Education

Lets talk about why trading takes years to learn. I already wrote about some reasons in this blog post here. You’re competing at F1 level with no minor league against sophisticated teams of people. However, let’s turn our attention to another major issue. Education….

The internet is rife with trading education. There’s so much content out there most are hit with information overload.

Trying to figure out trading is like taking a 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle and dumping it on the table and putting it together with no reference picture. It’s naturally going to take an extremely long time. Now imagine this puzzle is cats. You don’t know this yet, but that’s what’s on the front of the box. Now let’s take another puzzle with dogs as the theme. We don’t know that’s the theme yet. Again the puzzle is dumped on the table with the cat puzzle and the pieces are mixed together. We don’t know there are two puzzles as a new “trader” who’s trying to piece all of this together. All we do is look at one piece – of content – at a time. Trying to figure out how it fits together. After a while we may start to realize some of the pieces conflict and don’t fit together. Hmmmm?

Why is that? We don’t know there’s two different puzzles, but we’re trying to mesh two pieces together and for some reason it’s not working?

Then we start working on another piece and realize it’s doesn’t work after months of studying and trying to figure out how this one fucking piece fits. Turns out, there’s a third puzzle in the mix. It’s dinosaurs. Dinosaurs are extinct and no longer relevant to today’s standards of trading.

We continue spending years looking at one piece at a time. Studying a piece not figuring it out and moving on to another. We try different systems of laying out the puzzle pieces. Matching all the blacks with the blacks, browns with the browns, greens with the greens, yet for some reason this doesn’t seem to work well. We don’t see the big picture. We hop from one system to another attempting to piece it together. A puzzle so large it feels like we are moving at a snail’s pace. The new trader is faced with trying to piece together trading. They think they know what trading might be, however they are mistaken.

See, anything that requires a high degree of skill, is a lot more nuanced than we realize. There’s a lot of things: we don’t know what we don’t know.

Trading education is filled with conflicting information. Much like two conflicting puzzles. Trading education is also filled with systems and styles that don’t work anymore or never did like the extinct dinosaurs. The new trader surfs through system to system in the search of easy. They try one methodology, then the next, never really figuring out what works and what doesn’t as their results are always poor.

Part of the issue is traders don’t realize they need to gather data. Something I mentioned in my first post. Surfing from one system to the next is much needed, as you need to figure out what fits your personality. For me, that’s scalping. I’m just better at it than any other form of trading. It just fits me and stepping out of that box into another realm or another puzzle hurts my results. So it is encouraged to look for what just feels right.

Another issue is we live in a high paced world full of Tik Tok videos and short attention spans. Trading will punish the fuck out of you for that type of behaivor. It’s like being a sniper. Seems cool until you’re sitting on a rooftop in the Afghanistan heat with the sun beaming on you for days on end. When you have to shit, you just roll over and pinch one out as you can’t move too much, then you have to put it in a bag or bury it. Just laying there for days gathering intel, not shooting the first guy. Waiting for the right moment to hit the target. It’s rather boring, but requires intense focus.

The modern human just isn’t conditioned for that. You need stimulation and results RIGHT NOW! And thus this washes out a large percentage of want to be traders.

You need to gather data. You need to test to see if the system you’re studying has some form of edge. As a discretionary trader, I believe the edge is not necessarily a setup. While that’s important, it’s also your ability to gain clarity, to control your impulses, learn from your mistakes, and continue to push for improvement with a sense of urgency.

Edge is multiple things that are combined. It’s multiple marginal gains put together. One component of the trading system doesn’t mean it works. It has a nuance to it. Gathering data allows us to find nuance. Even when we find the nuances, it alone is not good enough and often needs to be complimented by another factor of support that also has nuances, and then when you combine these you get nuances you didn’t have when you marry the two components.

Most traders. Fucking almost everyone I’ve dealt with doesn’t know what tagging is, how to tag well, nor parse the information for edge. I owe tagging to my success and ultimately my first break through in trading, as trade tagging is data gathering.

Trade Craft is my tagging software. Now I did tag well before Trade Craft was even an idea. Other software offered it, but never really explained it. I just realized general statistics are shit. If I perform well Tuesday through Friday, but Mondays always lose, then should I just stop trading Monday!? No, something else is happening at a deeper level to cause piss poor performance. It’s not because I hate Mondays like Garfield.

There’s always a reason for bad performance and good performance. I would say virtually every trader I’ve dealt with never figured that out, hence the high failure rate in trading being like 95% or whatever it is these days. The high failure rate is really multiple things, not just one, but this certainly contributes.

When I first experienced 2 consecutive months of consistency which took years, I was consistently tagging. I had a setup called the gap jump. This was done on a composite profile and it was these low node valleys. I learned all the nuances of it and had somehow got good at it. Then the summer rolled in. Volatility died hard. Luckily I was tagging volatility. High, Medium, and Low.

I struggled and could not figure out what was going on. I realized it was because of low volatility. But I wasn’t happy with looking at those statistics. I had also tracked impulsive trades and noticed a lot of them were coming in. Hmmm what happened? So I looked at the timestamps and realized I was flip hitting long, short, long, short. All in a 5 minute time span. These strings of over trading were killing me. Clearly I was confused and not taking good trades to begin with. I filtered all this stuff out and realized I was consistent. It was the gap jump and it still worked.

