The Easy Money Trading Concept Elite Traders Use - Lance Breitstein

There is an algorithm in the market. There's actually thousands of algorithms running in the market every single day through Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, you know, Merrill Lynch. But to think that there is one algorithm, overarching thing driving anything, it's all just part of like the crazy, "I am the ICT" nonsense, in my opinion. It's very clear he's just a documented fraud at this point.

Lance Breitstein, the number one trader at a tier-one prop firm. I heard a rumor literally yesterday: I heard you made over a million. This is true. Some would say it's bigger than you think. Would you consider yourself one of the best traders in the world?

Do I like to think that I was one of the best at my specific skill set and niche of short-term intraday trading? I think I'm up there. I think I had probably one of the most epic trades ever. I had a 10-figure trade that was just real-time. Nobody really trades Forex just this funded trader idiosyncrasy, which shouldn't really exist. These funded trader programs, in my belief, I find it extra comical when people say, "Ooh, I'm a 1.2 million funded trader." I truly believe that if I was on the retail side, I would not have made it. I can guarantee you that.

What I do know about great and elite traders, especially because I've been in a privileged seat to mentor and work with so many, you always need to have—I would say that's a commonality for every exceptional elite trader I know—that's when the progress really started. For the people listening, if there's two things I would emphasize, it's [Music] the number one podcast in the trading space, the fastest growing, and that's Bank of every single one of [Music]

You welcome everyone back to the Words of Wisdom podcast. We are back once again and still the number one trading podcast in the world and the fastest growing, thanks to all of you and our incredible guests. Talking of which, we are here in New York, and I've been planning this podcast for a very long time in my mind, and then the stars aligned, and here we are. And we have the true honor to have the one and only Lance Breitstein.

So happy to be here on this snowy day in New York City. And I've—I love your podcast, I love your work, so can't wait to uh, do this thing. I really appreciate it, Lance. And I want to start out, and I know I don't normally start this way, but I heard a rumor literally yesterday before I came to sit down today, and it was essentially how much you've made from your trading career so far. And I'll bleep it if you want, there's no problem at all, but I heard you made over a million dollars in your career. This is true. Some would say it's bigger than you think. And you know, there are some of those grapevine grapevine rumors, but uh, I don't think it's always so much about the P&L, and that's actually one of my lesser things I like about the trading world is it can be so focused on P&L as a scorecard when life is so much more about than that and like who someone is is so much more than P&L or dollars and everything else.

Definately, no, I couldn't agree more, and it's super super impressive, especially considering the fact that the message that you've consistently shared in terms of the value that you provide to be able to then have such a—you back it all up essentially, right? It's all backed up with actual, you know, results. It's incredible. And where I want to start with, would you consider yourself one of the best traders in the world?

Oh boy, already the loaded question. So I think—I think best is hard to define because you could say who's made the absolute most P&L or who's done this, who's done that. Um, I know traders that have made far more money than I could ever imagine, and there's so many more traders that we've never even heard of and never will hear of. So do I think I'm the best overall? Definitely not. I know that is a fact. Uh, you have people like Lucas the Short Bear that are just absolute legends, probably one of the best ever. But do I like to think that I was one of the best at my specific skill set and niche of short-term intraday trading? I think I'm up there. And uh, some of the performances I did at Trillium, which is one of the oldest and most established trading firms in the world, really, I mean, their whole story was the founding family essentially invented electronic trading in the late 90s. And so to be one of the best or to be the best at that firm for the years that I was doing it was incredible. And then for what I was doing, you can just see that there's only so much volume going off on certain moves and you—you know, on certain plays you're the whale. I do also think that this past August, which was August 5th, 2024, I think I had probably one of the most epic trades ever, to be essentially just live-tweeted and in real-time with all of my thought process and everything else when the Yen was squeezing and the Nik panicked essentially. I traded overnight, and I had a 10-figure trade that was just real-time, uh, tweeted about. And so I think that was a pretty legendary moment where I was—I was proud of. And uh, there's no way to ever know the true rankings, but do I feel accomplished and proud of what I've done? Yes.

I love that. I love that. And you know, it's interesting to see the difference in your mindset in being able to essentially stay humble or at least recognize that even with your great performance, you're able to recognize that there are other accolades, there are other accolades that may people may have higher essentially. And yeah, it's—you know, you're the best at your strengths, while a lot of the time in the retail space, which I'm sure we'll touch on later as well, it's kind of the opposite. Everything's about propping yourself up as this incredible trader versus understanding the general community and the other traders out there as well. But what would you say makes you one of the best traders out there?

Sure. So I think that question gets asked quite a bit, and it isn't ever just one thing. What I do know about great and elite traders, especially because I've been in a privileged seat to mentor and work with so many, you always need to have edge, ideally tons of it. And then when you have your best hands, like your pocket aces, you bet incredibly incredibly big. Like I would say that's a commonality for every except prof elite trader I know. But then within that, especially during my Trillium days, I was much like any top performer or top athlete. I was so honed in to every single part of my craft. So I was lightning fast with all my optimized hotkeys. My whole screen layout was optimized for minimizing eye movement back and forth. I knew every single headline, every single context around every stock. I had all my different baskets. So every single thing I did, even routine-wise and execution-wise, was so dialed in. And I think to be at the cutting edge of your craft, no matter what that craft is, you need to be figuring out all those little 1% improvements. But at the end of the day, the two things that drive it the most: do you have a system with edge, and when that system has the most edge in specific moments, are you betting incredibly incredibly big?

I love that. I love that. And there's loads of those elements that you just touched on that we're going to touch on, no doubt, in terms of you. When it comes to edge, the risk sizing, uh, and even the optimization, which is interesting because I know a big part of your success as a trader has been the speed which you've been able to operate. But I've heard from, you know, other podcasts that you've done where that wasn't always the case. And that kind of leaves me like, who were you before trading? Like what was—who was Lance before trading came? We're going to take a look back, back, back when I was a wee lad. So really, I grew up mostly playing video games, and I have a lot of trader friends that also were big on video games. And I think if there was professional gaming, I don't know if I ever would have made it to trading because I love that stuff. Like that's all I wanted to do. And so I have a twin brother, and we—we weren't so into sports, like we didn't learn—learn a lot of that growing up. So what it was was just the two of us, just, you know, competing, competing, competing, trying to beat each other, Smash Brothers or Mario Kart or or name your pick. And that level of competitiveness and that refinement, and especially once online gaming became a thing, like it was so cool to be able to compete with all the really good players in the world and work up the rankings. And I would argue that for myself and many other of my friends that have gotten into trading or even—you have traders out there like like Brian Lee on Twitter who is a professional gamer. You have so many similarities in that trading, if you think about it, is kind of like a video game. And the more you can desensitize yourself to that number and focus on the process and improvement and speed and refine your execution, all of that leads to success. So I was someone that was, I think, very analytical, a very deep thinker, and I would use that especially in a lot of these video games to think like, okay, where can I get better? Where can I refine this? And eventually, I learned about trading from the Market Wizard's book, and then it was like, oh wait a second, this sounds like a really complex video game, except if you win, rather than getting imaginary points, you get dollars, and that seemed like an interesting trade that I wanted to be a part of.

Definitely. I can only imagine. And one thing I've always recognized with yourself is the way that you're able to sort of be very insightful into who you are and like where you operate and what you're good at, like like you said with the deep thinking, for example, is that always been the case or is that something that's kind of developed for your trading journey?

I think that's always been the case. I don't—I don't know necessarily why or where that stemmed from, but I think I always found that in life, the people that that do best—not necessarily people that do best, but those that are intentional with where they spend their time and how they spend their time, those are the people that end up getting what they want. If you don't do the reflection to figure out where do I want to go and how do I get there, I think you end up not really true to yourself and maximizing the opportunity of life.

Definitely. And what were the early days of your trading journey like?

Sure. So me being the slow introspective thinker that led to me not being great at the Trillium-style trading. I mean, some of the Trillium traders are some of the fastest—I would argue Trillium traders are pretty much the fastest human traders in the world. And when you take a very methodical, slow, intentional thinker like myself, then you put them in that seat, it was just like, oh my God, I can't—I can't process. Wait, I need to make that decision in two seconds. I—I'll debate it over like two hours. And so I sucked. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I sucked for a really really really long time. And every year Trillium recruits about, I don't know, maybe 25 people out of out of school, and I was one of the slowest learners. I was towards the back of my class. But while that time and and thank God Trillium generally gives their traders a long leash, I was thinking, and I was building a process for how to get better, and I was figuring out, Lance, like you're a smart guy, if you're so smart, why do you suck so much at this? And how are you going to fix it to get better? And so that's what really introduced me to this world of meta-learning, and I think those concepts first started to come out into into the forefront a little bit with people like Tim Ferriss that would—with his 4-Hour Work Week, he was trying to really break down different concepts and ideas. And as I started to read some of those books, like Talent Is Overrated and all sorts of other ones, it was like, okay, I need to get focused reps that are as realistic as possible to the real thing and just keep on practicing, practicing, practicing. And once I started to break down the skill of trading into its different components and then start to wrap and refine my weakest parts, that's when the progress really started. And then what's so cool is essentially doing that enabled me a method to learn faster and improve faster. So even though I had such a slow start, it's like James Clear of Atomic Habits talks about, it doesn't matter how slow my start was because I was refining my rate of change. And so then what happened is two years of slow start and going nowhere, coupled with a fast rate of change, eventually means because I kept sustaining that I ended up becoming one of the best.

What was your mindset there, going through that that period? Because obviously, right—right now knowing everything that you've achieved, that's incredible, but at that time you didn't know where you were going to get to. You probably had an idea of what you wanted to achieve yourself, but you didn't know if it was going to happen because at that time the results weren't showing that.

Yep. And I think there's no way to not have self-doubt. And I think a lot of people that enter the trading world, especially—especially at a top firm, you have a pedigree where you were probably—I mean, it—it attracts top athletes, it attracts top poker players, top chess players, uh, top Ivy League candidates and everything else. And so you get this whole class of people that generally have not failed in their whole life. Then you face something like the market where you're competing with the whole world at a high level, and you're like, oh wow, like this is—this is what failure feels like. I—I'm—I'm new to this. And I always talk about the importance of having a strong why. Trading inevitably, even if you magically succeed early on, it is an essential mathematical guarantee that at some point you will struggle, you will face obstacles, you will face drawdowns, you will face a mistake, the market will change, and then that's when the job really starts. Anybody can do trading when times are good and you're making money. The job of a trader is really, can you refine and persevere when the job is hard and difficult and when you have that own fight with your psyche. And so I struggled, and I thought, wow, like am I going to fail at this? But my why was: one, I loved the job, and and seeing my trainer next to me. Trillium is a bunch of young people making a fair amount of money if if you succeed. And people are dressed in sweatpants, people are dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, people are going on vacations if they want to go on vacations. There's not much bureaucracy. And so I saw what this job could be. I saw my boss next to me making sometimes a 100 grand plus a day, and from my world where where money was always very very tight and my family struggled with some of that, it was like, wow. And it's like this could be your ticket. No matter what it takes, do—do not leave anything on the table. Like if—if you're going to fail, if—first of all, Trillium is going to need to just kick me out, you know, throw me out kicking and screaming and clawing my way out the door. But then number two, like it's—it's—I was always okay if I didn't succeed, like I will find—I knew I was going to be successful somewhere. So if I don't make it in trading, I'm going to apply that same just ferocity and desire and drive and hunger and something else, and I'll still figure it out. But it was one of those things where it was like, I—I really wanted the job and and had that strong why of this—this could be amazing. So that you need that or else you're not going to survive the tough times.

But what was your mindset like as well then when Trillium—you're two years in or a year and a half in, Trillium comes to you and says, this might not be for you, like we—you really need—need to start showing some progress. Like what did that feel like? Was there any moments where he's like, okay, now I need to go look at a different career? Or was that kind of a moment where it was like ultimatum time? I need to make this happen.

