Talking about Freudian slips, let's introduce a little bit of psychology into trading. And let's keep the innuendos as minimal as possible. That's rough. Rebel Traders takes you inside the world of 2 underground master traders who take an entertaining and entertaining and contrarian look at the markets to cut through the noise of Wall Street and help you navigate the trading minefield. Together, Sean Donahoe and Phil Newton are on a mission to give you the unfair
advantage of a rebel trader. And now, here are your hosts, Sean Donahoe and mister Phil Newton. And, yes, I said that. I said it. Keep the innuendos as little as possible, which means at least 300 in the show rather than the usual 500. Who am I kidding? There's always gonna be innuendo. There's always gonna be, eighties references. We're just we're bloody well, look. At the end of every show, we say this show may contain nuts, and and I guess that makes me right and that
makes you less. I've got a I can see a pair of nuts right now. And you. Exactamundo. Exactamundo. As always, I'm joined by Phil, mister Phil Newton, the Aspire. And, yeah. Well, listen. We're continuing our 12, our 12 step recovery program. No. Our 12 roles of rebel trading, into basically different aspects that we, feel are critical to not only what we do every bloody day, but what you should incorporate and factor into your trading business as well. And one thing that you know, it it's
funny because some people treat trading like a hobby. We do treat it like a business. And we bring a very businesslike approach to everything that we do.
It's essential. You gotta have that kind of mindset. And it really does tap into the core of what we're gonna talk about today is that business mindset, the mental you know, the mindset, the, you know, perspective, the ability to take the good with the bad when it happens, you know, the stress and everything else, and all the different factors that really make you a better business person, but, also, in terms of that, a a much better trader as well,
which, again, ratifies into your bottom line profits, your success, your ability to do this today, next week, next month, next year. Psychology is critically important. Now that being said, where do you wanna start with this, Phillip? Because we can I I we said before we even went live? We can watch the fast show. Show to 30 minutes. But this is, I think, is one of those ones it's will be done when we're done because there's
plenty of rabbit holes we can go down here. And I've certainly got lots of recent examples from our current batch of students as a as a point. So a lot of our new students, if you're watching this and listening to this, you pay a bloody attention. But where do you wanna start with this one? Because I think there's a lot of different angles we can take here. Yeah. I think it's worth noting. This is something that can be summed up in sentence, but it doesn't emphasize the importance without the
long rambling stories, examples, and illustrations. And, you know, the importance is not understood without a long discussion. So it's got those two extremes involved with it. Yeah. Psychology, you know, you should have a strong mental fortitude, but what what on earth does that mean? It is on the spectrum of beach shaking, tree hugging, woo woo rah rah. So it it can be overlooked a lot as well. And then some people will disregard it because they've already got a natural
kind of mental toughness. And some people have that, which is great, but a lot of people don't have that as a natural inborn, inherited, however you wanna describe it, skill set, which is where I lay. I have a lot of difficulties with my kind of mental side of trading. But I also understood the importance of it. That was gonna be the differentiator
because everything that you read kind of says, yes. That's gonna be the thing that sets you apart from doing good in the short term or, to be fair, getting lucky in the short term versus being long term successful. And it's that mental, clarity, fortitude of just just being able to recognize that, hey. Maybe I'm having a bad day. Maybe I'm having a bad week. Maybe I shouldn't trade. You know, life just got in the way. Maybe I should just take a break.
And that's what we're trying to talk about, that emotional regulation. And the 3 usual ones that are mentioned are the fear, the hope, the greed, but there's also lots of kind of spin offs and cousins to those kind of three main emotions that we might experience.
And that's what we're gonna explore today. But, you know, essentially, we're going to kind of dive in and just try and give our examples, things that we've because that's all we can talk about, things that we've overcome because your experience is gonna be different from mine, isn't it, Sean? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, when I
first got started in this, I lost everything. 1999, again, right at the, the end of the growth spurt of the dotcom bubble, and I learned just how quickly a drawdown can kick you in the bollocks. And it can dissuade you from even taking action. I mean, my you know, I had, at the time, not a lot of money comparatively now. It was about $6, but that was my life savings in my twenties. Relative to your net worth at the time, it was below to the change. Worth. It was fucking everything.
