Trading Story: Trading Interviews, Tips Inspiration For Newer Traders

Mike Bellafiore is a New York City trader. Mike co-founded SMB Capital with a some trading buddies. SMB is a proprietary trading firm focused on helping newer traders become successful traders trading their system. In fact, some of his traders now make $600,000/year after trading three short years. If you're interested in learning more about proprietary trading or prop trading, this episode for you.

Consistently profitable trading is hard.

If anyone tells you differently, they probably haven’t done it very long (if at all) or they’re lying. And forget about taking advice from someone like that.

In my own trading I’ve had streaks of winners and streaks of losers. The winners can lull you into thinking you’ve got this thing figured out just before the next trade wipes out all the wins (or more) of those winning trades. That gives me a lot of respect for anyone who can turn in 20+% returns every year.

It’s a tough business.

So why is it important to stress the difficulty in trading?  Because it’s worth the effort to overcome the difficulties. Not only do I think it’s worth it, but if you’re listening to these podcasts, you probably think it’s worth it too.

You have this unexplainable drive to trade consistently: you’re staying up late looking at charts, buying trading books, attending conferences, or hiring coaches. The goal is worth the price paid for in time, energy, and dollars. Dollars spent both in losing trades and education.

But why? Have you ever laid out the exact reasons you’re trading?

This episode focuses on exploring the various motives behind people trading the markets – I’ve got 10 main reasons. As we go through these, think about where you find yourselves in the process.

Hunt Holladay is not a trading coach, a blogger, a StockTwit, or a YouTuber trying to promote his trading channel. He's just a trader. And a fairly new full-time trader to boot. He turned on his full-time account in January this year - about 6 months ago. At the time of this interview, Hunt had already booked 20% gains on the year, and was trending to have a year that most fund managers would kill to have. I think newer traders out there will get a lot of value from Hunt's story traveling the trading road to where he is now.

In this episode, I outline four reasons you should consider demo trading, also known as paper trading. Those reasons are practice, testing, learning a new platform, and building confidence. In addition, there’s also a couple of related things to consider as you’re demo trading.  

In this episode, I chat with Sebastian Kuhnert. Sebastian is the co-founder and managing director at Tradimo Interactive, a free trading school based in Denmark. Sebastian interacts with hundreds of traders in the Tradimo community so it was great to get his perspective on strategy, trader mistakes, and trading psychology. Plus, he reveals an easy Fibonacci strategy that any new forex trader can use.

In this episode, I catch you guys up on my trading journey. I’m getting closer to putting on some real trades and wanted to let you know where I’m at. Plus, I give you guys some of my takeaways so far in the podcast that should be helpful to you guys as well, especially if you haven’t had the chance to listen to all the podcasts. 

In this episode, I talk through why I chose to specialize in the forex. Three reasons why I think it’s a great market to trade. But I also take the flip side and discuss why you may not want to trade it – three reasons to avoid the forex. 

Dominic ‘D’ , or ‘Dom’ for short is a smart and dedicated, part-time trader. He has a finance background and even traded professionally for a time. But now he’s focused on trading just his personal account on the side. He’s grown his account from a modest sum and now has a net worth of over $200,000 – and he’s only in his 20’s.

Dom’s story is encouraging to some of the younger traders among us – he even targets a younger audience at his very active and entertaining blog, GenYFinanceGuy.com. It was a fun and practical conversation.

In this episode, we talk about things that all traders need. Things that I need, and things that you need as a solo-trader: time, energy, and goals. It’s a bit more personal, but hopefully helpful as you and I take on the markets. 

Tips to finding a good trading coach, mentor, or trading service. Six simple steps for shopping for trading help. But before we get into that, something happened in Houston a few years ago...