You—you want to know what was interesting and I think was actually kind of astute, despite at the time I was probably like 23 years old or something like that. I viewed the whole career as as a trade. There's reward and there's risk, and then—then there's probabilities of course. And so I knew what the upside could be, right? I see what the traders at the firm were making. I know what the time investment might be. And then of course, you can calculate much easier what's my opportunity cost. I knew that if I wanted, I could probably get a sales and trading job. I could work at a a bank somewhere, get—get—I mean, back then you're probably getting paid with bonus maybe 80 to 100 grand. Like I knew I could get that, but I was focusing that, hey, if this pans out, that excess income and the enjoyment of that job over being in some corporate bureaucracy that is massive. So it wasn't that crazy for me to say, look, like I'm just going to give it six months to a year. But now the other thing that's important is with any trade, you don't know where you might have biases and blind spots. And so with most trades, you generally want to stop on it. And so nevertheless, I was like, Lance, like look, you don't want to be in this position still struggling four years, six years, eight years. You could struggle forever. And then it's kind of like the sunk cost fallacy where you're like, oh, I'm so close. So my thought was, I'm going to give myself, you know, till year-end, um, and if at year-end I haven't hit these kind of pre-decided targets or I'm not seeing like real material growth, it's—it's time to accept fate that I was not meant to be a trader.

What steps did you take though in those—in that period of time to that made the difference, do you think?

The crazy part is I was actually already on the right track. I already had my system in place as far as like this is how I'm going to improve. I'm going to do—I'm going to watch tape of my trading. I'm going to do my daily write-ups. I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. I'm going to speak to each person in my little trading pod to see what they traded well. So I had an effective process. And so—and James Clear talks about this as well. So essentially if you have your your pot of water, you were—I was adding all this heat, but I just wasn't quite at the point where you could see the bubbles. And so I was doing the right things at that time, but I just needed a little bit more time. And I think a lot of people might find themselves in a similar spot. And I think the more important part is is what one of the guys in my group asked me, which was like, number one, do you understand the material and are you conceptually getting what makes a good trade versus a bad trade? Like are you at least self-aware of what you're doing wrong and and what you should be doing that would then have edge? And I was—that was fine. And then a lot of it was, I conceptually understood it, but it was just about getting the reps in real-time and speeding up my—my processing, my pattern recognition. And so as I was doing the right things, all I needed then was time. And we were able to see the improvement in my trading. I wasn't making money yet, but over time I was losing less. And then you would have a glimmer of hope where it's like, wow, I executed this—this one trade just as good as the experienced people behind me or around me. And so as you start to assess your trading, if your objective—it's like, okay, look, I'm not making money, but my trades are getting better. I am getting closer to connecting. And eventually the water boils. Profitable trading really boils down to two things: opportunity and volatility. And that is why the podcast has partnered with Market Journal because between the years 2016 and 2020, the amount of opportunity that was available as well as volatility to take advantage of was at the highest it has ever been. And all of that really pointed towards one man: President Donald Trump during his period in office. All it took was one tweet, and that would present so much volatility, and the right traders would take advantage of that and would create their record P&Ls. And that is why those same traders are so excited for this new period between 2025 to 2029 when we have President Donald Trump back in office. Now Market Journal is going to give you the weekly insights you need across crypto, Forex, Futures, and the stock market. So regardless of what happens, whether it's a tweet, a particular stock running up hundreds of percent, whatever volatility and opportunity that Market Journal can identify, it is going to share with you every single week, so you can purely focus on taking advantage of those opportunities and taking advantage of that volatility to create your record P&L. Now Market Journal is absolutely free. All you do is click the link in the description below, put in your email, and you—you will receive key updates on the markets every single week, so you are always up to date with what's going on and ready to execute when the time is right. Links in the description below. Thank you for enjoying this episode.

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Would you say, looking back now, would you say there could have been something you would have done better or differently, or do you feel like you actually did what—what was meant to happen?

Well, one—one thing that I think is so funny is you have the trading world today with so many resources, right? We've got your podcast, we've got tons of podcasts, we've got the whole Twitter community sharing trade write-ups. Like the quality of content even versus when I first started on Twitter maybe three years ago, so many people are sharing video reviews, sharing trade write-ups. So the amount of resources out there is actually amazing. And even stuff like—I'm a big proponent of the daily report card, which Mike Bellafiore helped popularize. And even stuff like the daily report card, cataloging all my trades and databasing my trades and and charts in Evernote, that didn't exist to me back then. Like—like—like back in—back in 2011, I was taking notes in just like Microsoft Word.

Copy and pasting like charts and paint and stuff. And so it's easy to say, with hindsight, I should have been doing all these other things. But I think a lot of it, it, it just takes time; that's part of what the journey is, right? You don't know what you don't know until you start exploring. And yeah, I do think if I had the right process, it probably took me at least a year, year and a half to start systemizing the process. Because learning from my trainer was drinking from a fire hose, right? He had been trading at least a decade by then, so it was like, okay, Lance, here are the 10 things I do at very, very high speed. Um, why are you not doing this? You know, this is what you need to be doing. And it was like, whoa, like it was just too much, especially at that speed when I'm a slow thinker. Yeah. And so it took me, that there was nobody saying, Lance, you need, hey, meta-learning is a thing. Hey, you got to break down this, this parts of the trading process. You gotta, you know, watch your, your, your, your trading tape and Evernote and do chart write-ups. Like it just, it wasn't like that back then.

You mentioned meta-learning sort of a couple times now. And in terms of meta-learning, is that essentially, well, one, learning how to learn, but breaking down that learning into its own sort of procedure and steps versus just a, let me watch this video, or uh, let me speak to this person, or ask this question? It's actually breaking it down into actionable pieces that complete… Exactly. Meta-learning is actually, is, is essentially just the process of how do I go about learning as efficiently as possible.

So the last year, just just for fun, I've been trying to uh get better at golf, okay, from a very low base of I suck and I am embarrassing to play with. On, I mean, I'm not like a total embarrassment, but it's not great. And so you could go to the driving range and you could hit 500 balls. If you hit 500 balls with your same shitty, mechanically wrong swing, do you think you're going to just cement your mechanically wrong swing, or will it magically get good? Of course, if you do the same shitty swing 500 times, you're not really getting better. Like, yes, you're putting time in, but if I, if I, if I just slice the ball every single time and don't fix my club face or whatever else, like practicing that, even though you're putting time in, doesn't change anything. I would rather than swing at 500 balls, I would rather do five proper swings where I correct the issue. And so one quote that I love is, is Hank Haney, who is Tiger Woods' swing coach, he talks about how Tiger, whether it was during a tournament, whether it was during a game, or whether on the Range, he would never hit a single ball without intentionality and reviewing and processing it afterwards.

So now, back in trading world, if you're going to, there's traders that sit there and they're a body in a seat, right? Okay, the market's moving, they're trying to do whatever, they're thinking about lunch, they're zoning out, they've got Netflix on one screen, they've got EDM in their ears, they're doing 12 things. And so if they trade for 500 days, they might really get maybe 20 or 30 true days worth of hours of focused, like intentional, really reflective thinking. So the difference between that and someone that is spending every single minute and hour of that day, right, and we're human, right? We can't focus the whole day, but if you are fighting with intention and urgency to get better every single day, the difference in progress is crazy.

So while most people were fooling around and like you would even see this in young people that hadn't yet established themselves, um, they would just be fooling around midday and like watching shows, like bullshitting. And even if it was midday again, I'm not perfect, like some of this is exaggeration, but as best as, as possible, I would be typing up tickers and just drilling myself, what do I think of this daily chart? What do I think of this intraday? Um, okay, my big issue right now is fighting the trend. Type up this chart. Okay, if I want to not fight the trend, I need X, Y, and Z to happen. Okay, type A, type up a different chart. Okay, process, process, process. If I want to be with the trend, I need A, B, and C to happen. And constantly drilling yourself like that, I was getting so many more reps than everyone else. So it's not just about the time you're putting in, it's the effectiveness and the intentionality of that time.

Just to go off the back of what you've said, uh, just of the last two questions, one was in terms of resources, I, I just forgot to mention is like I think in the retail space there's a, a very big misconception that I also had until very recently, um, which is, you know, the, the amount of actual verified, you know, traders and, and the, the information that's out there that you can learn from isn't, you know, there not enough, it's just very minuscule, and it's hard to find. And, and maybe there's, you know, you have to know someone to get it. But ever since making that pivot myself, I've come to realize this, like, because one of the issues that people were trying to say to me is like, you'll run out of guests so fast. And I've realized like there's so many verified traders out there, right? And they're there as well, they're active, like you said, on the ones… Yeah, but it's just about who essentially you're giving your time to, or who you're allowing your algorithm to put in front of you.

Well, so that's actually the double-edged sword, which I didn't really mention because I don't think things are necessarily easier these days because yes, there are more amazing resources, but markets do get more efficient over time. And then even more dangerously, if you were to immediately peruse the internet, the resources that float to the surface are the marketers and the [ __ ], so the ability to distill who is legitimate and verified and offering real knowledge versus who's offering noise and [ __ ] and just wasting your time is so incredibly difficult. So you can now use these resources, but if you're following someone that isn't a real trader with real edge and you spend two years following them, I'm sorry, you just wasted two years. So that's what makes it so, so dangerous at the same time. And it's not just about trading in the world today, you need the ability to really distill what is total [ __ ] and harmful to me and what is actually real signal and useful. And whether we're talking politics, whether we're talking trading, whether we're talking health and and stuff like that, it is such an important skill set to be able to say, oh wait, like this is, this is the scammy stuff on, on this side, I'm not going to learn from this. And okay, this is true, like verified, authentic, legit, and it might not be as noisy and flashy and and all the bells and whistles as the other side, but this is what I'm going to do to get better.

Definitely. And it kind of goes off the back of the, the second point though, with the meta-learning, the whole premise of that is being very intentional with your learning. And I think it's the same principle with your resources; if you're being intentional with quality resources, then you will end up finding, you know, the great traders who are providing great value and real value. Um, while if you're not intentional and you kind of just accept whatever comes your way, like whatever video pops up or whatever referral you get, and you kind of just don't question it beyond that, um, then you find out you find yourself in that position as you just mentioned. But equally, one thing you mentioned as well in terms of, um, you know, you could spend two years learning from the wrong people, or two years where you're not focused, sorry, and uh, you know, you've got so much things going on. And I feel like so many retail independent traders are in that position where they say, I've been trying this for six years, but then if you really broke that down of the six years, maybe six months of work has been done.

Yeah. And so here's the hard part, and I try and make this just so abundantly clear. And so here's the thing is, if your income is dependent on your following and your influence, you're selling a dream, you're not selling reality. And so what a lot of those people won't tell you is, first of all, the overwhelming majority of people will fail at this game, right? The other thing they don't tell you is the realities of the learning curve. The learning curve, I would say at Trillium, at SNB Capital, at any of these top shops, two years. Right now, let's dissect that, that two years. If you are a top candidate, if you are working at the job full-time, if you are in office in an amazing environment with professional resources, their capital, their technology, an amazing trading pot of experienced traders to learn from, so those things are critical in accelerating your learning curve. Now, if you don't know the basics of finance or markets, if you don't have proper mentorship, if you're doing this part-time, if you're doing this with minimal capital, if you're doing this without good technology, if you don't even know where to start and you can only dedicate so much time each day, well, then guess what? That learning curve is in two years. So what people don't recognize is that for most people at home, the learning curve could be three, four, five, six plus years. And I hate to say this, but like if, if you're, if you're a, um, you know, if, if you're working a full-time job and you're trading and studying a couple hours a, a day on the side, couple days a week, it's going to be a really long learning curve. And there's nothing wrong with that, but you need to have your eyes open to that fact. I think that makes a big difference as well, like being aware of exactly what it's going to look like so you can accept that versus that same scenario you gave; if you're not aware of that after a year, you're going to be wondering, putting the work… Well, then it's the saddest outcome there is because you are embarking on a long journey, but because you don't know the realities of it and you haven't committed or allowed yourself the space for that, if you're, it's, it ends up a total waste of your time, right? Like if you're not in a position to withstand a two-year learning curve, and if you think, okay, I have enough savings to do this one year, well, guess what? You're going to just blow all your savings. And there have been so many people harmed by that perception of the trading world, and these are good people, and that's what kind of got me to be such an advocate of some of this stuff. I would do uh, trader dinners, trader meetups and stuff, and I would meet these people and I would talk to them and hear, hear their story. And these were all like good-hearted people; of course, they want the dream success, they want the money, the lifestyle, all that stuff, but then they didn't really know the reality of the learning curve. So then, so many people end up almost in like that addiction, gambling phase where you blow your savings, it damages your family, it damages your friendships, it damages the, the trajectory and, and, and the savings of these people, and it's just because they're, they're being just totally bullshitted by people.