Yeah. It was everything that I worked for for a year and a half and managed to put at one side. And, yeah, losing all of that in this well, basically watching it nose dive and hit the ground like a fucking dart, it was a kick in the nuts. It really was. And it was it it could have either broke me, but instead, I looked at that as and this is, again, I would say mental toughness, but also the ability to take a step back and reflect on what went right, what was wrong. What was
wrong was me. What was wrong was me listening to other people who would, for want of a better word, exiting their positions as quickly as they could or, you know, either through the front door or off the top of a bloody building in some cases. I hate to say it. A dark humor. But that was right at the end of the dotcom well, the the end of the growth of the dotcom bubble. It was the beginning of the dive, which then, again, that particular position I had didn't recover for 17 years.
I'd long exited it, but it set me on a path to figure out what did I do wrong when everyone else is doing you know, there's 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars going through the markets every year. What did I do wrong? What can I do differently? And how can I do this right? And that, obviously, didn't happen immediately. That took a good month of licking my own wounds. And then came the self reflection. Self reflection, I would imagine,
Sean? Yeah. It took a it took a lot to get to a point where I could do that because the emotional side of that did knock me down a lot. That was a lot of work and a lot of money for me. Now, good example and a more recent example of that is we've got a lot of students coming into our program right now. And while one of the strategies we have is long term, you know, it's the the the equity curve is, you know, almost a straight line up like a bloody
Tesla rocket into orbit. That's great. But even with that, there are short terms where you could have a drawdown or things level out or it it breaks even, stuff like that. We teach, again, a lot of the business principles of this is a long term business. It's a principles and and we espouse a lot of the, I would say, shortcuts to psychological and mental toughness. A lot of the stuff we talk about is kind of built
into what we do. But, again, they're experiencing on paper draw downs because it's one of those periods right now. They started and they're going right into a drawdown like I did back in 1999. And, you know, not in the same way because it's on paper, thankfully, and mostly. And you weren't partying with Prince. Not in not in that time. Not at that time. First reference, back in the neck, Sean. I was gonna say that was an impressive impressive one there.
But yeah. So with that, again, they're coming into a period of drawdown, which is a kick in the nuts. Psychologically, you're like, well, then it makes you question everything. What am I doing? What is the strategy? Is everything right? Again, it comes down to then a lot of the emotional regulation, the stress management, the mental resilience that we talked about. But, also, it's got to come with that element of self evaluation, and
strategy evaluation and business evaluation. You gotta be able to remove yourself from the emotion to have that 30,000 foot perspective. It's it's hard to see the forest and the trees when your nose is right up against the bark. And that takes a little bit of ability to step back. I mean, what do you say about that? Because I I know you've got a different background. I'm sure you've got many, many stories as well.
But give us, you know, what it was for you, but, you know, your the the one thing that sticks in your head, but then also, for traders out there experiencing similar things and students as well. Yeah. I mean, I suppose just to put different names on what we're talking about, the usual trifecta, fear, hope, greed that we mentioned about. You know, what we're essentially talking about is just various aspects of stress and anxiety.
And I suppose it's only as as I crest a different hill in life as I approach my fifties. You know, it's not something that you would admit when you were in your twenties or thirties or it's too fair, even forties. You know, you're kind of in denial with some of these things. Because, you know, maybe you just never put names on these things before, but as soon as you step into that realm of trading, then you experience them immediately. And for and usually to a
dramatic extreme as well. And that's really what we're talking about because the emotions get I usually describe this like it's a volume dial, don't I, Sean? You know, when you've got, something going on, not just there with drone, but generally in life, you know, that there's a volume dial of the the stressor that that's going on in your life. And then with trading, that get cranked right up to noisy neighbor levels. You know, it's really it's really at its extreme, and that is very
disturbing, to say the least, if you're not prepared for it. And some people have just this, and I fucking hate them. They have this natural ability to cope with those things. But then the for the rest of us. So the rest of us. You know? You you've gotta do something about it. You you've got to have, checks and measures in place, because it's not a case of if you experience them. You will experience them. You will have good days. You will have bad days. You'll have
