070: Jeff Davis – Specializing, Automating and Using Stats for High Probability Trade Setups

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Okay, what's happening team? I'm thrilled to have you tuned in for what is a really interesting episode ahead with Jeff Davis. Jeff is a day trader who specializes in the SP futures, and he predominantly trades a mean reversion strategy which is built upon real data and statistical probabilities. Across his 20-year trading career, Jeff has also been heavily involved in the process of developing and deploying algorithmic strategies, but to a slightly lesser extent these days.

In this interview we talk about Jeff's prop days, the risks of being a one man business, automated trading, specializing, statistics, and a whole lot more as well. From this conversation, I think you'll pick up on the underlying theme, which is really all about building confidence in your strategy and then being able to size up when you have edge.

Lastly, Jeff has kindly offered to answer any trading questions that you might have, or if you'd like a little more depth around any of the topics that we head on. All you gotta do is go to chatwithraders.com forward slash 70 and leave a question in the comments area at the bottom of the page. Very straightforward. I think you know the drill by now. Take advantage of that, guys. I really do encourage that. Alright, so here we are. Please enjoy episode seventy with Jeff Davis.

Hey Jeff, what's going on? How are you? Hi Aaron. How I'm fine today. Um, thank you for having me on. Uh Nice to chat with you again. Likewise, likewise. It's awesome to have you on. Thank you very much for doing this. I know it's Sunday evening where you are, so um nice commitment from your side. But

First of all, let's start right at the very beginning. I think we're going back probably close to twenty years now. How did you get started in trading? Tell us about what you were doing at the time and yeah, what led you into financial markets? Well, I took uh you know, my path to trading wasn't what I would call conventional. I grew up in uh farm country about two and a half hours north of New York City.

But then after I graduated high school I ended up moving down about an hour outside of the city. Um was about when I was 30 years old. I was already married, had a mortgage, had a baby, another baby on the way, and that's I had a lot of responsibilities, and I was working in the US Postal Service. And um I worked in a processing center.

And the processing center being in that environment allowed me to have access to virtually every magazine and newspaper that came through the mail to be able to see it and read it. So I was a voracious reader and uh That's when I kind of discovered my interest in stock trading and the internet kind of was coming around at the same time. So that kind of enabled where you didn't have to be in the city in order to be a stock trader.

And everything just kinda, you know, started to go from there. I just uh I never knew what I wanted to do or be in high school. So it didn't make sense for me to go to college. So I went into the post office. I had no finance or economics background of any type and uh I just became attracted to the puzzle of picking stocks and then when day trading came around that really struck a chord with me.

I like the fact that I could possibly make a living from it while being my own boss. That I that really appealed to me. So I just kind of dove right in and proceeded to make every possible mistake one could make. But I I wanted to get there, so I just kept at it.

Excellent, excellent. Okay, well let's talk about some of those mistakes. So maybe walk us through your first one or two years when you decided that you were gonna start trading. Uh f well, first the first uh foray was uh just, you know, a small personal account, you know, not day trading at all, wasn't really available, no leverage or anything in that. Made a little bit and was able to save up and then when uh

you know, the prop firm started to come about with the L L Cs in that. Um, I was able to uh be able to join one and uh $25,000 account at that time minimum. And uh joined it and used to get my quotes over the internet and have to call in my orders. So it was very interesting and just I'd read a lot and like most people out there starting out, you just have all this enthusiasm and you read something and you think.

that's really gonna be it and do it and just turns out to not be that way. You know, there's guys out there that have been doing it and they're just gonna you know, you're gonna learn your lessons. And so I proceeded to learn my lessons. One of the big ones I learned right away was about risk. And it was because where I opened my account, the firm went under because a trader blew up the whole LLC. That was in 1999, Harbor Securities. So uh luckily for me.

it wasn't that big of a monetary loss because I was fabulously good at that point at burning up my own account. So by the time somebody else actually blew up the firm, uh I didn't have too much left. You know, I was well on my way to doing it on my own. So but I did learn a lesson in risk from that. So So how does how does that work? How does a single trader blow up a whole prop firm?

Uh, that time I guess the risk controls weren't that good and and everything was levered. There wasn't much money behind the firm really. So I think he made a bet on Apple earnings, I believe it was, in a very big way. And when he was wrong That was it. The whole the whole pie went down. Well, okay. Well I don't imagine he was too popular. No. No. Well, I don't think anybody was that, you know, was related, you know, in that firm, you know, had that firm that started it.

So then from there I went, you know, proceeded to just uh learn that lesson, saved up again and from there I went and I went to bright trading. And I did a little more research and knew they had the financial wherewithal and that and uh went to them. And needed to get a series seven. So I studied for two weeks, took the series seven test, passed out with a ninety-one.

Uh put 25,000 up with Bright and started uh heading to the city then. I decided they they didn't allow remote, which was very good for me at that point. And went down and got to sit on a desk and be surrounded by lots of different traders, lots of different strategies.

And um that was the start of like my prop trading career back then. Mainly all because of leverage. You could get the leverage. So if you were gonna make a daily or a monthly check, I didn't leave my job. I worked a night shift. So I actually worked overnight. Left in the morning, pretty much went straight to the train station, slept on an hour and a half train ride. And got up and traded all day and slept on the train back and did that day after day. That's how bad I wanted to learn.

Okay, so so when did you fit sleep in? Like when did you get a decent sleep? I know you said you had an hour and a half in the morning, but when was the when did you catch up? Um, sometimes I didn't trade the whole day. You know, I'd leave in the afternoons or something like that early to get in. You uh but I could go I was younger then. You could go a couple of days with you know, without a lot of sleep. So

You just did it. You know, I had no other choice. That was that was the way. I had bills to pay. I couldn't just walk away yet. And um That was it, no other options. Do it. Okay, so before joining Bright, were you a profitable trader at the time or did you learn to become profitable while you were at the firm? Um more so at Bright, but more at Bright. I never really became super profitable. I was always um more break-even then, I would say. I didn't know

What's I hadn't settled on a strategy yet, just the market changed immensely. Um when I decided to go full time, it was in March of 2000, the top of the Nasdaq tech bubble in the market. So um I had a lot of strategies worked out. I imagine as most people did, and they were all turned out to just be bull market strategies. And when the market started going down and their volatility really cranked up, nothing that I had thought I was going to be able to do was going to work.

So it became really clear then I had to learn to adapt. And that was, you know, that was the big lesson that I learned there is it was all about adapting at that point, just surviving. And they were changing rules at that time too in the markets. That's when we went from fractions to decimals. There was just all sorts of changes, you know, in the market structure and that also. So I really learned that you can never just depend on anything to stay status quo for very long.