Yeah. And we're going to go into a lot more uh, detail when it comes to sort of more what's going on in what you could call the retail space, etc. But just before we do that, cuz all we've done so far is really just recap, like go down memory lane as you said, we'll finish up with that, which is, I know there was a pivotal moment in terms of that period of time when you, you gave yourself to, to see the progress. And there was one particular trade on Tesla where you made roughly 5 to 10x your normal uh, P&L. I think you made $10,000. Um, you know, what did that do for you, that your mindset when you saw that? Was it a case where when you finally made that sort of trade, you realized, I'm, I can do this now?

Yep. So I don't think there's ever necessarily some magic moment because the reality is your improvement that leads to that, it's all these little levers you're pulling and all these little 1% improvements that eventually allow you to connect on the pitch. So if some rookie baseball player finally hit, hit some home run, they wouldn't be like, oh my God, that was the magic pitch that, that fixed my swing. It was like, well, no, you were working on that for the, the, the 10,000 other pitches. And what I would say though is, I was struggling at the time; it was the spring of, I believe, you know, my second year at the job essentially. I was interviewing elsewhere is, is just a little hedge just in case. And then there was this pattern in Tesla, a very classic exhaustion gap pattern, a pattern we continually see in the market even today. I mean, we're talking almost 15 years later. SMCI was a beautiful exhaustion gap this year; MSTR was a beautiful exhaustion gap. So these patterns still repeat themselves. And this was a pattern we kind of specialized in as a group, and it was something I, I saw, it was something that was game planable. Um, I had some reps on, I had all my little charts prepared, I was able to study, and so I knew how I wanted to attack that day and, and just thank God, or or whatever is out there, that the pattern essentially unfolded exactly as, as we drew it up and expected. And so if my normal day was, was one or two grand, I think I ended up putting up like 11 grand. I might even still have the screenshot on, on my phone, all, all these years later. And not only did that buy me a ton of time, right? Because wow, like, hey, you know, this, this kid's finally showing something. And uh, but even more importantly, I think my boss put up, I don't know, he put up 100 something grand, which especially back then, like now there's just monsters out there, people, people do some crazy trades, like the, the growth in P&L even from when I started, um, which I can, that's a whole separate subject, I, I can get into. But my boss made, I don't know, six figures, 100K plus or something. And the most important takeaway was, wow, what he did wasn't that different from what I did. And if I can stick around at this job, even if I just pay my bills and I get a couple of these each year over time, there's no reason why I can't do that. So that was that moment where I was like, wow, I, I can do this, I've done this once, and I'm getting better. And that motivation, then you just go into overdrive.

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From watching a, a brilliant podcast that you did with Trillium, um, which was phenomenal, and if, if anyone hasn't watched that, you should definitely watch that because uh, it goes into so, so much depth. There was a moment where you had on screen, um, sort of the chart of your P&L, and I wanted to ask you in terms of September 25, I don't if I'll just show you briefly… Yeah, I know the chart, you know, but December 2015, something happened, I don't know what happened actually, um, it was close… So now I know it's hard to read into that chart too much, but what it really was was, I believe the date was, oh God, that's how you know you're getting older, but it was, it was uh, I think August 27th, 2015, was there was just this mega flash crash in the market, um, I think there were just some jitters, I don't, there were some economic jitters that happened over the weekend. We were weak into the close on Friday, and so then I remember that I think it was a Monday, if I'm wrong, I know people correct me and call me an idiot in the comments, but uh, um, so I remember going into the office that morning and obviously on any big day, and that's kind of like the beauty of, of the trading office is like you feel it in your stomach, you can feel the tension in the air, like everyone is super, super on edge, everyone's like, CU, you know, this is, this is going to be a big day. And I remember the market was just kind of, just drifting lower and lower and lower as the pre-market developed. And I mean, my boss had been doing it, I think since like 01 or something, and I, I remember saying to him, um, hey, like, have you, have you ever seen the market gap down this much? Because I couldn't recall anything in my head, then he started thinking, he's like, he's like, [ __ ], like, no, I've never seen it down this big. And like, if, if he's saying that, I'm like, okay, this is, this is the real deal. Then the market opened, and it was just so many things went limit down, epic panic. And so at that point it was just a pure matter of like deploying buying power, and that's, oh my God, if I had, you know, back then I was just a young nothing trader, if I had the buying power I have today, like that would just be insane, insane, insane. But stuff like that, stuff like that will inevitably happen, panics will happen. And so that was like a mega quantum leap. And then from there, like that, that's just rocket fuel because at that point I was maybe four years into the job, and if the first two years were kind of building the process, years two through four were, okay, I'm starting to execute and click. Then like five plus, that was when it was like, okay, like now I'm, I'm really increasing my size. And then it was like, you're executing, and that, that feedback loop just compounds and compounds and, and I would say for me to be exceptionally, exceptionally good, like I would say I don't think it necessarily happened until maybe year seven or eight. And the craziest part too is, I mean, now I don't actively trade like I did essentially. I left Trillium at the end of 2021, and that was the end of my, you know, hyperactive, like scalping, trading every setup, super focus, gung-ho everything. And now I'll just mostly trade the big setups. What's incredible is I think even this year I've still grown and learned, like I still continue to learn and observe and, and improve my process, and it's, it's pretty amazing that, that it's just, it's just a beautiful game where you can always learn, there's always higher levels. Um, I still get inspiration and learn from others uh, on the internet and, and from the traders I work with. So I still think in trading world, like I'm not that it's even my priority anymore, but I do still think I'm, I'm getting better. And I would say for like truly elite, now I think this year I kind of, I mean, I was, I was elite for day trading, but now even like the bigger picture swing stuff, I think, think I've reached it.

Incredible. No, incredible. And it was interesting what you mentioned there as well though, in terms of that momentum because you see that in the P&L chart, not only from that moment we're capitalizing on that, but then as you said, like sort of going off the back of that momentum and then getting to the sort seven, eight-year mark, you see the, the, the huge rise in terms of P&L, um, is absolutely, you know, phenomenal. And one thing there you mentioned is that you're still learning to this day, and I do, but truly believe that there's a massive misconception in the retail space where it's like, once you're a consistently profitable trader, that's it, you made it, now, now you can just go and trade the market, make your money. I wish… I mean, what people need to realize is, no matter how good I got, probably every year I would, and I was a very high-frequency day trader, so you're placing so many bets, no matter how good I got, most years I would still have probably one or two negative months per year where just I would make some big bet, I'd mess up somewhere. And one thing that I think is always true, if you speak to a real trader, the job is never, ever easy, it is always hard, you always need to improve your game, you always need to be focused, you always need to be prepped. If you ever let, let your guard down, the market punishes you. So that's why it's even more comical when you, when you see the, the videos of, oh, the jet-set lifestyle, going out for models and bottles during the week, oh, then we're just gonna race around in our fast cars, and oh yeah, I made a quick 50 grand today. It's like, it's just not, it's just not, not reality. And I think, um, I think so much of, of this job, especially for, for the people listening, if there's two things I would emphasize, it's the power of environment; when you put yourself in an environment that optimizes your learning, and then also the power of feedback loops, right? If you were to go to the gym and you were to lift and you were to eat right and you were to do everything right, and after three months you didn't see any progress, odds are you're not going another six months. And the more you can make things a positive feedback loop, the, the more you can get that momentum, and it all just helps itself. And that's why, especially if I'm working with newer traders, younger traders, you want them to build consistency first. And so on the internet, all you have is this, this gain porn, right, of, of, oh my God, this person made 100K, this person made 50K, this person made a million. It's all just gain porn. And of course, what you're seeing is, you're seeing some very advanced traders on their biggest trades; what you're not seeing is that what they're doing is probably not…

Right for what you need to be doing, and the more you can build consistency and grow gradually, growing gradually is the fastest path to grow. Growing and changing fast is the slowest path to growth because you you take big losses; you take steps back. So really, working on your environment and the feedback loop is is very powerful.

Going off the back of both though, especially the environment side, like how helpful was it to actually be around profitable traders? You know, in that environment at Trillium, to actually see them handling risk as you said, like your boss doing 100K on a trade. Like, how helpful was that being early in your trading journey to be able to see that it's real? Because I feel like a lot of retail traders, they don't know any other traders. It's it's indescribably important. Like, I truly believe that if I was on the retail side, I would not have made it. I I can guarantee you that. I would say 99% chance I wouldn't have made it. And so it's beneficial in so many ways, right? Because you see the work ethic of the people around you; you're competing with the people around you; you see um the stocks that they're trading; you see the size that they're trading, and all that stuff compounds.

So to give you a fun example, so we're in New York right now. Uh, I love lifting and health and fitness, and so I travel a fair amount. You got to still go in shape. Yeah. And so I was able to sneak my way into this uh powerlifting Olympic lifting gym in New York City. It's in a little basement; it's not that big. And in this gym, it was a bunch of, you know, I'm older than them them at this point, it was a bunch of people in their 20s and everything; they were all serious lifters. And so what you saw was the whole workout session, they are talking about different tips; they're watching and recording each other's lifts; they're talking lifting; like they're giving each other feedback; they're they're talking about like different meets, different uh, you know, heroes that that that they watching at at meets and stuff. And most of all, they were having fun. Now when you take that type of environment, do you know how easy it is to go work out when all your friends are there and all your friends are having a fun time? Do you know how much easier it is to get that extra rep out when you're competing with your buddy next to you? And so those things like that matter so much.

And so when you're in one of the most competitive crucible pressure cooker environments where it's a bunch of young driven people trying to succeed at this job, and then you have experienced traders at all levels ahead of you, that is so powerful because you see all these people trying trying to figure out the path, and you can learn and mimic and and just compete. And it's if you're out there trading on your own on your retail side, you need to find ways to replicate that as much as possible. One thing I've been an advocate for is finding a good trading pod, meaning like if at all the professional firms, every person is part of a group to improve. If you're on the retail side, why are you not doing that? Why are you not sharing your trade writeups with others? Why are you not sharing your improvement ideas with others? So the more you can make your environment optimized for growth and fun, it will make your your process and your learning curve just so much better.

How important is it though to be involved in a in a trading pod, especially one that's going to provide value to you? How important is it that you're providing value to the group as well? Because I feel like a lot of, I don't know if it's maybe just being antisocial, maybe like or just not being that way inclined in putting themselves out there or being worried of being judged, or I don't know what it is, but a lot of traders in especially in the retail space, when it comes to interacting with other traders, just online or in say a Discord or whatever it may be, they're very reluctant to to really provide any value or even direct. But how important is that or necessary is that to actually get value from a trading pod?

Well, so here's the thing. I think there's a massive selection bias in what type of people are at home trading alone and doing this job where you have no co-workers and it's just all based on the Internet with with potentially zero human interaction. Those aren't the salespeople personas; the people that are um super social extroverted. Of course, there's exceptions, but I'm just saying in general, most people are pursuing trading because they're the more analytical deeper thinkers; they're more introverted. And so there's a lot of great parts of different personalities. That being said, um you still need to recognize that there's a lot of missed opportunity that you're not capturing if you don't put yourself out there. And so to your point, there's two things why people aren't in pods. One, in the best pods, every single person reciprocates effort and value in some way, and that was even true at at the trading firms uh at Trillium, even now when I advise SMB Capital. If you're a senior trader, you're providing mentorship and and experience and and insight. If you're low on the totem pole, it doesn't matter how new you are; generally your job is to be doing more of the menial tasks, helping to aggregate news, helping to research, helping to back test. No matter who you are, it's on you to find ways to reciprocate value and give it back. And then if you prove yourself and you provide that value, then other people want you around, want you a part of that group. But guess what? It takes effort and thinking. So so many people are like, "Lance, um I don't know how to find a trading pod; how do I do this?" And well, my answer is like, "Dude, guess what? That's on you to figure out." You know, this isn't the the job of trading is hard; you need to figure things out for yourself. And so many people, they'll ask me questions and I'm like, "Dude, like just Google this or figure it out on your own," and it's like you're only going to figure this out if you put the effort in. And like, yes, it does take effort; yes, not every attempt works, and it's much like dating; like it's not supposed to necessarily be easy, but when you find a good one, it makes it all worth it. But for many traders, that's putting in effort, and it's uncomfortable, and you got to put yourself out there. So I know why people don't do it, um and nevertheless it's like, hey, like if if you really are serious about your game, guess what? Discomfort is generally where most of the growth comes from. From 100% 100%.

