Everybody. Happy Monday. Hope you’re doing well. Heck of a week, right? You’re watching Nvidia. I’m sure everyone in the world’s been watching. I wanted to, I’ll talk about that at some part. This week I want to talk about, I’m a little bit behind in viewer comments on the YouTube channel, so I want to address a few of those. This one comes from name 3 1 3 9. That’s not someone’s real name. There’s no reason to use an alias. Folks, you can just use your real name. No one really caress. It says Sometimes I get small losses and I’m waiting for the big wins, but when I get a big win, I already got a lot of small losses, so then I’m breakeven account doesn’t get bigger, only treading water. So I mean, this is kind of how the market is for everybody, even the pros right now. So I don’t find that that’s terribly dissimilar from what other folks are experiencing.
It’s certainly very frustrating for me and my own sake. I tend to trade super small on my initial entries, so when there’s no follow through in this style of make it and take it market that we’re in, yeah, your p and l looks, it’s just kind of humming along there. But the key is, as you remember, is to play superior defense. And so as far as that’s concerned, if you’re not losing big chunks of cash, to me that’s a good thing because treading water in choppy markets, again, if you don’t have professional training, is really, really good. If you’re kind of a retail trader, do it yourselfer trade from home, that kind of thing. Give yourself a pat on the back because the goal here is to kind of sit and wait for the bigger moves and endure those market environments that aren’t really amenable to your trading, where your current trading is, right?
Because we’ll all evolve, but if you’re not losing a lot of money, that’s a good thing. I would also think about what your goal might be because there could be, the psychological side of it is that you might be taking your winners too quickly, and that is something that’s the dirty secret that no one likes to talk about because everyone wants to make it and take it when they can, but one day the markets will definitely change, and I saw it even in Nvidia too. A couple of folks reached out and they said they had made money coming into the report, but then they missed the whole next day, and that’s tough to miss those types of opportunities when you’re in the winning trade itself, of course, you don’t know what’s going to happen, so you have to live and embrace the uncertainty when you’re in the trade, which I think comes with experience. I don’t really listen to anybody or accept anyone else’s wisdom blindly because I’ve kind of had to learn the hard
Way that the best way to learn how to trade is to just do it yourself and then figure out what if it feels good for you, what can you get used to over time? What can you practice emotionally, right? That’s a big part of trading too, is the emotional practice that goes with it. If discipline equals freedom, that’s not going to come typically overnight. For newer traders, you may have extreme amounts of discipline in your life that you can borrow from, but just remember that in the beginning. If you’re struggling and you’re like, man, I’ve been doing this for six months, you really don’t have enough time, and I know that’s like you want immediate results. There might be other things if you’re on a diet or if you quit drinking or if you go to the gym in those types of endeavors, you can see results maybe perhaps much more quickly than you can if you were just trying to trade.
That’s the way it goes. Unfortunately, there might not be the types of results that you want within the timeframe that you hope to get them, so you have to kind of say it’s life on life’s terms. All you have to do is persist even in the face of not knowing what’s coming forward. But going back to the original question, it’s good to have small losses. The big wins will come. I’ve been in all different types of markets over 35 years, and we’re just in that type of market right now. There’s a lot of noise coming from the Fed, and people are afraid, and when they’re afraid, they typically don’t act in their own best interest. They make themselves feel good, and sometimes doing the right financial decision doesn’t actually feel good. Now, it is true. I know some traders who are on the shorter term, who are naturally kind of make it and take it type of people, and they’re thriving in this type of environment if you can catch the right events.
But in my experience, the right events are kind of all over the place, and those are like short squeezes earnings announcements, fading, opening reactions. It’s very difficult for a newer trader who doesn’t have any experience to come in and think they’re going to be a Swiss Army knife of trading skills. It takes months, if not years to develop sometimes just one skill. So you can’t compare yourself to the people who have five or 10 years of experience and who are making money in this market or the folks who just have a lot of natural ability. There are those people here too, and you need to support them and applaud them, and they’ll have their day in the sun and you’ll have yours. It might not come for a while, but you’re still entitled to it. As long as you do the work, those opportunities will come for you. So you just have to be persistent and determined. What I wouldn’t do is to try to trade bigger,
Because you want to let the move make the win, not your position size. And what I mean by that is I feel like as traders, we live and die by our position sizing. That’s where we make and lose our money, and so we don’t want to be in a position where I need to make more, therefore I need to trade up or scale up. The scaling up part should be very gradual, almost like one contract or 50 shares at a time or something like that. It should not be something that you do where you go from ones to fives and then or fives to twenties. It doesn’t work that way. Those are, it’s much too large of a jump in position sizing to try to trade that way. I’ll talk more about that perhaps in another episode, but at any rate, I appreciate everybody writing in and leaving comments. I’m going to catch up on a lot of these ganja, and I’ve been working on a few things, and so there’s just a lot happening behind the scenes.
There was another comment on, so that comment came in, if you want to go read it on Michael Martin show, episode 24, everything is going to change. And then there was a comment that just came in today from Stephen Morgan, 9, 5, 4 9 on your evolution as a trader. Take time episode. Do you have a Twitter handle? That way your listeners can repost you there. People can benefit from your page. Thank you, Steven. Appreciate it. I’m not a big Twitter guy and it might be surprising to hear, I don’t really want to engage with people on Twitter. I don’t like it really as an environment.
I’m mostly on listen only mode, and even then I have about 7,500 words that are blocked. I just don’t want to see other people’s bullshit, especially about politics come through my feed. So if there’s a member of the house or the Senate or in the White House, they’re blocked and their names are blocked. I just don’t want to hear anything about politics and people’s opinions about anything for the most part. And two, the YouTube channel is a community unto itself here that we’re kind of building. Obviously, it’s going to take time, but if there are comments or concerns or questions or this and that, I’d prefer it to happen here on the channel. This way we can all engage naturally here in the YouTube environment. I don’t really want to develop a Twitter following. I use it as I’ve mentioned, maybe on the even going as far back as the audio only version of the show, that it’s really there to help syndicate the episodes so that the folks who are more active on Twitter maybe can pick it up, but I’m not really there engaged in conversations on Reddit or Twitter or anything like that for a simple reason.
One, well, there’s two that are very closely related. One, I just don’t like the environment. I didn’t like it when, what’s his name with the funny looking beard ran it, and I don’t care for what Elon’s
Evolution is either. I just don’t like Twitter, and two, I don’t have the time. I don’t to sit around and have conversations with folks anytime I want to respond to something, I kind of do it for everyone’s benefit looking you all kind of in the eye on the camera and saying what I have to say and then leaving it that way. So for the time being, at least that’s going to be my ethos as it relates to responding to comments in this and that. I’d prefer to just do it and keep it within the environment where we all are and develop this as opposed to Twitter’s platform. But at any rate, folks, keep the comments coming. I appreciate your feedback on everything. I hope you’re all doing well. If you have any questions, you can reach out through the blog or you could leave something here. It’s better if you use your real name and I’ll see you all tomorrow. I.

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

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So you can tell now from the conversation we’ve been having this week, the level of uncertainty that any of us have to feel at any given time is really all relative to our environment. Like the environment that I was raised in as a trader, very different from the one that you all might be being raised in as we speak, but everyone has to deal with there that uncertainty, if you will, and their own environment for the time that they’re there. No one’s immune from it. I certainly wasn’t. But I remember going home thinking like, wow, I’m in a losing streak. My equity’s down and I have to put on a trade and I’m going to have to deal with the commission. So the first two or 3 cents that I would make, so think about it this way, for some of you who are trading short term, if I put on a wheat trade and wheat, corn and soybeans are priced in bushels, each contract is uniform lee at 5,000 bushels, which is a measure of volume.
And so each full point, or each full point in that regard is five K, and they move with fractions of a cents. So each full penny would be $50. But between fees and commissions, I had to do 3 cents just to break even. So I didn’t have the luxury of thinking of trading corn, soybeans, or wheat for a 10 cent move because 30% of that move would just go to cover the cost. Do you see where I’m going with it? So that’s how I got shaped into thinking the way that I’m thinking. It wasn’t that I had a bias to say, and I learned how to read the tape actually pretty well as far as stock trading was concerned back when you could kind of do it. Now it’s all high frequency trading and this and that, but if you had a level two and you had ticker tape and you could learn that as a skill, and I definitely did.
