Daily Ticker Podcast EP 16: Succeeding Despite Adversity

Transcript

Hey, everybody.

Good morning. Good morning. How’s everybody doing? Looks like the market is all set to, drift into all time highs here. Pretty nice follow through so far, and really brings home the point that we weren’t bearish at all, really.

We just stopped going up, and we’ve been pretty much sideways since the middle of December, which kind of brings me into something that I want to highlight, for lack of a better way of putting it.

It bears repeating because it’s super Important. And I wrote about it this morning, but I’m I’m just gonna pop it in here again just because I want everybody to really be on top of this.

It’s no secret that for at least 4 to 5 weeks, I’ve been talking about reducing position size on trades.

I’ve been posting charts of the, S and P 500 going sideways, had the box around it, put a big circle around it, and I said until this changes, Any position size that I’m gonna be putting on will be on the lower end of the scale unless it has to be happens to be in a industry Tree like technology right now, which is breaking out.

But even I’m still keeping my position size down because the market didn’t have direction pretty much since, I don’t know, mid December 13th or somewhere around that time.

So I guess I just want to this is not like a passing thought. This has nothing to do with the way the market’s traded recently.

It’s just good trading, which is when the market’s obvious, it’s our responsibility to hold longer, number 1, and number 2, if you’re comfortable with it, trading a little bit bigger.

But when the market is choppy sideways, not breaking out, and doing so on melted candle after melted candle.

We’ve been very Diligent with telling everybody that reducing position size is the right trade, not only for now, but it’s the right long term.

I think that we’ve spent a massive amount of time talking about that if you believe every trade is the same and every trade deserves the same risk, At that point, you really don’t have a strategy because you don’t see any trade as differently.

And I’ve tried to use as many metaphors and analogies as possible, but I’m gonna just use the one that makes the most sense, which is driving.

Every time you get in a car, it’s not the same thing. There’s different risk and different different times to step on the gas because it’s better conditions.

I’ve pretty much in every email, not maybe not every email, but absolutely every week, at least twice a week, I’ve been writing in the swing trade section that I’ve reduced my position size.

I have not had bigger allocation of capital on The swing trading side of things, on the day trading side, absolutely.

There’s been some amazing day trading setups recently. But I just want to bring this to the front because this is not a This is not a recent revelation, for lack of a better way of putting it. This is just a part of trading.

And if we’re going to be celebrating how much money we’re making when the market’s going straight up for 2 months and then ready to jump out the window when the market goes sideways and we’re not printing the same money we did during November December.

You’re gonna end up hopping from strategy to strategy and spending 48 hours in a row, Saturday Sunday on YouTube, trying to figure out what you’re doing wrong.

And and this goes back to and I said this story before, but when I built the saturation play strategy in 2007, and that was after 7 years of trading, Even after 7 years with a new strategy, I was trading 100 shares because I was thinking long term to determine whether or not it was valid strategy.

And if it was, only then in the right market conditions would I size up a little bit.

So I just want to reiterate this because we, we got a little bit of feedback about how the market’s trading recently and what that’s resulting in Profitable or not profitable swing trades and the size of the wins compared to what they were at the end of last year.

I don’t know how you can compare What the market did for November December to what the market has done again for the last 5 weeks.

So I’m telling you as a Experienced trader that long term thinking is how you last in this business, and if you are Under the belief that every trade is the same, you should always be going for it all the time and Not expecting to have any trades not work out.

You’re gonna have a really hard time lasting in this business because you’re gonna end up, constantly blaming a particular setup or strategy which is a little bit ridiculous when the previous 2 months That same strategy was printing money.

It’s market conditions. And if you understand that and acknowledge it. Trading is going to be a very fun business to run.

But now I’m gonna give you another I’m gonna give you another metaphor, which is Owning a business because obviously trading is owning a business. And nobody in their right mind would do what I’m about to say, but traders do this.

