299 · Michael Martin - Intersection of Emotional Intelligence and Tactics

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Right. We're carrying, you know, over the years I got much more aggressive in the mid 2000s, but in the mid to late nineties. I would go home with maybe 10% margin to equity ratio, which is kind of like where the CTAs kind of live. When I got really, really good and I had over 10, 15 years experience when China was buying everything in the mid 2000s.

I'd have 70% margin to equity. Like I was levered up. So mental errors were don't get haughty, don't get full of yourself. This has nothing to do with intelligence. Intelligence is important, but It's not how you make money. Making money is about knowing good trading tactics and can you pull them off? Do you have the will to do it? And I was afraid. I was absolutely petrified because every time I put on a trade, I felt like like kind of like I do now, like I'm on the witness stand and that.

You have to f you have to pass muster every day and you kinda do, but it's not because you're smart or stupid or you're lacking something intellectually. Trading is about adding risk. With an appropriate dosage, what is your risk unit? Like coming from a hedging being physically trained in commodities. You know what your needs are. So you hedge for your needs. But when you're a speculator, you don't need anything. So how the hell do you figure what the right position size is?

That I had to carve out of stone and figure out for myself. And when I lost money or more money than I had wanted, it was very, very hard on myself. And I said, okay, but trading is like sex in many ways. There are other things in life that is largely experiential.

I'm Tessa Yin's co-host and having a little fun with you. And I'm just so excited about sharing this interview with you. I promise it's not about cool accents. It's about this awesome gentleman by the name of Michael Martin and what he has to share with all of us. In fact, several of our past guests on the show were actually referred by Michael.

Raised in a hard working blue collar community, Michael embraced that same work ethic. Hard working, resourceful, an entrepreneur at heart. He hustled from cutting grass when he was twelve to the To working all types of jobs, including golf caddying and waitering at restaurants, to starting businesses.

Determined to transition into the white collar working world and being at the right place at the right time, he was exposed to the financial markets. Michael's interest in trading commodities futures originated during his time as a student. During an unexpected work study program he was introduced to developing seasonal models for heating oil and natural gas for a major hedging firm using spreadsheets and he was great at math.

He subsequently worked on Wall Street, managing commodity accounts, and despite the significant commissions, he realized that he could potentially earn much more through an incentive fee. So after three years at a brokerage firm, he started his own CTA. I sense that he has a very intuitive style about him in trading business and in life.

And I promise this is not just going to be another interview. It's engaging and there are lots of golden nuggets to take away with. So you don't want to miss this. Also, we've added a bonus behind the scenes segment for this episode where I put Michael on the witness stand some more with some questions.

So you're welcome to tune into that segment at the end of the interview. Also, guess what? As a gift to you, just because Michael's cool like that, we've included a link to Michael's audio version book, The Inner Voice of Trading. for free. And it's in the show notes of the episode of our website. Get it while it's available. Thanks, Michael. So to get it, just visit our website, chatwithraders.com, then navigate to this episode, episode 299, and you'll find the link in the show notes.

Enjoy. Ladies and gentlemen, we are so pleased to introduce mister Michael Martin, originally from New York.

Every trade. And it was very expensive to be an active trader back then. So that that was a good environment for me to learn how to trade. Cut my teeth and and and only trade when I have an edge.

Or bought seats on the exchanges, you know, the Amex, New York Stock Exchange, or they became locals in the commodities market. So that was my first introduction because they uh they were out working, I was still in college. And then just by m being in the right place at the right time, where I went to school at the time, they were the third largest landlord in the city. And so They were they were big users of natural gas.

and heating oil for electricity and for environment control in the winter, you know, respectively, and they didn't have a hedging plan. And just by uh look, I was in the right place at the right time with a work study job. where I help them design look at seasonal tendencies in in energy markets to design a hedging strategy.

And could cause problems because, you know, of all the schools under the university umbrella, you know, there's probably 25,000 faculty and students who were basically on rent control. And so worked into the price of the rents and the leases were energy costs.

And in New York, you know, you definitely have very, very cold winters that you need to have heated apartments and rooms and dorms and this and that. But also in in the summer, you know, it's hazy hot and humid, you can cut the humidity with a knife.

So people, you know, put their ACs on and if someone else is paying the bill, they're not turning the AC off when they go out. They're gonna come home to a a nice cooled apartment. So if there was a spike in prices, it was gonna cause a big problem for the school. And so I was really good with numbers and building models and stuff like that. My foray into actual trading actually started with stocks. I had built a a landscaping business.

and sold it and put some money into the market. I really didn't know what I was doing, but I was kind of cutting my teeth and learning the process. The commodity thing was just, like I said, a good I was in the right place at the right time. And I I understood it a lot better. I'cause I grew up, you know, in New York you actually have a crop year. So I understood seasonality just inherently and I could see that in prices. And so it just clicked for me.

Kennedy Cabot was another one. Waterhouse might have been around before it became TD Waterhouse before it evolved into TD Ameritrade. So I'm kind of dating myself. And you really had to prove financial wares. Like you couldn't it was a hard process to get an account opened. You couldn't just walk in and say, Hey, I want to trade. You had to show that you had

you know, substantial net worth and liquid net worth. And most futures margin accounts were not funded for anything less than a hundred thousand dollars. And you had to be there in person.

You know, there wasn't any you know, there was no internet. So there were no online applications. You could scan your driver's license and send it in and within twenty four hours you're up and running, wire the money in and you're trading. This was a two to three week process and you actually had to pass muster and go through compliance.

And there were a lot of people who got rejected. Now, I had very quickly gotten my series three. So they gave me, you know, the the they gave me the benefit of the doubt. You know, to let me do that. So I would say probably within six months. of of landing in my Wall Street job, I had a futures margin account, as well as a stock trading account. It was all together.

You know, with commodities, most markets aren't trending most of the time. So you really have to learn how to pick your spots and see what was moving. You know, gold was two hundred, three hundred dollars an ounce to give you context. It was, you know, it was a very different time.

You know, what can your Peter Lynch style? Like, what are the things that you see that you're using in your life? You know, you're buying X, Y, Z, good, or service. And then you kinda see, okay, where does it trade? You go to McDonald's, you go to Wendy's, you go, you know, you're using Apple, uh it was called Apple computer at the time. So all that technology was just coming online. Most people didn't have computers, never mind smartphones.

So all that stuff was new. You couldn't really see it or touch it because it was also very expensive. The first my first cell phone I think was a thousand dollars. Wow. And then it was a dollar a minute for talk time. So it was, you know, fantastically expensive.

