Off The Charts

As a Trader with zero to negative correlation to traditional assets, managing money on behalf of institutional investors is exactly where Jason Shapiro is supposed to be.

But if you were to ask him, he’d tell you he probably should’ve been a lawyer. And anyone else who comes to him asking about how to break into the world of full-time trading will likely get admonished with: “Go to Law School instead. Become a lawyer, then trade on the side with the money you make.”

Why would a highly successful trader say this?

Because Jason agrees with us that trading is easy, but BEING a trader is damn hard.

Jason is a contrarian trader. In its most basic form, this means Jason is seeking out opportunities where the crowd may have overextended itself in one direction. If everyone is on the same side of the trade, the reversal can be nasty when they all head for the exits at the same time. Being the trader on the right side of this reversal can be immensely profitable when Jason gets it right. But it’s very, very difficult.

Among the many things that make trading hard is that you are often doubting yourself. Especially if you aim to make money when almost everyone else is wrong.

“If the market made sense, it would be simple,” he says. “I could hand you a system that consistently makes money, and you’ll STILL mess it up.” It’s all psychology.

Jason gets charged up when people think they can easily learn to become successful traders. “Most amateur speculators are delusional.” He recoils when he hears people talking about the “freedom” that trading can provide. “Trading isn’t what people think it is. This isn’t the freedom you think it is.”

And very few can handle the reality of lumpy return streams, even if the “average” annual gain is a very impressive number. “It f-s with your head!”

In reality, Jason believes most retail people who engage in the markets are hobbyists. And there’s nothing wrong with that, “just know that’s what you’re doing!”

In this episode of Off The Charts, Jason shares some tactics he’s devised to keep him in the game for as long as he has been (hint: frugal living), why he’s no longer invited to dinner parties (hint: people cry), and he breaks down precisely why it never works out if one attempts to copy another trader (hint: math).

This episode of Off The Charts may become one of the most important episodes we ever publish. Please give it a watch (or a listen).

Jason Perz has grown comfortable with risk.

His whole life has manifested risk in every form. From being an adopted child who was teased at school for being "different," to riding BMX bikes and performing "shows" and dangerous stunts professionally, to living with and battling through drug and alcohol addiction, to trading on behalf on investors -- very little in Jason's life did not entail some forms of risk. And much of it was life threatening!

So, you can forgive him for being a little more nonchalant than most of us about the occasional measly 30% drawdowns in his individual positions.

From a very young age, Jason was different. He was adopted to a white family and inherited an "odd" Great Great Uncle who bootstrapped himself from a humble childhood with undiagnosed autism (it was the early 1900's) into a successful business man who took care of his extended family. This Great Uncle took an interest in a young Jason, taught him a lot of what he had learned in entrepreneurship, and sparked Jason's first interest in the markets.

But first, Jason had to make an escape from his own humble beginning and playground bullying. He found that first escape in the world of competitive BMX riding, which eventually resulted in a prolific career in which he was able to tour around the world performing for and wowing audiences everywhere he went. But sadly, the pay wasn't good. And it was a struggle. And eventually injuries piled up which led him down a dark path that began with prescription drugs and ended with him lost in the mire of a spiraling drug and alcohol addiction.

Jason said that when he was at the very depths of his addiction, he couldn't see a way out. "And the people around me couldn't see a way out."

How does one come back from that?

Tune in to find out how.

We've all been there.

Think about the time you first got interested in trading. It was exciting thinking about all the potential money we could make.

But then we were quickly overwhelmed with the reality of all the things we didn't know. Former aspiring traders never made it past this moment. The mountain they had to climb just looked too daunting.

When Jason Krutzky left the road after spending years touring with a rock band through North America and Europe, he decided he wanted to try his hand at full-time trading. "I was just throwing darts and hoping."

He found inspiration and education on the internet, particularly through pumper discord chat rooms, and predictably he made all the mistakes that bedevil every new trader. It is hard enough learning how to trade, but also trying to wade through the cacophony of voices on the social interwebs to find those he could trust was equally time-consuming.