That was a big part of why I kind of added the equities back in to my trading after having, I don’t want to say mastery A, who knows what the hell that means, but once I knew I could make money with futures, that’s when I kind of went back to where I had struggled and failed and tried to show more promise in my work. So it’s easy to understand that the bias is not a bias that I have. It was the environment that I was in, and I know that there are other traders who talked about having to pay a minimum, trying to trade size for their clients at the time, and the best that they could do as a negotiated rate was paid 25 cents a share, which might seem like mafiaa loan to you all today. So the environment that you’re in really shapes us, just like the environment that you were raised in around your household and how did those people feel about taking risk? What did they feel about other people who were risk takers, right? Because you hear lots of snarky stuff from people who are really, really ignorant and have
A fundamental misunderstanding of how markets work. We talked about a few of them, like the trading part is legalized gambling. Well, certainly it can be as long as they understand and concede to the fact that if you have a model that has positive expected value that you are the casino, you’re not the gambler, right? Gamblers are people who typically as a group, whether they’re in Vegas, Atlantic City, or any other place where gambling is legalized, whether it’s sports betting or whatever, they don’t know the odds and they don’t really care about the odds. They’re kind of in it for the entertainment value. There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s their money. But when you act like a pro trader, even if you don’t register or set up a fund or this and that, you should incorporate, but you’re a person who knows what the odds are, and odds are probabilities.
So you can calculate probabilities from the odds and vice versa. If you know your bed size, you can calculate expected value. If you know the expected value and what you make on a trade, you can use Kelly criteria to figure out how many trades you would need to put on to hit a certain level. You can calculate portfolio heat. So there’s really nothing random about your behavior at that point. There’s an awful lot of science for the people who talk about commodities having no real value. Well, that’s a truism. Everybody knows that, right? My dead grandmother knows that the commodities don’t have value the way a stock would, but that’s because it’s not a capital market. It’s not a stock or a bond. Futures deal with risk transference, right? So it’s more like it’s an insurance market, right? You’re underwriting the risk of someone who’s on the other side of the trade.
So of course not the same. But if you took a damn finance class instead of studying some bullshit major in school, you might know that, right? So you have really ignorant people showing up with a microphone in their face saying stuff that’s completely asinine. So at any rate, I don’t begrudge them studying what they want to study. But it’s interesting how the media has an uncanny ability to always put a microphone in the person who’s the biggest jackass in the crowd. And it’s usually along political lines. They don’t really ask me. I wonder why. So we are all shaped by our environments. And so your behavior in the trading as well as your behavior around what your understanding is about risk really comes down to what other people taught you about taking chances. Did they become victims? Did they say, Hey, you win some and you lose some? Now it’s onto the next challenge. The environment I grew up in is like,
If you don’t take chances, you’re not going to get anywhere. You had to be super bold. And that was from my parents who were born in the depression. They weren’t reckless, but they knew in order to escape them, a you, which growing up in the depression in the aftermath of my stock market crash in 1929 had huge psychological impact on people. I can remember hearing relatives mind you, B, hold your T, do your W, then your D, mind your business, hold your tongue, do your work, and then you’re done, which is, it’s an anthem for working class people. Why was that? Because coming out of 29 into the early thirties, you were on your knees at night thanking the Lord Jesus Christ that you had a job because so many people were out of work and they had to beg, borrow, and steal to get through the day. So having a job was like manna from heaven. Things have changed right now. People are very, very comfortable. They’re spending 10 bucks a morning for some kind of coffee drink, and they complain that they don’t have any money. So you look at that type of behavior and it shapes people. It’s very difficult to unwind them from that because it’s almost traumatizing. And so your upbringing might not be traumatizing, but you might’ve been exposed to a certain type of mindset or a collective type of mindset that conditioned your behavior in and around taking risks.
Now, I’m looking into this, and I can’t make any broad generalizations, but if you have highly educated parents who have master’s degrees or one’s a doctor, one’s an attorney, they love the educational route because it’s entirely predictable. We talk about the uncertainty. Ask them how they feel about uncertainty. When did it ever show up in their lives? Was there uncertainty about having to pass the bar? Big deal. You could take test again, right? What’s uncertainty, right? Those are really good questions to ask. When did you face an uncertainty and how did you react? Where did you learn that from? Because now if they learned it from their parents, you’re dealing with something that’s generational. And if they don’t want to embrace the uncertainty or you don’t, I find that it’s going to be challenging for you to become a very, very successful trader because that’s where the money’s made. Remember, there’s two payoffs. There’s the financial and then there’s the psychological. And in the psychological aspect of it, you need to have an enormous amount of personal strength, self-awareness, emotional intelligence, in and around how you’re going to behave when the outcome of something that you’re involved in is uncertain and probabilistic. Most people don’t like that because it goes against our primal thing of about fight or flee type of a deal.
We don’t typically invite ourselves to put ourselves in directly into harm’s way, police and firemen do, but they’re a different breed, right? Different type of person. So when I think about what it is that you are doing, where most people have struggled with trading, a lot of the answers to the questions can come from if they would just address how do they feel about dealing with the uncertainty and really map that out. Think about all the different parts of the trading from your research. When do you know you’re done doing your research? Is it a time constraint? Well, I put two hours in every night. Okay, well, let’s talk about the quality of it then. Are you looking in all the asset classes outside of the darlings of the media, right? We had the four horsemen right now. We had fangs. Now we’ve got eight or nine names that have led Nasdaq that have certainly retraced quite a bit recently.
So those themes are certainly something to talk about, but it’s not necessarily professional just because it’s on tv. So if you’re really concerned about making money, are you looking in international markets in other equities? Are you looking at currencies? Are you looking at the etms or the ETFs in and around those structures? Have you learned to short sell? Have you learned to trade the micros and the minis of those instruments just to get a feel for it? Have you learned to look at options trades to the extent that if you have a debit or a net debit balance, you typically have a known max loss as soon as you put the trade on. So how willing are you to investigate your feelings around uncertainty? Because your willingness on a scale of one to 10 has obviously a lot is relative strength, right? It’s R s I. And so it’s not that you should be fearless, but you can still look at your behavior around that. You can learn a lot about yourself. Some of the reasons why you might fold under pressure isn’t necessarily because you want to. It’s because that’s what you were taught to do because you saw other people fall to pieces.
I’m lucky, like Lady Gaga said, I’m born this way. I had a temperament that I was born with that allows me to not freak out when things work against me. So if I didn’t happen to get into managing risk in the markets, I had the same temperament. That would’ve been well for nine 11 operator 9 1 1, what’s your emergency? Because there’s nothing to freak out about or an emergency room nurse or doctor. I’m actually good under pressure. There’s a thing that comes over me that I can trigger that’s part of my personality where I kind of go into an overdrive. I’m actually the perfect person to have in that type of situation. And I’ve been in a few of them where I was able to make the difference,
But that’s just God, and maybe it’s some of it’s environment too. But that internal inner voice of being inquisitive, really sit and studying human behavior, my own behavior, certainly, and think about it, think about what we talk about on this show, and I’m just a pro trader. I’m not a psychologist, and material that we cover here is utterly remarkable, and it’s really helpful to the community. So as Yogi Berro said, you can observe a lot by watching. So that’s what you do. Just study your own behavior. Ask yourself open-ended questions. Why do I feel this way? Open-ended questions are ones where the answers are not yes or no, right? So open-ended questions you could start with where, why, and how did you learn that? And don’t judge yourself. I mean, if you want beat the shit out of yourself, go ahead. But that doesn’t really help you come up with a solution because again, normally we’re products of our environment.
So think about what your environment is. Now, do you have a community? I’ll tell you this. Half the folks that are in the Mastermind or any of the coaching stuff, I mean I didn’t ask them specifically, but I know a lot of them have said are intimated through phone conversations or some of the Zoom calls and the emails, not necessarily as one specific group, but as odd lots over the years. They wanted to be involved in a professional community where they could both be accountable but also understand what their blind spots are because we’re limited to those blind spots. Those are not necessarily limiting beliefs. But there’s information and there are data out there that we don’t have access to because we don’t know how to ask the best questions, not just of ourselves, but of our peer group. And so that’s where that comes in, and we all are better for it.
I benefit from it too because I get posed with questions that I might not have thought about for 20 years, and I get to grow. Look at that in your own behavior because that in and around that solution might be more, excuse me, in and around that study could be more of a solution that can help you unlock skills that you might already have that could lead you to better trading that might help you in those moments of uncertainty that might not even be necessarily any more uncertain than what you’re already willing to take, but can help you lead to more profits, or they can help you understand how to get out of losing trades much more quickly than you’re currently doing. And that can improve your equity curve. And as I’ve said before, we should always be trading our equity curve. Anyway, that’s all I have for you today. Appreciate y’all being here. I hope you’re planning on having a great weekend. I’ll be back again tomorrow. Take care.

