028: Andrew Falde – How to Avoid ‘Predicting’, the Purpose of Options Markets, and 7 Components of Profitable Systems

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Hey there, what's up everybody? Welcome back to a brand new episode of the Chat with Traders podcast. This is episode number twenty eight. And before we go any further, let me just say a huge thank you to everybody who listened, tweeted, shared last week's interview with Jack Schwager, I was thrilled to have him on the show and I mean it sounds like you guys all really enjoyed it, so thanks so much for listening. Now let me tell you a little bit about this week's guest.

And he originally was attracted by the fact that traders can make money in both rising and falling markets. So this week's guest, Andrew Fauldi, left a career in commercial real estate when the GFC hit in two thousand and eight to focus his attention on becoming a trader. A few years on, Andrew has carved a profitable niche for himself, trading options and designing systems. Both topics which are covered in depth during this interview.

But some of the highlights from this discussion would have to be the way in which Andrew avoids trying to predict the market and instead thinks of trades as a series of if then scenarios. Also the purpose of why the options market even exists is really interesting.

as well as the important factors one should consider when designing a system. I also like how Andrew applies a blend of systematic and discretionary aspects to his own trading, which we go into during this interview also. And If you have any questions, so If there's something you're challenged with or something you want to know more about, then take this opportunity to ask Andrew a question.

Whether it's in regards to trading options, designing systems, or just trading in general, Andrew's your man, so leave a question for him in the comments at chatwithraders dot com forward slash twenty eight. Scroll to the bottom of the page and leave a comment and Andrew will get back to you. Alright guys, I'm your host, Aaron Firefield. This is Chat With Traders and here is this week's guest, Andrew Faulde. Andrew, welcome to the podcast, man. How's it going?

Doing great. Thanks for having me on. No, thanks a lot for coming on the show. I mean, I really appreciate it. And there's a there's a few things I'd like to cover with you today. Uh so of course we'll begin with how you got into the world of trading and what your early experiences were like.

Um but from there we'll get into some discussion about options and sort of systematic trading. And seeing as you're very clued up on options where as I'm almost a complete novice in this area when um it comes to options, but I mean listeners will probably recall me saying that from previous episodes, but Feel free to add to your answers with anything that may be valuable, even if I don't necessarily prompt you with my questions. So Okay, sure. Um yeah, settle the plan.

Yeah, sounds great. All right, cool. So let's start from the start and if you don't mind, share with us what were you doing before you got into trading and then what actually sparked your interest in the markets?

Well, I began before I became uh a trader, I was a a full time commercial real estate broker. in uh Florida. And when I I was kind of developing my career there and I was working on teams and uh through unfortunate timing uh my career was just starting to grow when the the Great Recession hit and uh Florida specifically was kind of the epicenter for the real estate crisis, um where a lot of the uh of the United States real estate values dropped ten, fifteen, twenty percent.

And in the area where I live, uh things dropped by closer to fifty and sixty percent. And so we our local market went to more of a great uh not a great, but uh a depression, whereas the rest of the country went into a recession. And at that time so it was it was challenging and um it looked like it was gonna be very difficult for several years.

and one of my mentors that I've known ever since I was a teenager He also had a lot of commercial real estate holdings and we we uh were involved in the business together and we were discussing it and he had some uh investments with the hedge fund.

that was trading options and they were doing very well. And so we said, well this is great. You know, the market's going down and they're they're profitable. You know, it's it it just it was t totally counterintuitive. We did not understand how that was working. How are these guys trading options

uh which is you know part of the stock market. They're trading S P five hundred options and you know the market's crashing and everything's bad and the economy's going in the in the toilet and these guys are making money and they were making a lot of money.

and w we're like we have to figure out what's going on. We have to know what's happening. And so we both uh kind of parallel went into this um education process of kind of self teaching and exploring what was going on. And so that was that was back in, you know, two thousand seven, two thousand eight. And um w we're we're going through that process and a lot of studying and and one thing led to another that um I just decided that I d I didn't want to tie myself

to a local economy. I didn't want to tie myself to one industry and one sector and that by trading the market I was gonna have the ability to be in any market that I wanted to be in and anywhere in the world and I could do it from anywhere in the world and that I could actually profit like these guys

whether the market went up or down. And I I said, this is that's the path I need. I need to be on that path. I need to have that opportunity where I'm not dependent on a strong economy. I'm not dependent on economic growth. um for how I'm gonna do each year. So that's that's kinda what spurred everything and how I g uh became became attracted to the the trading world.

And then one thing led to another and and just through uh my natural instinct to network and work with traders and work with business uh contacts and and really just get out there and not just live in a bubble Um I got to know a lot of great people and got connected with SMB Capital in New York and really was able to expand and and get my trading up and running and and go full time. That's kind of the background.

Yeah, that's a really good answer. So let's get into that sort of um education process which you briefly touched on there. What was that what was that like? Like what did you what was the process you went through and what was that education that you were sort of um absorbing right at the very beginning there. Right.

Everybody starts probably in a similar place where they're gonna they're gonna absorb all the free information that's available. So, you know, there was lots of hours on YouTube and lots of time on blogs and social media and trying to find videos and then then you go buy the stack of books from Amazon and you get'em and you start reading all of them. And, you know, that that kinda orients you to what's going on and the the lingo.

Um but it it really the the unfortunate part of that is it it can lead you down a challenging path. because you may you may start to learn the language of trading, you understand the concepts of what the different tools are and what the different instruments are and maybe maybe they talk about strategy but they don't tell you what to do. They don't guide you um either from liability or they just don't know what they're doing and they just know how to explain the market.

Uh they might just be a financial publisher and not really a trader. And so you don't really get the tool you you understand about it, but you don't understand what to do or how to do it. So it w it was kinda like a a struggle. Uh there's a lot of excitement about the possibilities and um but really just not having any guidance made it kind of challenging. And then little by little I realized and then the other traders I work with uh realize this even quicker than me is

y you just you have to if you really want the best information, best education and you want to accelerate your knowledge, accelerate the growth of understanding and your personal growth, you gotta hire people. You have to hire the experts to teach you. And so we went down that path and many tens of thousands of dollars later, uh, of educating ourselves. Um, that's that's really what it took. It really took that for us.

Um to m to and it some people say and I and I've heard this by educators that I've worked with and respect very much'cause I know they're excellent traders and they also teach is uh when they tell somebody about trading and they give'em a strategy and they they tell'em what not to do and give'em guidance on what they should be focusing on. If if they give that away for free, the person never follows through.