Everything. So I just kind of tried to observe a lot, like what was going on in the world, what were other people doing? What were they watching? And then because commissions like, you know, I started with five thousand dollar grub stake in my trading account. For commissions on stock, it was fifty bucks. So that was one percent of my account balance for comf commodity futures, you know.

For some reason they had two different rates that would automatically apply. One was like if it was a day trade versus an overnight, you know, take it home, which is more my style. And that ranged between seventy five and a hundred dollars. So I was paying one and a half to two percent of my account balance. in commission. So again, I had to think like a sniper, not like a sniper like entry, but I had to sit and lay and wait for hours at a time, days upon time, waiting for

trends to evolve and things to start to break out before I could put money to work. Cause otherwise I was just really churning my account. It was a very difficult time because I really was full of piss and vinegar and I wanted to learn. Bye.

you know, the market's really there to take your money more than anything else. So I had to really learn the importance, which applies to today's marketplace too. It's like if you can't express your edge, you have to learn the importance of sitting on your hands.

You know, and and and and taking advantage of things that speculators really have a huge advantage of and that is they have the right to not participate.

I know I'cause I could see I could see the charting software was very You know, you almost had to do it by hand. But I could do the math in my head and say, like, okay, in the 70s, you know, soybeans moved five bucks. You know, that's twenty-five thousand dollars a contract. So I kept thinking, like, man, if I could just catch that. And put the money to work. and sit on it and live with the day to day fluctuations.

Then I could increase my wealth'cause I was clearly in the wealth acc I didn't have any room for error with five K. I mean, you don't have it now. Back then you didn't either. And they were meant much more like think think about AI. and smartphones and technology and everything internet related and mobile technology, all of that didn't exist. So almost all of the names except for like Apple and Microsoft really weren't even trading, right? AOL.

was A O L N it traded over the counter. You know, and and so you really had to pick your spots and be very judicious in your selection, security selection and when you would put things on. But I learned

And again, I'm environment really shapes us. I was grateful to grow up in that environment because it was so expensive to trade. I almost had to think in buying and selling commodity futures, I had to think like an investor. And that has brought more gains and wealth than I probably deserved. You know, just learning to sit on my hands and not offset a winning trade because I was so excited to have the winning trade in the first place.

Let the winners run. I said, like, I'm worth it. I had to convince myself in my head, like, okay, a lot of it comes from my background. Like I caddied golf bags at Wingfoot and Quaker Ridge. I worked You know, at mob-owned restaurants, and I made a lot of money. You know, I would make 5,000 and over the summer, I was making$5K a month back then, cash.

Because once I got to be a hundred percent up, I was like, okay, that's the whole summer. And I kept thinking, because that's what I could, that was my reference point. But I thought, okay, well, if you're going to be up 200%, like the guys at Commodities Corporation, you have to have been up 100% first.

So you can't panic. You you know, this is your big moment. You can't panic and do the small-minded thing and always live in like a make it and take it kind of mindset. You have to let your winners run and and that's what I learned to do. Thank God.

And the math, my dad was a math whiz and he taught me how to calculate numbers in my head. So I was a year ahead in math in school. I had passed out of a lot of classes that I would have had to have taken in math. And when I when I got there, I was like, Okay. I want to commodities to me are even better than real estate. In those days, if you bought a house, you'd have to put down 3K or or not 3K, but 10%. And then you could finance the rest. Well, commodities.

were even better because you'd be put down somewhere between two and five percent and you didn't even have to borrow anything because the leverage was implied, right? It was it was the the margin deposit is considered a good faith deposit on the full notion of value. So If you look at it, with five K under Regulation T, I could trade ten K of of market value in equities for things that were marginable.

For futures, if$5,000 is the number and that's 5% of what number? That's 100K. So I could trick control 100,000 in notional value of commodities. So there was almost like a ten X of when I thought about notional value, I under Reg T I can control ten K with futures margin I can control a hundred K. Okay, well, if those notional values went up 10%, what was the value or the impact on my five that my you know$5,000 grub steak?

So I immediately gravitated to futures uh commodities trading with a with a strong understanding that. With futures you have unlimited loss potential regardless of whether you're long and short. So if you smell smoke, you have to assume it's a five alarm fire. There is no like, well, I'm just gonna wait and see how things go. Uh uh.

And that complicated things because like I said, it was a hundred dollar commission to get in and out of the trade. So I had to always fight my emotions. Like I don't want to get knocked out of a trade that I could otherwise sit with through a small near term pullback. if the trend kind of still resumes. And that was that was really the hazing process where I had to thicken my skin.

So what I would do is I'd buy like a sleepy little corn contract or sugar is a even better is a better example.'Cause sugar's never in the newspaper. Like you'll never see a headline on the Wall Street Journal or Barons or on Fine you know, Yahoo Finance where someone's talking about sugar. And that was perfect for me because I didn't want to get buried in what we called the fab five. And the fab five is an expression I borrowed from Michigan basketball. And that would be like the yen.

The S P, thirty year bonds, gold and crude oil.'Cause those were the commodities that would get written about in the newspaper and would cause a lot of volatility. Again, remember, there's no internet. There's the C section of the Wall Street Journal. There's a business section of the New York Times, which nowadays basically doesn't even exist. Then there was Barons on the weekends. So those media plays could really impact the price of a commodity. And I didn't want to wake up to heartache.

So I would trade these sleepy little contracts that no one ever talked about, cocoa, cotton, sugar, you know, this and that. And so what I would do is as the market would move in my favor and I knew I was gonna be able to risk, say, two hundred and fifty to five hundred dollars of my account,'cause I really didn't have a choice. I was underfunded.

When the contract got up a few hundred dollars, I would immediately put my protective sell stop at break even. Now I didn't want to get knocked out, but I also didn't want to lose money. And so I honored that system really from day one. I just put in protective stops and I've been doing it ever since. So then what would happen is is like if I edit a second contract, I could see the volatility and say, okay, if it goes here, this is where I have to adjust my stop.

So that even if I have several more contracts in the account, I'm still not risking any more than the original two hundred and fifty to say five hundred that I was risking. Uh on the original trade. So I kind of built in like free call options. It wasn't exactly free. And sometimes the market would come back and knock me out and that was frustrating. But it was a way that I could sleep at night and live with myself.

and build into larger positions so that when they did take off, that's kind of how I made, you know, several thousand dollars on a trade was not because I had one or two contracts risk on, risk off. It's cause I I kinda unknowingly was pyramiding into into things, but very strictly managing the risk, you know, not taking on more risk.

thirty, forty percent of the time the mark the markets would continue to move in my favor, and then I was making really asymmetric returns for the risk that I was taking, which was the whole point. 'Cause I knew the math. I knew enough about playing poker and blackjack that this was a game of expected value, not about accuracy per se, or being right all the time. And I could emotionally live with that. I was good at I w I didn't have a problem taking chances.