And off the back of that, as you said though, the value, providing value to that group, it's almost like that feedback loop in a sense. But that was a big part of the reason why, you know, even two years in, you were still there at Trillium because of the amount of value you were providing. So and that's a great point. And so one thing that I took a lot of security in is I was getting a very very small salary at Trillium, but guess what? I was pretty confident Trillium would pretty much never fire me because of the value I was adding to my group, just in callouts and projects and everything else. I was making some of the other guys around me so much money, so why would you ever fire this guy? You know, like yeah, right. And and so it's one of those things where you always want to ask yourself, how can I make myself indispensable to those around me? And so many people, I think especially in in the day of the the internet and everything else, people want to take take take, oh like, you know, "give me answers, give me this, give me that," and not give anything in return. But but guess what? In the real world, that doesn't function that well. And so that might be fine on on the internet to some degree, but if you really want good good relationships, good co-workers, good friendships, it all needs to be reciprocal. And it's so interesting where I find that like even on the personal side of life, like the best friendships are when you have those friends that are like, you know, they're the friends that also help reach out, also help plan things, and and the more reciprocal and value add you can be to each other, it just makes everything flow better.

Definitely. And one element also of, you know, being at a traditional prop firm is that you get access to resources. So not only the trading pods and mentorship and and, you know, really senior traders, but also, you know, risk teams and technology and so on. What what do you feel like in terms of retail traders out there, the independent retail traders, what resources are they missing? Like what resources do you feel like they, not that they don't have access to, but they're not utilizing or even looking for?

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, one of the big things I've ranted about is a lot of retail tends to be totally blind to breaking news. Um, not so much anymore, but breaking news, at least for me in a lot of what I do, it's such a key variable, right? What stocks don't mean revert? Stocks with breaking news. So if you're a mean reversion trader and you're trying to revert something that has fresh news on it, it's not going to work. And so if you're totally blind to that nuance, it's really going to ruin all your data and all of your analysis. So stuff like that is a big one. And I think most of all, um it's almost it's almost like a diet where there's a lot of different strategies that work, but in order to actually succeed with any of them, you need to have faith that that strategy works and then stick with it as prescribed for enough time. And so I think the hard part with the internet and for retail is there's so much just so much noise and information out there; there's a million different strategies, a million different tickers. So how do they know where to center in, right? And it's dangerous because like we spoke about, if if you're following just some some bullshitter and you don't see progress after six months, guess what? It's probably because it's [ __ ] but you might be following some legit good advice, and it still might take over six months. So that's what makes it really hard. So that's why mentorship will always come down to the most important variable. Like the reality is most of the technology is is is out there, right? There's a lot lot of good tech on on the pro side, on the retail side, um there's there's uh like a lot of good tools and everything, but ultimately it's it's the mentorship that's that's going to matter the most because if you if you took away the capital, if you took away some of the tech, um if you took away some of those different resources, give me good mentorship and and you're going to find a way.

Yeah, I really like that. And uh one thing as we're talking about retail right now, why you and we're talking about prop firms, that prop firm term to the retail means something else, right? One one of my biggest pet peeves, and already my my blood's boiling, that's we've got the red for you, but um but yeah, like you know, in the retail space, the thing that's taken over over recent years has been what was coined as prop firms, bastardized later. Did I realize that actually there were real prop firms that exist and actually you could call them EV valuation firm or or funding programs or whatever they may be called. I know you like to call them bucket shops, so um now what are your thoughts when when you're observing, I know you're quite vocal on it already, but like what are your thoughts in terms of uh, you know, that side of the space and and, you know, what are the pros and cons, if there are any pros, like what are your thoughts in terms of its impact on the trading community?

So the story that I always tell is so I know a lot of traders in the real world; I know a lot of trading firms in the real world. So then in 2022, I go on Twitter, and we're at Trillium; you're not really allowed social media for for anything like that; it's it's very very strict. And so this whole world opened up to me that I was not exposed to. And when I got into that world, the first thing that hit me was what, like why why is everyone just trading the SNP and the NASDAQ so much? Like what is up with this? And like I was I was dumbfounded. There are trading firms that trade the S&P and the NASDAQ, but those are more like options market makers and stuff; they're not doing the type of stuff that that these other people on the retail side are attempting to do. And so what was also crazy is, right, as a manager at at Trillium, running an office, I had access to just crazy uh office level and even even firm level stats if I wanted to. And one thing that stuck with me, so Trillium is a 100 plus traders; yes, some of them are trainees and stuff, but exceptionally good traders overall, one of the best shops on the street for I don't know 20 years now, whatever. And there was I so the one of the one of the head traders at the time sent out an email about trading the the S&P. And so it's a little bit different when the S&P is super super in play like during covid or during the Fed. So there are times when the S&P and the NASDAQ are very much in play, and we would trade them. Nevertheless, the head trader crunched the data and sent out some email that like, "Hey, wake up people; no one's making money trading the S&P," and these are exceptional traders, exceptionally profitable. And so then we saw this email and we're like, "What? There's there's no way." So then I'm like, I'm just curious at that point. So then I crunched my data, and again this was like 2019 or so, so like a little before covid when it was very much in play. So there are disclaimers on this, but like I crunched my data that I was like [ __ ] you know, he's he's right. And then there's one other guy in the office, and he's like, "What? No, there's there's no way; like I definitely make money." Then like I remember he checked his stats on it because we had just internal software to do that; then he was just like awkwardly silent. So we were all just like, "Uh, hey, you know what? What is your data say?" He's like, "Uh, yeah, I was negative too." And so then when you take all these traders that in the aggregate on normal days are not making money in the S&P, you go online and there's this massive ecosystem of all ES and NQ, S&P and and NASDAQ traders. I'm like, "What? How is this possible?" And I didn't understand it initially, but then I started to learn more about the the world of funded trader programs and everything else. And my very strong belief is that the S&P and the NASDAQ and and futures and Forex, first of all, like nobody really trades Forex; it's it's just this funded trader uh idiosyncrasy which shouldn't really exist. And what's so and I'm not saying there's never edge, but just that it's infinitely more efficient than stocks and some of this other stuff. And so I see this whole ecosystem, like I would say the funded trader ecosystem is way bigger than even the stock side. Like I've I've I've sought out some of the data on like Apex and and TOPStep; the amount of participants they have, mindboggling; the payouts that Apex claims, mindboggling. And so I couldn't figure it out; then I started to do my digging, uh you know, I'm associated with with the lending firm where where they had a funded trader program, looking for funding. So I started to just learn about this, and I be I I came to two conclusions. So on this social influencer space, all the people love Forex and Futures because there's no PDT account minimum. So all of a sudden, if you need $30,000 or $25,000, the universe of people that you can market to, it shrinks by about 99%; you can only market to the 1% with $30,000 or 25,000 in in in cash to to meet PDT. And so that was a big one. All of a sudden, if you do the Futures in Forex, you can suck in 100x as many sheep, right? And so that was number one. The number two thing is these funded trader programs, in my belief, unlike true prop firms. So and why do I say unlike that? So a prop firm that was traditionally known like like I worked at, they they make a cut of of your P&L; they only win if I win. If their traders don't make money, they are out of business, full stop; they're gone, right? And that's important because their incentive then is to give me every single tool to succeed and make as much money as possible. Now with these programs, they're more like the casino; they want you to reup and reup and reup because they make money off off your slot machine roles, right? And so they are not incentivized to have you win. So what they do is they create all these rules: you must trade x amount; you must trade in this style; you can't withdraw except for this time because they know that the more you're trading and the more time left on that clock, over the long run, you're all going to lose and have to reup. And the other big thing with that is, guess what? Because these are casinos, you want to know what casinos do to get people in; they market, mhm. And so all of a sudden, you want to know what you get; every single influencer with an affiliate program, and all of a sudden, the way these influencers can make money and monetize their following is by feeding them to the casino. And so everything is incentivized to get as many people into this casino; nobody cares whether those people going to the casino make money; in fact, it's it's rigged against you. And so that is, in my view, why that whole ecosystem exists.

Do you do you see anywhere where there is a pro to the trader in terms of using these firms, or you think like traders should completely not?

So it's it's funny too because people, some people are so brainwashed by these things where when I talk about how ludicrous the rules are, they say, "No, no, no, no, no, Lance, you don't get it; that's the our benefit; it helps us grow our trading; it helps us like learn discipline." And it's like, "What? Like in no in no way does that help help you, right? If if if I'm trying to teach you to to box and I tie one arm or both your arms behind your head and I'm like, 'Oh, I'm teaching you how to bob and weave,' is I just punch you in the mouth plenty of times. Would you be like, 'Oh yeah, he's just trying to teach me how to bob and weave'? I'd be like, 'Uh, no, he's just beating the [ __ ] out of you and abusing you.'" And so it's like most people, it's set up for them to fail, and all those people that fail, those are the ones that subsidized probably like .1% of the clients. And I mean that quite literally; like the general success rate for most traders is I don't know, probably a couple percent on the retail side. Then when you add those restrictions and you have them trading something that's way more efficient, it's got to be 0.1%, and I would bet you by the definition of people reuping and redoing those accounts, I would bet you it's something like one in every 100,000 sims or whatever it's called are actually succeeding. And so there is a subset of people that can succeed; like if you're able to beat the game with your with your hands tied behind your back, like that's amazing. Those people that are winning and cashing out, incredible; they do exist; it takes a lot of skill. I have friends that that do the funded trader programs and make money from them; props to them.

One other thing I want to point out though, especially with the social media side, right? People will be posting their their funded trader payouts and everything. So first of all, I find it extra comical when people say like, I even saw a Twitter ad the other day, "Oh, I'm a 1.2 million funded trader." Dude, that's a meaningless number; like you're you're getting, first of all, it's a demo account; second of all, you might have only 5K worth of risk on that account. You could say it's a hundred million account, but if you only have 5K risk, it's a 5K account. So that's comical. But then the other thing, right, that I think people don't realize, they see all these payouts being published; you don't see the denominator. Yeah, how many attempts were these people taking? And so I know your podcast very well, right? Like you all have a ton of of these traders on there, and I'm sure some of them are legitimate, and I'm sure a lot of them also [ __ ] and manipulate the game. I could imagine, and like I don't doubt that people are like probably do some people Photoshop [ __ ] like I'm sure, but I think a lot of the people are getting those payouts, but what you're not seeing is like, "Oh wow, they were running, you know, like a [ __ ] ton of accounts." Yeah. And so it's like, are these people actually having real edge or are you just seeing the super manipulated side? Because guess what? Those same people at their payouts, you will find an affiliate link in their page every single time. So what's what's really the product here, you know? Or is it you just paying for a demo account and being fleeced?

Yeah, definitely. I think like completely valid points. And you know, off the back of what you said there, there has been a wide range of of traders who use these funded accounts who've been on the podcast, and you know, I've seen all sorts of different methodologies from very few who actually have edge, like actual edge, like they could take to an actual live account and trade, but there are some, right? But then there are those who are vocal about it as well. So props to them, but they say that, "I'm just playing the model; I I know I get this much risk, and I know if I do, you know, high risk over time, I'm going to have this reward." And so they they're vocal about it, but they say they're just playing the model of the casino, like you said, which is also a little bit funky too, right? But essentially, that's getting subsidized by the people that are just gambling.

Well, as you said about rules, they they, you know, the prop firms have now changed things to a degree because now, as people have been vocal about it, not meant to win.

Yeah, yeah. There are traders that will succeed and make money; they're asked or paid off to leave. I know that as a fact. Yeah. Now that happened to, I don't know if you know who Trader Kane is; he holds the biggest payout from Apex.

Yeah, I've seen uh I've seen some of his posts; I don't I don't know him, but that's what that's what they essentially happened is they paid him out, but he's not allowed to trade with them. But I don't get it; why would why would they pay him out and and kick him off the platform?