Okay, so how were you affected by the crash? Did you lose much money during that time or were you okay? No, because since I was new at Bright, um they had some controls on me, which was a good thing. And then um I just I managed to survive. I didn't really make money. I wasn't taking a check from there. I was still working. But I learned how not to lose money in that in that environment, you know, where I had I learned how to short.

I had no clue really how to short before, but in that market, you had to learn how to short. I really got a taste of volatility right away. Very interesting, got exposed to a lot of different types of strategies in that also. When you went into Bright, the first thing you kind of were taught was to go in and you were gonna tape read. And you were a tape reader and you were gonna pick one stock and you were gonna specialize in that stock.

To the point where If you got good enough you could tell when the specialist that was trading the stock on the s stock exchange floor went to lunch. Because you saw his little tricks. That's that was the whole thing. You knew all the rules of the specialist. You tried it to trade. Your whole object was to try and trade on the side of the specialist. Trade along with him, not against him. Okay. And is that something that you picked up and actually adapted for yourself at that point in time?

Uh slow learner. Okay. Slow learner here. Didn't come didn't come right away and you know, started to get it. And most of my problems were mainly me. not not really strategy wise or anything. I would tend to uh get over exuberant and trade too much and, you know, lots of the beginning stuff in that. Could pretty much I would make money in the morning and then proceed to give back a good chunk of it in the afternoon.

And just never did anything at that point to stop it right away. Okay. So how long were you with the firm for until you went out on your own and began trading independently? I was going down to Bright's offices daily until nine eleven, two thousand and one, when the office was we couldn't get to the office anymore. It was right next to the Trade Centers. Okay. So then they had to allow us to trade remotely and

That was it. I traded remote with it with them for a while and then ended up the you know, there was lots more competition and that and ended up moving on to, you know, trading from home and just doing my own accounts and that. There was other ways of getting leverage. Okay. And did you experience any challenges when you made that switch from going from trading within a prop firm where you're surrounded by traders to now being at home where it's just pretty much you?

Oh yes, yeah. Trading trading remotely was, you know, lonely, hard, but great at the same time. You just, you know, it's takes getting used to. Uh on the floor, though, in the in the office, you got exposure to different strategies, but never really did I experience where it's like this.

Big team thing where everybody's sharing everything. I mean, when the market was open, guys were trading. They were worried about making their money. And that they weren't telling you. You could sit next to somebody, but he wasn't telling you what he was thinking every moment in that. He was focused.

You know, guys that wanted to make money. I that's one thing I learned right away. The guys I had focused were the ones that made money. The guys that did the same thing every day, learned their strategy. The other guys came and went. The desk went from, you know, 50 people down to 15 at one point. saw so many people come and go.

So you you know, you really learn that the markets change and you gotta adapt with it. Saw guys that could make money for years that all of a sudden couldn't make a dime. Gone.

Interesting. Interesting. Okay. So I'm not sure where this fits in on your timeline, but at some point you went from being a discretionary trader to actually quantifying your approach. Um, when did that happen and how did that happen more importantly? When did that happen? Years later. Mainly when After I I got Lyme disease. And I got Lyme disease and I got sick and for a couple of years was too medicated to be able to trade. And I realized then that uh being in one man business

was great, but there was downsides to it. And when I came back one of my first goals was then to try to figure out a way where some things could be getting done if I wasn't able to physically trade all the time. And that was a big thing. That was a big realization that I think a lot of traders, a lot of your listeners that are starting out, they don't they don't take into account

Things happen in life. Life happens and you're a one man business. Um, if you can't make it to the keyboard or you're highly medicated for something, you're just you're not gonna perform the same. You're not gonna make money most likely. And you have to take that into account. So when everything is good and and you feel you have edge in that, you have to really make sure you push it and and you make money.

You can't be just fiddling along for a long period of time because you don't know when life is going to happen. Hopefully for most people it you know, nothing like that will happen. Yeah, I think that's a really valid point that you brought up there. And um this is something you mentioned to me when we last spoke, which I thought was awesome, is that

you know, when you're trading you're in most cases you're a one man band and if something happens to you, then um, you know, you're out of business pretty much. So Um, no, I really like that point. So what was the first step you took towards actually being able to quantify your strategy? Like how did how did that s begin to happen? Like how did you set those wheels in motion? Well the first thing was I developed um a tool. It was supposed to be a tool, and it was tape reading stock.

And I ended up getting that programmed with somebody that I was working with that I was mentoring and he was a programmer. So we exchanged my mentoring for his programming and ended up, you know, coming up with a really good product, really cool, really different. And um we just continued working on that. And ended up at some point I just saw it and said, Wow, this can be built into a strategy.

And that's when I went down that road of really, you know, learning about and and trying to build a a system. Now I had tried a s you know, I always a dabbled in it a little bit. Back in Back in 2005 when I was trading, one of the days of the year that I used to look forward to was the Russell Rebalance.

And starting out on the Russell Rebalance, I had identified certain types of stocks that tended to have big closing moves. There were big moves after the on the close with the MOCs on the Russell Rebalance in stocks. So I had identified that. So for a couple of years, I was trading them discretionarily and did well, did very well on those days.

So then I wanted to take that to where I could really, you know, not miss any opportunities. So I actually, you know, my brother was a programmer. I had him program a a program for me that would narrow everything down for me, filter it,'cause the filtering systems that back in that day weren't that good. I gave them all the parameters I wanted. They were custom.

And then it spit out the stocks and you, you know, in the last four minutes you were buying or selling and you were, you know, it was a four minute trade. That's it. You were out on the close. And so that was my first foray into you know, at that time nobody had the word algorithm. It wasn't you know, wasn't in use. There was no algorithmic trading or anything, but

That trade uh kind of all went away when computers came to everybody. You know, Russell imbalances now are not that big of a deal anymore. They were, you know, there was a lot of edge in them, and now the edge has pretty much been arbed out.

So that was my first foray. Then developed the the tape reading tool. That went back to my bright roots, just uh what's a strong stock, what's a weak stock. And you know, that algorithm pretty much is reading a whole bunch of different stocks. And then it takes all those metrics that you know it's it's it's determining buying and selling strength across a whole range of stocks.

And then that spits out some metrics and then a second algorithm then would take those metrics and la allow us to take those levels and turn them into some sort of a trading system. We could back test and we could, you know, test strategies and we could optimize and that's still working to this day and still the work on that is still going on as we speak. Cool. Okay, well let's break that down a little further. So um just going back to the tool that you started out uh developing.