And they could charge a thousand dollars for the same conversation and the person that pays a thousand dollars is gonna pay attention, they're gonna take notes and they're gonna they're gonna hold themselves accountable for a period of time because they they put money on the line that they're gonna take that knowledge and apply it.

So that's what happened for us. We spent lots of money, different uh service providers And and the best education I've ever received was through S M B training and that's why um I stuck with them and and really started to develop a relationship there so that I could take that information and

and kinda help share it with other people and and help other people learn the way I did. Hopefully the right way, you know. Not spending too much time um, you know, trying to consume free information and and think that's gonna help them grow their trading business.

Yeah, sure. I mean I have actually heard that in the past that when you do pay for something, you do tend to, in most cases, pay more attention to it and um actually benefit from it more so. I mean, that's probably like a you know, marketer's favourite phrase as well, but um I it does actually like it genuinely holds weight in most cases. So that's that's a good point that you brought up.

Um and you also spoke about um in your answer there about he spent tens of thousands of dollars on education. I mean Surely no one actually wants to pay that much. In hindsight, how could you have maybe not spent so much on on education? Like how could you have I Oh yeah. I'd I'd say, you know, I could probably go through and pick out twenty thousand of that that that we could have skipped, you know, in hindsight. But you don't know which

uh thousands of dollars in which courses and what instructors and what online programs. In hindsight we know like that some of those um mm it probably gave us more of the tools and taught us um uh about the market in a way and and by having the cost involved we really had to absorb it and that helped us probably at at s in s at some level. Um but the parts that mattered, you know, it's probably Three or four thousand dollars worth of education after knowing the basics. that really

gave the tools that hard and fast, you know, here's your training wheels, um just follow these guidelines, do exactly these steps from day to day. And y you know, most people's personality, most traders' personality is aren't gonna be able to live, you know following a s a very specific set of rules from day to day, but by starting that way, by doing it that way and letting a system work, you can realize that this it's not about

your intuition in the market, it really is about strategy. It's really about using things doing things that make sense, doing things that work. and it's not about your ability to predict. Once you get past that and you stop thinking that y the only way you're gonna deserve a profit is by predicting.

then you that kind of frees you of that responsibility and you know that you can just apply things that work in the right circumstances. So that you know, that's probably, you know, tens of thousands is not the I'm not gonna say that what it takes. That's not true at all. Um, but I I think it does take a few thousand dollars of education to

at least accelerate your process. You know, take somebody else's ten years of experience and pain of developing how s how it works and let them teach you in a few hours. Let them show you or let them mentor you over a couple of months. and just shortcut all of the trial and error and get to what works.

generate profits from it and then go from there and and start developing your own ideas. Um but just trial and error alone is that's that's how uh it becomes where you're gonna be going against the odds for your success. 'Cause most people aren't willing to pay for somebody to to help them. Most people think you have to predict what the market's gonna do to have a profit and that's just simply not the case.

Sure. Okay. So even for you in the sort of the first few years of your journey, If you had to put it down to maybe one or two things, what would you say were the biggest challenges that you had to push through when you were coming up? So challenges that essentially impacted your PL in a negative way.

Right. So um thinking I have to predict is is part is where it stems from. And then the second part of that is when you're wrong, then you have no plan'cause you say, Well, I made the prediction and I really feel and it looking back at the s at the early struggles, I r I really feel like I thought

that if I didn't predict it right, I didn't deserve to change my mind and then you know, stop losing money. Like I had to take that pain from being wrong and I had to wait until the market agreed with me to get out of the position.

And that w that was probably the worst and most str stressful times uh where I went through a few different m mouses where they'd get smashed and I'd have to go get another one and all that stuff. But um now knowing that it has nothing to do with predicting and I don't have to feel like I earned a profit by guessing what was gonna happen correctly.

Um that now it's more about adapting to what's going on and knowing the the two different probabilities in every market, which is the trend and the range. Um if the trend is identified then you can expect continuation in that trend. However, you have to respect the range as well. So uh if if you're a little bit

overbought in a in a bullish trend, you can't just say I have to be bullish'cause it's bullish. You can either be flat or a little bit less long or maybe even a tiny bit short if you want. But um really Getting past thinking, well, we're overbought, the market has to go down and that's the only way I'm gonna make a profit this week.

Um that there's a lot more ways to do that. So going I want to make sure I answer the question fully. Um early struggles, is that is that kind of what we're getting at? Absolutely, yeah. Challenges. So thinking I had a predict thing uh not being willing to admit when I was wrong and and get in the right direction again. Um oh, poor strategies, the wrong strategies on the wrong instrument. Uh that's a big one. So so

frequently managed uh income trading styles on low priced ETFs. That's just a recipe for disaster. So i you know, if you have a iron condor or a butterfly management strategy and you trade that on an ETF and you hear people talk about fixing and adjusting and managing their profiles, you say, Okay, I get it. I'm gonna use ETFs and I'm gonna use an income strategy, I'm gonna manage it.

frequently to keep make sure I'm I keep it under control and wait till I trap the market. Well, y you got two things right and one thing wrong. And the one thing wrong is y you're using it on the wrong instrument, which means your commissions are gonna be a thousand percent more. give or take, you know, whatever the exact number is. But you you're spending ten times as much On commission.

for frequent management, which means you're now you're running uphill with the wind in your face because you have to overcome very expensive commissions on that strategy. Uh whereas

the same strategy on an index option has a better chance because your commissions are less. Um or, you know, contrarian trading without risk management. Um that's you know, I just It's a you know public your show's uh heard by a lot of people so I won't mention any names, but um receiving guidance from uh people that were really more in the entertainment business than the trading business. um that just expressing their opinions all the time and and

saying, I have the experience I've done this for so long and the market has to go down and so it's just be short, that's it. That's the whole strategy. It's just be short'cause the market has to go down. And when it doesn't go down, they're they're silent. They have nothing the no more guidance for you.

And you're left to say, Well, what am I supposed to do? And if you don't have the right strategy and you don't have somebody that uh is showing you whether or not they were even in that position, then you're you're left on your own. Now you're out there with you know, frustrated and you're waiting until you're right. So, you know, being in the right strategies, having people that are actually showing you that they're doing what they're saying.

they think is gonna happen and and giving you guidance as far as day to day um how to get out of it and what to do if things aren't don't go the way they think. The best traders I know Uh the bet uh they aren't you know, I'm not saying they're the best traders in the world, but the best traders that I know uh at SMB, i they n none of them think that they are going to be right.

