Hey everybody, it’s Michael Martin. Thanks for being here. I appreciate all the feedback that you give me on the channel, in the emails and the comments. I think we’re growing at a good pace here. I appreciate the feedback very much. Gives me an idea of what you like. You know what you don’t like. Well, you know like everything but that you like certain things more than others. I got a nice comment from Bill and he asked, I’m going to read it, says, Michael, you touched on something. This was for the video, how I analyzed my trades, and I’m reading the comment here. It says, Michael, you touched on something I’ve been trying to work on and analyzing myself. I noticed I have triggers while trading that are simply in the wrong place or at the wrong time. Not sure if you might have a suggestion on how to reprogram myself in that respect.
Well, we consult to this and it’s a minimum three month program. So I don’t think I can give you a fortune kick, fortune cookie kind of statement that you can use. What you can do is take a journal and write down some things and then analyze the whole scene as if you’re a reporter for a newspaper or maybe even a detective. If you’re getting triggered, my guess is you’re watching the market tick by tick. So the question I have for you is why do you do that? What do you think you’re going to be able to get in process if you’re looking at all these charts or something like that, or your positions in real time? To me that’s like the worst thing that you can do because it could induce you, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience. It can induce you to do things that are not in your financial best interest.
But what might feel good in the short run. So it’s a super complicated question. I always start, well, what was your goal? What is it that you want your money to do for you? Because typically you can’t break that down to say, one minute bars or 15 second segments in the marketplace. You know, have to be able to conjugate what it is that you’re doing during the day with what your longer term goal is. Is it to grow your account? Is it to build up so much equity in the account that at a specific time in the future you can convert that to treasury bills and get 5% for doing no work and have a lot of passive income? Real estate doesn’t matter to me what it is, but typically when you don’t have a clear goal about what it is that you want to do, you can find yourself getting triggered like you are two, you might be internalizing that winning and losing somehow is a reflection of who you are as a person.
And that’s not the case. Really. Smart people lose money and really smart people who are super talented and who are even legends in this business, me have drawdowns, prot, protracted drawdowns that last for months and can go into the double digits. So I always find it amazing that people take losses so hard. I didn’t take losses hard to the extent that I knew I was on the path to finding out what would work for me. The only way to do it was trading with real money. And while I lost consistently, it told me what wasn’t working. So I didn’t look at it, it was tuition. I was looking at it like, okay, this process is steering me because I have to take some attempts to figure out what it is that I’m trying to do. Where’s my edge? Where’s my alpha? And you can only get that by doing.
So if you are getting triggered and it’s hurting you financially, then consider trading smaller. I do want to say something out loud. I know it’s going to piss a few people off. If you’re watching things tick by tick, I’m going to guess more than half the time. Probably 80, 90% is your account is underfunded. And that’s a tough spot to be in because in my view, you’re always going to be trading with scared money. Because look, if you have 5K and I know how hard it was to develop my own first to trade, you have to become a saver, which is the act of not consuming, then find a way to put that into an account. Then you have the account funded and it seems like it’s all the money in the world to you, but you have to be ready, willing, and able to risk all of that to figure out who you are.
You have a relationship with the market cause market’s a live-in breathing mechanism. And lastly, cause I don’t want to blather on and on about it because it does, there’s too many answers to this question. I don’t know who taught you the rules of money or finance and I don’t know who was entrepreneurial or not in your nuclear family or in your environment that you saw all the time. So just by being witness to all of that, somehow you were taught the rules of money and taking chances. You might have also been instilled about education and all this and that, and you ought to go get a job. And this is legalized gambling. I don’t know if there’s any of those biases or bigoted comments that come out of people’s mouths when they don’t know their sn from a hole in the ground, but they seem to have a pop popular opinions about what it is that you should be doing with your time, money, and your effort. Only the answer to that. So like I said, it gets steep. You might have had a overbearing parent who you can hear in the back of your mind when you’re doing all these trades and that’s affecting your self-esteem or how you feel when you’re losing money. It could also put you in a spot where you’re taking profits too soon. So I know a handful of people, and I mean a handful, not a lot, who are consistently profitable by trading in the short run. They have a knack.
The majority of people are going to have a very difficult time trying to do that in day trade because trading pushes your buttons.
If you have a fight or flight mechanism, it’s primal, right? We’re not built to take these risks on, I got lucky I was born this way, but it still took me over four years to figure out what it is that I could do. So I would look at your p and l, figure out the expected value of a trade stick with one ethos, one pattern or one trading style so that you can behave consistently because behavior predicts where you end up in life. So if you’re all over the place, as I like to say, you’ve heard me say it on the show, you’re going to get all over the place kind of results. And it’s very difficult to go to school on yourself and say, well, how do I make any sense out of this? Right? So it’s a super deep question. It’s hard to answer it just with one answer because any number of things could be working.
What I have found in for the hedge fund guys that we consult to that a lot of times it’s in their subconscious and you really need to develop, it’s what I call self-talk. Your inner voice. What is that? And who is that person? Is that, are you and your behavior kind of converging away from your inner voice? Or are you going towards it? Right? Because the smartest people on planet Earth, whether they’re traders or not, and they’re super successful, they have a very strong inner voice, they have very strong and powerful self-talk that propels them to move forward knowing that they have to take chances and they’re going to fail. Some of these people are going to fail publicly. I think Richard Branson just scuttled the company. He’s probably one of the most successful business people that you could ever read about. So does that mean he’s a failure?
No, doesn’t mean anything. So at any rate, long answer to it, what seems like a simple question, but the truth is, is that any of these triggers that you have, it’s hard to know how you were taught that because it’s behavioral, right? So you have to really look at who’s bugging me Anyway, I’m not answering the call. But anyway, that’s all I have for you. Please like and subscribe, keep the comments coming in. I really appreciate everything that you do for the channel cause I learn a lot about myself. I don’t have all the answers, but it’s really good stuff. Thank you.

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