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Did you have any people that emailed you that were from the YouTube channel? Did they tell you if they were from the YouTube channel or not?
I’m sure they all are. Really? Yeah. I’m sure they’re all because I’m only doing my marketing. Wow. It’s either that or they’re listening, so
That’s crazy. That’s good.
Otherwise, I don’t really know who they are. I don’t know how they would know me. Some of them come in from other channels where I was interviewed, but it’s still more like 90 10. Most of the traffic comes in from me or from what we’re doing. That’s
Great. This is great. So you want me to start off with the comment and then we talk about Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, and you could kind of say, I know you handled some of this in the coaching, but you know what I mean?
Yeah. Okay. Hi guys. Welcome back to another weekly segment that Mike and I do where we go over your guys topics, comments and questions. And today we have a really great episode. We are back in the studio and we hope you guys enjoyed the last episode. We hope you enjoyed the new dynamic here. With that said, if you guys haven’t already, make sure you guys like and subscribe. All comments up the algorithm, press the notifications bell so you get notified every time Mike uploads the video. And with that said, we can get into the topic. Today’s topic is a comment and it said good stuff. As always, I thought I’d stop the comment that I’m scaling down risk at the moment we do exist and shifting some core beliefs I have about trading. I used to think that making those home run trades entailed increased size, but now I’m beginning to understand that you don’t need a lot of size to catch a big move and make a lot smaller.
Size allows for you to factor in the noisy nature of the market before your hard stop is met. Point five R in every initial entry and adding when the trade is potentially proving you right with price action cuts out the losers that instantly trade into your hard stops. I found the key to building confidence and my trading ability is in being humble and accepting when I’m wrong, and that is easier to do when I’m only losing half of my intended be size when the market proves me very wrong. Thanks for all you do. Now, I know this is kind of a coaching topic, so as I understand you deal with quite a bit of this in the coaching stuff, so maybe you could give your thoughts on this comment.
Yeah, it throws into sharp relief a couple of things. One is if you take the human being out of it and you just look at their strategy, there’s an optimal bed size for the strategy. Doesn’t matter who’s running it, but then you have to conjugate it with the person’s temperament and their personality. What can they do emotionally? And there could be variance. And so we talk about this a lot because again, we want to help people optimize even if they’re day trading, how to optimize their position sizing so that they can get the most out of it, but also take into account drawdown because at the end of the day, what you don’t lose, you don’t have to earn back. And in my experience, and I think this is also in the literature, people tend to experience the paint on an order of magnitude that’s much greater than when they experience the joys.
So we spend a lot of work saying, okay, here’s what the model suggests. You could actually trade or bet what’s your R, your optimal R, your bed size. The same percentage can be represented with a lot of expressions, but then sometimes we find that the model is being under traded. So then the question is how do you help someone have more confidence, have less fear? You don’t know which side of the coin is driving them, right? It’s always good to protect your capital. You’re never going to go wrong doing that. However, if you do it over years and years and years and years, you could be leaving a lot of money on the table and I think the person who wrote the comment, I remember reading it when it comes through because I read them all. It’s a very insightful comment, and that is on the home run, you can hit moonshots that go 500 feet in the air and 460 feet long, or you could hit Giancarlo Stanton style line drives that leave the park at 120 miles an hour. If it goes over the wall, it’s a home run.
So how do you process the home run? Well, there’s two ways to do it. One is with your beds size, you can bet so big that your winners can all be home runs, but in my experience, the drawdowns with that type of bed sizing is also going to be very, very high. So you have to have the right emotional constitution to be able to deal with big whipsaws in your capital because it’s like when you win, it’s great when you lose, you can get spooked real quick and be like, man, I just gave back a significant chunk of my cash. Then there’s the way that is depicted in the comet and that is I’m going to have a smaller piece on at the beginning, and since I can’t predict the future, I’m going to let that thing run. The majority of it run that’s kind of more close to my style these days because of the lack of follow through and a whole bunch of other things I’d like to lose in the paper cuts.
Whereas because someone asked me, I think Alex asked me on the show how my trading style has changed. Well, it has to change to adapt to the markets. When things were less volatile, you could step in with 2% risk units. There were times I’ve had 5% risk units, but we’re not in those types of markets right now. So you think of what does 500 basis points look like compared to 10, this is a gigantic other worldly kind of risk. So how do you want to see the home run show up in your account? Do you want to bet on an event like the C P I number and might make it binary? Do you want to trade zero days to expiration options? How do you get delayed gratification if you’re trading D T E options? To me it’s mathematically you can’t work it out unless delayed gratification for you is the end of the day compared to 15 minute bars.
So you have to operationally define what you mean by delayed gratification. For me, it means overnight over the weekend, several weeks, right? Again, I’ve made a lot of money for no particular reason that I just didn’t offset a winning trade. So I don’t know what kind of skill or how you would look at that in terms of alpha and I’ve been around for a long time. So when we look from a coaching standpoint, the person has to be completely honest about what it is that they’re doing. That always helps come up with the best answer, and this probably comes up more in the mastermind than it would do in the 12 week program, but it would investigate the person’s behavior and then looking at the mindset, what’s the emotional response in understanding what the risk is and being able to define the risk from a mathematical standpoint so that the person can process their feelings around it before they even put the trade on so they can kind of anticipate.
No one likes surprises, not in anything. I think that’s kind of a human condition. You wouldn’t like if your teammates just kind of promoted you or voted you into in-game leader and then a week later they came back and said, you know what? We thought about it again. We’re actually going to stick with what we’re doing. It’s like, look, put a lot of thought into what you say before you open your mouth and then don’t get my hopes. I’ve manage my expectations. So that’s what we kind of do. They say expectations have built in disappointments, and so when you’re trying to bet on an earnings event or where the stock market’s going to go or whether Conor McGregor’s going to beat his next opponent, this is all binary yes or no, and it’s very, very difficult to handicap because anything can happen. We try to not because I have so much experience of losing a lot of money from doing stupid things, but also just in the experiment.
When I experiment, I experiment with real money. I don’t go to a laboratory and kind of do paper trading stuff. Once in a while I’ll do a paper trading simulation stuff. I have access to the best software and I can do it. Most other folks aren’t that fortunate, but I’ll oftentimes run an idea with real money. I want to see and be the lab rat. I’m my own lab rat. I want to feel my feelings around that and see, okay, then it’s like if I have an idea and I think it could work, what happens if I don’t try it with real money? What do I feel about myself then? Have I lost confidence?
Is my self-esteem lower than where it normally is? Is there something around shame or am I ashamed of myself? So I tend to be bold in my actions even though my risks are very small. You see what I’m saying? You have to make attempts, you have to roll the dice. And to me that’s really the most exciting thing about trading is that you can evolve as a human being. You can evolve as a human, you can evolve as a trader, and how you traded five years ago can be completely different from the way you’re doing it now and in each of the successive years, you’ve actually made money just because you had the inner strength to want to experiment and try new things and be open-minded.
Yeah, I mean in a lot of ways it’s making sure that you’re accountable for yourself and it’s kind like the in-game leading stuff. If I think something, I think things all the time as an in-game leader, even though I have just recently gotten the position, I was kind of basically putting myself in there in the first place. That’s kind why they wanted me to do it. You have to really be accountable and you have to have the confidence in yourself. If you don’t call something and it happens exactly the way you thought it out, that’s on. You have to have the confidence to just say, this is what we’re doing. We’re going to do it. And even if it’s the wrong call, you just have to make it because you learn from that experience. And then you talk about doing a postmortem. We have something like that as well.
It’s called VAD review where we look over the video from everybody’s perspective, we’re all recording mid practice, and we look over the video from everyone’s perspective and say, what is the expected value of this plague? Given the information that we have? Sometimes it’s hard to, I’m making these really big decisions in less than two seconds, fractions of seconds, and I have to be able to convey everything I’m doing very, very elaborately, but very concise. So I have to make sure that everybody has a clear understanding of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Otherwise they quite like, why am I listening to this guy? What’s going on? But it sounds like a similar concept with trading. You have to make sure that you don’t lose your confidence and you have to make sure that you continue to do what you think is right and when you’re wrong, learn from it
A hundred percent. I forgot who said it, but you get knocked out of a position, it can be aggravating, but the minute you lose your confidence, it’s awfully difficult. Even for, and I’ve had this happen, and this is one of the reasons why I say what I say. Again, take an average person, average ability, average intelligence, but somehow infuse them or help them understand how to become a much more confident trader and they’re going to go out and they’re going to crush it. Then you work with people who are at these bigger firms. I can’t mention the names, we got NDAs, but you’re talking to someone who’s used to making 5 million a year, and they might even have above average talent, but they lost their confidence. I can’t do anything. Right? Yeah. It’s a remarkable thing, and I’ve seen it in myself too, so I’m not immune from it myself. There’s been times where I was just like, I’m not in the zone. I’m going to take a week off and to calibrate my own system too, I typically take December off I can, and it allows me to look back like you do your vad, I think you called it video on demand,
Something like that. Yeah, VAD reviewing. It’s the name of a file type. Yeah.