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And you really get to operationally define that yourself. So what what I did, because again, I'm self-taught, you know. So again, I'm this is this is you're gonna laugh, but I didn't have anybody to show me like The guys that I eventually met who who mentored me when I became a pro. You know, we're obviously already very, very successful, but

There wasn't someone to kind of say, hey, kid, when this happens, there was no fifty or two hundred day moving average crossover kind of system like there is in stocks. There wasn't like a Dow theory like Victor Sperandio uses, you know, for equity.

risk management. So I had to do it by the seat of my pants. And the answer, the simple answer, Ian was I I thought by putting like I every day I would put the open high low close in and then mark to the market where my equity was if I had say three or four contracts in the sugar or the corn and say, okay, at the open I was up.

30 ticks and this is what I would have been because I wanted to calibrate my system to not have this hair trigger response to knock myself out of winning trades just because I was up big at the open. So I went through these case studies of looking at other moves and commodities and saying, okay, if I had my my proper risk management on, risking, say, you know, depending on where my equity in my account was, you know, between 200, 250 and$500.

you know, portrayed, could I live with these types of drawdowns, knowing that the trends would persist eventually for because of forces that I might not have even fully understood. So I, you know, I just tried to stay with the winners for as long as I could because I knew I wanted my money to work for me. Later in life, so so I kind of did it by saying 250. I have a 250 dollar trailing stop.

on my equity at any given time. That was how I did it in today's language. I didn't know it at the time. Like that's what you called it. Like who knows what the hell a trailing stop is? But that's effectively what it was. And if I was really making money, you know, and I got to like six, seven, eight thousand, I can remember giving it a little bit more room because now I wasn't losing my corpus. I wasn't losing my original grub steak.

It wasn't house money, but I was willing to go a little bit more aggressive because I was then risking money that I had already earned from my trading activities. Right. So I always look at it at my money. It's always my money. It's not house money.

But I I and I still do that today. If like my equity is up, I'll tr I'll t I tend to trade larger when I feel like not necessarily I'm in the zone. But if I have the PL to prove it, then I can afford myself more risks. I go back and I do this case study and say, okay, how much of this am I willing to risk in order to stay in the trade? Because the odds change, Ian, like once you're in the trade.

It's like that old Monty Hall thing. Like if they show you what's behind door number one, this and that, and there's a whole science around it, when you're in a trade. you know, risk on, risk off, you might have like a three to one payoff with 40% accuracy. So you know your system has positive expected value. But what you learn over time, and this took me a couple of years to learn in studying the data, is that your odds might change.

So now you have to use conditional probabilities or Bayes theorem to say like, okay I'm up X% percent in the trade or it's moved this amount. What's the probability of event B, like the move continuing up X amount, given the known probability of event number A, that I have a 40% accuracy and a three to one payoff? So you can really apply that math to make better decisions. It's it's not probably for for beginners, but it was math that I could understand because like I said, I was a math guy.

And then the light bulb kind of went off and said, See, this proves my theory that I should stay with winners, even if there is going to be a pullback, because the math support. staying with the trade and then maybe even adding another contract or another fifty shares or something at that point because the probability might be like, okay, you have a five to one payoff with a 30% pay, uh, 30% accuracy. So the expected values change over time. It's not static.

And they're not really indicators. I don't I I I use that term with you, but I think of them more as validators or confirming indicators because anything that you need to see about whether the trade's working out you can see in the damn price of the instrument itself. So ADX. Well, great. You're never gonna see ADX like is one that I've studied. And yes, you can see trends emerging.

Or the strength of a trend emerging once it starts to r come out of the twenty to twenty-five range and kind of trade up above twenty-five. But you're never gonna find a strongly trending market that doesn't have a high ADX number already, right? Um You could look at MAC D. There's a lot so so I just looked at all those things and I said, Why am I doing this? Like what is it intellectually that I want and what do I want out of it from an emotional and psychological standpoint?

And I realized after, you know, two or three years looking at all these newer, newer pre-frab indicators that I was really looking for some kind of emotional security. And it doesn't exist. There is no, you know, external solution to the internal things that you're feeling. And I don't want to layer up my charts with these things because it just doesn't work. They c they can only kind of confirm things that you can already see on the chart or That you can see in the price.

Very few of them. Like relative strength for stocks can matter. You can use ATR to normalize risk in the commodity markets that came out in nineteen seventy-eight. So that had already existed. I didn't know about it again because there wasn't an internet and I hadn't seen

Wells Wilder's, you know, book. So the answer is yes. I tried to uncover every stone, but I found that the efficacy or the value that any of them would bring was was wasn't going to help my profitability. It was more to calm my nerve. And that even still didn't didn't really work.

And I was used to the being a day player and, you know, my parents were depression era. And so we had enormous amount of grit. We were hard working people. Like that was the culture that we grew up in. A lot of Irish Catholic, Italian Catholic. People who left the city, wanted their own piece of property, and you know, instilled in their kids, put your head down and make something of yourself. So when I first got to Wall Street it was really

I wanted to be several months ahead. When I left, I had a thousand dollars a month rent. I had uh, you know, a thousand dollars a month go to student loans, and that's before I had any food, you know, dry cleaning for my suits and all that kind of stuff. So uh my my goal at Wall Street was to learn intellectual property. I wanted white collar.

I I I I wanted to stop having I wanted to stop exchanging my time for money. Was very clear about that. Cause I was and what did I do? I went to Wall Street and I was working fifteen hour days. Putting in blue collar hours on a white collar job, which is what you do'cause you don't know I didn't know anything else.

And if you didn't go to one of the five or six big bulge bracket firms, the brokerage firms, you were out of the market because there was no other way to get entry. Now it's like you could do it on your phone. You could trade for free. That's a complete culture 180 from where I was raised. So I was like, you know, I'm just as good as any of these people. They all think they're smarter than, you know, everybody.

Well, I'm just gonna grow my capital so that I could replace, you know, I figured look, if I got money markets were paying 5% in around 1995. And they w I remember them saying like five and five and ninety-five. And what they meant by that was the Dow was gonna hit five K. Interest rates were going to be 5K, money markets, right? And and that was all in ninety five.