winning streaks. You'll have losing streaks. And even the winning streaks can have this, negative, impact on, you know, a positive emotion essentially can have a a negative impact to your life, your mental, state of minds. And, you know, you've got the euphoria levels going through, and that can be very weird. So, again, general persona is stress management. How do we cope with the good times and the bad times so that we can make sensible decisions on a day to day
basis? So things that I have done over the years and still do to this day, meditate, I take time out, exercise, exercise, read books, things that are not necessarily trading related. Reading, I was actually, quite an eye opener when I was getting into meditation and stuff. I actually discovered that there's lots of things that are very, very shallow forms of meditation, so you probably do it without
realizing it. The great example is when you're reading a book and suddenly you've turned 50 pages and you look up and an hour's disappeared because you were engrossed in the thing that you were reading. And it could be, you know, any type of reading. It could be a white paper. You know, whatever your jam is, and you're just stuck in the words and reading and engrossed and you don't know the xenophobe. That's a very shallow form of meditation. So, you
know, you can do it in lots of different ways. Another example is when you're driving and you don't realize that you've got home safely after a 2 hour drive and you've you don't remember any of it. So, you know, you're just listening to the music. You're just in a world of your own. You're just you're looking at the view around you if it's a straight road and clear roads. You know, these are all very shallow forms. So you can take that one step further. Just put time aside every
day to self reflect. Some people like, writing a journal, looking back on the day. Again, not necessarily from a trading point of view, but from a life point of view as well. These are all skills that you use in your your everyday as well. I'm I use a a company, like, you know, very rarely recommend things, but I use a company called CenterPoint, which was the kind of, originator of, what we now know as binaural beats. And it's based on no for anyone
who just know, it's based on Nobel Prize winning research from the seventies. And it was discovered that if you played, say, for example, 100 megahertz in your left ear, 110 megahertz in your right ear, your brain gets put into a forced difference of that megahertz. So 10 megahertz would be an alpha form of, the alpha state, which is a very shallow form of meditation. So you don't have to have the 30 years transcendental meditation experience like the Beatles went on their journey.
They're following with Lucy in the Sky and all that. You don't have to do any of that. You can quite literally just plug in and meditate. So I would start meditative practices as part of your day to day as a way to deal with stress, stress and stress management. And it's not that I think just a final thought there just before I take a breath and have a drink is it will never go away. You know, whatever what meditation does over a long term period, it
changes your it increases your ability your coping mechanism. That's probably the better way to describe it. Like you might run a marathon, You know, if you've never run before even to the corner shop or to catch a bus, you know, you're going to find it difficult to run a 100 meters because you just don't fit. You're not used to doing it. But over a period of time, you can run the 100 meters. You can
do a 100 meters. Maybe you go from a leisurely maybe maybe you go from a fast walk, Sean, like me, to a steady steady pace and then a bit of a jog. And then you go a little faster, a little bit faster, and then you can run a little bit further distance. That's kind of like what it does over a period of time. You get used to being able to run longer distances. And the good thing with the meditative side is when you stop, your ability to run that distance stays with
you. So that coping mechanism is still there for you over a long term period of time. So, anyway, stress never goes away. Just your ability to cope with it is what you're improving. Yeah. You know, it's a valid dig. I mean, I I moved from a high stress environment, 10 plus businesses, to now just 3, which, again, still sounds like it's stressful. But for me, you know, it's it's very leisurely. A lot of my businesses have restructured them to
remove all the factors of extra stress. And a lot of what we do as traders, is non stressful compared to a lot of people's trading. So I also think not only do you have to, you know, take into consideration things like meditation. I don't meditate. I have my own versions of meditation, which involves 2 wheels and big engines and a racetrack. That for me is whatever you need to do, whatever you do to relax or put yourself in a relaxing zone is make that a central part
of what you do. One thing I I I really focused on, we used to espouse this a lot, and it took a while for me to get there personally because I had a lot to unwind was to build your business around the life you want. Don't cram life around the business you have. If your business is super stressful, which you're trading in our case and situation here, if everything is stressful, we'll figure out how to make it not stressful. And that's what a lot of what we do for
the trading aspect. Trading, for example, we design a lot of these strategies and approaches to be trading for busy people who don't wanna see I look almost so short. I wanna just want to intentionally jump in. We're on video now so I can see the visual cues of when when I can and can't. Well, I intentionally wanna jump in and cut you off this time, Sean, because I I just wanna come wind