That's just it that's all there is to it. They they have a an idea and they have a belief that they are skilled and have a good knowledge of the market. and that they're gonna be right more than half the time and really, uh, it's gonna be a a a number quite Bigger than half of the time? But it's still when they're wrong, they know. It it's I g I'm wrong. I'm done. We're I I'm out of that one. And it doesn't mean I'm flipping my position, it means I'm wrong and I'm done. I'm out of that one.

and you keep the loss small and you move on to the next one where when you're right you can have the big win. Um so it's just some of those kind of psychological things and strategic things where there's so many ways to approach the market that if you just have the wrong combination you're gonna be struggling.

So just having the right combination of strategies and psychology to make sure that you you have the the ability to control your losses when you're wrong and you know, have a have the good size wins when you're right.

Sure. Okay. No, that's a that's a really great answer, Andrew. Um and something I'd like to go into a little bit deeper on what you mentioned there. And it comes up now and then is why you shouldn't predict Um you shouldn't try and predict the market. But I mean, no one knows what the next one or X number of bars on the right hand side of their chart are going to be. So

What what do you mean by you shouldn't try to predict? Because obviously when you execute an order, you're either anticipating that it's gonna go up or it's gonna go down and hopefully in your favour, e either direction. Um Could you just expand on that, the reasoning on and the the mindset of predicting?

Sure. If if you're if it feel and this is going to get into just semantics, but hopefully that by going through that will maybe the psychology will come through. If if you feel like you're constantly predicting Or if it sounds like predicting, like th the market's currently wrong and it has to do this, or this announcement's gonna come out and this is what's gonna happen. And you basically position yourself with one scenario. If I'm right, I'll be profitable. If I'm wrong, I will lose.

If that's the case then you're you're gonna especially i and some people don't even go as far to say if I'm wrong because they just don't think it's possible. They say there's just no logical way that I'm wrong about this. And this is what has to happen and and I have to um be in that direction'cause it's the only thing that makes sense.

And they go for it. And if it doesn't work out, it's like their world falls apart and they don't under like they just they freeze. They don't it just it doesn't make any sense why it didn't happen the way they thought. Then they have no plan of what to do after that. Now we'll go into the part where you're saying you do have to have some kind of bias. You do have to um make some kind of assumption about what's gonna happen. Well

In options trading you don't have to make that distinction. You literally can have no directional opinion in options trading and go from that point. Your only opinion may be uh whether or not volatility will expand or contract in the short term. But even that is not gonna be that's only gonna be impacting the short term, but not the trade itself. So that's one way that you can remove predictions and I found that options traders that find good guidance and have discipline

have a higher probability of success than directional traders. And that's just from my own personal experience. I don't have some kind of deep, you know, thousand uh person survey to prove that or anything. But um my observation and working with a lot of traders and seeing the success rate um with the types of traders and seeing traders that failed at directional trading and then learned about non directional options trading.

that they have a much number one, they have a great chance that they will stop losing money if they have good guidance on the types of strategies and instruments to trade. And then secondly, they have a in an increased chance of generating some type of positive result. by using a systematic non directional options trade and with the right management strategies. And that's not saying that they're gonna make money every month, but if they stick with it for six months

in most market conditions, they're going to come out ahead by following those strategies. And they're not going to be home runs and you're not going to, you know, triple your account this year, but you can make decent income on on a decent sized account.

Then so now I'm gonna come now I'm gonna f finish the thought process by saying, Now when you do a directional trader, where does where does that leave them? They are a directional trader and I said that they can't predict, but they have to have an assumption.

the psychology that I would encourage, rather than feeling like a prediction, I would rather have a series of if then scenarios and several of them. So I would say if we trade back to this level, then I would consider that a great long opportunity. 'Cause it would be a dip in the direction of the trend. Just very simple if n scenario. If we were to have a dip in the direction of the trend to this level, I think the risk reward would be favorable.

for a directional trade back to the top of the range or to a new breakout and then I would close it when everybody else is buying the breakout. So that's my if then scenario. Say, well I don't have to just that's not the only way I need to make that I could make profits on that instrument. I can have a second if then scenario. If we don't pull back and we break out and we hold, then I can buy a held.

bid above that level or if we consolidate above that level for five or six bars and the bars are getting smaller, then I would also consider that a long opportunity. I don't need the market to come down to my level. I can take advantage of it another way. And that there I've just I've eliminated predicting what is going to happen. I've given myself two ways to profit. Then I can say if I if that first one happens and I buy it

and then it breaks the level that I thought was going to hold, now I can have a whole nother series of if then scenarios. If it holds below that and consolidates, now it's a short opportunity. If it trades back above and consolidates, it's a long opportunity. If it trades back above and takes off, I'm going to skip it. It's not trading i in a way that I want to trade and I'm just going to go on to something else.

Those are a number of scenarios where you say, Here's in this scenario I'm gonna have a small loss, in this scenario I might change my mind and go the other direction. In this scenario I have a lower probability trade, but I might be able to hold it longer. And you give yourself a number of ways to be in that.

without needing to say, you know, get in some chatroom or get on Twitter and say, XYZ gonna drop fifty po fifty cents and I'm gonna buy it and it's gonna make a new high. And now'cause you've made some public proclamac uh proclamation you feel like that has to happen for you to have any dignity in the world. Uh rather than that, just say here's some if then scenarios. If it gets here, I'm I would try this.

And it's a more humble attitude, it's a more adaptive attitude, and you don't feel like you have your pride tied up in what happens next in that stock or ETF or index or anything else. Yeah, that's that's really good. I like the idea of the if then scenario. Um that's that's definitely a way to overcome that predicting kind of mindset for sure. Um and just before we get into

a few more of the specifics about how you trade these days. I'd just like to ask you from the point you started to the point where you reached some sort of level of consistent profitability. What sort of time frame was that period? Uh there was probably a year and a half that was uh heavy bleeding and painful and stressful and then um probably uh a w uh six month period of kind of turning away from that and then

Hm, how I mean what year is it now? Fifteen, seven years. So and then after that, just kind of slowly and it's it's been a progressively steeper incline from that. So call it a year and a half of kind of poor results and non results. and then until I was moving into something that was more sustainable and then now at this point we're um you know, achieving levels as a as an active trader that

you don't hear about on in the news and from hedge funds and things like that, but just because it's more active and for smaller accounts than these these big institutions. Sure. Okay. No, that's very good. And

During that time like what the sort of the first eighteen months, how active were you trading and how intensively were you studying? I my study was off the charts. Um I would every waking moment that I had, I was reading and studying and back testing and creating charts and creating studies. Um

just going through and and watching webinars and reading books and reading information, it was it really was, you know, six AM to midnight every day. It was like I that's all I lived and breathed was the market. And that's just what I I felt like I had to do and it was i I learned a lot in that process. But I was also not consuming the correct information. So I had information overload from bad sources.