And my thought was like, I don't know how the hell I'm gonna do this, but I'm gonna put myself in the energy of having a million dollars at 5%. That's 50K or 4K a month, and I could pay my bills and have money to enjoy my life. Not a spendthrift. I didn't want a Ferrari. You know, I didn't want any of these. I'm not, I don't buy stuff. I didn't want to accumulate.

goods, especially things that are gonna depreciate. So I just thought like, how could I grow my wealth so that my money can finally work for me, right? You either work for your money or your money works for your money. And I I had no experience. I was complete virgin in that area. So I had to Teach myself, because it wasn't in my family, in my nuclear family, there weren't really any investors. There were some well-educated people, but they weren't really investors. They were savers and workers.

And they had pensions and that's not what I wanted for myself. So I knew I had to grow my capital. My Clark Kent job though was being a financial advisor. So you can imagine I was really leaving a living a d I was a double kid, like they said in the department. On when the weekend I would drop my R's and sound like I'm from Dorchester and Charleston.

And then, you know, during the day I'd be like, Yes, you know, let's talk about the confluence of religion in the Middle East and its effect on your Elomazanary concerns. And I'd become a completely different guy. So um

I didn't like that part of it. I didn't like to have to fool anyone or do something that, you know, try to be somebody that I wasn't. But, you know, the branch managers were looking at, you know, They didn't grade you on profitability. They graded you on how many new accounts did you open? Households, new accounts.

What were your net new assets that you brought in that either existing clients gave you or that you brought into the account, you know, transferred in? And how much did you generate in commissions and fees? Nowhere in there was like If you made money for the client.

And I knew that I was gonna be an alpha generator and they were not concerned with alpha generation unless it added up to their commissions. Mm-hmm. Because that's how they got paid. We had the whole floor and I'm sure the rent was a hundred thousand a month back then. So

You know, I didn't like that because I wanted more. It was so I but it was the only way I could get in. You know, it was the, you know, if they don't let you through the front door, you go through the bathroom window, kind of a deal. Well, that was kind of how I did it, because I figured from that perch.

I might be able to move horizontally. It like at least I could learn how the business is run. Before that it was I was looking from the outside in. I said, let me get into the business and then I could move around. It was a lot harder than I than I thought it would be. because they kind of pigeonhole you. And in those days they weren't, don't laugh. They they were hiding hiring traders on the desks if they had MBAs.

And I was like, that's gotta be the stupidest thing that they ever did on Wall Street.

like it was over the counter. So I remember, you know, buy buying Wendy's quick service restaurant. That was quote quoted 16 bit offered at a quarter. But if I could buy like three, four, five thousand shares for my own account and for my clients, I could call the market maker and negotiate them to get a better price. So I'd filled the trade at an eighth. And and to put an eighth commission. So I'd be in for sixteen and a quarter net. My clients would love that kind of stuff.

So I learned how the game was played because they had a P and L which was based on the spread. I had a P and L which was based on my commissions and fees, which cause was completely bass awkwards on doing the right thing for the client. But that was the game that we had to play. And I did that. for three years of finding things that had different s you know, spreads that they were moving and then using my institutional size to

negotiate better prices. They didn't really teach me how to make money. They taught me about how to ungame the system to benefit the client. Because they were not really prop traders the way, say, like a Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns were. Right. So I applied to all those places because after three years I had the track record. But they were still in the mindset that they wanted to hire you coming out of business school or sponsor you to get an MBA. And I was too

smart or too stupid to lie to them. Like I didn't want to get an NBA that had nothing to do with trading. It was to me, it was like I have to put now two more years as a buffer between me and my goal. Like that's not gonna happen. Um, so I I the interesting thing was that to a name like most of those companies are out of business, except for like David Shaw, long-term capital. You know, I had I'm sure I had caddied for John Merriwether at Wingfoot.

Sent I did, you know, sent the cover letter resume with my track record, with documented track record. And, you know, I don't think I got a callback. Like I was just completely shut out. So I started my own company. And that's what I did.

Long story short, I was in the right place at the right time with the right people, not mentioning any names, who had a big impact on delivering the Chinatown vote to Mayor Giuliani for his first term as mayor. And I helped those people because around July first of nineteen ninety seven. Hong Kong was gonna go back to being China controlled from the UK. Right? And so everybody there was a lot of people from Kowloon and a lot of Hong Kong folks in Chinatown in New York City.

And they were all scared. So they wanted to get their money out of Hong Kong because they thought the China would close the close the borders. So we called it political flight capital. And because I had done a good job making relationships with these people and perca perhaps because I wasn't involved in like organized crime or a tongue and I was at a big kinda gumshoe not a gumshoe but a you know

You know, I was a white boy, right? I was a white boy and they they were I they was at a reputable firm that they could trust. So all that capital came to me. Then I made those people money and commodities. So when I said, look, there's no vertical or horizontal movement for me here as a trader where I could do an even better job for you because we could cut commissions by ninety percent on the institutional side. I'm gonna go start my own company and work under a two and twenty structure.

And I realized like if I did that with the money that I had made my clients over the past few years, I would have done six times the gross commission that I did. And that all would have been mine. So I figured even so I left and I took about fifteen million worth of clients' assets in a two and twenty structure. And I really haven't worked for anyone since.

was that I always kept my losses small. I knew I did not want to go into protracted drawdowns that would crush me emotionally. I didn't mind losing the money, but I didn't want to be in a twenty percent drawdown needing because then you put a lot of pressure on your money. Right. Twenty percent drawdown. You you need twenty five percent to come back. That could take you two years. Like I don't I don't need that crap in my life.

And what I didn't wanna do is I kinda understood the technology. I understood things were trading. You know, I was just getting my first email account on SpryNet and Mind Valley or whatever, Mind Mind Spring, excuse me. And I didn't want to tie up my cash in stocks because of reg T when I could do 10 times more notional value with futures margin. So it was more an allocation decision to run a CTA.