up the hands of time back just 30 seconds. And I just want us to kind of recover what I think would be very important for a lot of people who are in the situation where you said de stress your life. You know, make it, you know, less busy. And a lot of people might be screaming inside their head, that little voice going, oh, of course, that's easy. It's easy for you to say. But you
went through this I wasn't doing a lot. I had health reasons for for doing it, which I've explained many times before, but I'd like to come back to the business. I think that's more relatable to the majority of people who are busy. They're overworked, overstressed. They've got self imposed, overworked conditions and situations. And I would imagine that a lot of people would be against Grimyard. It's easy for you to say you've done it, but you've been through the run
of the mill. You have literally been through the ringer. You had 10 businesses. You I I remember our conversation, Sean, you know, you you know, very looking back on it, you very graciously always put time aside for me, you know, whenever we needed to talk. But there was some days where you just think, you know, you could there was that deadness in in your eyes, you know. You're just like, I'm I'm I'm up against the wall here, you know, but you wouldn't let it bother you. But it's that, self I'm
gonna pull back to the word. It's it's self imposed, but you can get out of it. You know, who says that you have to be the person to do everything, whether it's in your work or your own life? Who says that you need to be the person to be the, you know, pulling the levers and running the businesses or doing the things? Delegation was is something that is difficult for the entrepreneurial minds and the entrepreneurial spirit, the people who want to be free
to do the things that they wanna do. And I I I can just wanna come back to this because you went through it, and a lot of people with, well, I've not got time to do this, and I've not got time to do that, and I haven't got time to breathe or scratch my ass or whatever the thing is. Like, well, who who said that you had to be an 80 hour workweek person? Who Mhmm. It's
self it's self imposed. Sorry. I'm just kind of like, you know, because this is the conversation that I've had in my head because I saw my parents go through it. You know, I worked grew up on a working farm. I've been regular work, you know, dust literally dust still doing. Sometimes, you know, you you burn the wick either sides of the burning wick. You know, and it's it it it's not pleasant to see someone go through. And I fell into it briefly myself, which caused all my my health
issues. But I just wanna come back to the sorry. There is a question here eventually, Sean. But, you know, who says that you have to, like, work the 80 hours? And and how can we or why should you delegate and free up your time? It doesn't have to be 100% perfect as we you know, whatever the the task is, the thing that's causing you all your time. Like, could you just get 80% of the way there with someone else doing it?
Mhmm. I mean, it's funny because I've been here now in Thailand. I I'm semi retired, in paradise. Spend most of my time on a motorcycle enjoying myself, but it took me a long time to get here. It took me probably 2 years in all honesty to pare down the stuff, to ruthlessly sacrifice certain aspects of things that I felt I had to do. And, you know, I used to be of the mindset,
you know, it's it's you work harder. And if you've got another half an hour, what can I cram that half hour within a day consistently to build more? And I was that very much that, you know, fill everything on all my time with growing and building and everything else and businesses, but it got to the point where it was slowly killing me. It really was. And I got to a point where I had to make a change, but that did require real world you a personal question, Sean. Go
ahead. A personal follow-up question because I know what my answer I know I know we've discussed proudly, so, you know, it'd be not mine. But, I really forgot the question. Busy work. Mhmm. Did you feel guilty if you weren't doing something? Of course. Absa bloody lutely because it's the entrepreneurial mindset. If you are not doing something, you're letting the team down. You're letting your business down. You're letting those who are depending on you down. And so
you will create. And like I said, you know, I've got spare half hour. What can I fill it with? Rather than say, go work on my motorbike. Go play guitar just to chill the hell out. I'm in a productive state. It's productive time of day. Okay. What else could I be doing? What can I be which which stone could I be dragging up the hill just a little bit more? You know? And it's one of those it it takes, it
does take an emotional toll. And even this business of trading, if you're staring in front of a screen all day looking for that perfect entry, that perfect exit, and everything else, that's just doing the same thing to your head, to your brain, and everything else, which is why I I You're on permanent standby, aren't you, in that regard? So you might be physically doing nothing, but mentally, you're is this it? Is that? You're analyzing. It's
busy work. Now sorry. Just to come just come final thing on this one because I think it's very important to kind of understand just a perspective of this. Now that you've gone through that, you've realized that being busy is not the way to long term success. Short term short term great works, book burnout happens, and that that's where you were. Now that you're doing significantly less, are you more productive than you've ever been before? A 100%.