So if you could imagine owning a restaurant and the restaurant is profitable, every quarter you make money, but every once in a while you have a slow week.

Could be a holiday, could be whatever the circumstances are, and During that slow week, you’re like this sucks.

I hate I’m not I’m I want to close this restaurant. I want to I’m gonna go look for a different restaurant because you had a slow week for 2 weeks, whatever it happens to be.

And that’s how traders, for some reason, don’t add The 2 together and say, okay, market conditions are different. I have to manage my trades differently.

I have a choice to either do nothing or take the ideas that still match the criteria, but because the market conditions are a little bit tough, I have to be smart with how much I’m willing to risk, and that’s what trading’s about.

And we’ve used the word distinctions A massive amount of time over the last 12 months, especially on coaching calls in game plan meetings because it is the next level of thinking.

Many traders never get beyond technical analysis because they Don’t understand that technical analysis is only the first chapter of the book of profitable trading. It’s what to look at.

It’s getting an idea of how to start making decisions, but the chapters after that are about Adding or subtracting reasons to the quality of the idea, and then chapters after that are how do we make adjustments So risk management position sizing, how long we hold trades, what kind of profits we’re going after.

And I think that’s the challenge for anybody who is ready to jump out a window because the market’s gone sideways for a few weeks and you’re just not thinking long term.

And I just want to Bring this up because that’s the whole point of the community is for me to give you my long term perspective of why I’ve lasted in this business as long as I have.

And a lot of smart people have blown up because they didn’t treat this like a business.

Now I had the luxury of being an entrepreneur before I became a trader. I started as an entrepreneur in 1988 and didn’t become a full time trader until 2,000.

So I had a unique perspective of what it took to run a business and more importantly, understanding the cycles of amazing and slow and amazing again and nothing going on and you’re just wiping the counter down.

I guess I understood that because I dealt with all that running multiple businesses for 12 years before before I started to run a trading business.

So I just want to reiterate this really important point because we have some really smart people in our community. We’ve attracted some Amazing people that I would love to have drinks and dinner with and that kind of stuff.

But being an entrepreneur and running a business, We’re all running a trading business here together as a special breed of person.

If you are Adversity challenged, where every time there’s the slightest bit of adversity or everything is not going perfectly the way that it did during November December.

And you can’t, for whatever reason, put that in context of this is what happens in any business.

It’s you’re gonna have a really hard time, and you should probably just be in an ETF and look at your stuff once a year. I don’t want to see that happen, but it’s reality. I’m not I’m not throwing cold water on anything here.

I’m what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to make sure that you have the right mindset To understand that you are running a trading business and any business, never mind a trading business, has periods where It’s easy and then periods where it’s challenging and you have to make different decisions.

And if you acknowledge that, You expect it and you’re ready for it. I’m not saying it’s easy to do that, but what I am saying Is it required? There’s a difference between the 2.

If you want to lose weight, you got to eat right and workout or some of those things. Right? Might not like it, but it’s required. I don’t have a lot of superpowers, but I will tell you this, My superpower is persistence.

And I don’t know anybody who does it as well as I do, and I’m I don’t say that I say that with all Modesty, because I don’t brag about anything that I do, but I could tell you right now my superpower is persist persistence.

And if you learn anything from me, learn that from me because to give up or think about giving up or think about doing something else simply because You’re go you recently went through something that could be conceived a stumbling block or, a reason to stop or any of those kinds of things, stop that.

I’m telling you right now as your friend, your coach, your mentor, the person with you here, Stop thinking that way. How you think is ultimately going to end up determining your level of success, both positive and negative.

We all have the same market. If companies didn’t have good days, bad days, good quarters, bad quarters, there’d literally be nothing for us to do.

So we’re trading these companies as they have good days, weeks, and months, and quarters, and earnings reports back and forth with all the volatility that’s going on based on What’s going on in those companies, which is the very thing giving us opportunity, which means that we can’t Say that we’re never running our business going to have bumps and roadblocks and amazing days and other days we’re like, oh my gosh.