You know, I I was probably running uh uh concurrently in RIA as well for the stock side, but also the profitability. Like if you have ten million dollars and you make twenty percent and you're getting twenty percent of that, right? So now I'm getting four hundred K. It was harder to do that with stocks without taking super gigantic positions. And I didn't want to do that because I knew if I I was onto something good and I was finally living not the dream, but I was

I was becoming the person that I had envisioned of becoming. I was a white-collar person, using my brain, managing risk, keeping losses small. And I knew that if I screwed that up, that I could be back at the golf course next week. And that was a big motivating factor to not necessarily to have to eat crow because I never had that kind of ego, but it would be just such a complete personal failure to have to have this thing, blow it, get so close to the promised land and then blow it up.

and then be relegated back to wait and tables, which look, you work hard, you earn money. There's nothing wrong with it. I made a fortune waiting tables and caddy and golf bags, but then I wanted to evolve.

on Calendly every month. Like, what do I spend for premium Spotify? Like I know my numbers. The good news is is when I left When I left the brokerage firm to set up my own CTA I started with twelve and then another three came over time'cause the people wanted to think about it and all this and that, but eventually over the next

six to twelve months that money kind of came. So I had a full fifteen. And for some of them I cut breaks, but I was earning between one and two percent as a management fee. So I really didn't have to sleep with one foot on the floor and worry about paying my bills. 'Cause I'd have a you know, a couple hundred K come in.

you know, to to handle my my fine my finances, which, you know, I had earned the right, you know, to do by doing a good job with those people. And also cause I was, you know, clearing I cleared E D and F man. They were charging me it's a lot by today's standards, but I went from paying say ninety to a hundred dollars to ten dollars round turn. There's like a ninety percent discount.

And everyone loved that because they were they definitely were aware of the commissions they were paying me when I was an upstairs, you know, guy at at the wire house. So I did think about it, but it wasn't a concern. I did my biggest concern was not getting into or having like a my big thing is like I'll never be in a 10% drawdown. If I smell smoke, I'm gonna puke it out.

And I'll even call the people and say, look, I'm gonna take a month off because the markets are not amenable to my trading style, but I won't charge you the management fee. Like I was very good at communicating with people. If they had to hear bad news from D before Kramer is a guy named Dan Dorfman who was kind of like the carnival barker for the markets. You just want man's opinion. You know, and I get it. He's entertainer, but both basically kind of useless.

And I figured like, man,'cause Maria Bartaroma was just kind of coming online, you know, and C N B C was evolving and this and that and I didn't want my clients to have to hear the bad news from the T V.

I had to be the person in control of the relationship. So I spent a lot of time communicating with people saying, It looks like this could set up. If it does, here's what I'm gonna do with gold, here's what I'm gonna do with crude, here's gonna what I would do with the Deutsche Mark, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And if it doesn't pan out or I don't you don't see the confirmation come through, it's because it turned out to be a suboptimal, you know, opportunity.

And I didn't I don't want to throw good money after bad because what we don't lose, we don't have to earn back. There'll always be another opportunity. But if you put yourself in a bad spot, drawdown wise, you know, you lose your confidence, you lose your nerve. And that's the last place you wanna be as a trader. You know, I don't mind losing the money. I don't want to lose my mental edge. The mental edge is the whole thing.

And this and that. So when I started making money, I had trouble trusting it. I was afraid that it was gonna go away. And I knew that it would have been my fault. Like I had enough self awareness to know like it's not gonna be a market correction that puts me out of business because I don't have that type of risk on.

Right. We're carrying, you know, over the years I got much more aggressive in the mid-2000s, but in the mid to late nineties, I would go home with maybe 10% margin to equity ratio, which is kind of like where the CTAs kind of live. When I got really, really good and I had over 10, 15 years experience when China was buying everything in the mid 2000s, I'd have 70% margin to equity. Like I was levered up.

You know, I was taking gigantic, you know, big five figure numbers out of gold and copper and sugar. I caught the sugar move from nine to eighteen. So mental errors were Don't get haughty, don't get full of yourself. This has nothing to do with intelligence. You know, when I went to Wall Street.

I had had teachers who had Nobel prizes. So I thought I was gonna go in and trade every asset class, every time frame. And all I did was lose money and and prove that that doesn't work, not at least at the beginning. So I said, like, I just have to stay in my lane. I have one skill. I understand commodities. I never would have guessed that that was, and I was an utter failure at foreign exchange. Plus, I hated the fact that it was 24-7. And you basically needed a Bloomberg.

And I couldn't afford a Bloomberg. And still to this day, I wouldn't pay$2K a month for two years to have data access to data. It's like, it's just not how I'm built. Options were very clever, but there were so many moving parts with Vega and Charm and Theta and implied volatility, historical volatility.

You know, it was too much for me given that I had my Clark Kent day job where I had to look and smell and feel like a financial advisor and kind of be a closeted Superman trader. You know, and and so the the You know, hubris, you know, pride has said, it's been written, Pride's a big banana peel. I couldn't fall in love with my PL. I would never sit and bass.

Like I've got a gigantic position open where, you know, you could have two hundred and fifty, three hundred thousand dollars of unrealized gains. You know, for a for a blue collar kid. When you started Wall Street, that could have been like three, four, five years of of total compensation pre-tax, right?

So I had to forget that thinking and just saying, okay, well, if you have$10 million,$12 million,$15 million and you have the$300,000 unrealized, you have to think percentages to give yourself context. So that really helped was to stop thinking in terms of dollars and cents and like, okay, I lost 10K on a trade, big deal. That was like, that would have been like a whole summer or or six months of working in my blue collar job.

Then coming to understand that intelligence is important, but it's not how you make money. Making money is about knowing good trading tactics and can you pull them off? Do you have the will to do it? And I was afraid. I was absolutely petrified because every time I put on a trade I felt like like kind of like I do now, like I'm on the witness stand and that you have to you have to pass muster every day. And you kind of do.

But it's not because you're smart or stupid or you're lacking something intellectually. Trading is about adding risk with an appropriate dosage. What is your risk unit? Like coming from a hedging being physically trained in commodities. You know what your needs are. So you hedge for your needs. But when you're a speculator, you don't need anything. So how the hell do you figure what the right position size is?

That I had to carve out of stone and figure out for myself. And when I lost money or more money than I had wanted, it was very, very hard on myself. And I said, Okay But trading is like sex in many ways. There are other things in life that is largely experiential. You can read about it and study books and God knows I've read every trading book that's out there. I still have'em. I've got, you know, first editions of

Edwards and McGee for stocks. I have Chester Keltner's book on you know how to make money in commodities, which is the actual title. And and those are all interesting. And obviously market wizards had an enormous impact on me, but not because of how they made money, just because they were regular people and I could identify w with them. based on the feelings that they had to feel when they were learning to develop their craft and and cut their teeth at this.

of the report. You know,'cause crop reports change like the wind. Uh, you know, sometimes there'll be a seasonal dislocation or there'll be a blight or or, you know, in some of the grains, especially Physically settled commodities are are seasonal and can have those types of disruptions more than, say, currencies or cash-settled, you know, commodities, in my in my humble opinion. So I did read. Everything I could get my hands on was

for for to one to learn the vocabulary and the vernacular of the space. I did, like I say, have friends. And so this has kind of never been disclosed before, but when I st set up my CTA in New York, and registered as a as a commodity trading advisor and became a member of the NFA, two or three times a week I would go to the floor of the various exchanges to meet with the people who were actually dealing with the physical commodities because they're the ones who have all the information.