M, right? What do you mean? He's making money; he's a good trader; isn't that what they want? Don't they want you to win? Don't they want you to succeed? You want to know what that sounds like? What happens if I go to the casino and I win too much? I get the tap on my shoulder; get the [ __ ] out. And guess what? If that was a true prop firm, if they truly wanted you to win, why are they doing that? And he's not alone; I have heard that story many times. And one thing you might you probably don't know of, and I only learned this more recently, um like a couple months ago, is that some, it was more on the CFD side; I'm not sure about the futures side, but the CFD side, there are some firms that they will give you, they know you're an influencer, uh and as you said, they don't want to be paying out large amounts, so they'll do a deal for you with; they'll give you the funded account so you don't have to do any of the challenges and uh…

You can trade it, and you're guaranteed a 2% profit. And so they'll pay you the 2%, and you can use it as marketing to get your sales and your commissions and your course sales. Wow. When I learned that, I was really—cuz I already knew the model—and wow, that's crazy. So they're even manipulating it, ring-rigging it, even for the marketing. And I was uh, I was really disappointed cuz I already knew, like, okay, the space, cuz I was involved. I I had a I had like a partnership in a prop firm a year ago. Wow. And that collapsed um, because there were three of us, and we essentially were influenced. I had the podcast; they had more social influence; and then we had someone who was running the back end, and they had run like four or five of the top 10 CFD firms. So we thought it's in safe hands, blah blah blah. Regardless of what happened, they came to a point where um, in the CFD space, one of the tech providers, one of the main platform providers, left. So then this this one month where everything shifted from sales to payouts shifted entirely. But because of the the management not managing it correctly, it just completely lopsided, went bankrupt. And it's just that was a huge lesson to me of like, okay, things may sound great, and when things are going great, but if things aren't done in the correct manner, and and regardless of the yeah, it was well, a lot of them have been closed, and people you always see these rule updates, right? The rules are being updated just to make sure because I'm sure they have these crazy stat models that are saying these are the rules so that x amount is always losing so that we can cover those that that that beat it.

And um, and so one thing that I think is important is a lot of people will say, "But Lance, what's the alternative?" Yeah, and I don't I don't—that to me makes my head explode. Like, I I lose my mind when people ask me that, cuz it's like, "Lance, I'm trying to get rich. What's the alternative to going to the casino?" It's like, "What, dude? What what do you mean the casino isn't how you get rich?" Like, it's negative expected value; that's how you lose your money. The alternative is to not go to the casino and to do something that's going to make you money over the long run. Like, literally, if you need to compared to going to the casino, get a different job or learn trading the right way. And what you're paying for these accounts over time, just like like look, if you don't have enough money to fund an account yet, just save up. You shouldn't be trading anyways; you shouldn't be risking capital. You can trade a demo account for free; build your chops; save up; build a war chest. That's not the answer people want; like, people want to hear like, "Oo, money now! When now!" So people don't want to listen, but that's on them at this point. But I think it's part of anyone with the platform to at least be honest and transparent and like some of the ethics of what people are doing out there, like, and good on good on you for this this this whole conversation. Like, I don't know, like, I I know why everyone just cares about, "Hey, I want to I want to make my nut, take care of me and my own," yeah, but it's like, is is that really sufficient for how we should operate in our life, right? Like, should we really make money at at the harm of of other people and through deceit and and poor ethics? Like, if that's your metric, like, so be it, but you're not someone I want to associate or be friends with. Like, there's so much more to life than—there's a lot of ways to make money. Um, look, maybe it might not be as much, but in the long run, like, I I do think all those things catch up with you. And if if you're not the person you you want to be, it just it's short-lived. Yeah, like your career, you poison yourself, you poison your mind. Definitely, definitely.

And I think the the final point on sort of the the prop firm side, well, evaluation firm side, we're learning; we're learning. But um, the world is changing, yes, but I think as you mentioned, like people are just assuming that's the only route; that's a dangerous mindset to have. And I'm not sure where it stems from. I think well, it stems from, you know, all the content they're consuming really just revolves around it to a degree for sure. Uh, they might not know any better, but I do think as we said, like people do use it, but the thing missing, which is a great pivot I guess, which is edge—like they don't actually have edge; they're just going to this thing and think—and it kind of comes back to the mentorship, everything that we've talked about so far. They don't they're lacking all of that; they don't even finan—uh, financial stability; they don't even have that. Like, I remember with ours, we were quite good at being realistic and saying like, "You need to have edge, make sure you have a good financial cushion, etc." But yet there would still be people, even if you're saying it, still be people who will purchase challenges and deposit money, whoever it may be, when they can't afford to lose any of that capital. That's bad. And I think it's really trying to, as you said, like as a collective community, trying to educate more and more and more as much as possible to say, "These are some principles, regardless of whether it's a, you know, personal live account or whether it is one of these evaluation firms, you need to have these things in place first before you even go there." Because in my opinion, like you should only be going to an evaluation firm if you know you're going to pass it. Yeah, you know, like you shouldn't be going there thinking, "I hope I pass this one," yeah, or else it's it's just money that's going to be gone.

And I think the thing that's important is, and I'll even preface this by saying anytime I'm speaking or anyone is speaking, we can only speak from our own viewpoints and experiences. So I recognize that there's a lot of different ways to make money in trading. There are people that beat these funded trader programs; there are people that make a whole career out of futures, a whole career out of forex. So everything I say is for me, and what I will say is there's times that like you can do well in in trading this stuff. In fact, some of my best trades in 2024 were actually in in futures, and so it's not that you can't do this stuff, but at the end of the day, you always need edge, and it's a question of what is going to offer you the most edge. How do you learn that, and how do you learn that without restrictions and rules that are going to try and limit that? This is a perfect pivot to be fair because I've heard you talk about in terms of finding the most edge for you has always been in the shorter time frames, like scalping. Why is that? Why is it the shorter time frame for you, or why do you feel like you found that that has been where the most edge is found?

Sure. So I think I think short-term trading offers the most edge, but it comes at a trade-off, and that trade-off is scalability. So there are some incredibly talented short-term traders; there are people that are making 100% plus, 200% plus on small accounts year after year after year. For take Warren Buffett at the extreme long-termism and extreme scalability, the whole other side of the spectrum, biggest account ever, longest time frame ever—at this point, he's struggling just to be the S&P 500, right? Um, but he's able to deploy just hundreds of billions of dollars. So it's it's that tradeoff. So my view is that for those levels of capital, things are actually quite efficient. You know, you can't just find 50 cents lying on the ground for free now. When you go to the smaller side of things, whether it's based on being quick to news, whether it's based on technical patterns, whether it's based on order flow or just different marketing efficiencies, there's a lot of of opportunities. And if you were to take something like crypto, what has more eyes on it—um, Apple or like like some random, you know, cryptocurrency shitcoin? Yeah. And so also in order to make money betting directionally, you need ranges. So the more range something has, generally the better, and that's also part of the flaw with stuff like Forex and some of the Futures is the S&P and the NASDAQ and pretty much all of Forex generally don't have big ranges. Then when you take something like in stock world and you have uh a beautiful breakout in Tesla that recently happened at 360 bucks, or you take something uh like the quantum computing names that have been exploding, you have stocks that might be moving 10, 15, 20% a day. So you can find much better just just skew and edge overall. And now what people forget is it's not just risk reward, but it's also probabilities. And my belief is that the the more price discovery and the more emotions and the more psychology and the more stuff is moving in general, that's where you're going to find the most edge. Not—it's it's not that's necessary, but not sufficient to make money, of course. You still need the system to captured in the rules and and the pattern recognition to find out where. And that's all derived of not only your own trading but also you've you know worked with 200 to 250 plus traders at this point, and you've seen the same sort of correlation in terms of short-term trading being more prevalent, more more edge being found for them. As you said, it's like the scalability aspect to it too, but also an element of of course short-term trading is the speed. And as we talked about very early on, speed wasn't your best thing; like that was something you had to develop. And I think as part of that process, if I'm not mistaken, was that you would record your your trading sessions and then actually review them, you know, meticulously and actually slow down the price action, slow down the speed essentially of your recording so you could watch the price and really dissect without the P&L, without the the pressures of live, you know, it actually being live and really dissecting what's going on. Is that a process that you took to essentially program and and improve your speed and your ability to to react in in real time eventually?

100%. Now let's think back to the metal learning stuff we were talking about. To get good at anything, you want to get as many focused, intentional reps with immediate feedback as possible. And now think about golf. If I were to play a game of golf on a course, which of course is essential—that's the end goal—you of course want to be shooting well on a golf course, but guess what? If you average I don't know five strokes—well, for me it might be let's say I average 10 strokes a hole—so I'm getting 180 swings over like I don't know, call it four, five hours of play, right? And I'm only getting 18 shots off the tee, so with my driver it might only be like 10 shots or something, and so I only get 10 reps for that. If my driver is the weakest part of my game, if I play four rounds of golf, I only get 40 shots, and they're not back to back. The way more effective way to improve on that aspect of my game is of course to go to the driving range, and especially the best is if I can go to a driving range with the cameras that show me my swing and action so that I can break it down. Or you set up a camera with your tripod, even if you go to some of these top lifting gyms, like, okay, look, there's the influencers with their camera so they can show off their butt and everything, but if you're a serious lifter, you also have your tripod and your phone because you're recording to see exactly your your wrist position, your technique, how everything's stacking up. And trading's no different, right? And so what we want to do is we want to find what's the weakest part of our game that's going to lead to the most improvement, and I want to really dissect that. Okay, like watching this this chart develop, what was I thinking? How can I reprogram that thought process? So one thing I used to always struggle with was fighting the trend. I have a very popular concept now called the right side of the V. Did I I intellectually recognized that was my issue, but then how did I fix it? I had all this tape that I would record of all these moments, and I would rewatch the tape, and I could just feel my thought process, like, "Oh, I I should be buying," I should—and it's like, "No, you got to recode and say, 'No, it's I'm on I'm on the front side; I'm on the front side; wait for the turn; wait for the turn; wait for the turn.' Boom, there it is." And then I would even—you want to make it as simulated as real time as possible, so I will even do the keystrokes and reprogram myself. So then when I am on the course, trading in real time, then it's like, okay, this stock is starting to come off; I'm gonna wait for the turn; I'm gonna wait for the back side; this is still front side; wait, wait, wait; and you get another rep, and you execute. And that only comes from getting so much more practice that might otherwise—like if you only see a good opportunity like that once a week or once a month, it might take you a whole year to get reps when I can now do that in like one week.

I find it so fascinating because it's not—well, it's not something I've actively heard of until I started watching your content and and some of S&B as well talking about the the processes of of doing that too. Um, but you can really, as you already talked about in terms of like lifters or even golf, but even like boxing, you hear it a lot—you're reviewing tapes, or I remember I think an analogy you had used previously was in basketball, same thing—like reviewing, you know, games and trying to meticulously review yourself. And what I love there in terms of—it's essentially, I don't know if it would be the right term, but like the anchoring process—like you essentially, when you were watching back the—and then doing the keystrokes—essentially, even though it's not real at that time, it's just anchoring the thought process, the process—it just trains all the muscle memory and everything, so then when it does happen live, it's triggering something already back to that moment. Especially when when I was at Trillium, I think for some of what I was doing again on some of these moves, you can you can see the volume that goes off. And for for a lot of this stuff, I was without a doubt one of the fastest in the world, and I didn't start that way; I started one of the slowest in the world. So how did I get there? I got there by again, like you said, watching this stuff in half speed. So in half speed, it's almost like it's almost like if you're learning an instrument—like if you're learning to play guitar, you know, your teacher walks you through everything; you're you're you're doing everything in super intentional slow motion. And so that's exactly what I would do. I would see it appear on my filter; I would connect all the dots; I would process the daily, the intraday; then I would execute in half speed; then I'd speed it up; then I'd speed it up; then I would be watching it in 2x or 3x speed. So then it's much like uh in baseball when the person's swinging the bat with the weight on it, all of a sudden you take the weight off, and your bat speeds so much faster, right? And so if I'm training myself at 2x speed and you get all those reps in, well, guess what? Nobody else was doing that. I'm sure some people are doing that now as I've you know talked about this stuff, but nobody was doing that. And then when you have someone as hungry and driven as I was, doing that so many hours every single Sunday, every single day, I was just working, working, working. So the amount of reps I was getting—it's not that I was naturally faster, naturally better; I wasn't good at any of this—but nobody had more reps than me.