Um was that a tool just for personal use or was that available publicly? No, it wasn't available publicly. It was gonna be available publicly and that lasted for about three days and then I decided no, it's gonna be a trading strategy and pulled everything right back. And then it's you know, there was probably out on the web there's some screenshots and that of it from way back in the beginning on some accounts I had in Twitter or something, but

It's changed so much since then. So not really too worried about that. And but that was uh It was mainly designed as I was mentoring people to be able to say to them, why are you taking this trade? You're trying to short the strongest stock.

or you're trying to buy the weakest stock or you know, that's that's kind of what it was to make things very visual for people. I always found the more visual stuff you can make in trading, the the easier people can pick up on it most of the time. Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. Now, one of the things I find really interesting about you, Jeff, is that you're essentially an algorithmic trader, yet you don't know how to program yourself.

Um, I mean did this come with any challenges um you know, by by having to rely on someone else to do the programming for you? I imagine it would for most people, but I was very lucky and blessed, either way you want to put it, in finding guys that could program that were also traders. So a lot of the language implementation in that that most people I hear talk about when you're trying to have a non trader program for you.

they just don't understand I'd never really went through that. So with me it was just finding people that I trusted and that were hard workers'cause we put in a lot of hours. And yes, I don't program, but I learned a l I learned a lot about programming and and back testing and that. I spent countless hours, you know, going through stuff and that. So Just uh not easy but can be done. And once again the internet makes it possible.

And my initial idea when I was able to show with people, uh, I didn't have to do much selling. They they wanted in. So that made it a a little bit easier too. What I was what I had come up with was different. and interesting and they just uh they decided to you know, they wanted to come on board. They came on board and we worked. We put a lot of time in.

Okay. So if you had your time over again, would you have made a a conscious decision to learn how to program right when you were starting to to go down this path, or would you have done it much the same as you have? I would have done it in high school when it was Fortran and that and Cobalt back when I was in high school if I knew it was going down this road. But no, I don't really um

I don't know. I think I got to where I am because of, you know, my pattern recognition in with my mind, seeing stuff and that. And I don't know if me being a programmer was gonna help that. It probably would have taken away from my screen time. And screen time is so important. So to me, I had the screen time and kind of had these patterns and that in my mind and that and it was just getting somebody to help me build them out. And we did that. and you know, got a really nice product out of it and

just going forward it's still, you know, it's still it's good. I don't I don't regret not programming. I don't at this age now where I am early fifties, I don't even wanna think about it. That's that's the truth of the matter. Okay. So I guess for for some younger guys who might be listening who, you know, are trading by hand at this stage.

Um, but maybe interested in getting into uh algorithmic trading, would you suggest teaming up with a programmer who has trading knowledge um versus learning how to program for themselves? Without a doubt. I I just think any way that you can go where you can get some part of your strategy automated or more mechanical is is gonna help you in these markets. These markets, you're just you're trading against algorithms.

left and right. The bulk of the trading is that. So any any help you get in that if you're in your in your early twenties. Definitely learn something. I would, you know, I'm saying me thirty years later, thirty years advanced from that. It's a different story. But somebody in their twenties, no, learn. And if you can't wait, then find somebody that can program, work with them. You know, get your ideas going. Just, you know, avoid the rabbit holes.

Well that was gonna be my next question is how did you avoid the rabbit holes? Because I know when you start going down this path, uh obviously first hand, um, as many listeners will know already that this is something I've been pursuing. How do you avoid the rabbit holes? Because it's very easy to get stuck and go off on random tangents. Um w how did you stay very focused while you were um getting to a point where you could automate your strategy? Didn't avoid all the rabbit holes, be honest.

got better at avoiding rabbit holes because you realized where they sapped you and how much programming time went to nowhere. And that and you were just gonna end up scrapping it or you know, you never scrapped it like, Oh, we'll put it on the shelf, maybe we can use it later, but you kinda knew in the back of your mind you weren't gonna get there most likely.

You know, but it's d you just didn't wanna say that you wasted a lot of time. So you you get better at it with experience. My one partner, that was, you know, Chris. Chris Hargarten's his name. He was very good at determining rabbit holes and, you know, not going down'em. He had done lots of programming work and running teams of programmers and at Microsoft for years.

So he was instrumental in me coming to that effect a lot. And I always wanted to just be day trading. So, you know, kind of knowing exactly what we were looking for. kept us out of the rabbit holes. If you're searching for edge, you're probably gonna run into some rabbit hole. And it's just, you know, if stuff you have to know when to throw in the towel a little bit on an idea if it isn't panning out.

You know, otherwise you're most likely gonna curve fit. You're gonna go down a whole bad path when it comes to, you know, trying to back test a strategy and that and and make a strategy that's gonna work. You have to really understand, you know, what the foundation of your strategy is, where your edge is, and how it's gonna, you know, how that's gonna play out in the real market. You know, not just in some back testing. I mean nobody has ever seen a back test that looked bad, do you?

Nobody ever comes to you and says, Hey, look at my back test that that lost money. It's like You know,'cause everybody can sit there and they'll take out the bad stuff and only leave in the good stuff and here's your back test. But in reality, that's not gonna work going forward at all. There's pretty virtually no chance of work.

Yeah, and I think that's really key what you said there is that you've gotta have a pretty good idea on what you're actually looking for before you go into this. So no, I like that. That's where the screen time, Aaron, that's where screen time and that comes in and really understanding You know, just do your homework on systems. I mean, they just have to listen to your other podcasts. There's plenty of guys. I've listened to most of them.

that, you know, talk about it. Like trend following, the big rage for the last twenty-five years and that. Well, you're gonna do a trend following strategy. You're probably only gonna have a win rate of uh thirty to forty percent. Are you going to stick with that strategy when the 60 and 70% is uh, you know, you're in that drawdown period? Most people don't.

You know, um, you just have to understand what your strategy is and how you're gonna make money out of it, how you're gonna consistently and then you have to understand how often it's gonna trade. You know, how are you gonna get to size in that? So there's a there's a lot that goes into it. You're not just gonna pop something out of the box. I mean, I s there's a lot of sites out there now that, you know, tell you they'll help you be an algo trader and it's like kind of out of the can stuff.

I don't think anything out of the can is really going to work that easy for anybody, truthfully. That's it's my opinion. I'm not expert. But I would say if it's generally available to the public as general knowledge, there's probably not much edge in it. The all if you're gonna make money from it, it's because of you.

You know, seriously, that's you know what it comes down to is trading. My whole path to trading Only got better when I took myself out of the equation, when I finally stopped hurting myself. you know, always acted in my best interest. It's n everybody's starting out they're thinking it's a strategy. I need this, I need another pattern, I need another trade. Uh No, you don't. You need to make sure that your psychological

effect on your trades is not what's causing the problems. That has to be right. And then when you design a strategy, the strategy that you're going to employ better fit your personality, your trading personality. You know, I like day trading. I like coming to the screens during the day. I I'm not an action junkie, but I enjoy coming to the screen during the day. I would not do good trading a system that only traded once a week or three times a month would not suit me.