They're actually involved on the physical side. Now, again, I was physically trained, but I would go to the floor and I would stand by man's ED and F man, you know, they had seats on every exchange. And so I would stand by their post and learn like what was the crowd doing? When were they, you know, where were my levels? What were the inflection points? Where were were we at day daily highs, weekly high, monthly highs, life of the contract highs? Where were we in the history of things?

and see what how what how did they behave at those inflection points? What kind of volume, what kind of open, how would they change open interest? And then calibrate that and kind of mark it to the market to see if I could incorporate that into my decision-making process. You know, because there is public, you know, for example, if you see this doesn't work for for equity people, but if you see like a commodity going up in price.

And volumes steadily increasing, but open interest increasing, you can ascertain that it's probably new longs that are coming into the marketplace. And being a smaller speculator compared to the bigger people of the day, I always wanted to be buying when there were other buyers.

Because I knew that they had the money to punch out my lights and they would also come back into the market perhaps and even support their existing positions. That would give me buoyancy for my smaller little positions, which W you know, they w seemed big for me. They were small in the context of the overall market. But on any given day, I'd be down at Coffee Sugar Cocoa and Cotton. I'd be at Comex, I'd be at NYMEX.

And I'd be trying to execute my orders kind of from the floor and just giving the orders to the clerk. You know, right there,'cause they would bring me onto the floor as a guest. Which you could do. You'd have to wear a suit and tie, no, you know, leather shoes and shave and look r you couldn't come in looking like in cargo pants and flip-flops. So you'd have to dress you'd have to dress neatly, but my friends would bring me on as as a as a guest.

And I would stand, you know, politely out of everybody's way. and then watch and see like where was the action. And then if gold kind of s closed down, I wouldn't go to Comex, you know, or trade copper or silver. I'd look and see, okay, is there anything going on in energies? But rarely a week went by from ninety seven to I moved to LA in April of ninety eight. That a that a that a week went by when I wasn't at one of the floors. Like learning that.

Not just how they behaved, but also the culture. Like it's really sad for me when I re reminisce about that culture. Like there were some great little things and traditions that they did. I remember being on the floor in natural gas. And one of the guys who was a longtime local died.

Even as I think about it, they they shut the exchange. Really? For a moment of silence. And they held the guy's picture up. You're never gonna see that anymore. It was very remarkable to see.

Lucky Luciano put together the Mafia Commission. It's when you kill people and they find dead bodies, the cops get involved and they start investigating. So we might as well decide to have peace among us.

and determine things behind the scenes so that we can all make money, right? And not draw the attention of the the, you know, the cops or the FBI. And I'm not saying that you should go, you know, go go do this, but The brokerage, the the clearing member community and the floor traders, they're not jealous. they they are competitive and they might take your success as an input to to go out and succeed more. But it's good for the business when the young people come in and succeed.

Right. Because it's it's hard for some of these larger places. They can't trade, for example, smaller markets because they're too big, they're beached whale. So if you look at s like the softs, coffee, sugar, coca, cotton, there's certain points where these entities that run fifty to a hundred billion dollars, they can't really trade those markets because even if they bought the w the exchange limit that you can buy.

It wouldn't move their knee the needle on their bottom line. Plus, it would still give them enormous amount of risks. So young guys like me would come in and say, look, I got twenty, twenty five million now and I could very regularly trade. you know, a methodology, you know, short-term, intermediate term trend following stuff where I could catch those moves and provide additional alpha to you.

Those were the biggest evolutions for me. And I knew that you can't really paper trade this stuff. You really have to learn how to calibrate. 'Cause again, I'm coming from blue-collar despair. I grew up in a Raymond Carver short story. I and I loved it. It shaped who I was. Like I I don't regret any of it, but environment has an enormous impact on who we become as people. So I spend a lot of time You know, who do I spend my time with? And and what kind of things are we doing? And I learned

Again, intelligence doesn't necessarily matter to the extent. I'll give you an example. There was a guy who I worked with at the Wirehouse who I really love. He was not a bright guy. He was like, Hey, how you doing? He was from East New York, which is a very tough neighborhood in Brooklyn, at least it was in the day. And he had been a paper salesman. He would walk around the streets in New York in the middle of the summer with reams of paper on his shoulders and sell it to businesses.

Because this is like, you know, now we just just go to Staples or you go to Amazon, you order to come to your house the next day. That didn't exist back then. And He did regularly a hundred thousand dollars a month in commissions and fees.

But he couldn't put a sentence together. Like he could barely put a sentence together. So I learned humbly that in Wall Street, it's we don't get paid to know stuff, we get paid to execute. And I had, you know, because I had done well in school, I had let myself kind of get over my skis and be like, there's oftentimes when I'm out with friends or family where I'm the smartest guy at the table. Well, guess what? No one cares.

It's the most wasted amount of energy that you can spend on yourself is to sit about thinking about your designations and your degrees. Sure you can be articulate and have a great vocabulary and explain complicated things, but There's no it doesn't necessarily mean, you know, again, if you're a PhD in finance and you're doing high frequency trading, yes, there's there's programming skills that you need to have, this and that. But for discretionary traders,

You get paid to execute. And that means can you keep your losses small?

The second thing is I can't manage risk based today, I can't manage risk today, Ian, based on what I think or anticipate could happen next week. Because the reality is, ex ante, if my protective stop is hit, I'm getting knocked out. I'm dealing with conditional probabilities of what could happen, woulds and coulds. for next week. And that was You know, well, the experts are saying this, this is showing up in the newspaper that and

There's supposed to be tightness in supply. So I'm just going to stay with the position and stay in a losing trade or something that's giving back too much longer because I think things are going to improve.

We ha we live in a paradigm of personal responsibility. That's number three. If I make money, I get to take credit. If I lose money, it's no one's fault but mine. I cannot blame anybody. I can't bl blame You know, you've been around for a while, Abby Joseph Cohen or Elaine Garzarelli or Mary Friggin Meeker or you know, anybody from Jerome Powell or Dodge and Elon Musk or

If I add and remove risk, that's my responsibility and nobody else's. And if I lose money or if I'm like, well, I, you know, I'm down a little bit, but it's not quite where I'd feel uncomfortable. I'm just going to see how things go. That's killed more traders than any other statement. In the world. So responsibility, it's yours. If you don't have it or you don't want it, consider not trading.