I wish I would’ve stayed in college and those kinds of things. I listened to my mother.

But if you want this to be something that really matters to you, Something that can be I’ll give you the quote that we hear from a lot of new members coming into the community, which is, man, I would love to get close to retirement and make that extra 4 to $6,000 per month to supplement the other money that I have so I’m not dipping into my savings account and by all the other pension and all those kinds of things.

If I could just make that 4 to $6,000 a month, I’ll be happy I’ll be the happiest person on the planet. Think about that long term. Think about the the fact that you’re running a business and there’s going to be Stumbling blocks.

But it’s your choice to determine whether or not that’s a stepping stone. And I’m I’m gonna tell you what I told people in my in who traded my money and what I live by.

K? Everybody knows how to celebrate the winning touchdown, which is what happened during November December. But it’s the people that get knocked down and get back up That really showed themselves what they’re made out of.

That’s what I want to convey to everybody in this community. There’s so much help in our community between game plan meetings, coaching calls, Discord.

There’s probably too much help available, and maybe it’s it might even be a little bit overwhelming, but I’d rather you had too many opportunities to learn and grow and improve and understand that you’re not the only person going through a tough patch.

If you happen to be going through a tough patch right now, Lean on the community.

Lean on me. It’s the it’s the whole reason I quote, unquote can have a retirement is because I felt like I could make a difference for as many people as possible.

But the critical aspect of all of this is you have to decide when and if things get a little bit tougher, Whether it’s market conditions or whether it is you’re just not trading well or you’re not following the rules.

It’s during those moments of decision of when things are tougher that you prove to yourself How bad you actually want it and what you’re actually made of.

You don’t have to prove that to me, you don’t have to prove that to anybody else, But if you actually want to do this for the long term, you have to prove to yourself that when you get knocked down, you’re gonna get up again.

That you’re not gonna Search for excuses.

You’re gonna actually search for solutions. You’re gonna ask better questions. You’re gonna say, did this happen to anybody else? Is this happening to anybody else? Am I the only person going through this?

And I could literally guarantee you that we will have an answer for what you’re going through because I’ve done it and I’ve done it, coached people through it and gave people to trade my money for years.

I’ve seen pretty much everything.

So Lean on my superpower, and Joe, and Lynn, and all the other amazing people that we have in this community because If if you are under the impression that trading is is the smooth Carpet ride into the clouds, it’s not.

There’s ups, there’s downs, there’s euphoria, there’s anger.

All of those things go into doing something extraordinary. And I’ll just finish that part up with with Something really important. People who do do extraordinary things do not live ordinary lives. That’s just a fact.

If you want what other people dream about, you have to do what other people are not willing to. And the most exciting part of that is that choosing to move forward through adversity and learn from it It’s literally a decision.

It has nothing to do with what happens externally. Nothing. It’s your choice. If you rethink and grow rich, and all of those books on personal development, There’s a golden thread running through all of them.

It’s all about stories about how the most famous people that we’ve we now know as famous and wealthy and and successful. All stories about how many times they failed before they finally pushed through.

And I used to play a game with myself when I was still trying to figure Roll this out way back in the day that there was, like, this gate that the the the success gods wouldn’t let you through until they finally got to the point, they’re like, alright, Stephanie is not gonna quit.

We might as well finally let her through the gate. She’s paid her dues. Let’s let her through. She’s not stopping. It’s clear. She’s made a determination that no matter what happens, she’s gonna learn from it and she’s improving.

We might as well let her on the other side because she’s earned it. That’s how things work with success. You have to deal with the ups and the downs because they’re both a part of that long term success.

And when you acknowledge that’s a part of the process instead of believing that You can be the 1st person in history to never have any down moments.

It becomes magical because now you start to say to yourself, Okay. What’s the lesson in that? What’s the lesson in that? What’s the instead of saying why is that happening to me?