I trade way less now than I you know, than I did before. But the the market's changed. I just feel that's the most prudent thing to do. And I've focused and narrowed strategies down. Everything is getting towards a mature simplicity, I like to call it. Just, you know, as a Ron Meyer, a basketball coach. You know, uh Bruce Lee has quotes out there about, you know, simplify. You know, it's not what you add, it's what you take away. That's where I think all traders need to try to get.

And it's not by doing more. It's by doing less and what you do less of, do better, and in the trading world, do it bigger. You know, find find something where you can get to size on it, especially if you're a one man business. You don't have other other streams of income coming into that. Why mess around with something? You're you're in a risk business. You you can't go into a risk business to just make what

people doing a salary job. You need to go into a risk business and make more. And it that comes with being able to get size on, have confidence and and know your edge and then be able to size up. And you know, that's where, you know, that's what's kind of led me to where I am today. Some parts are automated. I have tools that I've designed that I use that I trust. And then I may be the guy now that pushes the button, but it's all only pushing the button that spots.

that have really shown edge to me, you know, through my work, through the hard hours, long hours of work I put in to, you know, understand this is where I wanna trade. Jeff. I really like 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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Um now just before we get into more of the specifics about how you are trading now, because I know it's slightly different from how you have been trading in some ways. Just before we get to that, what did the team project lead to, like the programmers you were working with, um, how are they still in how are you still involved with them? Where do they fit into the picture today? It is getting ready to start trading. It's been trading for a hedge fund.

And that's it. The strategy, you know, the algorithm is being used and they're developing strategies off of it at at the hedge fund. I no longer have the day to day in it, it just um five years of doing my style of trading just You know, I got burned out a little.

I spent a lot of hours, be at the market during the day and then all night long and I I got burned out. And um so what was developed they're using and they're they're building onto it. I'm in touch with them, but I don't have day to day anymore. They're you know, they're more uh They've taken it to another quant level. But it's trading actively for a hedge fund. And uh it's been looked at by, you know, quite a few other firms are raising money around it.

And it's trading in the S P futures, which I started out as a stock trader. So just that alone has, you know Where I came to really specialize in it, where I started, I ended up being back to and just specializing in the one product. And, you know, I started it bright. You picked one stock, you traded it every day. Well now for me it's the S P futures and that's that's what the algorithm is trading also, the S P futures.

All right Jeff, well let's let's dig into more about how you are trading now. So you said you've gone back to specializing um and I know a very big part of that for you is actually building your strategy around statistical probabilities. Um can you just Maybe give us a little more insight to how you are trading today. Okay, as I stated, I'm trading SP futures. Everything is designed around um mean reversion strategy.

The reason I settle on mean reversion is I like to be active. There's more chances at mean reversion in the one product. Index products are really not trending products.

They do trend, everything trends, but they don't trend the majority of the time. You know, your your S P you know, trend days in the S P happen On average over the last ten years, anywhere between ten and fifteen percent of trading days are what people could label as some sort of a trend day, you know, open near lows, close on highs, open near highs, close on lows. Something like that. I mean everybody's different definition may be a little different with range, but most days are range days.

And in a range day, there's certain things that happen in a range day that tend to happen time and time again. And that's where I focus. everything that I do. Everything is pretty much uh with range in mind. Okay, so a big part of that for you is actually knowing the statistics within those ranges. Like if something happens, then there's a X percent chance that this is going to happen.

Um how have you actually built your strategy around that and how do you get those statistics? Because I mean, I personally feel as though There is such a great edge in knowing your numbers to that extent. Like once you have them, you can then begin to actually build your strategy um around those statistics. So I guess what I'm asking here is how do you actually get those statistics?

Believe it or not, a lot of them are available out there on the internet, but the average trader just doesn't look at them as they have any sort of use. When I'm looking for statistics, I'll I'll read something, I'll see something, and then I go and maybe back test it out for myself, see if it's true.

You know, other things. I, you know, there's just numbers out there from real reputable people and you can find them. They're there. You have to know what you're looking for. I use, you know, when I say, you know, high probability statistics, let's take for instance

I'm looking at a certain amount of range is done in the morning. I've built a range prediction algorithm also. And a certain amount of range is done in this certain time period in the morning. And that will tell me that, you know, 80% of the days We're only going to do this much range that day. So now if we start to near that level, that's where I would then tend to come in and faith.

if everything looks copacetic on the buying and selling levels, you know, if it's not, you know, if news hasn't come into the market. News can always change anything. So without news coming into the market, Those probabilities hold up. I have like, I'll use spikes. When we just went pit through this past period in January and February, we were getting spikes. of, you know, 26 handles in less than an hour, you know, sometimes 30 and 35 minutes.

You know, I have the data. I know what over the last 15 years, when you get that kind of a spike, what the odds are for some reversion on it and what, you know, that reversion could be. And that's where I build the trades off of. So you're just you're waiting for those to set up. And then I steal. I steal, I forget, somebody had a quote about that, you know, stealing good ideas. Well, I steal from all sorts of different disciplines.

I'm not a fib trader. I don't really believe in pivot points. I don't ascribe to any of that. But every one of those has probabilities of certain points in those. Domains being hit. Let's say the pivot or the pivot point traders. Well, the pivot is traded at on 70% of all days.

So, you know, depending where we open, where we close, that can, you know, come into there. Everybody kind of knows yesterday's high and yesterday's low. Well, yesterday's high and yesterday's low over time has been traded at 88% of the time. One of them is hit. You know, that's the kind of thing. So um I put those those big high high probability targets along with my range stuff.

And that's what gives me where I'll get my entries. And I use a lot of stuff with VWAP now. So many traders are looking at VWAP and they're using VWAP to enter trades. Well, VWAP is the target on most of my trades. When we get away from VWAP in one direction or the other, that's where I get interested. Cause I get interested in in this algorithmic environment that we're in. Your HFTs, which are now your specialists, are not trend traders.

They're they're mean reversion. Everything they do is is causes mean reversion to come in more often than not. So VWAP is most is more often than not, instead of trending away from VWAP, it's always reverting back to VWAP. So I use I use levels like that, you know, certain levels I come up to proprietarily with my back testing. And that's it. I you I range, I track range. Like, you know, you don't read a lot about range out there. And I always thought one of the reasons why is.

