on you. This is me trying to give you some insight as to why it might be difficult for you to really make a lot of progress with a smaller account. In today’s day and age. Let me go back when I first started, bed sizes for that time were ranging from two to 5%. Hello, put on your frigging depends bladder control because that’s the ultimate stop order for the love of Christ, the king, 5% risk units. Now over time with for a whole slew of reasons that I don’t want to get into, including those that are kind of imposed upon traders by the allocators who want lower vol returns.
Lower vol just means when you look at your account balance, not the instruments that you’re trading, they don’t want to see your account up 10% in a day. Of course, every prop trader on planet Earth wants that, but if you’re getting an allocation from a third party, it became more common for them to seek 25 basis points, not 25%. And so you had to gear down the leverage in your account even if you were trading commodity futures to a lower range of leverage. Now, margin to equity ratio is not necessarily a risk management tool, but it does give you a little bit of a barometer on the level of aggressiveness for your style of trading. So what ends up happening is when you have say,
$5 in your account, so let me actually, I’m sorry, I’m all over the place. So we went from two to 500 basis point bed sizes to today where you’re looking at one 10th to maybe one half of 1% at the pro level on average to garner returns. The 2% bet sizing, 1% to 2%. That’s of course a personal preference. If you’re trading your own money, that’s fine. It’s just that if you are trying to go and get an allocation from anyone, you want to be mindful of what the environment is like. Okay, so having said that, when you look at having a funded account, meaning your own money, not one of these paper trading online thingies, I’m talking about your own money and you’re looking in today’s day and age, what would be considered a whopper of a bed size at 2%, that’s a hundred dollars if I do the math right, a hundred dollars for a $5,000 account.
And so now you have this kind of, it’s not that it’s incongruent because 2% of five K is a hundred dollars. It’s just that it’s so easy to hit it when you look at stop, stop-loss placement, it’s too easy to hit $100. And so I think the smaller trader in that regard, or the trader who can be tomorrow’s whale is a little bit behind the eight ball in that there’s not a lot of room in the account. There’s not a lot of give and without knowing other external conditions, like you can refund your account from time to time and you’re willing to do that to learn your craft by all means, because kind of what I did, I took much bigger risks though rather than 2% because I needed to grow my money much more quickly. So I was willing emotionally and financially to withstand larger drawdowns.
And that was true well into my professional career too. And so just be mindful of the fact that you might be more sensitive to how those things work and how the nature of what you think your protective stop is, right? Obviously if you’re dealing with the ein, if you can even trade that with five K, you’re looking at two points. Now, you could scale it down and trade the minis and the micros. I don’t know if that’s appropriate for you. Again, I’m not recommending you do that, so you have to hold me harmless. You have to figure that out for yourself. But then you have to say to yourself again, are you putting yourself deliberately in the environment where you’re going to be the small trader who takes small losses but also small gains? And so those kind of things all live in the same neighborhood. It’s very difficult to find yourself with a 10 to one, 10 R to one R trading situation unless you just happen to be in the right
Place the right time. So it was very, very difficult to grow your account from those small levels. It’s an enormous amount of work. Now, do what you can, but I think I owe it to you when everybody out there is trying to sell you stuff on their small term, short term, small time trading systems because it’s emotionally appealing for you and you want it to be true. So you’ll kind of lead yourself to believe whatever they say, which might not be in your best interest. And that can be, that can be other types of chat rooms or research or alerts via text or dms on Twitter or stock twits of course.
And again, be aware of what your emotional needs are. They could be driving the whole show here in the end. You have to eat your own cooking, you have to do your own research. You’re not going to trade your way to financial freedom by subscribing to somebody else’s system. And they send you 15 ideas every day. Which one are you going to pick? Again, you can disagree with me, you can dislike what I’m saying, but I’ve been there, I’ve done it. So in terms of that, it’s not contested. And I feel like the marketers absolutely want your money because to you, you are annuity for them. And the more people that they can get as a member paying them monthly fees, that’s their asset. So the membership, what you think is helping you is actually helping them generate revenue. So again, I’m not trying to be cynical.
Maybe there’s some gems of interest out there that can be helpful, but in my experience, the pros out there, and again, even if you don’t want to go pro, you have to do the things that the pros do in order to get the results that they get because it’s all behavioral at the end of the day. So in my experience, whereas the professionals and the hedge funds, sure they might get the research part of some soft dollar arrangement or otherwise, and it helps generate commissions for the clearing members or the prime brokerage firms, they ultimately have to live like and die by their own sort. They have to eat their own cooking. The responsibility of the trade, including how do you get the name on your list to the postmortem that you do when you’re out of the trade winner or loser, really comes down to you.
And the more that you’re willing to go to that spot of personal responsibility, the better off you’re going to be. Part of that’s going to be to make sure that you have an adequately funded account. And so while you might be able to get into the market and try a few things and try your hand at things with a smaller account, I think you’re putting yourself in a much harder spot because of the sensitivity to what small dollars mean. Small losses on a dollar basis mean as a percentage of your overall account. You really want to break up your money in as many ways as possible. And by that
2% risk unit, you’ve got 50 betts in your account. If you break up a hundred percent of your money into one 10th of 1%, now you’ve got a thousand mistakes. See, it’s very, very different when you have more money. So yes, you can break up your money, but divide five K by a thousand, what’s your bed size going to be at that point? Because the bid ask spread might be what your max loss is. You see, it’s harder. You put yourself in a bit of a financial corner if you’re trying to do this with smaller accounts is all I’m saying. That’s the point I wanted to make. I wish everyone the best, and I hope things go very smoothly for all of you. But I think as far as that’s concerned, there needs to be someone in the community who can have a little straight talk with you just to kind of give you some insight because again, we’re talking about self-awareness and what happens in your subconscious when you put in an account that’s in my mind’s eye underfunded.
You can find yourself developing bad habits because of this percentage, high percentage, low dollar amount equality. You see what I’m saying? And the goal is to learn about yourself so that you can understand why you behave the way you behave and why you do what you do. You might be reacting to the pressures of having an underfunded account. Anyway, all good here. I’m happy to, I don’t have all the answers, but I have a lot of good insight on these things because kind of how I started. But anyway, I appreciate you all being here, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

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