Okay. So I get to kind of do a postmortem on the year, do some planning with a clear head. I don’t have to worry about the markets. It is what it is. I’m very fortunate to be able to have the ability to take that type of liberty. But again, to me, the game is to learn about yourself and to say, if you go back and replay all your trades, and then you looked at, okay, well, where were the other big movers during the year? How did I miss those? How did I, because again, in this business, you get results or you get excuses, and I think at your level too, at your level, you have to improvise in many ways. As I G L, you have to study the theory. You have to know best practices, but you don’t have time to sit there.
That’s how you lose games.
You have to be decisive, and traders do too. So when I look at that and say, okay, this thing moved 250%, how in the name of God almighty did I miss that trade? How did it not show up? Where’s my screening process? So you go back and you plug the holes because you find out that the market morphs and every year presents you with new challenges, so you have to evolve your tool set.
Yeah, yeah. We call ’em protocols in the gaming industry.
Love it. I love it. And so we could say the same type of a deal. What’s the protocol when someone’s sitting there only looking at the NASDAQ futures, einy futures on the s and p or the Russell two K, there’s a whole universe of things that are happening out there that might present them opportunities to make easier money than to sit and double click their mouse all day. But the question is what system or method of behavior is going to be, it’s like cigarettes. Cigarettes are not tobacco. That’s incidental. It’s a nicotine delivery device, and we found that we can take out the tar and all the other bullshit, and you can now get a pure, perhaps cleaner.
Definitely cleaner. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the whole benefit of all this other stuff.
Oh, the vaping to me, I don’t want to put anything in my lungs.
Vaping not
Great. Yeah. I don’t want to put anything inside my lungs that’s not fresh air.
Yeah, definitely not ideal, but yeah, no, it’s just cutting all the BSS in general.
So when you look at a person’s trading model or you look at their behavior inside the game, that whole environment is set up to give them some type of pleasure. And so when you look at it, I even see people sabotage themselves because the sabotage in and of itself has a predictable outcome, and that gives the person an illusion of control in a world that’s dealing with probabilistic outcomes. You know what I’m saying? So it gets super deep. It’s not just about the E mini and I’m not picking on people. I know a lot of people make bank on the EIN and good for them. I’m just saying that that particular instrument draws a lot of people, so there’s a higher incidence of failure just because there’s greater numbers of people coming in there. So that is, it’s not because the market sucks. It’s not because the instrument doesn’t work, but people create these environments for themselves and they play out psychological stuff as you come to find that it’s not terribly different than what they do to sabotage their personal relationships, their friendships, their romantic love affairs, their marriages.
There’s an emotional model that’s being played out, behavioral software in their subconscious. And so we try to spend a lot of time speaking about that. And with 35 years of experience, I have an enormous encyclopedia at the Oxford English Dictionary of bad experiences. I’ve been a bonehead at times and I’ve just been ignorant to stuff. But the key is you still have to be hyper aware of your universe and evolve and fall forward, which happens at every step of the way. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a professional gamer like yourself or a professional trader. It happens at every level of the way. You have to be super self-aware of your environment and your behavior within that environment and then also recognize what’s the emotional and the psychological feedback besides the financial one or perhaps the points and the stats from inside your game. Do you find that you have people at your level who self-sabotage?
Oh yeah.
And then also that affects the team,
And especially from an in-game leader perspective, everybody right now, there’s actually a crisis to find in-game leaders. We’re just not producing ’em anymore. Again, thankless role, nobody wants to do it. Everybody gets like
The stat lines are mediocre, you’re focused on other stuff. You’re focusing on everyone else’s excellence.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, and I mean there’s definitely part of that. I mean, that dynamic has changed quite a bit recently where there are stacks, he’s a Korean player, he’s an IGL L who is just, I mean, dude, this guy’s ice cold. He can put out crazy stat lines. There’s AK from Brazil. He’s on a team called Loud, and there’s more and more of these guys evolving. A North American guy, he plays for evil geniuses. There are all these guys coming out now that can I G L at a very, very high level, and they are putting out really good stat lines and it’s complicated, but for the majority of people, you’re not going to be capable of micromanaging that many things, articulating things that well in that short of an amount of time making those decisions. And so a lot of people who try to igl L because now there’s a little bit of glamor associated with I G L, especially for people who have not historically been very smart when it comes to school and stuff like that, they try and become an I G L because everyone who is a great I G L is known as a big brain and that’s the title that great I Gs are given big brain.
These guys are insanely smart. Even at the pro level, the commentators, they love the igs now because they can listen in to the communications, which most people can’t until after the game and they’ll say, oh my God, stacks just made this crazy call. How is he even aware of this? How are they even aware of this stuff? This guy’s got a huge brain. And so people kind of seek that type of reward now, but a lot of the self-sabotage happens because they’re either too afraid to make decisions or when one thing goes wrong, they don’t know where to adapt next. And so that’s when that self, the team I coached, one of the teams I coached, the self-sabotaging behavior for this IGL L in particular was when one thing went slightly awry, they just lost control and they just started goofing off and they were like, oh, I don’t know. The energy level was just not where it needed to be. They completely lost focus on the game.
Was it a maturity thing?
I believe so, yeah. But I mean, it was something we worked on and we got better. But in general, it’s kind of like you said, it’s that person’s emotional model playing out in the game. And if they’re not capable of dealing with those external stressors and really just associating them into binary like one and two or one and zero, they’re not going to be able to make decisions going forward. And that’s something that’s really, really important. And that’s a big self-sabotaging behavior with igl ls
In trading. When a player loses it and just starts doing erratic stuff, they’re set to go on tilt.
Similar concept
Where the outcome of the trade isn’t necessarily, it’s not about the money, it’s about the emotional win. And it happens a lot. I think more in the short term space. So many more attempts happening during the day in short-term trading rather than longer term trading where you might have to trim a position, you might have to add to one, you might have to initiate a new position. It’s a different type of psychological approach in terms of how do you want to harvest your wins. Again, we talked about home runs. Do you want them intraday from trading really big or trying to bet on an event or are you going to start slow and steady and let the position grow with the expected outcome of it being and growing into a monster winner? A lot of folks think that it’s easier to do that on the short run because you’re either going to see the winner, you’re not. Whereas in my experience, it’s much easier actually to pick good names and hold onto the winners and let them grow. They will go if you just let them.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it’s funny you say going on tilt, that happens all the time in the gaming space because it’s like everything is so short term. Rounds are short. Rounds are like two minutes long.
Oh, wow, I didn’t know that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They’re short. So a lot of stuff happens in two minutes. That’s why when I talk about some of the igl and stuff, I’m not exaggerating. I’m literally making decisions in fractions of a second. And it’s like when some igl ls are faced with a little bit of adversity as far as things don’t go quite to plan. They’ll just go on tilt. Or even just players in general. It happens if they swing corner that they knew they shouldn’t have swung with all the information or the way that they swung it. There’s different techniques of clearing a corner. There’s a technique called slicing the pie. They do an improper swing, like, I want this reward. I want to get three kills right now. I’ve been having a really lackluster game. I need these stats, man, that happens all the time too. And then they just go on tilt. And it’s another thing that we say it’s called mental boom. And mental boom is what happens when you’ve been on tilt and now you’re not even angry anymore. You’re just out of energy. You got nothing left. And so you’re just
Like an emotional hangover.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re just kind of in emotional limbo.
Yeah, that happens too. There’s so many similarities when you have performance in and around a computer space and you need to know, like you said, the expected value of a play in poker, they talk about the expected value of a hand is the expected value of a trade. You can know the math and you can be intellectually understanding all of it and even understand other people’s behavior. But until you’ve actually done it and you’ve been in that space, you have to be battle tested.