Because you're going to lose more money than you could ever damn dream of with a lack of basical attitude or or be like, I'm going to just take cr credit for the winners, but the losers are going to be somebody else's fault. That dog don't hunt. You're going to get killed. You're going to get absolutely killed. So I learned to be decisive. Your traders have to be decisive.

This new news information, it's it's it's actually bullish. And so I I feel even more confident about holding on. It'll bounce back. My position will bounce back because the news now seems to be better than it was when I entered the position. So So if I if I put in a stop loss or if I get out now, cut my losses short, I'm gonna be missing out on the big rebound.

Was it the hype? Was it people selling newspapers? Was it something that the like cause again, the physical people, the folks who actually have the commodities, they know everything because they're in the damn soybean or cotton business. And so for them it might not be news. It might be a news story for the public and the small speculators. But what you're looking for there is like you can't the only the I think

You know, and and he's I think he's been on the show. My my good buddy, you know, Brian Shannon would say only price pays. separately from him, I d I kind of coined a phrase that I used with my clients from very early on and that on Wall Street only price will tell you the truth. Because everyone is selling something, so there's kind of that part of it too.

But if bullish news hits the tape and The price doesn't move, I'm absolutely going to probably adjust my stop higher or be at least be mentally prepared that I'm probably going to get knocked out of the trade. And the converse is also true. If really bearish stuff is supposed to hit the tape and the price is kind of still moving higher, I have to trust the price.

But all the while I I I'll have a protective stop. Like you can't, I don't try to overthink things. Ultimately, if the data that you mention is so important, it's gonna be reflected in the price. And if the price doesn't move, now we have a divergence. And that's the point where you focus on price. You can't fall in love with NVIDIA or AI. Trump got in office and Bitcoin went from 107 to 77. How's that feeling for you?

We're gonna have a sovereign fund, but we're not really gonna put taxpayer money to work. We're just gonna kind of confiscate the stuff from Silk Road and keep it. Well, that's a whole different demand equation now.

Because it's price action and it either shows up or it doesn't. And you have to be object. Look, I'm the first guy to get very aggravated if I get knocked out of a winning trade and then have the thing revert, but I'll just always buy back in at higher prices. Like that doesn't bother me.

I don't look at like, well, I really want to fall in love with this trade, you know, you know, buy sugar at 17 and sell it at 75. Well, I might get knocked out and be in and out of the trade a slew of times to catch chunks of the move.

I don't have to have it be can you know, if you invested ten thousand dollars in in McDonald's in nineteen sixty five, you've had more money than than Jesus. Well, that's great, but ten thousand dollars in nineteen sixty-five was an enormous fortune. Most people didn't have it. So you learn to also

Have a discerning ear. You can learn to hear money. If you missed the 10, you know, best days of the stock market, here's what your returns would have looked like. But what they don't tell you is that. Things like that happen in clusters, and the 10 worst days were also close to the 10 best days. So you'd have to have the worst. damn luck of any human being who ever put money to work in the market to only miss the up days and not miss the down days that kinda went with it. And if you look around

September eleven or what happened in when we all got twenty twenty when COVID hit the tape, you can see the best and worst days kinda happened in clusters, right? So So there's a long winded way of answering that question. You have to stay out of the news and learn that your job as a speculator is in single sentence is to play superior defense. I don't believe the winners take care of themselves. You have to show up and win and you have to know what your appetite for risk is.

If you're if you're gonna try to do this in any asset class, the goal is to keep your losses small. Focus on playing defense. You wanna think about being Lawrence Taylor, not Ladanian Tom Tomlinson, the other LT, or whoever the big running back is of the day.

a a codified body of law like we had in the thirty four act and the nineteen forty, you know, the the thirty three act, the thirty four act, the investment company act of nineteen forty, you had, you know, S. I. P. C. And you also had um You know, Arissa, all of those landmark types of laws that were codified.

They give everybody a level playing field, right? So I'm not Joe Crypto, but I like the idea that for that space, the regulatory environment seems to be kind of coming of age, right? So that's that's a good thing for the market. It's good for people, it's good for investors. I like the idea of, you know, we're still very early in AI in that most people, if you talk to them on the street, and I know that doesn't sound scientific, they can't tell you where AI shows up in their life.

They know if they are on a website and they're having trouble, they have an AI bot. And that's the extent of it. So I'm excited to kind of see what that brings to the table. But you know, the stuff that I do with Victor Sperandio, you know, our strategy has a negative sixty six correlation to the S P. And it just brings into sharp relief that diversification is absolutely important for everybody, whether you're a trader or an investor. And, you know.

Those are all things that you can determine before you even put money to risk is is what are you going to trade? How are you going to trade it?

Know yourself. You know, put put some time into knowing yourself about how do you feel about making and losing money? How do you feel about being right or being wrong? being right, making money, losing money, being wrong. Like it's not a reflection of your intelligence. It's a function of being, you know, having good luck and good timing versus bad luck and bad timing. You know, so so there's a lot that goes on there. I'm excited, you know, for people to kind of focus on that.

And learn about themselves because if you don't know who you are, I don't think it really matters too much what the hell you know. Because you can't, you're never going to be able to turn that into. And as trading is experiential. You know, the best teeth the best trader coach is you're actually doing the trading. And that's coming from a guy who's done some consulting and coaching on the side, right? The best way to do it is to just say, do it. I'm gonna risk a hundred bucks.

And that's how I'm going to learn my craft because that'll calibrate who you are with what you know how to do for that period of time in your life and get you going towards the results that you think that you want.

I had to learn somewhere, so I don't regret it, but I could have had more efficiency if I had gone out on my own sooner. But it all happened for a reason and everything was a learning experience. So I I don't have I'm not a person who has regrets. Everything played a part in my evolution as a human being. You know, there were certain people I didn't like at the firm, but you have to take the thick with the thin and just focus on what of it can you actually use and keep moving forward.

foundations endowments be around for like the next fifty to a hundred years, right? So that they can go execute their plan. Right. So that's kind of the role that we play there. And then with my own money, what can I do to um give give money away in philanthropic causes, you know, to help people put you know put a little wind in their sail.

I'm sure that many traders would feel the same way. So I just want to say thank you for your philanthropy and for your contributions to the trading community.

The first thing we talk about, they're like, What about sugar? And should I be piled into cotton? I'm like, We're not even gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about the clarity of what vision do you have for yourself? Because

You have to see the point B. And if you're at point A, you have to know what your point B is. Even if you don't know how to get there, you have to have that vision. So I think if you have that vision for yourself and you can see yourself being a certain type of a trader. That'll likely

your behavior is going to kind of converge to where it needs to be so that you can get where you need to go. That's what I that's how I've manifested almost everything in my life is to envision being somebody like a completely different person.

