Trader Radio

EPISOSE 91

Now, let's get into Arian's actual text message and talk about it:

"I used to trade on h4 and daily time frame after i burn 4 account. I used timothy morge median line (andrew's pitchfork) for 2 years and making 1-2% monthly. Then i went to london for my master and there i get a job to in financial markets. Forex managed account. I managed 200k. But after 1 year of managing fund i suddlnly start to loss money. I couldnt to decide when to trade. After that i lost my trading job and start to trade for my self imean my own fund. Which was leas than 5k. Becuase 1-2% of 5k monthly profit is not good enough for living i changed my trading to scalping and take more risk of each trade. And then just lossing money. Then i start robot trading in forex factory. I just found couple of robots and test them and nothing .... Now there is a simple method called 00 in ff and i subsribed to them and pay 97. He is a nice guy very helpful but i have a day job and i cant follow all his system. Thats all."

1. Stop trading a system that you can't trade.

2. Stop trying to live off a $5,000 account. There are maybe 2 traders on the planet that could do that. I don't know if they are actually mutant super heroes.

Now just move ahead and slowly, safely, compound your gains over time. If you want to make a lot of money in a short period of time, we can do an episode about that - but know that the more money you want to make, with a small account, in a small amount of time, the higher the probability that you will lose all the money.

There are a lot of other points here.

1) Making 1% a month is kind of awesome. Don't ever think that some amount of profit isn't enough. That comes from comparing yourself to other people. Once you start comparing yourself to other people (even to say you are better than them), you go down a road that only ends in depression. Eventually you will find that someone else is doing better than you, and it will depress you, and you will start to give up.

2) Some people say that comparing yourself to others, or wanting to beat others at the game - is a huge motivation. I want you to be motivated to do your best because you want the best for yourself and your family, not so you can get revenge on someone else who doesn't know you or care about you and who isn't paying attention to you. I want you to look up at the scoreboard during the game and see - OLD ME - 10 points, NEW ME - 100 POINTS. And do that every day. Keep score against the old, lazy, vengeful, working hard at the wrong thing part of yourself - and then you are going to start doing great things.

3) There is a difference between putting yourself in the role of the student, and putting yourself in the role of being below other people. It's one thing to say, this guy is my teacher. It's another thing to say this guy is my GURU. So I am pleased that you asked me for advice. I like that. I am happy to hear from you. And then also - keep in mind that the student has to become the teacher at some point. So humbly take what you learn and share it with others. Give credit where it is due, to your mentors or your teachers, but never worship someone to the point where you cannot make a decision without checking with a guru. I see traders all the time follow someone on Twitter, and wait for the pronouncement from on high. That's not how we do things around here in Bookertown. You are meant to do great things, we are all meant to do something great - and we learn from each other, we hold each other up, we interchange between the roles of student and teacher over time. In my lifetime membership program, a new member gets mentored by more experienced traders in the chat room, and then over time that new trader becomes a natural mentor to someone else. "Oh I learned that and here's how you do it," and we tell you from the start - when you become a lifetime member, as quickly as possible, start contributing, start learning new things and sharing it with the group. Take yourself out of the role of insubordinate, insufficient, inexperienced trader, and start diving in to the role of helper, advocate, cheerleader for others, etc. In our family we're happy for you when you do well, you're happy for others when they do well, and we're all striving for the same thing - net gains at the end of the week, at the end of the month, tossing out the dead old self who was losing money and making stupid mistakes, and inviting in the new self, that rises to the challenge, doesn't accept excuses, doesn't play the role of the victim, and does the great things he or she was meant to do.

EPISODE 90

To be a trader, you must do this one thing

First of all, I'm gonna be here tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that, and the week after that, and next month, and next year, and ten years down the road.

I love doing this. I love talking to you, working with you, giving you advice that other people are trying to sell you for $10,000.

But I want to tell you something - I am not even close to reaching as many people as I want to reach. We get 10,000 listeners to a good episode of the podcast. That's not even close to where we should be. We can help a whole generation of older people who did not save enough for retirement. We can help an entire generation of young people who aren't going to get a good job, with good pay, at a good company - it just doesn't exist anymore.

Why am I saying this? Because more and more, I am seeing that this is now the world works - every man for himself. Every woman for herself. Companies don't take care of people anymore.

And guess what the answer is supposed to be? Start an internet company. Start a YouTube channel. Start selling something online. Well, I am gonna tell you - that takes 5-7 years to get up and running. It is hard work. And it's the only long term security - doing it yourself.

So here's the advice. Here's the one thing that every trader has to understand: You Gotta Do It By Yourself. It's all on your shoulders.

And I understand that. That's why I am here. That's why I do these podcasts. That's why I still travel around the world. Because I can see this from your perspective. I have been where you are, I still am where you are - trying to get this trading thing done, in the least amount of time possible, in the most efficient manner

So what does it take for a trader to be successful after having years of failure? I got an interesting text from a trader in Iran. His name is Arian.