Seeking the hero trade too is a bad thing. I need those three kills. I remember playing football, I was basically this size in grade school, so I had to play offensive line and if anything that you practice, you kind of get good at. So eventually I became a center. I was center for my whole life basically in playing American football. And eventually the folks caught up to me. So I needed to rely on a lot of technique and quickness. There’s a certain capacity to running an offensive line that is ball control offense. But the technique is what saved me. Interestingly enough though, despite how good those teams were, which I think the worst seat, we were undefeated a couple times and our worst year was the sophomore year. We were seven and two. We were undefeated in the league seven and two overall. I didn’t have my name in the paper once because no one caress about the center, but the in game leader, and I was the center for offense. I did shotgun. I did point after touchdown and I snapped for the punts, the deep snap. So if I got injured, I didn’t go both ways. A lot of my peers, Lynch went both ways. I talk about him on the show, great guy, kid I’ve known since fourth grade.
I didn’t go because if I got hurt, there was no one, they would’ve needed two or three guys to replace me. So it was one of those unsung hero kind of roles where it had to get done. I was never going to get any pats on the back. No one would ever give me the game ball, you know what I mean? But it was a job that had to get done and it had to get done. And so I can understand with the frustration, I was just happy to be on a winning team. I was happy to have a starting role on that particular team. My skill was in baseball and ice hockey, probably better. But those obviously, I remember those plays in those years. They were yesterday had a big impact and helping me learn how to be a team player. And it wasn’t about me.
Can you get your job done for the benefit of the other people that are on the team that are meaning the offensive team? The defensive team as well as the folks who aren’t even playing so much all in that together. You know what I mean? So you have to learn how to subvert your ego. And so that’s kind of how I look at trading too. It’s really not about finding the glory. It’s like you’re handling other people’s money and you’re doing a job for them. And even though you’re called probably more of a trader slash portfolio manager, there’s still more of a fiduciary responsibility in that you’re handling someone’s money. A lot of hard work probably went into them accumulating that money. And so even though you’re in commodity futures or looking at equity derivatives and in some cases stocks, you still have to handle all that money like a newborn child. And just because you have the power to sit there and double click your mice as mouse as fast as you possibly can, it doesn’t mean that you should
For sure. Yeah, and one thing that I wanted to say that I thought wouldn’t be a great parallel with trading and gaming, but something that would be kind of funny to mention because it’s like if you applied the same thing in trading, it would be like a gambling addict type of thing. When you’re down numbers in this game in particular, especially if it’s on rounds where you don’t have as good of a buy an economy system in the game,
What does down numbers mean?
So it’s five V five, right? So if you lose two teammates early in the round, it’s a three V five now and there’s no damage really done to the other team,
And those guys don’t come back for that round. So there’s like a five on three power play in hockey. Yeah.
Okay, got you. And so what we do in those types of situations is we do hero plays because it’s like we’re down numbers anyway. The likelihood we’ll win this round with the utility we have, sometimes you’ll lose your dualist. So if you want to go plant the bomb, you can’t get into the bomb site fast because the doist with all the movement abilities is dead. You have no way to get in there quickly and get past all the enemy utility or the enemy smokes or get them distracted. There’s nothing like that. So you have to kind of weave your way through the map. And so what we talk about on my team in particular is like how do we deal with these situations? And we usually go for hero plays. Fortunately, we have a lot of really mechanically talented guys, and so it happens a lot when we’re down numbers.
We still win rounds. We have a very high win percentage. Oh, that’s awesome. Even on low numbers, and that’s fairly uncommon. Some teams have it more than others. This Korean team, D R X that I really like, I’m a big fan of them. They have a really great win percentage when they’re down numbers. They have a four V five win percentage that is unparalleled in the league and it’s pretty crazy. But yeah, so I just thought it was funny if you were down money on a trade and you just started doing all these hero plays and trying to throw more money at the situation, that would almost never pan out safely, I guess.
So that brings up something interesting. There are times when you’ve been down in your inner draw down, you’re losing money or your equity is down from a previous peak. That’s what a drawdown is. You could still be up, you take a million dollars up to 1,000,007 and draw it down to 1,000,006, you just lost a hundred K, you’re still up, but you’re in a drawdown, right? So how you feel and process your feelings around the drawdown is part of the rub because it happens to everybody. And I do remember, I don’t know what the psychological term was, but I do remember that there’s like a sixth sense that comes about me. Again, it probably comes from experience. I want to investigate as it is. One of the things on my goals on my to-do list is to understand where that comes from. I tend to trade pretty well from a disadvantaged situation.
Now again, if you’re up 1,000,007 and you draw it down a hundred K, you’re still up 60%. That’s not necessarily a disadvantaged position, but people respond differently to different stimulus and something kicks in. For me, I want to learn what it is more and more so I can articulate it and talk about it here. I think other folks might have a similar situation is when it kind of fits in the old cliche of when the tough gets going. You know what I’m saying? That kind of a deal. So I want to investigate that more and see what is it that I can summon from inside my brain and from my experience and all my tactics that I can use and I can deploy in that moment to perform better. Because everything that we do is,

He’s got a couple of really good things though. And one of ’em is the immigrant mentality. He, he coined the term with steep A. He was saying how steep A is going to beat anyone. He’s got the Croatian last name and all that. So he was Steve a’s good. He was talking about it and all that. And I kind of related to that as well, a lot. I come from a family of Italian immigrants. My grandfather as a kid all the time. He raised me for a few years. My parents were working a lot, and I would go to his house after school every day and he is like, don’t ever forget that you’re Italian and that you have nothing. You have nothing. You got to make this life work for you. I came here so you would have a better future. I wasn’t necessarily going to have a lot when I came here. I set this up, this whole thing up for you. And so that mentality, when I applied it to my work ethic really just shoots me way ahead of everybody else. I know that I got nothing to fall back on. I have to make this work.
I love that. I remember being in that spot when I started too. It’s like we weren’t for money and I had to hustle from a very young age, 12, 12 or whatever, start working making my own cash. And you realize, yeah, what’s the equity? You want to build equity. And so I don’t know if this is the right time to have this conversation, but when people start thinking about wealth in the country and you have the poor and you have the upper class and the top 1% and the billionaires and all this and that. I’m from a lower middle class upbringing, and the way I look at it is you’re talking about immigrants when they come here, they come here from nothing. You can’t say that they’re poor full of opportunity, so they just don’t have it on paper yet. But they have all the promise.
They’re very projectable. You know what I’m saying? They have a great attitude. They want to win. They want the liberties. They appreciate everything that’s here and they add to the community. But ultimately, what I understood from my own upbringing, I can’t say that this is true for you or for anybody else, was that being in the middle class had nothing to do with how much money you made. It was exhibited by the type of behavior that you exhibited every day. And so middle class is middle class, not because of the money that they make, it’s because of what they do. What did they do behaviorally? You see what I’m saying? And I knew I had to change that or else I was destined for the same thing because it’s habitual going to work, having a job doing all that stuff, it keeps you a ceiling above your head.
And I knew I didn’t want that ceiling. I knew I wanted to have unlimited upside. I want to have a call option on my life and on my income and on all the opportunity that I had or that I could see even the unseen, right? That comes from one of the things in the Catholic church, you believe in all the seen and the unseen, and I believed that there would be opportunities for me as I would get older. I didn’t know where they were going to come from. I didn’t even know what those opportunities were going to be, but I knew that I had awareness and a strong inner voice that was going to help me discover that, and I would be an opportunist and take advantage of them at the time. So far, it’s worked out pretty well. I don’t catch ’em all, but I caught a good chunk of ’em, mostly because I had a vision for my life that was going to be like your grandfather, very, very different than the one that my parents had. So I knew I had to exhibit different behavior, and I’m young, and I knew this. I was a teenager and I said, I have to do things differently, which was weird because then I felt like I was almost rejecting my culture or abandoning my parents, which is not how I felt emotionally, but when you start to have to exhibit different behavior, it feels on some level like you’re rejecting. So there’s an identity crisis going on.
How do you exhibit love and express love to your parents when you’re trying to be everything that they’re not on some level, at least from a financial standpoint. You know what I mean? And that was very difficult. It is cultural, might be too much information, but that’s how Michael Martin Frankenstein evolved was I watched everyone else’s behavior and said, okay, if I want to have the results that X, Y, Z person has, I have to do what they do. I have to think a little bit like they do, not from an expertise standpoint because so much of success in trading doesn’t necessarily come from having an expertise, but having the ability to execute on it. There’s a lot of people who know a lot about trading, but they can’t. They’re analysts or they have newsletters. They don’t actually trade and there’s nothing wrong with it, but we get paid to execute just like you and your teammates. You got to win. If you don’t win, you’re not getting sponsorships, you’re not getting paid, you’re not winning tournaments have a good time
Sometimes.
Sometimes, yeah.