Yeah. Like almost having an identity crisis about it too. Like just being a completely different like you know, doing things out of character like I had when I was you know, first going to Wall Street and starting to do well for myself, I had people from my hometown

who I don't know that they had envy, but they were kinda like, Look, you're a hometown kid from New York and your dad was in a labor union. What are you going to an Ivy League school for? What are you they used to say something like, um It's a very New York way of saying things. They just like they could go check out Martin. He thinks who the hell he is. Which is a a way of saying Martin's full of himself. They be check out Martin, he thinks who the hell he is.

And I'd be like, I don't think who the hell I am at all. I'm just pushing myself to achieve, you know, higher levels of achievement based on my ability. There's no sense in slacking off or not using any of the gifts that God has given me. And if I fail, I know I could come back and be you. Easy. No, I didn't say that. That would be arrogant. But that's where my mindset was. Is like, why would these people just want to coast?

through life and not push themselves. Like every day, I'm not saying push it in the market or push risk, but you know, a person has to have goals. Every day. And take steps, even if you don't know what step two is take a step, hold one mini or one micro contract overnight just to see what it feels like. Or, you know, buy an option contract and hold it overnight and just kind of see what it feels like so that you could learn.

To manage your emotional intelligence around managing risk, right? Or investigate why do you take your winners too soon? Like what would it mean if you had.

Right. So you go back and validate the process, which was really reckless behavior. There's even other things that are a little more subtler, like you put a trade on, but you don't have enough risk. So it does make money, but you made money and you're like, okay, so now you're coaching yourself to kind of get used to being a small winner. And that becomes a mindset.

So so and'cause you're validated about the accuracy. Like this is a thing that really smart people, you know, if they went to good colleges or, you know they were just very good students, they're really tied up in the accuracy thing because it validates who they are. It's what they're used to.

Is trading just a vehicle to validate your intelligence, or is it a vehicle to make ungodly sums of cash?'Cause that's what I wanted it to do. I didn't want to be broke. I was tired of being like living you know, I was two or three months ahead of my bills, but that was it. Like I had enormous fear. And I was in New York City where everything is twenty bucks. You know, I mean it's like a

Create tax loss carry forwards for people. Like you actually have to make money. So there was the time where that validation really meant something to me as a human being, as a guy. Because, like every guy you know, I have a fragile male ego, right? So I wanted to have that badge, if you will, that that social proof that I was a profitable trader. But profitability too has to be operationally defined.

So one of the things that I did was I looked at my PL and I said, okay, I've made X amount of money on this trade or I made the X amount of money this week, divide that by minimum wage. And that's how many hours I would have had to have worked to earn that money. And so that's like a little trick that I used to use to coach people so that they didn't get excited, you know, if you could work at Chick-fil-A for twenty bucks an hour.

And you make two hundred bucks trading, like that's a 10 hour work week. That's something that you could do in the physical world. So the trading part isn't really exciting. Now, if you're pulling down five K. Or two thousand a week. Then you divide that and you're like, okay, that's a hundred hour work week. That's really not something that I could do and sustain. So now I know I'm leveraging my time because I'm bringing out of the market more money that I would have to work.

At a salaried job somewhere, for example. And I'm my own boss. I could work from home. I could talk with Michael Martin on the camera and not go on camera. Um is my hair look okay? I just

that wasn't producing whatever they had to produce, there's a there's a kind of play on words. They say, you know, you either have to change the man or you got to change the man. Right. Meaning like, okay, here's what's not happening. Here's all the resources we can give you to help you. Here's when it has to change by and here's what's gonna happen if it doesn't change. Like we're gonna reallocate you to another department or

you know, you're gonna be out of your job. Right. And so I would have those conversations because I I already like I by the time I got to Wall Street, you know, I was in my early twenties. I had worked since I'm twelve. So physically I was exhausted from working. And that's not a complaint. It's just the reality. I had started working and cutting grass in my neighborhood and trimming hedges when I was 12.

And I I had not in the middle of the school year, but there was it was there was really no time for me to not work. I would do things and pick up a ten dollar job on a weekend by raking somebody's lawn or I'd help somebody move furniture. Like I was that kind of guy Friday who would help people in the neighborhood. And then, you know, when I started to drive, I did that and then

You know, I I kind of said, okay, for all the work that I'm going to do, I want to make sure that I could make the most amount of money. So I did things like I delivered flowers and they were like, okay, you're going to get a lot of tips. And I didn't. And so I was making minimum wage, but I wasn't making any

So I was like, okay, I have to up my hourly rate. Where can I make a lot of money? So then I thought, like, okay, waiters can make like a hundred bucks a night. So I said, Oh, that's pretty cool. So I just started applying to restaurants and working as a w as a waiter and You know, I got in remarkably with no experience. And then same thing with with golf caddying.

And then so then after that, when I made a lot of money, you know, doing those jobs, I was like, okay, now I have to figure out how to join how the other half live. I need to figure out a way to use my brain. And I remember exactly where I was on the exact day of the week. I was I working at a restaurant in New York in Westchester County. Um, the name will come to me in a second.

The place was called Traveler's Rest. And it was a German cuisine place. So they had Wiener Schnitzel and and all that kind of really good German food, if you like it. dumplings and this and that. And Millwood. It was in Millwood, New York on Route One Hundred, which is kind of right in the very tony part of town, Westchester County. And we were also open on Monday nights. Most restaurants in the fancy ones were dark. That was like their day off.

And I remember it was a Sunday and I was setting up tables at, you know, because we would open at one o'clock for like an early lunch. And I was I was there at probably eleven, eleven thirty setting up. And on the music system, they had uh yesterday a song by the Beatles that Paul McCartney wrote. And it was like the dentist. Music elevator music version. It wasn't Paul and the Beatles, but it was a stylized version with you know violins and

Yeah, exactly. And I mean I remember thinking like, man. Paul McCartney's getting paid for this now. He wrote the song once in the sixties. 20 years later, and he's still getting paid. Like I gotta figure out how to have how do I get paid for not working, which sounds ridiculous to a working class person, but when you think like a business owner, it makes perfect sense. So I had to approach trading.

In a way that how can I trade it while not being there? How can I treat trading like a business that I own that I don't have to manage? So I can put in my stops and walk away because the clearing members have every incentive to want to you know, execute my trades for me. You know what I'm saying?

And then ask myself really good open ended questions, not these endless loop like why does this stuff keep happening to me? Like I that doesn't go anywhere, you know.