Sure, he was passionate about wanting to learn. But he also says he was delusional. I think we can all relate to that.

What Jason continues to learn about trading is, as he puts it, "trading is the practice of non-emotion." This was a hard 180-degree turn for someone who spent his life as a musician pouring his heart and soul into finding and channeling his creative spirit. "Non-emotion" was a foreign concept to him.

But learning to gauge himself and put in hours and hours of screentime is how he finds his edge. "You have to be in it. You have to be living it, breathing it." If you can't put in the screen time, you'll be a failure in no time.

An early adulthood spent on the road as a struggling, traveling musician prepared him to learn a skill such as trading.  How? He learned the confidence to ask for help.

Jason relates some stories of hanging around music clubs in Atlanta, meeting successful musicians, and having the confidence to go up, introduce himself, put a tape in their hands, and ask to be given a listen. When he dipped his toes in the trading world, he utilized this same skill to reach out to other experienced traders, forge relationships and friendships, and find lessons and mentorship this way.

We can all learn to be better at this. Jason shows us how it's done.

Please enjoy this conversation with a Trader who's still cutting his teeth in this business. I promise there are nuggets in here that we can all both relate to and learn from.

If there’s one thing Brian Lund learned about himself over the past 30 years in the markets, he must write. Without a doubt, without even thinking about it, he knows that to express himself and to complete his thoughts into productive trading, he needs to sit down and start writing.

And this makes sense. We hear this a lot from our smart friends.

Barry Ritholtz once wrote: “I write to find out what I’m thinking.”

In this conversation with Brian, we get into the importance of sleep hygiene and how it’s so important for us to be at our best. Not just in trading, but in living.

We dig into challenges Brian has overcome along the way, including an ADHD diagnosis, and morphing from an always-on entrepreneur who constants has problems to solve to a trader who must sit on his hands and wait for things to happen.

We also cover his hacks like therapy, meditation, and a CPAP machine to help him maintain his sharpness.

Like all of us, Brian has suffered from the market honing in on his biggest weaknesses. He’s got the battle scars to prove it. But learning from these mistakes and fighting the urge to revenge trade have been evolutions that took time. Brian discusses how many of the trading problems we experience are simply contrived. They aren’t real. We make them up in our heads. The market doesn’t care that we lost money in this stock the last time we traded it, and it doesn’t owe us any money on our next trade.

Brian is a former night owl who now has a hot take on spousal sleeping arrangements. You don’t want to miss this!

We hope you enjoy me and Steve Strazza’s wide-ranging chat with our friend Brian Lund.

If there is one thing that stands out from any conversation with Brian Shannon about the trading process, it is this:

For discretionary traders, there are no rules. Instead, there are “guidelines.”

And because Brian is human, he occasionally breaks his guidelines and suffers the same consequences as anyone else. Everyone gets what they deserve. Even a trader of 30+ years like Brian Shannon.

If a trader buys the dip or sells the rip without a plan to control her risk then she, too, will get what she deserves. Eventually. The market is always on the hunt for our weaknesses.

This is one of the things I love about my friend Brian. He doesn’t tolerate nonsense. He tells it like it is. Tough love. It’s what a trader needs.

And he’s adamant about tuning out the noise and focusing on his strengths. For instance, he no longer pays any attention to financial TV. “It makes me emotional. TV is just theatrics. If it doesn’t help me make money, I completely ignore it.” He knows what he’s good at, says no to everything else, and makes the best use of his time by focusing his energies on profitable pursuits.

Shouldn’t we all live and trade like that?

He’s had to learn the hard way that things like global macro, or Fed policy, or foreign affairs just confuse him. And certainly don’t add any alpha to his trades. Instead, he focuses on a “bottoms-up” approach to stock trading where each individual setup is measured on its own merits. Each potential trade speaks for itself.

After more than 30 years in this business, Brian’s engagement with it has varied between addiction, obsession, and passion. But one thing he knows to be true is much of what we need to do in order to be successful cannot be learned in a book. It has to be experienced.