I feel like a misconception in the retail space off the back of that is that I'll learn as I do. So as you mentioned, like if you just did that, you know, the amount of reps you would you'd probably get only get a very small handful of reps in a year in comparison to the blown out the water in proportion of the reps you've done by doing that process. Why? And I feel like that misconception is that, "Oh, I learn as I trade; I can only learn when I'm trading," and therefore they just find themselves just constantly in that boom and bust cycle. Exactly. And think about it—this year was active, but a lot of years super slow. So you might get some of these some of these years where you could sit around all day for eight hours—I guess you—how you—I know the market's not eight hours, but whatever—um, and you might get zero reps. And like we spoke at the very beginning of the podcast, imagine the difference in intentionality and effectiveness of someone that sits around getting zero reps for someone that took that slow period and is just doing chart writeups and watching tape and getting—you could get 100 reps that day, right? And so that compounded over the course of years, it's a difference between huge success and huge failure. Definitely. And in terms of edge, when when people hear about edge in the more retail space, I think they just quickly and automatically just associate it to strategy, and that's it—purely just strategy, or "Here's my top-down analysis and my technicals," maybe some fundamentals if they use that, which a lot of retail traders don't. Like, what would you say the true meaning of trading edge is?

Sure. So I think in its most simplest form, edge is simply positive expectancy. Then it's a question of what can give someone that positive expectancy, and it could be your strategy; it could actually be a lot of things. So maybe you have speed versus everyone else—like if you're a uh an algorithm or a high-frequency trading firm, your edge is your speed. Um, maybe you have an edge in resources—maybe I have all the news sources imaginable; maybe my edge is in my information processing—"Hey, I'm not the fastest to this news, but that biotech trial data, I can understand this trial data better than anyone else"—that was never me, but that's someone out there. And um, or maybe it's also psychology—"Hey, like this is—when everyone is max scared, max panic, I'm good at recognizing that feeling in my stomach, recognizing that fear and recognizing that equals opportunity." Um, maybe your uh edge also comes from just having a good good broker with with short locates or access a big big trend. This year was access to overnight trading—um, being being able to trade uh the overnight session, being able to trade futures, being able to trade options—like SMCI this year on that exhaustion gap in in in February had an amazing opportunity in options, but you need to be able to have access to that; that's that can be part of your edge. So all of these things together along with with your psychology, your work ethic, your pattern recognition—that's what really comes together to give you positive expectancy. In terms of positive expectancy, how would you define that for the audience? We'll have a definition on screen hopefully, but like what—how would you define that for the audience if they don't understand what that means?

Sure. So positive expectancy simply means if you do that thing over the long run, will it make you money? So if we were to flip a coin and bet 50 cents—I I get it on on heads, 50 cents I pay it on tails—the expectancy of that over the long run is is zero, right? It's 50/50 coin flip, and whatever I make I'm going to give away over the long run, so there's no positive expectancy there. And so meanwhile, if I were a really good poker player and let's say I played 10,000 hands and on the average hand I made 50 bucks, my expectancy would be positive, and it would be 50 bucks per hand. So the way every trader should be thinking is at the essence—we all need edge. Without edge, you have—no matter how good your psychology or risk management is, you will not make a single dollar over the long run. You need positive expectancy. So as traders, we then want to be collecting data and able to quantify that—"How much do I make in this strategy and that strategy and that strategy?" And that allows you to then refine and figure out what you should be trading and what you shouldn't. And a lot of traders, they don't properly collect their data and do this analysis. So especially if you're one of the less systematic traders, you might be doing five strategies; four of them might be making decent money, and maybe one of those four is making amazing money, but then you have one strategy that you're losing money in. But because the human mind is just prone to error and and and bias and everything, you don't recognize that you're just draining P&L in this fifth strategy, and if you just cut it out, you'd be making more. But a lot of that we don't know if we don't crunch the data and do the analysis. It's that saying, isn't it—"You don't know what you don't measure." Yeah, right. Yeah. One of my favorite analogies that I always tell is um in IPOs, we would trade a lot of those, and the best IPOs were always the super super hot ones—uh, the the Alibaba's, the Reddit's, the RM IPOs, stuff like that. And so I had these trainees where they were trading every IPO, even like the slow shitty ones, even the [ __ ] liquid ones. And so eventually I was like, "Hey, like why why are you trading these shitty IPOs?" And he looked at me, and he's like, "Oh, I make money in IPOs." And that factually was correct; he does make money in IPOs. But I knew the nuance that he was missing. And so I said, "Okay, crunch your data and tell me what you find." He crunches his data and he's like, "Look, I told you I make money in IPOs." And I'm like, "Yeah, but what do you notice?" And you know, I'm I'm going to butcher these stats; I obviously don't remember the the specifics, but it was something to the effect of if he traded 10 IPOs, he traded two hot ones and eight just garbage ones. Yeah, he made a lot of money in the two hot ones, then lost in the eight garbage ones. And all he had to do to make his strategy infinitely more effective is, "Dude, stop trading the garbage ones," you know? But a lot of people don't know that until you actually go through the data. But then the process of, say, for that example, removing those eight garbage ones, would it be a case of just reviewing and meticulously going through what those looked like, what were the precursors of those, on so that when they present themselves in the future, he can then look to exactly—and so then that's part of doing the deep work—is you can ask yourself, "What defines the hot IPO?" Okay, you know, it must have um a name brand name; it must have at least this much float; it must have at least this much, you know, excitement, however you want to call it. Um, and that's when you start to systemize and refine your strategies.

I love that. And in terms of ticker selection as well or even market selection, how important is that in terms of edge? I mean, I would argue it's everything; it's everything; it's—it's if you don't trade the right stocks, you don't stand a chance. And so if you were to pick what five stocks I need to trade each day, I will not make a single dime. So it is it is an absolutely necessary precursor to making money. And one analogy I talk about is the broken slot machine, and it's one of those things where if you put me in a casino and I just start playing different, you know, there's a thousand plus tickers, a thousand plus slot machines—if I just play anyone, I'm going to lose over the long run.

What I need to do is find the game that's broken. That doesn't mean I'll necessarily win, but I at least have the chance and the expected value to win. And so those tend to be the stocks that are moving on news catalysts that are making large emotional, um, big price discovery moves, like based on extreme technicals, um, and that is kind of what I need to do.

And so even when I talk about like futures and forex, a lot of times I view those markets as fairly efficient and, at least for me, not not a ton of edge. But there will be times when those markets are also doing something amazing, you know, like moves in the Yen, moves in the Nik, um, or uh, all sorts of times we get catalysts, and that's when I'll be involved in that, and that's when I personally view that those have the most edge. But if I trade that stuff when it's not in play, as as we like to call it, I'm not going to make a single di—I'm going to lose. In play can be like, you know, volatility or a particular news catalyst, good charts, just doing something special, not really just range-bound and and and no—nothing's going to have that 24/7, correct. And I think that's a misconception people might have.

I've heard you say before, actually, which I thought was—it made complete sense when you're taking all of this context into it as well, where you like, "I don't understand the traders who just say I'm just a futures trader or I'm just an NQ trader," you know, y—um, because of that that concept of like, okay, cool, but then there's so much being left on the table. Because I I I know traders like that. I do know traders who only trade one pair, and they they do it well, but I understand the concept of like if you if you go through a period of, let's say, of two, three weeks on that particular pathway, there's nothing's happening, and it can really start to have a knock-on effect onto your psychology or your doubt, or whatever it may be, hopefully not. But in that two to three weeks, there was probably plenty of opportunities that were in play.

Yep. And a lot of what I try to do is I try to teach optimal, and look, we'll never achieve optimal, but it's so important to know what is optimal, at least from an objective mathematical sense. And so in general, we want to be moving to whatever offers the most expected value. So that might be Bitcoin post-Trump election; that might be Tesla post-Trump election. So if you're in a market that isn't really moving well, guess what? You're leaving some huge opportunities there. And so it's so important to always think to yourself like—and even even online, right, there's some amazing real traders out there, and they all posted their end-of-year reviews and everything. Some I highlighted on my Twitter account. The best traders out there move to wherever the big opportunities were, and we're talking SMCI, we're talking MSTR, we're talking Bitcoin, we're talking uh, the Nik, we're talking um, all these different products, all these different strategies. Some were mean reversions; some were breakouts. And so yes, you need to stick to your own strengths, but ideally, if you're going to stick to your own strengths, can you apply it to the best product or ticker possible?

One thing I would love to ask you as well is something that you mentioned in terms of negative edge. So obviously we've talked about edge in general, but what would you class as negative edge?

So essentially, just negative expected value. So that's going to be when, over the long run, if you play that game, you're going to lose. And so I would argue that for most people—not everyone, but most people—will struggle in stuff like the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ and the forex pairs on a normal average day. Um, so at least for me, definitely for me, I would have negative edge doing that. And so I think people need to be so aware of when they do have edge and when they don't, because most traders that I know, and at least most I've seen, even in the professional world and otherwise, they have the most edge in times of the most volatility and volume and craziness. So that's when most traders want to turn on the risk and really, really push. But then in periods when things are are calm and range-bound and there isn't much going on, that's when you got to really pair back. And so even even a trader like myself, if I'm trading during a slow time or if I'm trading when there aren't these really good opportunities, I'll lose money, and most most traders will—like, I'm sure there's some trader out there that's just can really do fine in those range-bound times. Like I don't I don't discount that, but for most people, including myself, part of the job is you got to make money, and you got to know when to just be pedal to the metal. Wow, we're getting pocket pairs; I'm getting aces, kings, queens, and really, really bet. Then you also got to know like, okay, I'm getting 27, I'm getting 38, I'm getting 102 or something, and just say, "I'm not playing this at all right now."

Yeah, what would you say in terms of building out an edge, so actually identifying it and then being able to size into it, trade it effectively, trade it live, even—what does that process look like?

Yep. So there's a few methods to find edge. Uh, some of those are backtesting. Uh, you can just essentially look at a hypothesis, a hypothesis, and test that data in the past. You can forward test, meaning how do I think uh, this is going to plan out, pan out, and then essentially execute that in the future and collect data. Or then what I think is one of the most effective strategies is to reverse engineer something. And if if I had no edge, where would I start? I would observe the market and try to find what stocks are making the craziest moves, and I would just simply database them all, whether an Evernote, whether on Notion, I would just collect every chart of something doing really big moves on really high volume. So in the last quarter or so, maybe I would be looking at the Tesla chart; maybe I would be looking at the quantum names; maybe I would be looking at Paler. Um, and I'd really just just take those charts, and then I'd try and find patterns and principles, like okay, like what happens when this broke to highs? Uh, was this—what what made this a better setup or a worse setup? What led to the really clean moves? Oh, like, okay, this this led to a really clean move because we broke to highs on a news catalyst. And you start to find stuff that like the longer the consolidation you have when you break to highs, the better the probability of a good move. If you have high volume when you break to highs, the better the probability of a good move. If you have a news catalyst, so you can start to stack on all these little variables and then build kind of a blueprint, and you can say like, okay, I want to find stocks that have made an initial big move, we consolidate, I don't know, at least an equal amount, we then break to highs on high volume and a news catalyst. And you can start testing that, and you'll find that like with enough variables, you start to find, okay, this this leads to—

Doing the necessary work, but just as off the back of that, because let's say the average retail trader, let's say they're going to a mentor, right, who's teaching them an edge, whether it's legitimate or not, but regardless, or even if someone's going to a prop firm and they're being taught edges from senior traders, for example, is it still necessary for someone who's being taught something, whether it's watching videos or whatever it may be, and they understand it, but is it necessary for you to still go through that process you just mentioned where you're going onto those those charts and you're identifying these key markers, you're identifying these setups, really soaking in, you know, what the reality of that looks like, what the data is saying in terms of its performance over X sample size, so that when it comes to you actually trading it, you truly actually understand that edge versus just, "He told me that's that that this is what the edge is; let me go trade that," but you don't actually understand what the average losing streak looks like, the winning streak looks like, what the most optimum uh, side of that edge looks like versus the the suboptimum?