So from all of that free information that was out there from entertainers rather than um you know traders that were actually trading professionally and getting real real results and sharing their results that they were getting. Um so that's I don't think that's the process everybody should go through. I think I I worked too hard and looked in all the wrong places. Um and and was looking for people that were gonna show me how to predict the market.

Or w depending on them to predict it and feeling like I could follow blindly along with them. Um that that just none of that worked out very well. The study was very intensive. And the the activity was pretty active, you know, probably f five to fifteen trades a day, uh, sometimes more than that, which would have been a bad thing,'cause uh I would not have been trading strategically.

Um so moderate amount of trading. I wasn't I wasn't trying to scalp or day trade or or find the hot stock of the day or anything like that. I was just probably over managing options trades. um in the wrong instruments, the the commissions were through the roof, you know, really eating into any chance I would have had of making profit even if I knew what I was doing. Um all those mistakes, you know, that's that's kind of what it looked like.

So while I was working hard and feeling like the harder I worked, the worse it got. And so at some point I kinda backed off and said I'm seeing, I'm looking around and as I uh was getting into the S and B world and I started seeing these traders that had full time careers and were basically bought three courses and learned for a few months. Uh profitability. I said, Well what's going on here? These guys, you know, they trade like three times a week.

And, you know, then they're doing well. I don't understand this. So that's when I kind of adapted that mentality and got into a little bit calmer state and learning how to trade that way and it it was doing well. Okay, sure. And just real quick before we move on. while you're studying from like, say, six AM till midnight most days, you obviously didn't have a job during that period. So what were you doing for an income? So that that was with the group. I I was doing some other consulting.

and uh y m because my background is marketing. So I would do marketing consulting. Um I did some real estate consulting and I had some real estate deals that were left over. uh from the brokerage company that'cause commercial real estate deals specifically, a lot of'em take, you know, six months, eighteen months to happen.

So I had a lot of deals that were kind of pending that um I still had a a commission coming on, so those checks were coming um on occasion. So it it was enough. It was pretty thin though. There wasn't really a lot of income and you know there was there was more nights where I was buying ramen noodles and, you know, keeping things nice and easy. Um

But thankfully those those days are behind. At least for now. You know. I'm thankful for it but um that's that it does it's not like that anymore. But I think more importantly it's I'm I'm grateful for uh I don't even care about um you know, the what a little m extra money coming in does.

Mike Bellafiore says he he he talks to young traders and developing traders. And says, what do you think the greatest part of trading is? You know, why why do you think we do this? And they say, the money. And they try to come up with like a deeper answer'cause he knows they know that's what he's getting at. So like financial freedom and taking care of your family and things like that. He's like, Yes, all of that's good. All of that's great, but you could do that anything. You could go out

and get a master's degree and be an engineer and do something else. You know, you could get all of that. in some other job and industry. So why is it trading though? Why is it trading? and like, oh, you know, it's freedom and you can make more money and this and that and and Mike he always let he lets them go on and give all their answers and he's very consistent in his responses. This is something where

it's very challenging and most people don't make it. So when you can achieve and you can get to that point where you say, I went through the rigors and I went through that process and the learning process and now I can actually do it. And there's that achievement level. It's kinda it's more of an a an analogy for a professional athlete.

that has to work hard to get to a certain level. And you know, some people call it you you can almost call it like the gamification or the sport of it that that's that's the part that I'm really enjoying right now is that confidence that something I used to look at and have no clue and and used to kind of pound back on me and was challenging. Uh now I can navigate it from day to day and actually feel like I'm on the right side of things.

And uh it took a long time to get there, but I really enjoy that. Are you ready to get serious about trading? Then join Tasty Trade, Investopedia's best platform for options trading in 2026. Stocks, options, futures, and more. Tasty Trade has everything you trade all in one platform. Get low commissions, including zero commission on stocks.

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Okay Andrew, so let's move along a little bit and shift into some discussion about um more of about the way in which you trade nowadays. So how would you define your trading method? Uh the core positions that I'm in are income oriented and income some kind of has a uh lower returns and and it can be you're definitely not gonna hit uh big home runs, but it's it's definitely better than typical investment returns.

Um but income oriented market neutral trading of options on the indexes. So that is the core position probably Just gonna think about the numbers and try to do quick math in my head. Probably eighty percent of the portfolio is in that style of trading and then the rest is semi d uh semi directional still has an income approach. Often, uh probably ninety to ninety five percent of my trades are options, um a combination of buying and selling net short, net long, mostly short options.

Um and then a little bit of futures trading for hedging and for opportunistic uh swing trades and a little bit of uh just more recently in the last few months actually been diving deeper into the S M B equities programs. Um they have a a s a program now called Trader ninety where they that's where they have all their tools combined uh multiple meetings throughout the day talking about d um equity directional setups. So I've been getting into more of that.

since the income trading is going well and want to diversify further. But with the income trading that's oriented to selling market premium in the options market. Um you have the the edge of time decay, which uh is the one component to options trading that kinda allows you to trade with the wind at your back. Um if if s if you believe in trend following you can believe in the trend following of premium decay. Which is that it's a constant in the market.

And then you just have to mitigate the other risks in that trading. And that's where I orient a lot of my trading too. And that that is a probably a steeper learning curve to understand.

initially, but ultimately when you get through that little bit longer learning curve of how those different aspects work together, um, options trading is very much three and four dimensional rather than um Uh directional trading which is two dimensional, um r you can always call it three dimensional, you have up, down and then over time.

Uh with options trading you have volatility and implied volatility considerations and uh uh different Greek measurements and things like that. But once you get through that learning curve then options allows you to have um a higher probability of success as you trade from day to day and month to month. So that is Basically with style man, I do sell a lot of weekly premium. That is uh that took a long time to master'cause it is a very volatile market, so I do not recommend you hope.

uh two feet first into the weekly options market without a lot of experience in trading, probably starting with monthlies. Um, prefer liquid instruments that I can manage uh actively, but making sure I get enough premium. So there's a lot of criteria involved and making sure you find the right opportunities in the weekly selling market. Um I with individual stocks I buy options because they are a little bit more erratic and can move faster and further than an index.