I mean, I guess the good news is, or a big takeaway from that is I understand the feeling of, it feels like you’re kind of rejecting a little bit of that identity, but if you ask your parents, they want you to be better than they were in every aspect. Yeah, that’s true. I had this conversation with my mom. She told me, oh, I want you to be better than both your dad and I combined. And that’s the most motivational thing you can hear from anybody around you is like, I want you to be better than all of us. And that’s great. And I think people can apply that to their lives, even if they aren’t necessarily immigrants or anything like that. It’s not about that. It’s just that mentality of I have to make this work and I have to be better and I have to improve. And I think that’s a really great takeaway for anybody in any situation. Whether you do it connecting to your culture or not doesn’t necessarily matter. It doesn’t have to be the catalyst, but for me, that’s what it was.
I hear that a lot. We want you to do better than we did. That is definitely part of the immigrant experience. Come to America, work hard, create an opportunity and environment for your kids to thrive and to take it to higher levels. And I can trace that from my dad’s dad to my dad, to myself, to my own kids, that the trajectory is going up and it’s come from hard work and sweat equity. Nothing was given to us. Nothing about white privilege. That’s for damn sure. I’ve had lots of struggle and lots of failure. Nothing was given to me at all.
So I feel like that’s not uncommon. I’ve heard that expression before or I’ve heard parents say that, or I’ve heard my friends who’ve had parents who come from a similar background as my parents did say that the parents had intimated that they wanted their kids to do very well, and certainly take the opportunity, find the opportunities, or take the ones that are presented and be resourceful and scale them up and then repeat that process. And I’ve definitely been able to do that. It hasn’t always been easy. I think it’s probably not terribly dissimilar from yourself or even a lot of the folks watching that’s kind of life is you’re always kind of scaling up when you can. It has to be the right conditions. Just like in the trading in your trading account, you can only scale up very gradually. You can’t go from zero to a hundred fast and furious, but the ego wants you to do it.
But yeah, that’s a good point. I don’t really have much more to say about it, but I think it’s definitely a theme in many people’s lives is to know when to scale up. How do you know that the opportunity is in front of you? So we’d kind of discussed that in a lot of the coaching too, how to understand your environment, how to understand what’s before you and how to be open-minded to understand that sometimes the opportunity is an opportunity even though it doesn’t seem like it is from your perspective. So we try to break down the perspective a lot, which is hard because that too comes from culture and person’s environment
For sure mean. And it’s like the perspective is huge in everything you do. Having an outside perspective or a different timely perspective, as in if I told my teammates what was happening in the situation in the game that was wrong, I’m still heated in the moment. I can’t think everything all the way through properly. And then when we go and vdd review later and talk about it after there’s a different clarity around the situation, we’re all putting our brains to figure out this one problem that we had and a big way to fix it. A really good solution, and I think the same kind of applies for the coaching and the stuff that you do, is you’re able to have a different perspective than they do with all the knowledge that you have, and provide a well-rounded approach to finding solutions and finding these different protocols that people can use to apply in their daily lives and even different ways of getting motivation or even discipline.
And around that, there has to be willingness. A lot of folks who want the solution, but they’re cynical, right? They’re like, let’s see what you have to say. And I’m like, listen, I’m fine with you being exactly the way you are. They don’t come to me with that type of shitty attitude. I don’t owe you anything. First of all, if you want help, you got to change your attitude. You know what I’m saying? Yeah. Yeah. So I’m happy to help you, but I don’t have anything to prove to
You in the wise words of one of my favorite managers in Supercross. His name is Roger DeCoster. He managed the K T M team. I grew up doing motocross and Supercross, loving it and watching it. We have a few pros that are from this area that were on the world stage and all that. Roger DeCoster said, I cannot help those who do not want to be helped, and that is my favorite saying ever. It was also the context in which he was saying it. But yeah, it’s a great thing really. If you want to learn, then come to learn,
Come to learn. Because in that regard, you can’t lose. But I think what happens is people become embedded with their ego gets embedded in their process, and they feel like it’s not just the best way for them, but it’s the best way period, which is not, obviously that’s not the case. There’s a lot of ways to skin the cat here. So my hat’s off to however people win for sure, in and around that you want to find a set of rules or a strategy that’s compatible with your temperament, but you also want to be open-minded to understanding, and I know it’s hard, right? We talked about this maybe off camera in that a person grows up, they go through the process, they’re dating sooner or later they want to settle down and get married, and that becomes a thesis in their brain, and they kind of marry who they’re with at the time.
But when you think about it from a statistical standpoint, how do you know that that person’s the best possible spouse? Just because you feel like they are. You don’t have much science around it. You have a feeling you have a bias. So when you talk to someone about their trading strategy, they’re kind of married to it like a spouse. So two, three years into it, how do you know that it’s still the best strategy for you? Just because you’ve had success the first two or three years? Again, from an opportunity standpoint. Now in the world that we live in with all the social morays, of course, you make a commitment to someone in marriage, it’s typically, at least for a moment in time on the altar, it’s till death do you part for half the people, it doesn’t really work out that way. And there’s other communities where there aren’t even father figures inside the household.
That’s a whole other conversation. Now that’s become a generational problem, but so asking them to change their trading strategy when they say it goes back to the management consultant, Tom Peters, who wrote a book called In Search of Excellence. He had a thing where I think it was Tom Peters who said, he took on the expression, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it, right? He said, if it’s not broken, you haven’t looked hard enough. So I’ve always remembered that that was the follow-up book. The name of the book escapes me. I read it 30 something years ago. I’ll have to look up the name while you’re saying your piece. But so that’s kind of the investigation that we do as we always have to challenge ourselves, is to say, is my process congruent with my personality? Have I become complacent with my gains even if I’m making 50% a year? How do you know that there’s not more out there?
And then when you ask somebody to change it, it’s asking them to cut a leg off their wife in some cases, at least,
And they take it personally. Yeah. The one guy snapped at me. I don’t know some guy who’s got, I don’t even know. It might not even be a guy, but I tried to read all the comments because if someone’s going to take the time to leave a comment, I want read it. I appreciate it. Right? Coming from where I come from that anyone’s watching the show to me, I still am amazed, right? I’m grateful for all of it. But he said something along the line, making money overnight was bullshit or something like that compared to what you could do day trading. And my thought is, look, if you have a different study, then edify me reciprocate and show me the love. Because I’m aware of the community. I have friends who work at the online broker dealers and they tell me this incidents and how many people blow up in bull markets.
Now, it might be a kick in the head to have to hear that your strategy works for you, but it doesn’t work for the majority of the other people. I don’t know why that would bother a person, but again, I’m trying to be the voice of reason here because I’m really no different than they say the black belt is a white belt who never quit. And in many ways, that’s my trading career is I’ve had hardships like anybody else. I just didn’t let that subvert my own behavior. I didn’t hurt myself. I bite my fingers. No, just kidding. I cut my cut myself. No, and it shouldn’t make fun of that. That’s some serious stuff. But we’re all kind of in this together, and I’m trying to help the newer folks who don’t have the people who could benefit. I think most from the show are people who don’t have their own communities.
They’re not on a trading desk. They understand that the discords are kind of televangelists, and they’re clever enough to know that, but that still leaves them without a father figure, a mentor or a coach or someone community that they can share their experiences with. So that’s why we kind of do the show. One was to give back to fight what I called intellectual greed when I needed help. Early on in my career were very few people who were willing to help me. They thought I was encroaching on taking their job. That was the kind of vibe that they had.
But the other part of it is that, and I didn’t think of it at the time, but it’s kind of an externality, is that we do have a bit of a community here, and it’s growing and people appreciate that. So they can kind of dial in, they can get it for free to the extent that they have the time to listen to me blather on about stuff. I try to keep it short. Our Wednesdays are longer, but the Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday episodes where it’s just me, I try to keep those now to no more than 10 minutes. Sometimes they go a little bit longer. And then if they want to engage for something a little bit more personalized, there has to be an exchange of value. We could talk about masterminds or they can join a coaching group, but the majority of the material is legit and it’s free, and it creates the community and it helps people discover things that they might not be. I want to ask them questions that they might not be able to ask themselves because the end result is personal growth. And you can’t lose if you’re growing personally, not in your life, not in your trading account. That’s my opinion. Tell me I’m an idiot.
No, I mean, I completely agree. I think a lot of what I have done historically with anything performance related is just focused on improving. When I started and decided that I wanted to play valance or video games professionally, it wasn’t like, oh, this just kind of happened. It was like a decision. And I was like, how am I going to catch up to all the people that are super far ahead of me and not get discouraged? And from day one, I was like, I just have to improve my process every single day. And
There
You go with that, I’ve been able to make leads
And you do do that. I’ve witnessed that in the years that I’ve known you. That is absolutely something that I will testify is absolutely true. You are your own lab rat. You to me, are like what Tim Ferriss.