I'm asking a leading I'm asking a leading question in fairness. I'm asking a leading question. There's a flip side to it. I fully retired when I came here. And all I was doing is I took a few months for myself, keep things ticking along. And I was really just idling, but I was also de stressing and everything else. So I thought, okay, you know what? Fully retire. It's probably a bit of recovering as well. You know, you've just been through all of
that. You're probably in a little bit of recovery, mentally, physically, emotionally Yeah. All the rest of it. But I would I would imagine that you're I was gonna say I decided that I was gonna be fully retired. I was gonna do that's it. I'm done. I'm done with everything. I'm in a position now where I don't have to worry. Trading fills, the the the coffers, so to speak. I don't have to ever work again if I don't want to. The thing was, though, after about 6 months of that, I got so fucking
bored. I couldn't stand it. I really so I had to start things back up again in a small but, again, with a self reflection of, okay. I know what I want. I know what I don't want. And now I can get to the final part, which is finally build the business around the life I want, which I have, which is freaking awesome. But now I have constraints in regards to that, which, again, has allowed me to, shit, I don't have to work at all if I don't really want to.
But I enjoy what we do now a 100 times more, and it allows me to do so much more, be more productive, but I'm also more ruthless about my time than I am monthly. If it eats too much time, it takes away from for example, my weekends. I always block off Friday to Monday. Why? Because I might be traveling. I might go do something for the weekend, but I might be leaving on Friday and come back Monday depending on long weekend or what I'm doing
here. Which means, really, I'm only working 3 days a week or doing stuff 3 days a week. I might answer an email and do a little bit here and there if I've got time. But, again, on my calendar, it blocks out all that time. That means I'm only working 3 days a week if I feel like it to get shit done. And that just allows me to do everything I bloody would want. So to answer one of the things you said is, you know, for all those
who are thinking, well, that sounds easy. You've you've done it. It took a while. It took a lot of intentions, but also the mental fortitude to realize where I am right now, I put myself in a gilded cage. I built this gilded cage around myself, which was my life. I had to intentionally deconstruct what was wrong, what was right, what do I need to change. And then rather than, well, that's difficult. I'm not gonna do it. It's
like, okay. How do I do that? What do I have to do in order to unwind, to disconnect, to sacrifice on the altar of my future and my mental well-being and then make those changes. And and it took time. So, I mean, even with what we're talking about here, trading gives you a lot of freedoms. If you are successful, consistent, and you can build trading around the life you want and you're not setting from the screen all day,
you've got strategies. Like, one of one of those strategies we do, it literally takes me 5, 10 minutes in a day, and that is from the time that, you know, I get an alert that a certain condition's happened to pressing 2 buttons on my phone. Sometimes it only takes 30 seconds. It just depends if I'm paying attention or not and when I'm paying attention, but that's it. And then I'm done for the day, and off I go. It's not stressful. But there's a couple things in regards to that we can
talk about. But, I mean, a lot of the strategies that we focus on are time efficient, so I'm not worried about that. And we've said this before as well, actually, Sean. Everything that we do has to run through the filter of, is it time efficient? And it and and we've always spoken about it in terms of,
the trading thing. You know? Can I, you know, am I gonna be spending all day doing this, or can I do this in in, you know, 10, 15 minutes, you know, if I'm taking my time, you know, putting the kettle on and, you know, all that jazz? So everything needs to be done through that lens. But what we're talking about now is not not necessarily just the training side, but also the the you can apply the same filter to your line. You know? And this
is something that you and me. We used we we used to go back and forth on this for years where we'd is it me? Do I need to do it? Can someone else do it? Or does it need to be done at all? You know, we we would constantly have these kind of, like, time you know, we went on a little bit of a time management rift at one point, didn't we, Sean, as you were going through kind of all these
changes? And we were just trying to declutter our lives ourselves because it's very easy just to add another thing and add another thing and add another thing, you know, whatever the thing is, And suddenly your day is full from nonstop and you're exhausted. Like so, you know, you can change your lifestyle, not and change it to suit trading, your business, your work. It can be done. It really can be done. So for anyone who was shouting, oh, it's easy for you. Well,
we've been through it. Like, we've done it. We know it's possible, and that should be the first step for you. You should know it's possible, and then you can start to make changes. And write you know, start writing down all the things you did work in life And, you know, start writing those things down that that is, like, okay, that you're doing. And then you wanna put ask yourself, like, do I need to do that? Or can