So I think if you have proper mentorship, you can you can actually get away without it. Like if if someone's giving you a strategy and says, "When A, B, and C happens, do X," if that person has done the work and you're following it, you can get away with it. Okay, that being said, if you really want to understand stuff or develop or expand from there, you need to do the hard work. You need to get into the data. And if you look at so many of the best traders that have developed incredible skill sets and edge, uh, you know, there's there's someone from Sweden, Christian Quam Magi, really talented trader, incredible incredible guy. How did he find his strategy? So he did actually kind of mimic and clone off of this this guy, Preep, and but what he also did is he went through hundreds and thousands of charts based on that concept, and he marked them all up. If you take my trainer, my trainer has notebooks upon notebooks upon notebooks of charts, and he all just marked them up. And even if you take Greg Seba, who's another, you know, legendary amazing trader that's been around for a while, and this was before even computer charting, by hand, he was just taking all these charts, reverse engineering, and taking notes. And even for me, my Evernote is thousands of charts that I've all mocked up, and that's the only way to really, really truly know this stuff and innovate and expand and refine.

Definitely. And in terms of trading psychology, because I know you've you very much have said that, you know, you can have the best psychology in the world; if you don't have edge, you're still not going to make any money. And I I can agree more. And it was actually yourself and and a couple of others who were really sharing that message over recent years that it really hit home, because in the retail space, it's all just promoted—psychology is the biggest problem; psychology is going to be the biggest problem. And I've really started trying to pivot the message through the podcast of it actually—yes, psychology is a real thing, um, you know, handling size, for example, or handling a loss, for example, there might be some psychological things that prop up, but regardless of that, you won't be you won't really get to that position anyway unless unless you have edge. And a lot of people, I think—well, not a lot, I know a lot of people in the retail space have no edge, and they're trading, and then they're blaming their performance on psychology. You know, "Revenge trade!"

I could not agree more with any of that. And so again, this is where I have my healthy dose of skepticism. Why why is there so much psychology stuff from the influencers and the content? Because psychology can't really be disproven, right? Like, of course you need risk management; of course you don't want to be on tilt; of course you don't want to overtrade. Like nobody can argue with with any of that. And so it's it's—you even see these trading coaches, it's like, how how many Twitter profiles is it? Oh, I'm I've got 25k followers, and I'm a trading coach. And I go on their little websites and I try and see their background, and it's like, what? Like you have you have no real background in in trading or psychology. Like what what are we doing here? Like and I don't I don't mean to presume that you need to have um, some traditional education. I don't think you need a PhD or anything, but like you can't just you know, pull your knowledge out of a Cracker Jack box, right? And like the thing the thing that always cracked me up, right, and uh, there's there's this account, Leah the trader, that I got in one of my classic Twitter beefs in, and thanks to the wonderful internet sleuths out there, so she she was a like BDSM like sex therapist and everything, and you can literally follow this on her timeline on her Instagram with 50,000 followers. She picks up trading in April of 2020. Like, "Uh, this is fun." Six months later, by the by the end of the year, she is selling a trading course. And then what happens, right, is you get a platform; you get this feedback loop of credibility. Oh, I was on this podcast, or oh, I did that. Then it's like, oh, of course this person's credible, when it's like, what? This this person's never published a trading profit in their life. This person wasn't a trading psychologist. This person doesn't know the issues of traders. This person isn't familiar with markets. They opened up a Robinhood account in April of 2020, and we're selling people on courses six months later, and they have a 50,000-plus person following. So it's like anytime I see that, it's like, oh, wait, the reason why there's so many like psychology influencers out there, trading psychology, is because the barrier to entry to speak on that is zero.

Yeah, right. And there's no way to prove or disprove it, because of course you know this stuff. So it's like like you said, it's not that it isn't important—of of course it is, right? But I would argue that like if—think about the poker player analogy—if I don't know what hands to play and I don't know what strategies to actually win the hand, my psychology doesn't matter; my bankroll management doesn't matter, because I don't even know what hands to play. So that always needs to come first. Then the more developed you get, I do think it becomes more of a more of a factor for risk, you know, risk management, of course, but then also psychology at the elite level, and it's like optimization at that point, really. It's like trying to remove barriers towards further success.

Correct. Yeah, finding, building your STRs, it's the same thing. Like you see all this lifestyle content out on the internet, and I think it's great to consume it; it gives all the dopamine and everything else; it's catchy; it's it's it's fun. But I think ultimately, if you're if you're a trader trying to improve your game, the lifestyle content that might give you like—I think I think the argument is, oh, it's motivating and inspiring. Yeah, short-term motivation and short-term inspiration isn't what leads to success. The way to success is by sustaining work ethic and improvements day after day after day after day. And if you're just consuming that stuff rather than doing the hard work, it's not helping.

One thing I have heard you say, actually, in terms of psychology, is that early on, psychology is important in terms of that positive feedback loop. Yeah, that's really the extent of it, is making sure you're keeping that positive feedback loop early on. Yeah, and obviously, as we talked about, optimizing later. One thing you did say which I thought was fascinating because it's so true when I've been speaking to these veteran traders is psychology hasn't changed in hundreds of years. There's always been panic; always been fear; always been greed. None of that has, you know, changed; that has always been the case. And I find it just is—it's enlightening because I feel like a lot of traders think, and I think, you know, generally in society we think the same way as well, it's like, what's happening now is the biggest problem ever that's ever taken place, when in reality, 10 years ago there was, or 20 years ago, and 50 years ago, it's always been the same mentality that's kind of been shared by the masses. It's like, "This is the problem now," when in reality, it's just—it's resurfaced in a different way, or it's just, you know, our perception of now and and sort of uh, people's time horizons of what they're looking at. Um, so I really enjoyed that sort of thought process.

Isn't it kind of funny how for how advanced we are with technology, like we're like we're at the advent of AI; we're we're able to send people to the Moon; we're talking about who could we colonize Mars and stuff—yet if you think about it, the most fundamental thing that has not changed for millions of years is our psychology, right? Like we still question uh, you know, what's the meaning of life, or like, you know, love, breakups, like, "Oh, man, I like I've got I'm aging; I've got gray hairs coming in." Like psychology and and greed and and fear, all that stuff hasn't really changed one bit, right? Like even if you take music today, music and and literature and poems, they're still on the same subjects and the same human emotions that have been for just hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years, right? And the beauty of of trading is, if you think about it, a stock chart is at its essence—it's it's just the almost art and the the visual representation of transactions. And what's so funny is you can be aware of these biases and all these flaws of psychology, and you still feel it anyways. Like if I see—if I'm not invested in Tesla or if I'm not invested in tech or I'm not invested in whatever—and you see it going up up up up up, you still feel that, "Oh my God, I can't believe I'm missing this," even when you're aware of it. When the stock market panics, even for me, how many how many panics have I traded? Like it's it's got to be some crazy number because I'm involved in the individual stocks and everything else. When when you're in a stock that's panicking, no matter what, you still feel it in your stomach. There's just something so human about all this stuff, and greed and fear still have not changed just because there's algorithms and VWAP and this and that. That hasn't changed the fact that like on, you know, August 2015, when the market was gapping down, everyone was like, "Holy [ __ ] I'm so scared! Panic! Panic! Panic!" And even today, like even if you took this past August, you know, it's funny, both are August, I guess, nine years later, there was still a massive panic as people were scared. Warren Buffett sold Apple, and Warren Buffett sold Bank of America, and uh, Nvidia's AI might not be as good, and the Yen squeezing panic, whatever—we're still getting that despite technology and and science and trading having advanced so much, so much.

Yeah. And so many people are skeptical of edge erosion—"This strategy won't last"—where it's it's odd because over the course of my career—almost almost 15 years at this point—it's like, wait, scarily so much has stayed the same. And any stuff that's been eroded, there's been more than enough new opportunities that's compensated for. If I would say markets to a degree are less efficient, they're more efficient in some regards, like order flow and the time to incorporate news, but at the same time, especially this past year and in 2020, 2021, the ranges and price discovery and moves we're seeing are unbelievable, right? Like there were so many years where you won't get stuff like uh, the semi move and the AI move and the quantum computing move all in the short space of time. Yeah, we're seeing crazy crazy moves. So I'd argue that like yes, some areas got more efficient, but there's still incredible amounts of the pie out there.

One thing you mentioned in terms—I don't know if it's really related to psychology in a sense—but you've said before like there's no "they," as in there's no algorithm trying to target traders. I don't know if you know, but in the retail space, is this huge—well, at least with the podcast audience to a degree—this is this huge debate constantly of uh, there's this algorithm that runs the market. Um, and I've had a few—like I've had uh, you know, like Naso from the New York Stock Exchange, he's talked about an algorithm. I've had um, you know, people in the past as well talk about algorithms or or say there is no algorithm. Like what are your thoughts, like as you've already said, there is no "they," for example, trying to target you, but like when you hear these things or observe these things in the space, like how does that make you feel? What are your thoughts when you see it? Like do you think it's just something that's really holding back traders from actually potentially being an actual trader?

I will say it makes me die inside a little bit, you know? Like I think a lot of times the internet can be pretty toxic these days. Like if you go on Instagram, you know, reels can be just like a cesspool of like brainless, damaging content of like the sex appeal and the this the that, all this crap. Then if you go on TikTok, it's it's the dances, the everything else. On Twitter, there's the divisiveness, and a lot of that it tends to depress me in in a sense, because you see the world kind of just get sucked into this the lore of stuff that kind of isn't good long-term. Um, you see people still arguing on the internet—look, whether you're you're pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, like so many people are still dying on that hill and like being miserable over this stuff, whether you're pro-Trump, anti-Trump, people are like so divisive and dying on on hills that just aren't productive at at a certain point, right? And so when I hear about stuff like—I kind of group a lot of that in the—like, one, I think it's just total [ __ ], but then two, like it's so vague and so bullshitty where it's like there's no even essence of it to disprove. Like there there is an algorithm in the market; there's actually probably thousands of algorithms running in the market every single day, right? There's people that are executing a zillion algorithms through Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, you know, Merrill Lynch, like all the banks, all the all the hedge funds. Guess what? Citadel has probably dozens of algorithms. Jane Street Capital, dozens. Renaissance, RenTech, like there's like a zillion firms that are all running their algorithms. But to think that there is one algorithm, overarching thing driving anything—it's all just part of like the crazy I am the ICT nonsense, which again, we're talking—I actually didn't know this—well, first of all, in my opinion, it's very clear he's just a documented fraud at this point, but then someone pointed out to me recently that—and he supposedly—I've not verified this myself—but supposedly he has said that he was kidnapped.

Oh, yeah, you want to know the story? So yeah, he said that he was kidnapped by—it was two names, like Parsons and Parsons or something like this—kidnapped, taken to like this underground, you know, facility, and then, you know, had to secretly code an algorithm that would be used on the financial markets, and then, you know, his emblem thing that's apparently like what was the key code or something to get into this.

Yeah, so I didn't know any of this. Do you believe that?

No, no, not at all.

Do you do you think there is even a 1% chance that is true?

No.

Do you think there is a police record anywhere of that? Like then you're talking about a guy with 500,000-plus followers, and like you even like the the munchkin stuff, like it's so it's so [ __ ] weird and creepy, and like when people believe it, it does depress me, honestly. Um, not to dunk on any of that because like, look, that dude's gonna do his thing, whatever, like, but it's it's depressing in the sense that you see people fall for it. Yeah, and I would say for all the gurus and stuff like—even even when you find the accounts of like, oh God, someone showed me a funny one recently. Oh my God, it was something like like PB investing or it's it's some 17-year-old, and it's it's like this 17-year-old just doing, you know, the ridiculous guru stuff, and 50,000-plus followers, and it it does make me sad in the sense, like just just seeing how how just gullible the masses can be. And yeah, it's it it's sad to me.

I don't blame you, because especially when you think about the accolades not only that you've achieved, but more so even the environments that you've traded with and then the people, other traders that you actually know and no doubt know their journeys and so on, it's like the polar opposite of of the reality of trading. It's even like—do you do you know the Liver King?

Has that—

Yes, the guy—

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you have someone that's that's clearly on steroids—

With a massive, massive following, I think it's probably what, like, a million plus, yeah. And one, he's just totally lying about everything, and two, he's being a proponent of things that are, are one, not true, but probably also harmful and dangerous. Yeah. And I don't fault the guy for monetizing and and becoming famous and all that stuff. So like, look, like do I view it as ethical? Um, no. Like I, I don't think, you know, in kind of the Buddhist mindset that I have, I don't view that as an ethical living. But even worse, the sad part is the million people that think like, oh my God, this guy isn't just on truckloads of steroids, and this is actually healthy, and I should be eating, you know, like this craziness, which is just so nutritionally devoid from like, you know, all, all the fibers and other micronutrients. And so it's, yeah, it's, you know, it's tough to really see where, where the world goes on some of this and the misinformation, and it's, and AI is going to make it worse. So, uh, that's, that's the part that scares me with a lot of the, the furu stuff and the lifestyle stuff.

