In my eyes, my public speaking skills remain either atrocious or some form of hilarious with shots of reality. I was able to give the “blooper reel” a lot of ammunition this past weekend while speaking in Florida:
“This stuff is boring, I’ll admit (but once you learn it, you’re done)” when talking about intermarket analysis. I was told this is not how you “sell” something.
When trying to explain getting on the right side of the trade: “Don’t get your a** handed to you, you want to hand out some a**”.
“Ride the horse” was mumbled, when discussing following news and data flows, sounding like “Ride the whore”, which was followed by me explaining that “You want to get it cheap”, when discussing price.
…..and so on. Being bureaucratic or tactful is not an area in which I excel sometimes — if you knew where I grew up, you might understand a little better. But then again, would rather have someone try to string you along all the time? Probably not.
What’s learning if you can’t have some fun along the way? I explained that overall I wasn’t a fan of our format just simply because of the retention factor. I think back to my days of college courses and how much of the information I actually remembered and apply to this day. Repetition is of utmost importance, and that’s why we did the recording and we’re holding a follow up session in a couple of weeks.
So far the feedback had been good, particularly surrounding all the new bits I threw in regarding order flows. It is the emails I have not yet received that make me nervous, and why I stress: if you didn’t understand something, or need further clarification, let me know. When you call 1-800-nobrainertrades you are not redirected to a hut in Antarctica or passed onto a sales hotline.
We covered a lot of ground in a relatively short period of time, and I have been getting hit with requests for more. We were saying that this was the last time I was going to do this because of the sheer amount of time it took out of my schedule and away from my work, but I’m glad I did it. We had some old friends join and an amazing crew of other full-time traders in the room that simply knew what they were doing.
“I now pronounce you trading strategy and trader” tends to have a 90% divorce rate
If there was one “take-home” that I wanted to stress and came up over and over again throughout the weekend, it is that every successful trader we had in the room or listening had their “trade” that they liked the most.
For one person, it was buying or selling into price when it came up to retest the base of a range.
For another, it was buying or selling at extremes outside of a daily range.
For another it was pouncing on price just ahead of local highs or lows and price touching the top of an order block, or any other array of common behaviors discussed throughout the weekend.
I have been trading for a long time now. Before the idea of this blog even came into light I was going through many of the same motions of anyone else in terms of development. My “professional” background only did so much good when it came to me actually applying any form of normalcy when it came to trading. It always gets personal.
I explained that the way most people teach, and the way most people learn, is simply by talking about their “trading strategy” and expecting the listener to copy it verbatim. This hardly ever works, in my opinion (which was easily confirmed by others). We emphasized market mechanics in relation to traders reacting to information flows in addition to common behaviors in price. “Order blocks” were of particular high-end discussion, simply because I know this is one area in which many people either know nothing about or have a severe deficiency when it comes to understanding. This alone can bring a tremendous amount of structure to anyone’s routine. I stress, get the feeds in the last post I mentioned and try and start to put it all together.
Getting “married” to someone else’s trading system tends to be death by opinion. You have no way to verify how well it works nor do you have the means to typically trade it successfully. It is all taken “as-is” and via the word of the instructor. Everyone in the room that could turn a profit had their own means of entering and exiting the market, and each one coincided with basic market mechanics. None of them used indicators, but others, I know, certainly do. Bottom line, it doesn’t matter.
But either way, it boils down to focus. If you find yourself scrambling for trades or overwhelmed by common reactions of price, I encourage you to hone in on that one thing that you see happen all the time and learn to trade it well. I did my best to provide structure to common reactions but ultimately the work is in your hands when it comes to what you are comfortable trading.
If you see something posted, here or elsewhere, just remember: you don’t have to listen to it. If you try it with a little bit of risk, and have “so-so” success with it, then so be it. Move onto something that makes more sense or you can easily wrap your head around. But don’t force it.
On the other side of the coin: getting out of your comfort zone is very important if you are in any form of development phase. For something you previously hated, you might find that you actually enjoy just based on future learning. But don’t experiment with risk.
“Why would you put money on something you don’t understand? It doesn’t make sense”
Another line I repeated over and over again throughout the weekend was: “Why would you put money on something you don’t understand? It doesn’t make sense.”
This applies to everything. I cannot begin to tell you the number of traders that I have witnessed go down the tubes before they even understood a small fraction of what drives this market.
I imagined: if someone sat next to me for 12 weeks in order to teach them to learn how to trade, what would I do? I took these ideas and put them in a brief trading plan for some people to follow, and for at least the first 6 weeks, risk was down to only .1% of account value per trade. The idea behind this was based on that quote above, and the logic is about as simple as it gets. Common sense, in any perception.
Thank you again for the support. As promised the plans for the future are floating along right now and I’m working on the next addition to this site. As usual, blog updates in the interim with nothing but the juice. See you soon,