someone else do it? Because if someone else can do it 80% as well, or even to be fair, probably better than you can, then maybe you should hand that off. Maybe you should start thinking about hiring people. Stop putting a value on your time, so that you can claim it back. So I appreciate we're talking a bit more generalized lifestyle, but but these are all things that are true when it comes to trading as well. It's maintaining balance, keeping calm. How can we stress
our lives? Most people are stressed because they're doing too much, and they've not got 5 minutes to scratch their ass as we've said. So we're just, like, you know, how can you, again, destress, declutter, you know, decompress, and, you know, make it a better life so that you can enrich it with something that is gonna significantly change your life, which, you know, for us, trading has done that. And we can put all these things in place. So we've
got we've got very high level this time. But I know we spoke about these things before at a at a micro level, like, really, like, nose up against the charts type of thing. Well, I think this time around, we've ended up going, like, quite high level. I think this is probably the best conversation we've
had about this, I think. It probably is. And one thing I would also say, and this was key to me doing this in my life, and outside of things like, you know, holistic life choices such as exercise, eating healthy, you know, going to the gym 3 times a week, making good life good life habits helps you, again, balance out all your, you know, your hormones, chemicals in your body, you you know, longevity, also allows you to de stress with that. You know,
for example, I I kickbox. You know? Hey. I'm in freaking Thailand. We've died. Yeah. Great. I kickbox regularly, Sean. I often break toes. There you go. But one of the things I was gonna say is one of the the the critical exercises for me that allowed me to start the process of decluttering, removing everything is what is your number? What is your comfort disposable income number that allows you to then not stress about the big things in life, mortgage, rent,
you know, health insurance. Yeah. This is not the big ticket items. No. No. No. No. No. Number. This is not, oh, she had a £1,000,000 in my account. You know? It's not it's not that win the lottery number. But practically, what do you need? What do you need to live and and and be comfortable and not stress about if you have a surprise bill? Yeah. And that's the point of this is you could then find out what to kill. Yeah. That realistic number is probably a lot smaller than you think. Because
I'm quite a frugal person, you know, despite my career choice. Like, I'm not. I've done the flashcards and the and the the big things and the expensive items. I've done that, and I didn't find any enrichments in it, Sean. But it's nice to not worry about, you know, if you wanna take 6 months off, if you wanna take a year off, if you wanna you know, forget. I can retire. You know? If you wanna do that, you can do. Or retire for a year and decide to have a big comeback, you know,
which is what you did. You know, it can be done. So I think I think what what we're talking about now is it's kind of like lifestyle choices as well, but they're super relevant to trading because we wanna be able to again, sometimes when we've spoken about in in context to trading because everyone's idea of it is sitting at the desk for 6 hours a day, Monday to Friday, like a time consuming job. And it's not someone's idea.
You know? And again, some vision of an eighties movie scene, you know, the the or the the high frequency trading with massive computer banks. And, you know, it it's not true. I mean, I lost all my technology, Sean. I had a I had a break in early in the year. And I a huge realization for me is I can do everything on the mobile phone. You know, it was frustrating at first, But when you got used to well, I've I've kind of got to suck up and just get on with it. So all my emails were done on the
phone. All the you know, I like to I like when I'm at work, I like to have the desk to say that even if it's just a laptop because I've got a laptop and a second monitor now. But just the the, the desk working, just a mental thing. But what I realized is I didn't need everything to to kind of make it work. It can be done on a mobile phone very minimal time. So, anyway, lifestyle choices. What I would think about is, like, in context of trading, how do you envision
yourself trading? What does it mean to you? And or what do you want it to mean to you more importantly? Because if it's just check-in, check for trades, check out, which is what we're big advocates of, then you're looking at, you know, 10, 20 minutes during the day. And your strategy of choice then needs to be reflective of, okay. I've got this small window of opportunity to check for things, check for setups. And if they're not there,
walk away. You don't have to sit there for 6 hours hoping that they magically appear. You know, that that's what we're trying to get to. So again, if you're if you like the idea of sitting there all day and you've got the time to do that, then, yeah, maybe a very a very active strategy on lower time frames would be suitable. But if you've not got that time, then you wanna be thinking about, okay. Well, maybe long term strategy is a higher time frame setups. Maybe, you know, 60 minute charts,
