Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Hope you’re doing well. Normally I have ganja here on Wednesdays and I screwed up. I went over to meet him over where we do the recordings and I forgot the damn camera. The one that I’m on right now at my place. I record the Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday videos with the same camera. So I got all the way over there and then I was kind of crunched for time, so it wasn’t, I couldn’t double back, grab the camera, then go back this and that. So the reason Ganja isn’t here today isn’t for any other reason than I screwed up. I was a bonehead and I forgot the camera at home. Sorry about that. We did have a good little chat while we were over there together. So while I’m here, I’d like to talk very quickly about a comment that I got.
Hello, Michael. I really appreciate your content and I’m an avid listener. I’m currently going through your whole library. I’m in the middle of my process about one and a half years in and on my way to profitability. I’ve learned a lot about myself and your content helps. I might have a deeper question further into my process, but as of now, how would you recommend us to keep our motivation up if we’ve already made good money elsewhere, but really want to pursue Trading Futures as a career? So that’s a great question. There’s a lot of folks who kind of make horizontal moves from being successful in one area and they want to come in to trade anything. Could be stocks, could be options, could be futures as this is from Javier or Xavier, depends how you want to say it. Hopefully I’m saying Xavier Burgess and it’s on the video. Produce higher returns with better time management. So for me, it’s about goal setting because you could always look at yourself at day zero, no matter where you are, and obviously the goal is to play superior defense no matter what, and set yourself up at day zero and imagine what it is that you want to achieve with your trading. Do you want to achieve consistent returns? Do you want to achieve high returns? Do you want to be slow and steady wins the race? So you get to choose the acceleration.
You can choose rate of return, you can choose the acceleration. Obviously you have to choose the bed size, but I would think about it like if this is a new endeavor for you and you’re coming in to it with financial means, you can consider thinking about it with, again, how do you want the whole process of trading to serve you? Is it more of doing a crossword puzzle? Is it something for you to figure out and it’s not really about the money, or maybe you have so much you can start to think about being a philanthropist and grow more financial abundance so that you can give more away. So there’s a lot of things to do with it, but I would also consider, again, ultimately, what do you want the money to do for you? How does the capital serve you if you grow more and more money?
Sometimes just wanting more is okay. I think there’s a difference between achieving abundance and even greater levels of abundance than greed. But it’s a very personal question to ask yourself. Also, how do you want to spend your day? I was speaking with a client earlier today on the phone, who’s part of a group, and we talked about how do you spend your day? And I don’t like to get emotionally invested in trades, not how I get into them, not when they are on and not when I have to offset them. And so one of the things that I do to manage my time, but also to manage my emotional constitution is I enter the market with stops. I enter with stops, I exit with stops, and I trust my clearing member to execute them for me. I have never had a problem with someone for, oh man, we forgot your order.
That doesn’t allow me to act on a hair trigger response and want to step over my rules and then want to affect a transaction when there isn’t one there. How can this happen for you? Well, maybe if you’re got a million dollars risk, half a percent or 5,000, your system generates as much as three R on average and your winners. And so you want to learn how to trail your stops. So basically what you can do is obviously as soon as you get your order entry filled, you put in your protective stop, then you could set the alert on your phone or on the computer to make a sound or otherwise maybe send you an alert if that technology is available. When the instrument moves one R in your favor, at which point you’ll go in and cancel and replace. You’ll move out off of your existing protective stop and raise it to break even.
So you’re still going to risk one R, but now that one R isn’t of corpus or your original principle, it’s of it’s on unrealized gains. So then if you move a full percent or two R and you’re up in unrealized gains, now you can move your protective stop to plus 0.5. So you still have one R at risk, but now against a market moving very quickly or gapping against you, you’re pretty much guaranteed to make money, and then you can stagger those all the way up. I tend to like to do that so I don’t sit in front of the screen all day, but at the same time, I have very, very regimented risk management. You might find that that helps you. I think there’s a million ways to go with this question, but I think setting up a goal and starting with a goal and then how you want
The trading to serve you in your life. So there’s how do you want trading to serve you from the trading standpoint, but then how do you want the results of the trading and the time, money, and effort that you need to put into your craft of trading? How do you want that to impact your life? Because I find that if you don’t get super clear with that, trading could be your morning, noon and night, and that’s what you want for your significant other, not necessarily for your trading. You don’t want to be stalking the markets or becoming obsessive because that typically doesn’t end well. Anyway, sorry about not having ganja here. He’ll definitely be back next week. The screw up was on me. Please like and subscribe. I appreci you’ll appreciate you all being here and I’ll see you tomorrow.
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