For sure. And I mean, that’s just part of the whole process, and it’s a really big belief that I have is just improving all the time. And I don’t like when people say, this is the best way that this can be done, or anything like that. Like you said, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Well, if you haven’t looked hard enough, if it’s not broken, I kind of adopt that mentality and that process, my whole ethos and everything. I think one of the other things too, you can draw inspiration from stoicism in a certain aspect, so it doesn’t hurt your ego too much. It is a challenge if you’re constantly dismantling yourself, how is that not going to affect your ego and your confidence with things? Marcus Aurelius, one of my favorite things he’s ever said is you don’t really have to let things bother you.
It’s a
Choice. Yeah, it’s a choice. It’s a choice to let things bother you. So if you’re not doing something as good as you can do it, don’t let that bother you. Just figure it out. Don’t let it affect your ego. Don’t let it hurt. You Just find a better solution, and you are capable of finding one 99% of the time. It’s just about putting in the work and thinking about it.
Yeah, I figured that stuff out on my own. It’s like, how do I win if I go on tilt? You? I’ve had situations in my life when I went on tilt, not in my trading, but just in life, and it didn’t feel good afterwards. It didn’t feel good that I had exhibited poor self-control, lack of disciplines, probably a couple of ways to explain it, where I also too was ashamed of myself that I was so flatfooted to not expect that the outcome that happened that destabilized me so much that I was not aware of that being a possibility of an event that could have occurred. As you can see, I live in a probabilistic way. Everything I look at is Im probabilities, and so it’s why I don’t throw shade on people on social media. There’s no equity in it. How do I get better myself if that’s something I’m going to do? And there’s plenty of idiots out there that I don’t agree with what they say. I don’t like their behavior. I don’t probably even like them in some circumstances as people. I don’t like what they stand for, but what do I get out of it if I go on Twitter and call them out on something? Doesn’t increase my cashflow, doesn’t increase my portfolio, doesn’t increase my net worth and karma is bad.
I’m a Christian. So there’s all that too, where I don’t want to get into the religious part, but at the end of the day, so it’s a bad trade. The book is called Tom Peters, thriving on Chaos Handbook for Management Revolution. That was the one that I think was the next follow up from his book called In Search of Excellence. I mentioned the quote, if it’s not broke, you haven’t looked hard enough. And I think it was Tom, I think it was Tom who said, if it isn’t broken, you haven’t looked hard enough. So the idea for me when I’ve read that was I can always make little tweaks and improvements to trading models to my personal life, to this and that. And it doesn’t mean you have to turn your world upside down. It doesn’t mean you have to stop trading the ein if that’s your favorite flavor, but always seek to improve yourself. Always seek to improve your trading. Because if there’s a way, when you think about everyone knows the 80 20 rule and Reto, Pareto, but there’s also a Pareto efficiency. So if you could make the same amount of money for working 80 hours less during the day, why wouldn’t you think about that? It would mean letting go of things that are now deeply held beliefs. But what do you call that person who’s afraid to take on those challenges? A coward,
Fragile is usually what I say,
Fragile. Okay. Fragile is probably a better word than coward, but everyone wants to talk tough, but they’re not willing to look inward. And so I’ve had a couple of, I don’t want to say come to Jesus meetings, but a couple of very frank conversations with people that their understanding, they had a fundamental misunderstanding on how the markets work. They heard someone say it, and it became something, and I call it that Johnny Cochrane logic from the OJ Simpson trial, if it doesn’t fit, you must have quit. It had nothing to do with the law, but he kept framing it. If the glove that we’re putting over a vulcanized rubber glove that hand, and it’s two sizes too small now because anytime a leather glove gets wet, it’s dried and it shrinks. So there’s so much practical, so much common sense that went out the window there.
But yeah, I mean to me, if people are willing to look inward, they really can’t lose. They really can’t lose, and I think they can do a lot of it on their own. Certainly there’s a lot, lot to harvest from our discussions here. If they wanted something more private, again, we can talk one-on-one. The Mastermind does a lot of stuff. But then even there in Mastermind and in the group, you have to be willing to share. It’s not a passive sit watch a bunch of videos. That’s what this is for. This is kind of infotainment, it’s insightful, our ethos here, but in order to be in one of my groups, they have to do the work. If they’re not willing to get into the group and to share, then it’s not a good fit. Save your money.
Yeah, for sure. I would a hundred percent agree with that. Yeah. I think we had some really good takeaways and some good points this
Episode, and I appreciate the original comment that kind of cascaded all of this. It’s all like the old saying, from having taught in the classroom when you’re taught how to teach, they say if one person has a question, probably means a bunch of others do, but they’re just afraid to ask the question. So whether the questions come in online or in the mastermind or in the coaching group or even through YouTube, I’m happy to answer the questions to the best that I can. Again, it’s kind of subjective, kind of based on my experience, either deliberately or my own experience or something. I witnessed somebody else experience and I was able to internalize it and learn from it as a person, as either, how can I incorporate that into what I’m doing or how can I see that it clearly didn’t work? It’s something I shouldn’t be messing with and not incorporate anything. It has an economic bad, but ultimately we want to try to think about efficiency. How can you get the same or better results for less inputs, less work, less hours, less time, so that you can go live your life.
Yeah, for sure. And yeah, I think with that said, we can wrap it up here. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate all the
Support. Thanks folks.
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Hey everybody. Happy Tuesday. Thanks for being here. As Ganja would say in tomorrow’s episode, please like and subscribe helps the algorithm. It feeds the algorithm. I don’t even know what the hell algorithm he’s talking about, but he knows I trust him. And then if you click the bell thing, you can apparently get alerted when we upload new videos and this and that. So please check it out. I want to talk to you about how I started to embrace the uncertainty myself in my own trading. Because again, when I first went to Wall Street, every assumption that I made was incorrect. I mean, almost everyone. I thought that with some basic training and actually being in Wall Street proper, that I’d be able to trade any asset class longer, short and be able to do so in any asset in any timeframe. Meaning I could trade short term, I could trade longer term because I didn’t know it at the time, but I had made the assumption that being on Wall Street and both the physical proximity, but also being in that community would give me an edge over the amateurs trying to do it at home.
And that obviously was completely incorrect.
But to my credit, I was able to study myself, study my own behavior, be honest with my feelings and have integrity around all that without judging myself. I didn’t have anything else to go on. I didn’t have a mentor, a coach, I didn’t have a father figure. I didn’t have any family friends who were successful at that. I had nothing to go on, but my own goals and aspirations for wanting to change my economic situation from going, which at that point in my time was mostly working summer jobs, working full-time, having landscaping, going around, building the landscaping company, then selling that and then having to find seasonal work because in New York have four seasons and the summer and the winter can tend to be extreme as far as polar opposites are called. I’m not saying that it’s the coldest place in the country or neither the hottest, but I am saying that the winter from the summer are as far apart as they could possibly be in terms of having the extremes. And so it’s obvious if you’re caddying golf bags in the summertime, you can’t do that in the winter unless you go south. And that wasn’t practical for me. I had things to do where I was, and likewise in the winter I couldn’t caddy, so I had to find seasonal work and that was waiting tables and this and that and hustling and making money to pay my bills. So having said all that, I
Remember it was so expensive to day trade. I guess I was lucky to be in that environment at that time. Round turn commissions on futures for the public on a day trade, I think was like $110 Overnight. Round turns were like 1 25 a contract. Stock commissions ran between one and a half percent of the invested amount to 3%. And so that wasn’t even working there. Whatever discounts they would afford you, they didn’t really want you trading. They wanted you to gather assets so that you could charge other people commission. They weren’t really interested in you trading your own account, at least at that time. So I had to really learn from my own behavior and say, okay, who are the people who were making money? And I won’t mention their names. I had mixed emotions about who they were as people, and I don’t want to bring any undue attention to them.
There were a few people though who had, at that point in time, a great amount of positions in companies that we know now, like Sun Microsystem, Cisco I Omega, and they had bought into these companies and held them, and they had adjusting for splits. They had in some of these instances, they had a cost basis that was under $5. And I said, Hmm, I want to definitely investigate that. I don’t know if my holding period is going to be several years to take into account these types of splits. But it was in the tech boom kind of leading into the internet boom, and the names were just flying. And so the reasons why a board of directors will determine a company should split is simply to make the shares more marketable. You see, at the end of the day.