4 hour charts, daily charts. Maybe if you're really super busy at the moment, maybe it's gonna be, well, I only wanna check-in at the end of the day. You know, maybe some, you know, multi day or multi week swing trading is the approach that you need to start with until you kind of reorganize yourself. So think about what it means to you, what time do you have available, and then you can back into the right strategy for for you and your situation. Again, we had this conversation on
Monday with some of our students. You know, we've got a variety of setups that are quite short term in nature, but they don't they're not time intensive. And we've got 6 of them essentially, and everyone thinks that you've got to trade all 6. Well, no. No. You you you pick the one that's most suitable for you. Just pick one of them. And, you know, if you can check the charts for, you know, 5, 10 minutes in the morning at set time, as per the strategy rules,
then use the morning setup. If you can't do that, then you've got an afternoon setup. If you can't do that, you've got an end of day thing. You know, you can just check-in at the end of the day with the the swing version of what we do. So you can pick the flavor. It's still Sean's frame. You can pick the flavor of ice cream that you like, you know, for your particular
situation. You don't have to do everything every day all the time. You've just said you just pick, okay, but this is the one that's most relevant to my situation. It suits my pace of life, the thing that I want from training, and that's the one I'm going to stick with. And until you see it, because then maybe you've got more free time later. You can add other things later on.
From a lifestyle point of view, Sean, what we what we both, made, huge strides towards is to have a lot of free time and to do the things that we wanna do, whenever we wanna do it with whomever we choose to do it. And one thing that I would think is plan free time. It sounds silly, but when I started putting blank spots on my calendar, and there's about 80% blank spots now on my calendar, And it has been for years. But it's by design.
It wasn't like that at first, dude, because you again, it's very easy to fill your time, fill your day. I'll just do this. I'll go and do that just with the, the the US audience may, know this is the hoodie do list. You know, it it whatever is time consuming, you know, like, put some time aside for it. Okay. Well, Tuesday morning, is gonna be household chores. You know, Thursday afternoon's laundry day. You know, it's
whatever the thing is, I don't know what what your lifestyle is. You obviously gotta fill this. So so kind of my daily routine beyond the things that I need to do to look after that. Again, I do a lot of cooking. So, you know, cooking's high on my priority. My morning list is essentially I get up Wednesday morning. I'm sorry. Wednesday morning doing a pot list,
but most mornings blocked off. There's nothing that I intend on doing other than going for walks, reading a book, grabbing a coffee, and just having that 4 hour morning, that nice relaxing morning. Because that's how I like to start my day, nice and relaxing. Because I'm not productive in the mornings, usually, in my everyday life. That's what I've discovered. So but maybe you're, I know you are, Sean. You're an early bird. You're you're a very productive person
first thing in the morning. So you're normally if you, you know, you've got to research for you. You're normally elbows deep in code if I send you a message first thing in the morning because that's when you're most productive, most busy. That's when your mind is most agile for those sorts of things. So, you know, figure out what when you're best, and that's when you wanna be doing your kind of work block forms of a better description. And just think
about give yourself time constraints. So normally, because of the US market, my afternoon is the US morning. So I have my early afternoon, 2 to 3 hours where I've got a window where you can either coach some students on Mondays and Wednesdays, which is what I do. And then the rest of the day, it's just I can check-in from the mobile phone from the
comfort of anywhere. Usually, you know, go and visit zoos, go in for walks, go in for rambles, go in hiking up mountains because that's what I like to do with my free time with with my lovely wife. And it's by design is the point. It's like these things need to be blocked off at first so that, like, no one can take that time from you. No one can book in a meeting. No one can make a phone call. And if the phone rings in that app, like, turn the phone off. You know? So design the life that you
want. Have the trading window that makes sense to you around everything else. And then it takes a bit of time, but it we know it can be done, can't it, Sean? Because we've we've guided people through this before and this process before in the past, this kind of high level that we're going through. But it all revolves around stress management. How do you de stress your life? Absolutely. I mean, to go back I mean, everything you
said is a 100%, you know, bag on the nail. Just to go back to one of the things I was talking about with whatever your number is is optimization is a process of elimination. Okay? Is what can you cut? What do you need to maintain? Where do you need to go? What are the big things that need to change in your life? And what can be done to mitigate any of the negatives from? So optimizing not only your stress levels, your life, and your business, and everything else is a