So I like to buy weeklies on um individual stocks. uh based on the defined trend, pullbacks in the trend, consolidations within a trend, things like that. So that's kind of the mix that I have going on right now, but mostly that monthly contracts, index, options trading right now.

If you could, for those who might have no idea um about

the income aspect of options trading, how would you sort of just describe that and just explain that to someone? That's it's a good time you asked me that'cause just earlier today I was talking to Seth and then a gentleman Mike Eisner at SMB we had a conference call and we were discussing that exact topic because we want to bring some of our newer options programs um that are really based on uh very I'm gonna call them simple strategies and it's not because

uh they have a lower probability of success or any other factor that makes them less attractive. They're just simple to understand. And we were just discussing on how do you how do you describe this to somebody that doesn't know the options market. And the idea is there's the options market is an insurance market. If you look at the fundamentals of it. The futures market is

uh is originally designed and the purpose of it is for hedging. So if you own a bunch of stocks and you want to short term lock in the price of those stocks, but you don't want to Uh say you have a basket of a hundred stocks and they're all different places and let's say this is back in the old days when they were actually stock certificates.

And it was a big to do to go figure out how to sell all your stock because you thought the market was due for a correction, uh, it was crashing, maybe it was up a lot, so you want to hedge. Whatever that circumstance is, the process of selling was so cumbersome that it was easier to go to the futures market and sell a few futures contracts and and have a synthetic hedge. You synthetically reduced your exposure to directional uh conditions in the market.

The options market comes a step further and uses a variety of contracts, calls and puts uh that you can buy or sell and then combinations of those. And it basically creates that same hedging opportunity. You can sell calls which would limit your upside, but it says if the stock or index rises above this price uh at or before expiration, then I would

uh I would have the obligation to dispose of this asset at that price to the person that bought the call from me. And then if you buy the put or if you sell a put, uh if the market drops below the put contract, At or before expiration. then you could be under the obligation to buy the stock or asset. at that price from the person that

bought the put from you. So and then you can be on the other end, you can buy. So you'd have the right to execute that contract, but you wouldn't be obligated to do that. So once you get past that's where the learning curve is, you have to get all of these contracts and long and short puts and calls uh premium, buying premium versus selling premium. Once you get through all that the sh the simpler analogy is it's just like an insurance company. Uh there's the insurer

And then there's the insured. The insurance company is selling insurance premium. they are the ones taking on an outsized risk for something that is not necessarily likely to happen. And they do it in the right amount of size and they do it in a diversified way that they have an edge and they have a good business model. And in fact, as the insurance buyer, you hope they do. You hope they have the capability to fulfill their obligation.

Uh because you need to be protected in your specific circumstance. So maybe a trader, maybe a highly leveraged investor um can own a lot of shares of certain companies that they feel strongly about fundamentally on the long side. However, earnings announcements are coming up. Um or there's just maybe they have a nice profits kind of runaway from the mean in their favor and they want to defend the position but fundamentally they have no reason to sell it.

So they can go to the options market and buy puts. And they can they can put a floor on how much risk they have. And that floor is not a stop loss. The stop loss If it touches that price, you're out. It's done. They your your stock is taken away from you. Um your the position is closed and if it immediately spikes back up in your direction, you you're out of the position. You've lost it. So your way of defining risk is a limited opportunity because if it touches that point

Any time while the trade is open, you're out of the stock. But if you buy a put You can own the right to sell it at that price, but you don't have to sell it at that price. until expiration. At expiration you can either exer exercise your right or you can roll the contract, meaning you close that month because it's expiring and you go by and put in a different month. and that's a way to defend your position without using a stop lock.

And very common to do that because it adds a little more flexibility. Now all the benefits of that, the other side of the coin is that happens at a premium. you have to pay uh a premium value uh in some when you study it's called extrinsic value, it's called options premium. Um in that it's just like insurance premium. You have to pay for the right to be covered. And so you pay that extra value. So if

you don't use it, that premium goes away. Tur it goes to zero at expiration. So if you buy one a one month put, it expires a month from now, and you pay a dollar per share for that put for a hundred and fifty dollar stock. You're gonna lose three quarters of a percent. uh on that stock value to defend that position. So that but if it drops twenty percent overnight, you're gonna lock in, you're gonna minimize and you're gonna reduce your exposure. Say the put you bought was

uh five percent below the stock price and it opens up down twenty percent. You are capped, you do not lose more than five percent plus the cost of the put. So you would lose five and a quarter per five and three quarters percent instead of twenty percent.

And that's the purpose of the options market. Now if you go in and you are an option seller and you know how to combine various options positions and hedge those Um you can you can actually bet in both directions of the market at the same time and you ha you have the middle of that position which is premium decay in both directions, where either

own puts and sell more premium uh below it or you can sell calls and sell puts. That increases your odds because usually an options buyer is going to buy in one direction or the other. But when you s if you bought in both directions you'd be overinsuring, statistically speaking. So you'd be you'd have too much premium paid. Well, if you go as a seller, you wanna sell too much. You wanna sell

more than is probably gonna be needed to ensure those positions. And then you use other management techniques um uh management from day to day. You can look at your risk and make adjustments when things are changing or if volatility gets to a certain level you reduce your exposure. Uh there's a lot of management techniques beyond that.

And you can see that from there it's it's entirely different. It's a completely different market than uh stock trading where you just have a variety of setups that have a probability of either going up or going down. Um and then that's your directional exposure. It's a very fifty fifty. when you when you look over a a thousand trades and a thousand traders, it's a fifty fifty game. Um uh whereas a trader with excellent experience and guidance and um using a good system or good strategy

is gonna be better than fifty percent. An options trader can pretty much day one with a good system, uh, can become sixty or seventy percent profitable. and they can use management techniques that keep their risk reward very favorable as well. Um but you have to get through that learning curve of how the options market works. And without the proper learning curve you have um a lot a lot going against you because there is an outsized risk involved.

in the options market that the brokers, the market allows you to take amounts of risk that would they would not allow you to take on a pure stock trade. Um, so that's that's a risk that has to be understood and has to be studied very well or else you could be walking into a lot of pain in the options market. Okay, that's excellent, Andrew. Um thanks for you know really expanding on that. That's excellent. Um so while options are of course your your weapon of choice.