So I had to figure out that calculus for myself. What was I comfortable with? What could I afford to lose because I didn’t have a lot to lose. And I mentioned this before about trading with an adequate amount of capital in the count, trying to trade futures where you put on a futures trade, you get the initial margin call and everyone can meet that, that’s your margin. But then there’s a point where if the thing moves against you, whether you’re short and it goes up and you’re long or it goes down, there’s a maintenance call. And typically you don’t want to meet margin calls, maintenance margin calls, those are the margin calls. They just call the margin calls. Typically, whenever you put a trade on, you have a margin call, but that money is liquid in the account. The ones that you don’t want, where people were cliff diving off of buildings were the maintenance calls.
They didn’t have the money, and those were the ones you have to bring your account back up to a certain level. And so the rule of thumb is, and this is still true today, that you don’t want to meet a margin call with cash. You offset what’s causing the duress in the account. That should seem obvious to you. However, when you look at where the stop would have to be in order for the name to go there against you, you could always set your stop well in advance of where that margin call would be triggered. So this way you can avoid all margin calls. I can’t recall ever having a maintenance margin call in my entire career because I spent a lot of time understanding the markets before I put on the trades, and I was also trading smalls. We didn’t have, I was trading one lots.
We didn’t have the micros or the minis at the time. They didn’t exist. And I’m old enough to know when the s and p futures contract, the one that was really liquid was $500 a point. It was probably 40,000 in margin for one contract, and it was big. Maybe it was 2019. I’m thinking 39,000. It might’ve been 19 if I’m wrong, but still that’s big for a trader. Starting out, if you had 25 K, could you imagine putting 20,000? So that’s why they decided to cut the einy to one 10th the size, and that certainly started the proliferation of doing a lot of electronic trading in futures. But the thing is, is that because I was so busy during the day talking with clients, speaking with them about the trading strategy that I was going to enact in their accounts, I needed to have a way to have somebody mind the fort when I was there, meaning someone babysit my positions.
So how else can I possibly do that if I’m out of the office down in Chinatown or wherever, I was in New York City speaking with clients, but I had risk gone. Some of you might be having panic attacks already. Now, I was too new to warrant having my own dedicated assistant based on my newness, my assets under management and my production, which is what they referred to as commissions and fees, which is kind of what you’re graded on, you’re graded on at that point. You were graded on the number of new accounts that you opened, the amount of net new assets that you brought in and the commissions and fees that you generated for that month. That’s what happens inside these firms. Nowhere in there is it like Michael improved, made 15% the month for a client. Another client had a baby and named their child, Michael Martin after them. That was not the interest of the company at all. Obviously things can change, but I know how they’re graded. It’s ultimately a game of gathering assets because then it’s very predictable. The more assets, the more the annual fee, and that creates more dollars that
Gets between the house and the person. So at the end of the day, I remember saying to myself, if I’m going to actually endeavor to do this, and for that short three year window kind of serve two bosses, I had a different agenda than the one that they had. I knew I needed to rely on the stops. There was no other way I could leave a newborn child, which I would consider a long wheat contract that has to be babysat, right? Because the thing could move 20 cents against you. There’s a thousand bucks. If you had 10,000 in your account, you just down 10%, even if the damn contract only moved two and a half percent itself on a price basis. So I learned very quickly that if I was going to try to escape this kind of purgatory that I was in, that I needed to embrace the uncertainty of having these positions on and keeping them on because the commissions were so strong, so high, but at the same time still go out and look like I was doing my day job to keep my boss happy, but then know that I rest assured that as while the outcry session, because these were all outcry session at the time, while the outcry session was in play, I had a protective stop on the floor to take me out of my position if the market moved against me, didn’t have to move sharply against me.
I just needed to know that there was that circuit breaker kind of thing that said, okay, boom, it’s hit here. It’s elected. You don’t care about slippage and skit either because you look back on the day and say, okay, beans or wheat, whatever, it might’ve been sugar. You say beans were off 20 cents. I got stopped at a 10 cent loss. It went down, it closed, it settled 20 cents on the day, but then it followed through weaker the rest of the week. So that’s when you’re sitting and you’re thinking, God, that there is such a thing as a stop order because it’s the point where you transfer the risk anymore. We talked about it a couple weeks ago. It’s okay to be wrong. You just can’t stay wrong. And so then I had to learn, how do you actually use a trailing stop? How do you do it?
And so then as the thing would work out in my favor, I needed to embrace the uncertainty. And I can remember my thinking at the time was if I was up, say 500 on a trade, I literally said, okay, that allows me to do five other trades and pay the commissions and not affect my principle because the commissions were so expensive at the time. So it also forced me, I should say this out loud, it also forced me to think longer term because nowadays commissions are effectively zero When you think about where they were 35 years ago, they’re down depending on who you talk to and who your clearing member is. And when you look at the exchange fees, they’re down between 95 and 99%. The transaction itself has become a commodity, and I know that there’s certain places that give the trades away for free, even though they’re probably collaring trades in front running and this and that.
So it’s not exactly free, but you don’t see the commission or the markup or the markdown in the event that they’re market makers in those securities. So I kept thinking, in order to combat the expenses of executing lots of trades, I need to be able to sit on my hands and let my winners run because it’s very punitive from a commission standpoint to kind of churn my own account, even though I had the dashboard in front of me at that time, which nowadays anyone could log in the internet. Back in those days, no one had internet. It didn’t exist. Very few people, less than half of my clients had their own computers. A handful of people had analog cell phones, those big daddy ones that Gordon Gecko had that had 30 minutes of talk time and were a dollar a minute talk time.
And so you had to play poker with your p and l as it also related to your trading, because again, if you made 500 bucks and the round turn commissions overnight were 1 25, the way I looked at it was like, okay, now I’ve got four free trades on some level. Very different mindset than the way it is today. So with you having the ability to churn your own account also as you talk about embracing the uncertainty you want to take a look at for all the trades that you’re doing, are you kind of running to stand still as is a two song running to stand still? And I don’t want to be that person sitting there spending hours and hours and hours in front of the screen trading like a banshee just because it’s free and just because I can but not making any progress.
So that to me is an economic bad. The lower commissions or the non-existent commissions are almost an economic bad for you because they induce you to do things that aren’t in your best interest, which is to overtrade. So I learned how to take risk home overnight, realizing that, hey, look, yes, once in a blue moon, something can happen against me, but I don’t really have a choice. I had to choose what I call the evil of two lessers. I had to either overtrade the accountant, get killed on commissions or hold onto my winners, realizing that once in a while I’ll see a sharp move overnight. Those fears, as people would say about a lot of fears in life, the things you worry about very rarely come true.
So I had to learn how to adjust my protective stops. There wasn’t a lot of overnight trading either. There wasn’t globex, for example, there wasn’t any of that plan, a kind of stuff where you could call the desk. So you were in the position until the opening bell. And I can remember going in and as I was breaking up my day, the front part of my day was to handle my risk management for my own trading account, to the point where I would call the floor and say, what’s the opening range look like? And sometimes they would tell you, sometimes they wouldn’t know. I’d call to earlier this and that, but I developed a strong relationship with the floor to get that information. And then I would try to plan out my day according to what the opening ranges were. Then I would say, okay, if that is the case, here’s where I would change my protective stop then.
So I did a lot of, I was like the king of cancel and replace, because every time you have a protective stop, you have to cancel that one and replace it with another order. Nowadays, it’s a click of a mouse, but back in the day, it was a little bit more mechanical. The last thing you wanted to do is say, okay, I’m long December wheat and my stop is at four 40. The market moves higher. And I say, okay, sell my one or two lot at four 50, but then leave the four 40 in because then as the market retraces, I’ll get knocked out of my long and be flat at four 50. But if I didn’t cancel the four 40, the market sees that as a sell so I could end up being short one or two contracts if I was stupid, I wasn’t.
I always wrote stuff down. I did make that one error that I wrote about. I’ll talk about that another time because running a little long today. But we’ll be here tomorrow with Ganja. Please like and subscribe, and again, if you think you want to be on the show, you can reach out and we’ll go from there. I can’t take everybody, this is kind of like a beta project in how I can be useful or how we can be useful together for the rest of the community. It might fail and fall on its face, but we’ll have to see. So I’ll probably take a couple of applications and then speak with you on the phone to see if it makes sense. If it doesn’t seem like it’s a good fit, don’t be angry because ultimately it’s a bit of an entertainment product, so it has to make sense for the audience. Anyway, thanks for being here and I’ll see you tomorrow with Ganja.

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This is an automated transcript