process of elimination. It's what can you cut out and what can you replace it with that's better. Now sometimes a lot of people resist that because eliminating or sacrificing or however you want to put on it, you know, what terms you wanna put on it, it can seem like a painful process until you have a good game plan of what you replace it with that's better or what you don't need at all, which, again, look
at the benefits from that as a stepping stone process to that. So no matter what you're doing, everything we talked about here from a trading perspective, from a life perspective, from a business perspective, it's all helping that future that you want. Because trading is at the end of the day, trading is a business. And a business is just a process where you put effort in, money in, and you get more
proceeds out. And money fixes you know, when they say money can't buy happiness, well, well, it solves a lot of fucking problems. Okay? And you can certainly rent system money. Exactly. I was gonna say, money may not buy happiness, but it buys motorcycles. So for me, that's happiness. It allows me to travel. It allows me not to be stressed. Well, guess
what? That's happiness at the end of the day. If you are not for example, I've got a situation right now, which I won't go into, a personal situation, which could cost me a fuck ton of money. Okay? Could cause a lot of stress, but I've got the mental fortitude. I've got the resources to make what would have been a absolute freaking nightmare 2 years ago into, oh, well, there you go. Done. Problem solved. Here you go.
Freeing up the bandwidth to be there able to take those things on, the resources to make them happen, and then it gets pushed off of the stress show, so to speak, Makes life a lot fucking easier. And trading on the surface of it, people think is super stressful. You gotta have 6 monitors. You're gonna be monitoring all these charts, every pip, every tick, every news event. Bullshit.
Absolute bullshit. Like Phil said, he could trade on his phone. I do that. I actually was in the mountains near Burma, at a stupid altitude on the back of a motorbike, got a signal placed to trade. Now I say that just to say that, hey. Look. If I can trade in the mountains of Burma on a cell phone with shitty signal and be successful in doing so, there's no fucking excuses in the world not to be a trader and be a successful trader. So I think that's a good point to kind of,
I would say play yeah. I I was gonna say land this one touchdown and everything else. Any last words as we kind of because you're right. We did I knew this one was gonna be an exciting one or a good one for us. I knew we were gonna uncork the bloody bottle here a little bit. Because I think we spoke about some I I am almost gagging on the phrase because we used to joke about these phrases. I think we've spoken about some of the high level stuff, but it's vastly important and highly
relevant. It's the low level stuff, the macro and the micro, essentially. Again, we've spoken about on past episodes, like doing the meditative practice, keeping mental journals, knowing when to take breaks. We've spoken out these these are all things that you should know as common, kind of standard stuff. But I think today's discussion, Sean, has been really, you know, invigorating just to say, you know, it's not just about the training. It's about life, life
adjustments, you know, having a better life. So it's more of that lifestyle design, that is highly applicable, highly relevant, and highly doable if you just change your viewpoints and know that it can be done. So if you're resisting that change and you are stressed in life, then, yeah, you can make the changes. You know, I know it's possible. Sean knows it's possible. Again, we we focus more on your kind of origin story here,
Sean, things that you've done in the past. You know, I've spoken about my kind of health issues in the past, so I I won't belabor them right now. But I think it was really good illustration, Sean, of how to go from very fucking busy to, you know, time rich and to have an enriched life because of it. And, you know, a lot of it is because of, the the trading that we do and the freedoms that it gives us. Absa bloody lutely. I agree a 100%. So with that being said, I trust these were
some valuable insights and lessons. Again, if you've got any questions, just shoot us an email, sean@tradekenyon.com. Phil@tradekenyon.com. If you are listening to this, make sure you like, subscribe, press the mash and like buttons and what have you. All the cool stuff that the cool kids say in social media. But the main thing is apply what we teach. Apply what we talk about. See how this is
relevant to where you are right now and make it bloody happen. So with that being said, I think it's gonna be the same bad time, same bad channel next week. And, Phil, I'm gonna leave last words for you as we sign off. There you go. Absolutely. This has been happening. Adios. For more cutting edge trading advice and a free trader workshop to help you build a personalized trading plan and make smarter trading decisions. Go to tradecanyon.com now. Futures, options on futures. Stock and
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