The way in which you trade options, I believe, is fairly systematic. So if you could describe to us What extent is your approach systematic and are there still any discretionary aspects to this? I I worked for a very long time to develop systems. uh through a combination of underlying market statistics and signals uh for both the trend as well as mean reversion. And then I also did a lot of systematic study of option strategies, so different management techniques.

um selling different strikes with different times expiration, different f uh frequency of management, different uh ways of looking at directional risk and hedging that from day to day. And Um I actually my first experience with S and B was a as a student and that was actually taking a course. I'm gonna call it a course, but at the time I took it was not a course. It was actually I asked them, uh I called up and I talked to Steve Spencer.

Co founder and I said, W is anybody there? Could they train me on developing trading algorithms? and he said, Let me get back with you So uh and then he got back with me and said, We have an algor algorithm trader here. He develops systems and he is developing systems and signals and indicators

for the firm and he would be willing to do a training. So I actually went up to S and B uh and this is part of where my you know that adding up to my um you know a little bit more expensive learning experience than most traders go through, but um I think it was ten days I actually spent there the first time.

on the desk working with Rick Martin, their um algorithm and systems tr uh trader and trading developer. And that's where I started to learn a lot about the systematic approaches, very rule based uh combining a lot of the tools that you see. So if you see an indicator and you see a system, you can actually just take all of that information and combine it into one set of rules. and automate a back test. Automate

uh report that would tell you how well that would do and what the statistics behind it were. And There's there are some very excellent um algorithms and systems out there. To me there's a lot of systems that you can develop a back test that has extremely great results. High probabilities uh of the historic trades working out, um, excellent equity curves, low drawdowns, big run ups.

doing very well. But when you dig down and you either randomize the information or you move it into the forward market um a lot of those systems break down and don't work. So as far as high probability trading, to to to be able to develop a fully automated directional system to me is not it's just not my psychology. I spent a lot of time working on that and I got a lot of benefits from it that I'll talk about in a second. But just as far as the study of it and applying it

To answer your question, do I use discretion? Discretion is a huge part of my execution trading and my trading decision. I use systems to guide what I look at. Um I get signals and alerts on things that are worth trading for a variety of reasons. Uh either pullbacks in the direction of the trend, liquidity, uh relative implied volatility.

things like that, relative strength to the market, a lot of those things, uh general trendy trendiness signals, consolidation signals, uh, on all instruments that I really like that work well and continue from from back testing statistics all the way into taking those signals as a discretionary trade, seeing that

the wind is really at my back. The trades get easier, the profits are more easy. I don't have to wonder about what's gonna happen in the trade. I just know I have a good probability. I put the trade on, I have a reason to exit, I have a reason to take profit, and that's it. So on systems, I believe that system studying systematic trading is very valuable. It's actually very valuable for an investor, somebody that's looking for

uh much longer term holds using a systematic approach. Maybe uh it could even be a fundamental way of looking at the market and picking a portfolio. there's still a systematic way that Rick taught me and then together actually a couple of years later we then developed a course together to kind of formalize that experience that I went through.

which was kind of off the cuff, uh, scheduled, he designed it. We s got together and we had a ten day one on one experience to study and learn all of this and I got to absorb his decades of experience on Wall Street and in Chicago. and absorb all that information, process it, stay in communication, developed a lot of systems, um, did a lot of correspondence and work together, phone calls, went back and visited.

and then ultimately it came down to saying, uh let's formalize this, make it a a s a more of a video series that's a little easier to to intake, more affordable'cause it's recorded, so we put that together. And in that we actually Uh in that course we had a couple minute period that we talked about what we call the seven steps to system success. which is whether it's an a discretionary

Uh the really you can use it to analyze your own discretionary trading is one thing you can do with it. So you're basically analyzing yourself as the system or you can analyze an indicator, you can analyze a management technique.

uh a f a filtering system. Say if a filter generates that this is a stock we're trading for the day and you can just see what the ending result for that day would be on each of those. But whatever it came out to be Uh these seven steps are very uh useful for kind of measuring any type of trading, any style of trading. Yeah, okay. So those seven steps which you just mentioned there.

Um I've actually seen that video series and it was really well done. So would it be possible to ask you to briefly run through those seven steps, just mentioning what each one is along with just one or two real quick points?

Yes, got it. Uh um the first there's so the seven steps and we have them in a in a specific order. And one of the first things I like to mention is um when looking at this And and you can do this for a lot of any type of education when somebody's giving you a list or a bullet point or a summary, you can say, why isn't something in this? And in this circumstance, um I would like to point out the fact that the one that we have listed last is last for a reason.

and it's without fail. Any system uh I talk about one of the most common questions at the very beginning is accuracy. It actually just today we have the Options Tribe uh premium chatroom And the question came up today. We're talking about ratio straddles uh where I sell premium at a ratio

So I have a directional opinion, but I also have a market neutral opinion, uh, premium decay, stop losses, automated management, things like that. You're saying the first question, we're kind of bringing up that conversation again, and one of the first questions that got popped in was and I I will I'll kinda leave some suspense. I won't even tell ya. But it was this last point. It's the without fail, it's so common to see the first question be asked is what we feel

uh is one of the least important things to be concerned with in trading. So there's your suspense, so I'll I'll save it for the end. Um the first one

is risk. That is absolutely the first and most important thing. Uh the first is the w one at the end, but one of the top ones that's often discussed is what's the return? How much did it make? What how much did it make last year? What's the average annual return? How much did it make per week? That's the often the first question is how much did it make? But we like to look at what what is the risk? And there's multiple forms of risk.

And there is the series is free. If you go to S M B training or actually I think you can just Google it, if you just type in seven steps to system success. Uh it's yeah. Probably or you can yeah, you're gonna link to it probably. I'll put a yeah, I'll put a link to it in the show notes. So if anyone wants a link it'll just be at chatwithraders dot com forward slash twenty eight.

Um and the link will be just below the interview. So Yeah, that'll be good. You can go through that and see. But risk we talk about total capital required to make the trade, average drawdown, average loss, uh cumulative drawdowns at the peak to trough measurement, uh looking at standard deviation of a loss. Um a lot of those types of measures that's most important because if you have two systems

that both make sixty percent a year on average. And one has five percent drawdowns and the other one has fifteen percent drawdowns. And I have actually a couple more examples where it even goes to the point of showing a system that made less but had a better ratio of drawdown. when you apply leverage to that or you randomize that information and you take the same statistics and you repeat it randomly through a uh program

it actually shows you that it's unreliable or it's less reliable and when that happens it means that's something you can't scale up. Um n nobody's trading because they want to make another thousand dollars a month. Everybody that's ever gotten into trading, no matter how small they start

The they all it's without fail, you if you know how to do it, you're gonna open up an Excel sheet and you're gonna do some kind of compounding interest calculation to figure out how quickly you're gonna be able to trade bigger so you can make more. And if you don't fully know and understand risk as a mathematical figure in your trading,

you all of those dreams of compound interest are gonna turn into nightmares because you don't understand the big drawdown that's coming. And you have a couple of good weeks or a couple of good months, so then you ramp up your size and you don't know when that risk that you could have defined by your strategy

that it was gonna hit you down too far. So you shouldn't have ramped up so quickly. You should have ramped up a little slower considering the risk that was probably coming. Uh they do this at S and B on the options desk. Um they're they're doing very well. The market's been excellent for market neutral options trading. But the reality is, you know, the flash crash is coming, two thousand eight is coming, and August two thousand eleven is coming and which is which are the harder times.