How many of you don’t do this? Had I not done it I would never have figured out what was hurting me nor what was working. I continued to tag and gather statistics on my trades, filtering out emotions, finding what hurt the worst and what worked the best. I kept doing this. Marginal gains baby!

I just kept improving.

Tagging a trade gives you very specific statistics on your trades. Journal software can’t know what the setup is, or if you were tilted. Only you can know that and have to manually enter this stuff in. You need to record the sessions and just watch them gathering data. Parsing through it, and the scary thing is. No one talks about it… This is like that puzzle piece that fell under the table and you don’t know it. You may never find it. And if you do, you just might be too lazy to implement it. After all, trading attracts the lazy.

You have to do a ton of work outside of trading, with tagging, video reviews, marking up charts, playbooking the A+ setups, crunching stats, learning how to use psychological techniques to fix your problems. Most of the magic is outside of actual trading, Just like most athletes get better in practice outside of the game. It’s not talked about enough. It’s not shown. It’s not there and you guys are following a lot of surface leveled shit that looks sexy but in the end you have to perform.

That’s the thing. I’ve been coaching a trader for 8 months now. I narrate live with him, and trade with him. His results are not mine. There’s just a point where the skill of it all doesn’t transfer. If Tom Brady taught you how to throw a football for a few weeks, would you go off winning super bowls? No… You need a lot of experience. You need to gather data and review no matter the system you are pursuing. 

Virtually no trader does this. Thus, they surf from one system to the next for years, never really piecing it together, always blaming the system or the algos or something else that’s not them.

You can pay for my education. Pay for my narrations and reviews, but there’s so many years of knowledge and experience, it’s impossible to get it all out. The next issue is we only retain 8-10% of new information we consume, therefore it requires you to cycle through trading education 10-15 times over to get it to sync in. No one does that! This is why I do a lot of narration videos and reviews. Each piece of content is unique but has a lot of the same lessons that eventually make it into your head.

Plus, market regimes shift. So certain educational pieces don’t stand up to the new regime. Sometimes the educator evolves, hopefully they do? When they evolve, the outlook shifts and the techniques improve. This is why I sell my live content. To show you day by day what it looks like.

Trading really is a quest for sacred knowledge. The holy grail. But it doesn’t exist. The worst part is traders that are looking for rigid systems. Black and white, do this when that happens. I don’t think that works well, as I’m discretionary. I think trading is an art form. Not a rigid approach. The rigidity just won’t give you the results you’re looking for, but this type of education exists and how can one possibly know, especially if they don’t gather data?

In the end the end consumer – you – want the shortest, easiest path to success, and a lot of educators know this – so they sell you on what you want.

What I talk about seems hard, grueling and not very fun. It seems very time consuming. So why bother? Well, you do what you want with your life. But I can tell you this. I’ve been around long enough and watched traders for years, the same traders that grow. Some don’t make any fucking progress, and others do. I’m sharing the difference. Trading is hard. It’s very time consuming, and it’s a full time job. You have to dedicate your life to it which can be scary, and plenty do but have nothing to show.

I’ve seen guys waste years system jumping and avoiding the trader work it takes to get good at this. It’s a common theme and most traders do the same shit as the next guy. A lot of them may seem dumb, but in reality these are guys who are incredibly smart. Business owners, tech wizards, highly educated folks. Even the run of the mill guy who hasn’t got shit going on falls into this as well, but trading does not reward you intelligence. It’s your work ethic. The ability to grind every fucking day like a plow horse in the fields. Giving it everything you got.

You just can’t short cut this journey knowing what you now know, and if you want to short cut it then this trader work is how you do it. Not to mention, you’re doing it all by yourself, which is hard enough to be your own accountability partner. I see guys make the same fuck ups day after day.

Humans just aren’t wired for change and this job requires completely changing who you are as a person now. It almost requires you to be the best version of yourself.

Trading education just lacks depth. At least modern education. A guy who nerds out over data like me gets no views compared to someone who shows fun high paced b-roll footage, and awesome Lamborghini graphics.

No one really cares. They just want to be entertained with the hopes of being a trader, without the will to do what it takes. This is a common problem in the NBA. Lots of players want the fame and glory that comes with being an NBA player, but they don’t show up to practice and they don’t really love the game.

You have to love the game. The grind. The failure. The trades. The money comes last.

When I first started, trading was filled with nerdy guys that talked technical stuff. It has unfortunately become over-saturated with influencers. Every industry really. However, what they do works. Therefore, the masses follow them, because the formula builds that audience and in the end it is becoming more of an illusion.

Trading triggers emotions. The market makers know how to do that. Influencers know it as well.

But hey. Failure is necessary for growth and failing at putting together puzzle pieces that were never meant to fit with each other is how we learn and grow. It’s all necessary. Most people complain about it. But you have to fall for stupid shit in order to learn, because no one is going to save you. You’re responsible for your own rescue.