That’s a choice, That’s a perspective and that’s a 100% up to you. As the market now is sitting and kissing all time highs and Potentially looking at another big massive breakout right now.

You need to be in the right frame of mind every day to be dealing with the awesome, dealing with the tough, dealing with I don’t understand, dealing with nothing’s going on, but still being the same person underneath all of that, which is the person who’s in control because it doesn’t matter what happened.

It’s how you perceive it. I’ll tie it up with the quote by W Clement Stone that he was an inverse paranoid.

And he believed that the market was conspiring to help him. When you think about that and think about the opportunities that we have to make decisions in the markets and in our personal lives.

And you start to see everything that happens as the universe sending you something and conspiring to help you succeed.

Everything that happens is not good or bad. It’s just a lesson to be further along tomorrow. So I know that none of what we just talked about really has anything to do a trading, but it has everything to do with being successful.

And everything to do with especially being successful in this business, which It’s the whole point of why we’re here together.

And the whole point about why we’re really picky about who we allow into the community because we want people that are willing to hear these kinds of things and learn from them as opposed to being a negative Nancy and just see the worst in everything, and then take all the credit in the world when the market’s going straight up and believing that they’re the reason for it.

It’s a system. It’s a process. Success is a process.

There’s steps that you have to take And eventually you get to the other side because you learn that the whole business of trading, the whole business of business is minimizing the downside while you’re learning how to make the upside.

It’s a process. You have to go through the steps. You have to take trades. You have to take your lumps. You have to handle test, which is a whole other part of what we do.

The whole part that I want to get across here is that we have spent a massive amount of time Discussing market conditions are tough and what that meant for risk management. It’s a part of the process.

If you have been not changing your position size with the current market conditions and trading every trade the same way and losing, allowing yourself to lose more than the profits that were available for the last 4 weeks.

You just paid a lesson and now you have to decide are you going to use it because it might have been a very expensive lesson. And that’s fine, because sometimes the biggest pain Gets us to take the most decisive action.

That’s where we’re at right now. So I hope everybody watches this more than once because I’m telling you right now, My superpower is persistence, and I am better at it than anybody I know.

Anybody. I’ve gone through more stuff in my life as an entrepreneur and physically with losing the vision in one of my eyes that I have every reason in the world to complain about some of the stuff that happens, but I don’t.

All I say is, okay, I’m on the wrong train. Let me get on the next and that’s it.

It’s as far as it goes, and then we go to the next one. Alright? So I I want you to really think about this, I want you to really ask yourself, am I learning from everything that happens, or am I looking for reasons to not succeed?

There’s no such venture in the world, especially the markets where it’s gonna be smooth sailing every single day.

It doesn’t exist, and if you believe that’s the way it should be, you shouldn’t be you shouldn’t be allocating money to the markets on your own because you you you’re just seeing The total business wrong.

Okay? So let’s make sure that we are here to support each other because I am here for you, but you have to listen. Not because I’m smarter than anybody, but because I paid my dues to be able to say this to everybody.

Alright. So let’s get into today’s activity. There’s some pretty decent volatility, this morning, obviously, with the market resting at or near all time highs.

The Dow is not necessarily there yet. That’s mostly because of financial stocks and energy stocks getting hammered. I actually wanted to start out with Roku this morning. I didn’t see any news other than this upgrade here by Seaport.

The stock is actually up with good volume pre market, which is really the the bigger part of what we’re talking about right now. So it’s bearish, but some really good positive premarket activity, which is really important.

Okay? Very important to everybody. Look, there’s one thing that will never be said about me personally, which is I don’t care. Nobody will ever be able to say I don’t care.

There’s crazy Pete that is, like, super passionate and wants you to learn. And then there’s let’s celebrate together because this is awesome. Let’s take a moment to to enjoy what we just accomplished.

But I love being a part of this community. I love being here for everybody every day. But But when I feel like we’re going off track or somebody’s not thinking long term, I I just want to make sure that we do those kinds of things.