Because a lot of people that are using range, it's working for them and they don't want it to go away. So you don't read a lot of stuff about range. And I, you know, so I got into range way back Reading Jeff Cooper, Tony Crable, Linda Bradford Ratchke, and that. And it's stuck with me ever since. It's consistent, it's always.

expanding and contracting. Those are the regimes I look at. And there's different trades, different setups in those regimes. And you know, when you're developing a strategy or any kind of trading system, whether it be discretionary or anything, Nothing is gonna work in every regime. It's gonna you're every system most likely is gonna have a period of time where it really makes money, a period of time where it treads water, and probably a drawdown period of time.

That's it. I like to know where we are in all those different things and I can then adjust, you know, how I trade, how often I trade and that all to the regime or whether or not I trade at all.

And I didn't go down the rabbit hole looking for turns. You know, I just listened to your podcast with Dr. Steenbarger and he was talking about learn from your losses. Well, I know we're getting close to turns when certain when one part of my strategy starts to take on losses. I know we're going to the next regime most likely.

Why? Because I was just going through a period of really, you know, having big time performance and now it's sputtering a little bit. Guess what? Regime is most likely changing. Do I try to find something I went down that rabbit hole? To pick the turns is the holy grail. Don't try to pick the turns in the regimes.

Just let your trades go out. And when you're near when you know you're at the time frames where probability is that the regime could be running out, maybe you lower your size or something, but you don't just Try to, you know, go against it. I don't try to predict in that way.

That's it. And then everything for me now remember everything is on a day trading time frame also. But these regimes still play in. We were in when you're in high volatility, most people try to, you know, talk about it as a volatility regime. I never settled on that because of all the hedging that goes on. 'Cause the VIX and everything just op, you know, has days where it just isn't d going with the market because of the hedging.

Hedge hedges being put on, hedges being taken off, and it has that decoupling. So I just use, you know, everything I do is off of average true range. What is the market moving? How much is it moved? How far will it likely go? And there we go. So I do everything off of that. And I track everything off of, you know, a certain ATR and percentage wise, keep apples to apples and everything.

And I can tell you right now, 40% of the ATR, 14 day ATR is done on 94% of the days. If I'm gonna do most mean reversion trades without some other good reason to do it. I need to see 40% done because 95 out of 100 days, you're going to do more than that. So why am I trying to fade something before that unless there's some other big level or something comes in? That's the way everything is put together with that. You know, I know, you know, there's just s like the spike.

I'll give you one. A 22-handle spike in less than an hour has a 70% chance approximately of reverting approximately five handles. You know, does that happen in low volatility? No, they don't happen. In high volatility, you can get five of them in a day. You know, so you have to know what what part of your system in in what regime is gonna be active and where you're gonna be trading it.

That's it. And everything I do is, you know, off a range and I got my algo running, which shows me it's tape reading, you know, all these stocks and the SP 500. And that's giving me buying and selling levels where I have a look that nobody else has. I don't use any of the technical indicators out there. It's pretty much built my own indicator that I'm looking at for buying and selling levels.

And if they match up, sometimes they just make me hold up a little bit. Then it's just design your system to where you can execute it. That's where lots of people fail. They try to design a system. that is gonna look good on paper or they think is gonna play out, but they can't stick with it. you know, everybody's goal. They think they're gonna I'm a day trader. I'm gonna trade with these very tight stops and I'm gonna have four four to one risk reward on my wins in that.

You're trying to design an automated system, that's probably not going to work out too well for you. You know, you're not gonna you you're just gonna get stopped so many times. You're you're gonna have periods where you get stopped, and then what are you gonna do? You're gonna fiddle in it. And you're going to change it. And what are you going to change it to? To what's just happened recently most most likely. Recency bias is just so huge among, you know, newer traders.

The the older traders were boring. We're we're bored. We just execute. We come in the same day and every day and we do the same thing over and over. That's what we look to do. We we don't care about excitement. We're not chasing, I like to call it, you know, on social media, Twitter and that, that, you know, that stock flavor of the day.

We're looking at our strategy. That's it. And we're executing it regardlessly. You just execute relentlessly. Sets up. It's never just one trade. It's the whole series of trades that's going to play out. That's it, and you execute. And that's how you get good at the execution. That's how you get good with your psychology to be able to stay in the trade. How many times have you had a stop? And let's say you take a three-point stop.

This the the price of the product you're trading now moves to two points against you. It's one point from the stop and you're sitting there and you're feeling like, oh, this isn't feeling good. It's not looking good. You know, ah, what the heck? Let me just Take it here rather than letting it hit the three point stop. I'll save the point. Boom, you exit and what's it immediately do? Goes right back in your favor and goes on to what would have made money.

That's bad enough. But what most of us would do, I did it in the past. Now you get a revenge trade because now you, oh, I was right and I'm out of it. Now you chase in and you're in at a worse spot than you were in previously. And now you try to trade that with the three-point stop and you're offsides and you're stopped out. And that's where until you know your personality and you are convinced you're not gonna do the stuff that's gonna hurt your account and it's just

You know, that's what patience is. Patience is just saying, I can take this pain. I mean, I was just looking today and I read a quote that I had. from Jeff Cooper, who I don't know if a lot of people know who he is. He's been around a long time. He's got books out there in at Jeff Cooper Live, I believe, is his Twitter handle for anybody you want to look him up in that.

And I was reading this today, and it says, trading is more about knowing when not to trade than it is about trading. Trading is timing. Waiting is painful. Pain brings wisdom. Wisdom brings balance. Trading can be excruciatingly exciting when done wrong and tauntingly tedious when done right. And that's the truth.

When you're doing it right, it's boring. And it's not all this excitement and jumping from one thing to the next. It's finding something, getting in it, and coming in here day after day and executing it. And that takes a little time. You're gonna have to get some screen time. You have to think outside the box maybe a little bit, and you have to throw away what the crowd is doing. There's so many trading wisdoms now that

don't apply on the shorter time frames. That may still be applicable for the long timeframes, but in my opinion, on the shorter timeframes, they just don't even apply anymore. And, you know, that's just trading. Trading is always changing. And all these kind of wisdoms, like, you know, the trend is your friend. You know, I know good trend traders in that on the day trading time frame and an index product.

It trends like 15% of the time. If you're gonna aspire to the trend as your friend and try to always trade that on the trend, you're not gonna get very far. You're gonna be the hamster on the wheel most likely. You know, you have to know your product, you have to know the regimes, you have to know when the probability of trending is higher rather than lower.

And that's the truth of the matter. None of those old trading wisdoms you can just take point blank and think that's gonna, you know, be the your holy grail for trading, your path to profitability. It's not going to be. You have to know what fits for you. And that's the one thing like with the guys I work with, yeah.

Always harping on them. It has to fit your personality. You have to understand your system so you can stick with it. You have to know where it's likely to draw down. You have to know what regime it's gonna make money in. That's when you can maybe do size, you know. Just those are the things. It's so, so much with psychological. You know, I just uh I can't stress that enough.