And there's gonna be a drawdown month. So they're always taking that in consideration on their trade size, not just ramping up the next month'cause last month was good. They know the pending risk. They know what's gonna happen.

And so that's how you pick your trade size and and how big you're gonna trade and what your expectation is. The second one is reward. You do have to have a positive belief in a positive mathematical and statistical outlook that you're gonna have trading profits. So and they need to be proven by looking back in time at what you've been doing, and they need to be proven in a simulated environment, and they need to be proven forward.

uh in the real world. And if you're not getting a reward, if there's not profit You need to really don't let psychology say, well eventually it's gonna start working, or I'm gonna start tweaking things that I've never considered before and think that's gonna make the difference. You have to have a positive expectation of profit. The third one is actually the term expectancy. So I kinda said expectation, but expectancy is an actual math formula.

that's used for your average win, your average loss times the number of each of those. And that comes down to an expectancy number. It's a very simple calculation that we could almost put this as I can almost move this up to number one'cause it's it's such a valuable number and There's so many other figures that uh systematic traders use as far as cumulative average returns, sharp ratio, uh standard deviation of returns, etcetera.

cumulative or expectancy is a simpler and very straightforward um figure that also has the benefit where when you have a single trade on, while that trade is on, it's very, very difficult to think about the fact that this is one out of a thousand trades. There's gonna be a thousand entries and exits.

that you're gonna experience on a system or through some approach to the market. And when you look at each trade as if whether or not this one works out or whether i if sixty percent of the next ten trades or eighty percent of the next ten trades work, that that's has some kind of weight on the system.

When the reality is it's over a thousand you need to know that every time you pull the trigger that you're not going to achieve a specific return That is your expectancy number, but you need to psychologically say, as long as I do this right, as long as I follow my rules, as long as I do what I'm supposed to do with this trade. I need to just know that I'm racking up my expectancy number. That every time I do it right, I just say I earned

twenty three dollars on this trade because that's my expectancy in this system. Whether or not you lost ten or you made sixty, it doesn't matter. You say my expectancy is twenty three dollars per trade and that's the psychology you have behind using expectancy rather than how often you're right. The fourth one is volatility.

which is not not necessarily the volatility of the instrument you trade, but it's actually the volatility of returns. So it's Basically it's simple it's not simple math, but it is uh simply proven with math. that if you have less volatility of returns, so fewer of your trades are outliers. Uh most of your profits aren't generated from one or two big wins and you don't have these

sudden uh larger losses than usual. When you can eliminate those, you have less outliers, you have a better probability of that system working for years and years to come. So looking at different ways of volatility of returns is something that we do. Um the f which one am I on? Five. Five is frequency. So that is partially psychology also has to do with Uh transaction costs.

that uh a higher frequency system, especially as a retail trader, has instantly has lower probabilities of success because your ratio of cost to expectancy goes up. So that is uh one of the things behind frequency. Also your ability to execute if you're taking the trades manually goes down because uh on paper it looks wonderful. In the real world you realize that sometimes you're sick, sometimes you go to the bathroom, sometimes

uh the power goes out and there's a lot of things where you can't mess with your statistics because of uh the fact that you aren't a machine. Uh the sixth one is duration. So that's a a kind of a psychology one. That lets you know that some systems, um trend oriented systems specifically, are going to have uh a lot of losses.

put together. So they're gonna have a lot of small losses with very short durations. So you're gonna feel like you take a loss, you take a loss, you take a loss, you take a loss. And then you have a trade that starts to go in your favor. Psychologically you say, This is I don't want this one to turn into a loss too, so I'm going to take it off. And that becomes the one that makes ten times more than any of the losses had.

knowing that you're s there are systems like that. I've I've seen systems with thirty percent accuracy or less. that were fantastic systems'cause they had tiny little losses when they're wrong. So they just accumulated a few little losses, but they were great setups. They were the times when they could take that small amount of risk.

and they get wiggled out, they take uh uh the setup occurs again, they take a little risk, they get wiggled out, and then the setup occurs, they they load up on the position and it goes in their favor. And it goes big and it goes for a long time. So your losses may have been two, three hours, and your wins can last two weeks. and be enormous. So knowing that behind your system lets you know to to allow those losses to just happen. Let them accumulate, let them happen over a short period of time.

Um if the wh entire market is very stagnant, you may have a lot of stocks, a lot of positions all experience the same thing at the same time. And right around the time you want to quit and pull the plug, y five or six of those gonna can run in your favor big on that system. So you just have to know what the duration expectancy is.

Uh and then the last one. Or the last one which often is brought up as the most important thing. It's the first question I often receive about a system or a strategy. that is I feel could almost be removed from the list, but there is a purpose for it on the list, so that's why it's still there. And that one is accuracy. Asking how often or how many trades out of ten or how many trades out of a hundred are profitable is probably the most common first question.

But it is the least important aspect of trading to know if something is gonna be reliable and profitable in the future. Um the psychology of having to be right is what often brings that up. The psychology of wanting to win often is brought up um the training that we have in school that says if you get below seventy if you get less than seventy percent of the answers right, you are a failure. You have failed at this. and bringing that into the trading world is what keeps a lot of people

from becoming profitable and having fun in this in this market. You have to be willing and understand that you may actually be wrong half the time and that could lead to excellent results. you could have a fifty percent success rate and have outstanding results. Because if you're fifty percent accurate in a trend following approach to the market So half of your trends run in your favor and half of'em have small exits.

you're gonna be fantastically successful at trading. The reality is trend following is often thirty five to forty percent accurate. And that's why most people fall in love and with the concept of trend following but then when they try to execute it they often get shaken out and move on to something else pretty quickly.

because they get that negative feedback from the market and see that they're accumulating losses and instinct comes in and says, Well if I'm not getting the results I expected, it's probably wrong and I need to quit. But the reality is you just didn't have the right expectations. of how that was going to work out. You you probably were misled um into being only shown great examples of when something worked or being shown uh two things that didn't work and five things that did.