He has been trading since 2005, without success. He told me that he has tried robots, all the systems you can think of. And still unprofitable. Why would that be?

I have one answer: He lost money.

I am not trying to be a jerk. (Maybe that comes naturally, sorry).

What I am saying is - he is unprofitable for a very simple reason: he lost money. That's the definition.

Now, the fastest way to become a profitable trader is to ... wait for it: **close your winning trades**.

It sound so simplistic as to be ridiculous. The first step in becoming a winning trader is to answer one question.

**Can I make $1 this week?**

If the answer is no, then maybe you have to reduce the number. Can you make 10 cents this week? Can you end the week, with 10 cents more in your trading account than when you started?

If the answer is yes, you already know how to be a winning trader.

It's such an unsatisfying answer. It makes some traders angry at me.

It makes a trader angry because what they want me to know is that they can't make enough money to support their family. And they want me to give them an answer on how to do that. So let me answer that question.

**Make $1 this week, and then stop.**

That's it. Make a $1. And then do the same for the next 4 weeks. After you make a $1, even if it happens on the first day of the week, stop.

This proves that you CAN make money. See, you can be a profitable trader. Now you have dispelled the horrible lie that the trading education industrial complex would want you to believe.

Now you need to go 4 weeks and make $1 per week. The next four weeks you make $2 a week. And week by week, you gradually increase that number until you hit a week where the number is too difficult to make. Then you stay at that level until it feels easy again. This is how it's done.

But there are some problems.

Some of you are accustomed to taking huge losses. This has to stop. If you can't bring yourself to stop taking massive losses, then you need to get some help in therapy. If you think that is a dumb idea, then you need to get some help in therapy.

Some of you have a chaotic life. One of you wrote to me and revealed that your life was so out of control, with drugs, and prostitutes, and crazy family members - and you were simultaneously asking me if I could help you with your trading. Listen, you gotta get your shit together before anyone can help you.

Some of you keep missing your trades - you aren't in front of the computer when you need to be. You either need to run your trades from a mobile device, and get the alerts you need, or you need to switch to robotic trading. That will solve the problem.

In short, here's how I feel about trading problems: find the absolute quickest, simplest path to the heart of the issue, and then implement the solution. Some people approach a trading problem with the hope that someone will tell them to buy another cool book or something. That's a person who likes having the problem. Most of the time - if you have a trading problem - you know what the answer is.

EPISODE 89 OF TRADER RADIO:

Why is it that two traders can have the same opportunity - but don’t get the same results?

Take Kylee, for example. She works at my favorite breakfast restaurant. One day she said, I see that you’re running a trading robot. I don’t know how to do that yet, would you teach me how? I did, and now she’s making money.

Here’s part 1 of her story.

We get so many emails. How do you know if an email that sells you a trading product is a scam?

In this episode, your host “Dark Rob” breaks down an email that looks like a possible trading scam. It turns out the guy selling trading stuff is a pretty good guy, maybe even a great trader, but his email is just terrible.

It’s hard to tell for sure if something like this is a scam. But there are some easy signs that someone is just trying to sell you something.

I get so damn angry about these emails - “The reason you’re a loser,” “They are better traders than you,” or the emails that compare you to bank traders. Why would you want to be a bank trader, with a boss, with a substance abuse habit, with crazy high housing costs, with an office dress code that doesn’t allow Star Wars t-shirts?

Roberto "Let's Try to Make Work Difficult"

Booker Show Notes: What's the fastest way to solve a problem? Could it be ... not doing anything about the problem?

What's the problem with stops? There are two types of traders. One type of trader uses a stop. The other does not. Usually, these two types of traders hate each other. Haha. Right? They argue. They fight. They seek followers to their particular brand of trading religion.

I want to talk about a few ways to make each side correct.

1) If you don't want to use a stop-loss, then reduce your trade size. You will immediately find happiness and peace of mind. You will immediately start winning. You will immediately forget what it is like to be frustrated that you picked the right direction but you got stopped out before you could make any money.

2) If you want to use a stop-loss, then increase your trade size, and extend your profit target, and protect your profits. And scale into the trade, or scale out of the trade. One way to immediately improve your trading (if you use stops) is to slightly increase your profit target.

3) If you don't want to do either of these two things, consider a time stop. I've been playing around with this idea for years. Here's one way to look at it. For example, I'm looking at the open order book at Oanda, the forex broker. I'm looking at this cool graph that shows me where all the orders are. You can actually see in real time, where price is now, and where people took their trades. And guess what? Price is moving up, and most people are short the EUR/USD. That means that as price is moving upward, traders are increasingly staying in sell positions.

Maybe those trades will work out. But probably not. Most people will bail on those short positions before they turn profitable.

What can we do? We could build a system that waits until a lot lot lot of traders are short, while price is moving up, and then we can short it, too, after they've all done that. And then we could hold for 24 hours. Or we could wait for the first sign that traders are accumulating sell positions while price is rising - when sell trades outnumber buy trades - and then we can trade against the crowd, and hold those trades for 24 hours.