You know, and I go back to tape reading all the time, you know. And you know, in my strategies it's it starts from tape reading and You don't really read the tape anymore with these level twos and that, with the algorithms, the HFT, that's kind of gone. But it's just to me, tape reading is knowing your strategy and just sticking to it and executing it all the time.

That's it. You know, in the old days it was a book written 1920s or something on tape reading. And one of the things he said in it was, averaging does not come within the province of the tape reader. Averaging is groping for the top or bottom. You know, so when I go into a trade, I just I'm in. That's it. That's not that's part of my strategy. Maybe other people can find scaling in and

I'm on a day trade time frame. Time is against me. I have to go in with my size and do it. And you have to have confidence to do that. That's the truth of the matter. You have to you just have to know you have to see it, know it, and then execute it. And that's the, you know, to me, that all comes from us first, just you know. Knowing yourself and knowing where you're supposed to push the button to get into that trade and not letting anything else take you into it. I mean, just this past week.

came within ticks of a spot I wanted to get in, but in the type of tape we were in, in the regime we're in, I've learned I have to wait, it has to get to my level for me to trade. gets within two ticks, turns, and goes all the way the other way. I'm not I'm not in the trade. I can't get upset. I don't chase. Nope, it didn't get to where I needed to be. That's the thing. This year this month in March, I was just looking at my numbers before.

In March, only traded of the I think it was approximately 20 trading days in March, only traded 13 of them. And I'm a day trader. But sometimes we had really tight days here. No movement really. Not nothing sets up. Don't push the button. Come back the next day. That was really interesting to hear about how, you know, out of

What was it, 20 trading days? You've only traded 13 days and you're a day trader. I think that was that was really awesome that you could share that with listeners. Um it's a great point. One of the analogies I'm always giving to my guys that I I work with um is this. Picture a pool, in ground pool filled with sharks. Well that's what you're jumping into to get your money.

I want to jump into there when there's the most money at the bottom. You know, you know, in ground pools, the water's generally pretty clear. You can see, you know, I can see what's there. I want to jump in when it's worth Going in there for. I don't want to jump in and take a chance on getting bit when there isn't that much going for. And that's the one thing through the years.

That's where the mature simplicity comes in. It just everything is the maturity of a trader is gonna be to where less is more, less is more. And the m the sooner guys start to pick on that.

And it pick that up and just stick with that, the the better off they are on on their trading paths. That that less is more. And I don't want to be jumping in that pool all the time with all the sharks now. And overtrading in my experience. I've had access to lots of different prop firms. I, you know, I know the guys at SMB and that overtrading is the downfall of most of your failing traders.

And overtrading comes from not being confident in what you're doing, your psychological trading, you know, meant your mental capital is just depleted and you're just operating on tilt, you're jumping from strategy to strategy. you know, somewhere you have to draw the line and say, listen, this is this is what suits me. I I I need to be active, but how can I be active in a prudent way?

Or I have a slower personality. I can sit and wait and only trade twice a week. Look for a strategy that that's going to set up with. That's the main thing. You know, understand. So that you can always executed. That's the d that's the problem. Too many times, how many times have traders sat there, they've identified a level, price gets to that level, and they do nothing.

Because at that point now they say, oh, well, what about this or what about that? You know, that's where the probabilities come in. That's where I don't struggle with. It hits my level. I know what my probabilities are, and I'm going in the trade. That's it. My risk is taken care of. I know what I'm risking. I the trade is structured. I do the same thing on every single trade. There's virtually no difference in the in the trades, the steps that happen once I once I get into a trade.

Do I have any control over the trade once a minute? I can't control anything. That's it. All I can control is how much I lose. That's it. How much I make or how much I lose. I don't have any sway on whether that's going to happen. And that's what I focus on. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, the reason why you can why you're so how do I say this? Why why you

can trade with such confidence and and be so clear on on your probabilities is because you specialise in trading one product and that's the spy. I mean I think that's kind of rare um amongst most traders is that they actually just specialise in trading a single product. Um I mean i is that something that you would suggest

other traders who are coming up today perhaps consider?'Cause it's very difficult. I mean, we had this discussion a couple of weeks back when we were talking, is that it's very hard to to be crystal clear on your probabilities and know your statistics when you're trading a whole basket of stocks um or basket of futures markets or whatever it may be. W what would you say to other traders who are who are trading a whole range of different stocks?

What should they consider? Like should they think about maybe specializing in in a single product? Yes. In one word, yes. I will say Do I demand or do I think you have to nar narrow it to one product? Maybe not. I choose to do that. I like the futures now. I I trade that. You know the leverage is there. It's just a good product.

You don't have slippage on your stops. It's just, it's that seems to, that fits me very well. And I can get stats going back. You know, the stuff holds up. That's the market, the SP. I don't have to worry about anything else. I'm trading the market. I don't have to worry about reddle sectors and stuff like that. But I would think that it's fine. specialize in some niche, some, you know, when I was at Bright Trading, there were guys that traded opening orders only. That's what they specialize.

You know, there were guys that traded back then you had the AOL Time Warner merger, and there were guys that were just scalping against the spread on the ARB of the takeover. And that's what they did every day for however long. That thing took like over a year to close or something like that. Came in every day and just scalped against, you know, that that spread. And they specialized in that. There was other guys that specialized in trading only the high-priced stock.

You know, that's you you have to specialize. When I was going to Bright, I rode in a train car. And in the last car on the train, tell you about traders, how much they take. These were all pro traders. Want to know how much they cared about risk?

They sat in the last car in the train. I used to joke with them. Why you guys all back here? Some of'em had been riding the train a lot longer than me going to the going to the city. Know what they said? Have you ever seen a derailment? If there's any cars left on the track, it's the last ones. When the train runs off the track. They had they were taking care of the risk on their train ride to work.

They didn't sit in the front car. They were in the back car in case the train derailed. I mean, they they specialized. I saw these guys. I met execution block traders. The tra the car was filled with like the specialist clerks from uh SLK, the the the the clearing firm that Spear le spear leads Kellogg.