He has observed that too many inexperienced traders want to simply copy successful traders instead of learning the “why” behind any trade. This is the type of thing that experience teaches you.

One important thing Brian has learned is that most times when he takes on 20+ swing trade positions and his account is fully leveraged, that would usually be a signal that the stock market is ripe for a meaningful pullback. Do you think he learned that in a textbook? Or did he learn it the hard way via experience?

I think you know the answer.

Please enjoy this wonderful episode of Off The Charts with our friend Brian Shannon.

Nobody is having more fun than Kenny Glick.

He’s found the perfect outlet for combining his myriad passions of risk-taking, education, and entertainment to the benefit of anyone who gets caught in his orbit.

Kenny’s unorthodox path to Wall Street is proof.

In the early 1990s, Kenny was plying his craft as a fledgling standup comedian when he was spotted by a stockbroker who was impressed with his ability to “sling bullshit” onstage. The stockbroker offered him a job on the spot at his firm.

Turns out, the “firm” was a stereotypical Boiler Room that soured Kenny’s opinions of the interworking of investing, which was the early drive to turn him into a self-proclaimed “permabear.”

When one of the senior brokers at the firm told Kenny his nickname was “Mushroom” because he’s kept in the dark and fed shit, he realized he needed to find something better to do.

That something better came while attending a Pearl Jam concert where he met another gentleman who introduced Kenny to the world of day trading NASDAQ stocks. His life would never be the same again.

In our chat, we get into the painful rollercoaster from then until now and why Kenny firmly believes “the market has taught me EVERYthing.”

Please enjoy mine and Steve Strazza’s wide-ranging chat with The Warlock, The Mensch of Mentions, The Edutainer, our friend and soon-to-be yours, Kenny Glick.

In the first episode of our new podcast interview series, Off the Charts, my co-host Steve Strazza and I interviewed one of our favorite people on Wall Street, Jay Woods.

But he’s not just our favorites, he is a favorite of many. I would argue he’s the most popular man on Wall Street!

One thing I’ve heard repeatedly over the years is some version of: “Have you gotten the Jay Woods tour of the New York Stock Exchange?” Gratefully, I can say I have. And the breadth and depth of Jay’s NYSE history is quite literally off the charts.

Steve and I are both incredibly grateful to call Jay a friend.

In this hour-long chat, Jay talks about the first chart he ever created (by hand). His uncle (famed market technician Ralph Acampora) purchased two shares of IBM for a young Jay as a gift and encouraged him to do so to track his first investment.

We then fast-forward to his days as a Wall Street intern where his job description might best have been: ‘Lunch ticket order taker.’ The unspoken silver lining of that experience was the skills he learned in this process that translated into the ability to multi-task and eventually thrive in a fast-paced role as a Specialist making markets in several stocks at once.

In his younger days, Jay considered himself to be a bit shy and reserved. But soon after becoming a full-fledged Specialist on the floor of the NYSE, Jay acquired a wonderful sense of humor and quick wit that has earned him the respect and admiration of nearly everyone he now meets.

But it was not just an affable personality that Jay won on the floor, he also learned the hard way that having a short memory helped him stay sane and move on from tough lessons metered out by an often unforgiving market, angry stakeholders, and plans gone awry.

And while Jay won’t admit to “seeing it all,” he’s seen a lot — from the dot-com bubble to literally being just 3 blocks from Ground Zero during 9/11, to the Great Financial Crisis, to navigating the ever-changing shifting corporate sands and trends that have completely changed the role Specialists now play on the Floor of the NYSE.

Grab a snack, settle in, and enjoy this delightful conversation with the amazing Jay Woods!

Bringing this episode back from the archives to celebrate my late friend Jon Boorman who sadly passed away from a bout with glioblastoma (brain cancer) on October 21, 2020.

Recorded in August of 2015 (long before his diagnosis), Jon and I discussed his background, his experiences working for big banks, and his approach to trading the markets when he struck out on his own.

Many of the lessons from his career and life that he shares in this conversation are even more poignant today.

I learn by doing. And that costs money.

The losing trades suck. But they aren't what hurt the most.