And that sets you up for that expectation that if you do this you're gonna win more often than when you're wrong. And the reality is it's probably not that way. It's probably seven losses and three wins or six losses and four wins. That's probably how it is. And you may actually enter where you have ten losses in a row or one out of ten works. And that's not enough data to consider something invalid. You have to look at more information than that.

So th those are the seven steps in a very abbreviated way. The entire video series that you can opt in and get for free um explores that over uh I think it's either seven business days or seven calendar days. That you get those.

Whereas a video and kind of an article that goes with each one of those. So you go through that entire process and even that is just a very brief snapshot of what Rick and I went into in the uh Systems Foundation course at SMB where we really dive deep into all these metrics and ways of looking at different techniques and strategies. uh and how they how you can measure them and know if they're gonna work.

All right. Awesome. No, that was really good, Andrew. Um thanks for thanks for again for going into so much detail on that. And I again I'll put the link to that um in the show notes at chatwithraders.com forward slash twenty eight. So Um if anyone's interested in um learning more about systematic trading then um definitely definitely check that out. Um I did and I got a lot of value from it. So

Anyway, we should probably start to wind things down, but let me ask you just one more question and I love to ask this question to a majority of the guests. And that is what's the number one reason why the majority of traders lose money and never reach a high level of success in your opinion.

Well, I'll just I'll have to just give an answer because you know I could probably think about this for days and and come up with it, but um or I might give a mixed answer. One is There's uh traders enter the market with a lot of confidence. because they've they've they're either smart so they're they may be more intelligent than a lot of their peers, family or friends. And so they look at the trading market and say, Okay, most people fail at this.

However, I'm generally smarter. I I am uh you know, good head on my shoulders when I try to understand something I do well with it and I'm also passionate about it. So they say, Well, I have what it takes because most of my friends they're just not even interested. So if they try, they'd probably fail. So I'm probably well suited for success because I have other success in my life. Or I've seen um very successful businessmen

and investors um that you know th in in the in the markets that come to trading and they they get uh a negative feedback from the market, meaning they lose money. And They approach it the same way they would approach anything else in their life. If it's sports and you're losing, you just practice harder and you try harder and you learn more and in through sheer effort you're going to be able to improve yourself and get better results.

in business, you can work longer hours and you can um cut your prices and you can make decisions that you control w how you're going to fix it and you get positive results from that in other areas of your life because you overcome what's going on and you make it work. And trader those that are attracted to trading often have that mentality and characteristic. They come to the market and it you have to learn very, very quickly that your willpower

He has no place in the markets. Your willpower to say, I am going to hang on to this trade until I'm right. Um, I'm gonna will this system to work, I'm gonna will this trade to work, and and you just say, I know I'm gonna be right, and you take that approach to the market, um the worst thing that can happen is that you get rewarded for that a few times. Uh so you call the top.

in something that's high flying or up big for the day. You call the top and it and it and it drops right away. Say, Oh, that's great. That should have taken a bigger size. Then it happens again and you do it again a little bigger size. Oh, that was great. And you don't even realize the whole market was consolidating, so every pop was faded. And and then all of a sudden uh you know, the December rally comes and the market breaks out, you say, Well, I've been conditioned, I know it works.

Um, I'm gonna short this thing. And then it takes off. The whole market goes up six percent, your stocks go up eleven percent, and the whole time you're just trying to will it, you're trying to study, you're trying to figure out why it should go down, why it's gotta work out why you're right. And through some willpower effort it's gonna work out for you.

Um, where the the mentality that works is to know when you're wrong and have a understanding that certain strata there's nobody that's gonna be right a hundred percent of the time and as soon as you are wrong, as soon as you get to a point that is exceeded your expectation of what should happen. that you need to do something about it. And one reason I love options trading is I don't always have to close the position.

I uh in my psychology that works great because I still get to kinda hang on to my idea. But in options trading I can take other approaches for just kind of defending myself and and bringing in a different trade to kind of enhance the position and and not really close the original one. Uh it's just kind of a psychological game I get to play uh that that helps me and it really works out better. But that's I I think that's kind of it. Is that they bring in

success in other areas of their life, they try to apply it to the market and it doesn't it's but the market doesn't play by the same rules. So I think I'm just gonna pick that one. I think that's kind of one I may not be a common one that's brought up Yeah, that's actually a really unique answer. I don't think anyone's given anything quite from that angle before, so th I really like that answer. That's a good one. Um now Andrew, thanks so much for coming on. Um now I know

There's quite a few listeners who I've spoken with who are keen to get into options or who might have already started on options. So would you be open to answering any questions that listeners might have in the comments about trading and more specifically around options? Yeah, that'd be great. You can uh uh just let me know or figure out some way that I can be notified when they Get posted and I'd be happy to answer any questions.

For sure, yeah. So if anyone has any ans um sorry, if anyone has any questions for Andrew, just go to chatwithraders.com forward slash twenty eight, scroll to the bottom of the page and just leave a comment there and um I I'll let you know, Andrew, whenever there's any new questions there and um you can jump onto those. Great. Okay, and where can listeners go to find out more about you? You can go a lot of places to find out about me, but um

Uh most of my work right now is through SMB Capital and SMB training, uh also known as SMBU. So the fastest way to type that in is probably SMBU dot com. Um you can also get me on Twitter. So I have a pretty unique first and last name combination. So if you d uh were to Google Twitter, Andrew Faldi or just Andrew Faldi in general. Uh you'll probably find me in a few different places and I don't have any other distant relatives or anything with the same name at this point, so

I I'm pretty easy to find that way as well. So uh Twitter, uh Andrew Faldy, or I think it's Andrew F underscore S M B, but it's pretty hard to miss. Um but what's what's any other way? Uh Andrew at andrewfaldy dot com is email address. You can send that as well, so it'll come right to me and then I can add you to my Google Plus and you can get updates that way as well. Okay, good one. Well I'll make sure to put links to um everything you just mentioned there uh in the show notes.

um including your Twitter handles. So um yeah, anyone who wants to find out more about you can just jump onto any of those links. And uh like I mentioned I'll also put a link to the video series that you created about system trading. All right, Andrew, well thanks so much for coming on the show today and sharing plenty of valuable pointers uh with everyone listening. Have an awesome week and uh let's stay in touch. All right, you're welcome. Thanks a lot for having me. Thanks Andrew.

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