And that I used to see the runs from the specialist post at the end of the day, these guys said. The thing you learned was that was obvious right away was low volume stocks, the specialist never lost money. Only chance he had of losing money was in his high volume stock where news could come in and the whole market could go one way and he had to be the guy taking the other side of it. You know, I saw there were NYMEX traders on there. These were the locals in the commodity pits in New York.

and that. You know, their whole game was on specializing. You talk to'em, they didn't say, Oh, I trade this, I trade that, I trade that. They traded, you know, one guy was a spread trader. He traded spreads. Another guy traded the crack spread in just oil. Time and time again, when I looked, the guys that were making real money and real livings somehow.

specialized in either an area or a type of product, but they did not try to be a jack of all trades. They were a master in in one trade. And to me, you know, I choose to do just one product because With the statistical probabilities I do, it's just that's where they are. I can I can know my product intimately. And so I can have I can get to that confidence place sooner to get to bigger size. And to me

That's what matters. It's all about, you know, if you're if you're trading and you're not your strategy isn't allowing you to be able to raise your size and get to size, then what's the sense? You know, why? Because everything's changing. It's not going to last forever, whatever your edge is. You have to, when you have the edge, you've got to be able to start to push the pedal. And you know, most guys

You know, when their focus is spread wide, I don't see them get there. That's just the truth of the matter. That's what I've seen. The best traders I see, they focus. They know, they specialize. It may not be one product, but it's one niche, one type of trade, one pattern. You know, however you're gonna break it down, but they are good at it. They don't try, they don't trade, you know, guys that trade high dollar stocks don't trade single-digit midgets.

You know, that's just the way it is for the most part. You know, you you you trade what you're comfortable in, where you get that confidence. And you get that confidence by specializing. You know, would you go to you know to your doctor for, you know, heart surgery, that's your GP, that's your general practitioner?

No. Well in trading it's the same thing. You got, you know, you're gonna you you need to specialize in some way. I mean, I've heard other guests of yours say it. Morad. I know Morad. I've had conversations with him, future trader seventy one. you know, specialized. Dr. Steenberger, I've had conversations with him and email conversations and that for the last couple of years and that his whole thing has come around focus. Focus on what you do best, what you can do it. Nobody

that I know is talking about trying to trade this wide spectrum of things. It's it's figure out what fits your personality in the product and then dive in and put your focus there.

That's just what I see. That's what I believe. Okay. No, that's really good. That's really, really good. Now, one of the things I'd just like to pick up on there is you've emphasized this a couple times throughout our conversation here, is you've got to get When the time's right, you've got to be able to put size on it. Can you elaborate on on what you mean by this a little more? Um, do you mean like taking much higher risk than

than you normally would. Like, um I mean, it sounds like you're you're really ramping up how much you're risking on each trade when you when you're talking about you've got to get size on it. Can you just walk us through that a little bit? Okay. Um strategy I'm currently trading. We'll s we'll just start right with that.

gets developed. I start trading it. I'm trading it a one size, you know, kind of feeling it out. Because no matter what you do, when you're developing a strategy, You're in a certain mindset and you think you're going to cover everything that's going to come up, but you don't. So you go in and you start to trade it and you know now the regime changes and you say, oh, I thought I had all the rules covered for that regime, but then maybe you haven't been in that regime for six months.

Now you're into this new regime and you say, oh, I forgot about that. So I always allow for that. So it's going to take me a little time just to, I like to see the strategy trade in, you know, the regimes that I have labeled. You know, I use it's expansion and contraction. There's two different flows of the market in those regimes to me, and the rules vary slightly in those different regimes.

Once I've traded both regimes in it and everything is panning out, then the whole goal of the thing is to start to raise the size. Now I use a fixed stop amount. Pretty much all the time. Now it's not fixed by an exact, let's say, in the S P futures. In a certain regime, it may be six points, it could be eight points a week later where I'm risking. The reason is I'm using what I've settled on to tell me what to risk is, and I track the one minute average bar change in the SP future.

And then I know my stop I want to be approximately three times that or more in order to have a decent stop. I need to be outside of that range. I need to be outside of the norm. So I I I track that one minute range all the time, the average of it as we go through the day. And my stop can actually change during the day. For the most part, that stop is always

goes against what everything I thought when I first started trading. I thought as a day trader I would be trying to design a system where I would have the three-point stop to make six point. No, that's not where I ended up. All my work has led me to taking me a place where I will have this six-point stop. With a first scale at three points and a second scale maybe at seven to nine points someplace or further. But the wider stop.

Why the wider stop? Because it allows me to get on the size. When I am comfortable, I tell the guys I work with all the time. So many people set a stop and they say that's what they're willing to risk to lose. But in actuality, when they're sitting at the screen, they're not. They're not. So my stop is set wide to protect me from myself, since I'm sitting here and I'm watching the action. I have it at six to eight points. Let's say I enter on a short. Price runs through me. Three points.

If I had a four-point stop, Aaron, I'm getting into that zone where now I'm starting to think I'm wrong. They just ran right through me, right? I got in, I didn't get profitable for even a minute. You know, I thought I had a good level. They came right through me, three points. There's my stop sitting at four. The urge is very strong then to come in and say, just take it off here and save yourself the point. Because it is real money in that. By me having it at six.

And sitting there and saying, I know that the six doesn't get hit that often. I know the percent I know my percent of the time that I take a s the full stop. That's what I call my full stop. It's almost like a catastrophic, but it's in there. When I know that percentage, I can sit there. They run three points through me now. I'm not tempted to fiddle on anything.

That's it. Now the process may change. Now my target where my initial first scale may come back. It may come back to break even. They went three points by me. Everything is I'm looking for a six point reversion. Well, you know My expected value now in this trade just diminished.

And I'm you know, so you have to understand that it just diminished. I'm looking for a six point mean reversion. They ran three points through my entry. So now my my stats are all saying I can get three points into money. we start to drift back towards break even, I may decide to reduce half my risk right then.

And and keep on the other half looking for that three-point reversion. And now also it makes it more comfortable. If I'm wrong, they're gonna go back. And even if they get the six-point stop, it's really only a three now. Cause I cut my risk in half. And that's the whole thing. I don't want to fiddle. When you're building any sort of strategy, you have to figure out ways that you can trade it and execute it without the urge to fiddle in it.

That's the truth of the matter. So like me, I very rarely will say they ran through me and now they're coming back towards my entry point. Most of the time I'll just execute half. I'll have the guys I work with saying to me, why aren't you taking off the whole thing?

Listen, I've got the trade in. There's still opportunity here. I don't want to fiddle that much. I'm going to leave on the half. My risk is cut in half. What am I worried about? If I truly had accepted taking the loss on full size at the at the six point. Why am I worried about taking the loss on the three points? It's all just psychologically

being content and understanding I can take that risk. So you desi I designed the strategy, whereas now I can size up. I can just start doing more contracts each time. get comfortable with that number with that six point stop. That's my worst case scenario. Once if I'm truly comfortable with that and I'm comfortable with the strategy, it start to raise the size. Why? could go away in a year, in a year and a half.

It's about pushing that size up to make more in those same trades. But you have to build a comfort level with your strategy under live conditions. before you can start to do that. But once you start to get that comfort level, you have to go. And that's the thing. And the main part of it is being comfortable with your stop. And for me, in day trading, any system you employ where you employ stops, the returns are going to come down as soon as you put stops.

You have to put stops most likely, you know, unless you're sitting there and you can always execute. But I like to have a stop in. My stop I consider it, you know, it's six to eight points in these markets most of the time in the futures. My first scale on the profit side will come out at three or four. That's right, take it off. You know, that now allows me to sit with that second piece in that normal bouncing back and forth.

I don't get antsy at all. That's it. My stop is now moved. I got a first piece in my pocket. That's money in my pocket. Now I determine my risk on that second half. what to how much money they can take away or do I get to keep all that money in my pocket. It just makes it very simple, very easy to stick with. The whole strategy is just designed where your mental capital stays in play.

And your capital in your trading account grows. And that's you know what it is. Like the numbers for March, they're not astounding, but you know, my average, yeah, let me just pull it up. Every trade I trade in two scales. I mean, if you read my blogs on medium.com, you can see I talk about scales. I trade in two scales. I'll just put that right out there. And my losses.

Overall, all the losses are averaging just a little over one point in the futures. Meanwhile, each trade is averaging almost four and a half. My first scale is only getting me about two and a half points on average. Because it depends on what the volatility is. If price is having a hard time moving, I'm getting that first scale off to relieve the pressure on my mental side.

That's all it is to not fidget. I have some money in my pocket and I can let the second part go. I don't have to worry about it. I can let that play out because slow moving markets, everything takes longer. I got a fast personality. I had to design a way where when I don't get that instant gratification, I could sit with the trade.

That's what most day traders are like. They we like that instant gratification. You get into a trade, you want to see it starting to work. How many times have you gotten into a trade? It doesn't work right away, and then you're looking to take it off.

Just out of just because you're bored. You're you're you know, it isn't doing what you wanted it to do. And that's it. So I had to combat all that in the strategy. You know, the second scale is averaging almost seven points with a two to one win rate. You know, that's what mean reversion can get you. You trade on the trend side of the ledger. It's gonna be a little different. Win rate's not gonna be as high.

You have to figure that out on your own. Me, I like a higher win rate. A higher win rate where the mean reversion comes in. I can find a higher win rate. I am day trading. I have a stop. And it just allows me to be able to keep my personality in check, trade my personality, be active, and put on size. I hope that makes sense to you.

Absolutely. No, and I mean guys listen, if that didn't make sense, I would suggest actually rewinding a little bit and listening back through that twice because that was uh really interesting, Jeff. I appreciate you really going into good detail on that and and sharing that with us.

Um very insightful. Well we should probably wind the things down now. Um we've been going for just over an hour, so I've really appreciated having you on, Jeff. It's been good. Um where can listeners go to find out more about you? Well, I'm on Twitter at Shack48 Trading. I mean you could pretty much just Google Shack forty eight trading. I've been writing blogs for years. I don't always keep up with it.

in that lately I'd wrote some on Medium in the past couple months. I had other ones I used to write for SMB Capital. I wrote for Minionville for a little while. But I get in a phase where I want to write something and then I kind of fall out of it a little bit. So you can find me there.

Anybody wants to contact me, it's, you know, fairly easy. I mean on Twitter, you can just reach out to me if you want to send me a direct message and I don't follow you because I don't follow a lot of people. I haven't been as active on social media because of the focus. I really I've always followed a lot of smart people that are talking more macro stuff in that, but I've really cut that down a lot. I don't wanna even have anything come in. I just

Day trade, stick to that, and only what matters to that. And I've really cut down a lot on my social media interaction. A lot. I used to post a lot more. I I don't do it as much. But I'm available to anybody. If somebody'd like to come in during the day, I run a call.

you know, hit me up. I'll let you join in for a day or two. You can take a listen. You can see, you know, live what I do. Um, you know, you I think you'll find some really interesting stuff. Uh it's the S P futures that I'm trading now. And uh you'll just uh it's pretty uh pretty interesting. That's I'll say. But I'm easy. I'm I'm accessible. I'm I'm out there to help people. I don't I don't mind helping, but I I like I love helping guys, Aaron. Let me just say this.

I love helping the guy that's been kicking around for a couple years and they haven't figured out how to really make the money. They're not losing money, but they can't find that way to flip the switch. Those are the guys that I really can, I can, I delve into. I love helping those.

You know, why? They've showed the persistence. I don't really like it and this stage in my trading career. If I write something for the newer guys, if I, you know, uh do something like this for the newer guys, that's fine. But My one on one time and my stuff like that, I really like a guy that has shown He's not giving up right away at the first little, you know, storm that comes along.

Because I've come across so many guys in my career where, you know, they all tell you, oh, this is my passion, this and that, the first little storm comes along and they're they're gone. They're out. You know, I like the guys that've been kicking around and I love working with businessmen. because they understand that this is a business.

Guys, transitioning out of business and that because I put a lot of stuff in those terms. That's the difference. This is not a hobby. This is not a place to come to markets to get your action junkie side out. This is a business. You gotta run it like a business, especially if you're a one-person business and you have to have a goal of really making something of it because there's nobody else to back you up.

When if something happens with you. So you have to take it serious and you have to have that focus and do it. So those are the type of guys, any of them out there like that. Hit me up. I I I'd love to talk to you. Yeah, and as you can tell I'm I'm not shy when it comes to talking. Nailed it Jeff. Absolutely brilliant answer to take us out. Thank you very much. Um one thing I was just gonna add in there is maybe guys if you have any questions for Jeff

Uh just leave a comment in the show notes at the bottom of this page. Um I I take it you'd be you'd be cool answering uh any questions that come through, Jeff. Yes, no problem, Aaron. Awesome. Okay guys, so just go to chatwithraders.com. Scroll to the bottom of the page. I will first go to chatwithraders.com and find this episode. I'm not sure what um episode number it'll be just yet.

Um but scroll to the bottom of the show notes page and leave your question in the comments area at the bottom and um both Jeff and I will be monitoring that. So um yeah, if you've got any questions, that's the place to leave them. Can I just say one more thing, Aaron? Go for it.

I think what you're doing is fantastic for the trading community. I um I listened to most of your uh podcasts that you've done. I've, you know, I tried to get through and listen to all of them. I've actually discovered some new guys that I follow on Twitter a little bit and that, but I think there's just there's lots of good information out there for, you know, you're really providing a good service to the trading community and I just gotta commend you on that. And

I look forward to all the podcasts that you put out. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. It means a lot coming from yourself, Jeff. So good stuff. All right guys, let's close this out here and once again, Jeff, thanks a lot for coming on. Thank you for having me. You've reached the end of this episode of Chat with Traders, but rest assured there are more episodes. if you'd leave a rate. with traders.