And I also know like there's a lot of good people out there that I, I don't mean this in like, in a, in a dunk or like a derogatory way, I truly don't, but like, not, not everyone is super cognitively intelligent. Like a lot of people didn't go to school, a lot of people don't have any nutritional background or, or any background on finance or stocks. And so when you don't have a lot of the background knowledge or the information or just like you don't have a good [ __ ] filter for some of the stuff, it's, I think we can quickly say, oh, these people are so dumb, they're idiots. Oh, if people are falling for these scammers, like, you know, they deserve to be scammed. That's not really true, you know, like I, I feel empathy and, and sadness for people that, that don't have the awareness. Like, you know, there's even, even if you take like the elderly, right, like there's a lot of elderly that fall for the telephone scams. You should be like, oh man, they're dumb. It's like, no, that's someone's parent, you know, that's someone that's just being taken advantage of. Um, they don't know what they don't know, exactly, someone else knows they don't know it. Yeah, and it's coming out of trust and this feedback loop of credibility, and, and that's very dangerous in, in the world. It is, it really is.

And I think, uh, hopefully though, like I know that as you mentioned, you, what was it, 21, you said 2021, 2022, you joined Twitter, yep, started doing more like, sort of content or at least providing value to the, to the industry, etc. So I think seeing more of that is helping to make changes. And I think interestingly enough, you know how we, and we won't go into the topic, but like into the evaluation firms, I think the mess that's been there the last two years has actually pushed traders to seek out, you know, more legitimate traders and legitimate ways of getting funding and growing their, their accounts and so on. And so many people will say like, like look, people will always scam, right? I, and I get why people do it. It's, I wouldn't do it, but I get why people do it. But the best thing you can do to prevent it, assuming there's no regulation, which there, there really isn't right now, the, the best you can do is to educate. And, and that's okay. And so some people might say, Lance, you're wasting your time, Lance, why are you doing this? But there are people that are learning and becoming more aware, and that has changed since when I started on the platform. And I won't say who, there, there is one very popular furu that used to be very active on Twitter, and he now only is on Instagram as far as his posting, and I know someone that knows him, and I know exactly why he's only on Instagram, and that's because the people on Twitter have wisened up, and when he posts on Twitter they say, hey man, you know, you haven't verified any of this, like this is [ __ ], and so because people are more self-aware and the environment has changed, he's had to move, and that's fine, because that, that'll spread and like, um, it's, it's good to see that, and like things can be taken too far where I think like there's always this moving goalpost of, oh, how do I know trillum didn't lie about your background? Oh wait, by the way, oh, for, for the record everyone, uh, and you can confirm this, words out of your mouth, I verified all my trading, you've seen my brokerage account, you've seen my uh K when we sat down, show me, yeah, I can't tell you, but it was incredible. And so, you know, people will always say, oh wait, you know, I probably just paid you to say that, oh wait, I bribed the kinfo people or cheated that, and even if I post any document, it's always like the, oh, you can just photoshop it. So yeah, I get that there's like some level of moving goalpost, but it's good to just always have a healthy, not an unhealthy dose, but just, just a healthy dose of, hey, you know, just, just, just prove it to me.

Yeah, no, I think so as well. And I think, uh, like I said, we're starting to see a shift, I believe, and I, I think it will hopefully continue. But one thing I did want to touch on, which I think is very important, I've been doing it over and again, it was actually off the back of listening to yourself and, and some a few key other traders that I know performed very, very well, and the key theme to me stands out is like dynamic risk sizing. Because in the tra, in the more retail space, if you, if you were to turn around and say, hey, I risk 5% of my capital, everyone's going to call you a gambler, especially in the Forex space and that side of things, they're going to say you're a gambler, that's gambling, then you, you can't be profitable doing that. But then, yeah, I see all these professional traders and, and really successful traders talk about dynamic risk sizing and learning how to, you know, on your A+ setup, put in as much risk as possible, um, you know, that within, within reason of course, you know, where did that stem from? Was that something that you learn early on in your career or was it something that you developed over time? So my trainer always did a good job modeling a lot of these things, then I think me with my analytical side, it was always up to me to kind of use first principles and think, what's the actual concept and reality behind this? Like, what's the principles driving this? And so it's so important, if, if someone does anything to succeed, Ed, it's, you need to think, just, just on your own and independently. And so if people say, oh, risking 5% of an account is crazy, you should never do that, you need to independently assess that. And so what are, what are the variables involved in this question? Okay, like if I were to tell you you have a 100% chance of winning, is it crazy to risk 5% of your account? No, it would be crazy not to risk 5% or more of your account. And so then all of a sudden we touched on something, so the win rate matters, but also like, okay, like let's say it's a 90% win rate, but if you lost, you, you, you die, God forbid, like there's no amount of, of my account I would, I would ever risk for that, right? So now we just touched on another variable, the risk reward of that decision also matters. Those two variables, it's actually the expected value. So based on the expected value of our trades that determine how much we're going to bet, right? So if something is a negative expected value bet, no matter what, you should always bet zero. And the model I'll give for this is going back to poker, because it's always a good simplification, I don't want to bet the same on 10 8 as I bet on Aces. That doesn't mean I necessarily want to go all in with Aces, right? Like, and like keep in mind with all these things, it's going to depend your own tolerances, how risk tolerant are you? Someone, if you have 50 grand in the bank and that's all you have, your ability to bet 50 grand should be very, very hesitant, right? If you're, if you're 21 and you have $500 in the bank and you're super young and you don't have a family, you should be probably on average more risk tolerant. If I'm, I don't know, 80 years old, my desire to bet any large portion is, is going to be, be low, right? Because what's, what's it going to do for me? But I don't want to impair my life, so there's going to be all these variables, like how good is the trade, what are my odds, what's the expected value, what are my risk tolerances, and that determines what's right for you. So what's right for me or anyone else on the internet is not going to align with you, because the 22-year-old should not be betting the same amount of their wealth as the 45-year-old with two kids that's struggling to pay a mortgage and whatever else.

Yeah, can, can we talk about the Easy Money trades? Y, how, what would you define as an Easy Money Trade? So an Easy Money Trade is what I call the free throws or, or the layups of, of trading. They might not be the sexy home run that you post on your Twitter to get all the likes, but it's the trade that's just a very reliable single that helps you build that feedback loop. So it might be, I think for many traders, especially at SMB, we found a lot of them finding consistency with scalping and very short-term trades, um, you know, okay, maybe you've got a nice resistance level, something breaks above, you're going to be as quick as possible to buy exactly at the resistance, maybe scalp it out 5 cents, 8 cents, 20 cents higher, um, so, and it's really the trades that allow you to just hit consistent singles. And so the analogy I give to people is this, because they, they see me only swinging on a lot of the home runs, when that's because of my lifestyle and my situation, and the analogy I give is, let's bring it back to poker, to make the most amount of money in poker, the optimal strategy is not to just bet Aces, right? Because if you only play Aces, you're missing out on kings, queens, Jacks, tens, all these other good hands, of course you might want to bet most on them, but what you find though is if you play a lot of the singles and the doubles and the triples and you make money on the 10, the Jacks, the Queens, then when you finally get the aces, not only can you bet more on those because you have more cushion, but you also have lower variance in your trading. So even if I get one pair of Aces a month, I can lose on that hand and still be positive from all my other trading. And so that's the type of thing that I, I use to help people understand, like you always want to be playing most hands with positive expected value, then that helps you build consistency. So the Easy Money trades are kind of like those easy little layups for you that helps you build that consistency and everything. One thing you've said is that, master the easy trades, and in the meantime, master the ace trades, so gradual, so like, first master the easy trades, and then once you've done that, then move on to mastering your Ace trades, and then another element being that, learn to size up more on your easy trades, so that you have the buffer to do that more, you know, much more elevated size for that Ace tra, yep, correct. And so why is that? Why, why do I recommend all that? So almost by definition, aces are rare, it's the best hand, you don't get that five times a day, we can only dream, right? So if you were to only study Aces a lot of the month, you're just going to be sitting there doing nothing, that's not that effective, right? So absolutely, when there is a really amazing play, you want to study that, document that, detail that, but all that other time in between, you want to study the really replicable easy free throws, so that you can build your little playbook of all these little different strategies, and then throughout the month, you know, you can hit your singles, hit your singles, hit your singles, and then also because you get so many more of those singles, the easiest way to start to grow is by sizing those up. If normally you bet one grand on a single, you start to bet 1100, 1200, 1300, 1500, and all of those singles betting more on them, then gives you more cushion to bet more on the aces. That's, I think that's so important, and hopefully people can really take that on board, because I think it really makes a difference between being able to make a career out of trading. I think yes, you can make money from probably having a static risk, but you need large capital already to probably try and make that transition to full-time trading versus if you learn this element, and again, it's not like you're saying just do dynamic risk, you're saying go through this process that we've kind of guided this podcast hopefully in a way where we went through your history and where you sort of developed this, the mindset, developed the, the processes that you use, and also learn how you still are learning to this day, but equally then going through the process of edge, going through time frames and styles, um, you know, the, the environment and how important that is, then onto obviously the risk sizing, once you've gone through all that process, um, but the good traders can miss something, but immediately change, this is something you've said before, like good traders can miss something, but can change quite quickly, you know, within, you know, one or two times of making this mistake versus a lot of traders, unfortunately, will make seven, eight, 10 times, they'll make that same mistake over and over again. Why do you think that is? Is that something that traders can naturally have, or is it something that can be learned to develop and, and sort of reduce down those number of mistakes? The traders willing to face, you know, I don't know, um, I don't know, I think it's one of those questions of, of nature versus nurture again, and maybe it's some, some mix of both. And so that was actually one of the most important traits I would look for when I was recruiting new hires, and I think it tends to be common with athletes, for example, where they've spent their whole youth with a coach, you know, giving them feedback, saying, hey, you messed this up, you can do this better, this is what you need to do, and, and ultimately, I think it's like, if I had to pick one skill as far as hiring someone, it's the ability to effectively incorporate feedback. And what I found is those that did the best at trading, they were the people that, they, they weren't a natural or anything, I don't think anyone's necessarily like a total natural at this stuff, but when given feedback, they were able to learn from their mistake and incorporate it faster, whereas the people that just ended up standing no chance and were the quickest to go were the people that, no matter how simple the feedback was, they continually made the same mistake day after day after day after day. And don't get me wrong, like especially if something is a habit or it's your default way of thinking and, and your default mental programming, it's super hard to change this stuff, um, but that's again where you try, you want to slow it down, take it slow, break it down into the steps and really work on that. But I think that level of consciousness and awareness, and it's also part of what I like to call again, just, just trading with that sense of urgency, that is what, what really leads to growth. The people that are hungry to make that improvement today, not tomorrow, not next week, next month, like if I, if I slice because of this issue and I need to fix this elbow or whatever, I want to fix that this next shot of, and swinging the club.

Yeah. What are your thoughts in terms of your, one thing we mentioned about ticker selection being part of edge earlier, but I know one thing you talked about in that same trillion podcast, it was in terms of your P&L coming from such a small number of trades, like the bulk of your P&L coming from a small number of trades, like a percentile of trades, while also the same when it came to the tickers, it was a smaller number of tickers made up for the bulk of the, the P&L. What is that correlation? Yeah, so I think what you'll find and why that exists is, again, I hate to be the broken record, but it goes back to poker, occasionally in very select rare instances, you get some incredible, incredible opportunities with amazing edge, the equ of the pocket aces. So what you'll see in the trading world and at really, I'd imagine every trading firm there is, is, I mean, that's not true, high-frequency trading firms are probably different structure, but like most directional trading firms, you're probably going to get like 90% of your P&L from 10% of the opportunities, because really, really good traders recognize that the expected value of these, these plays is not all the same, and when there's those couple amazing plays, and I, I mean this is something SB Capital does amazingly well, when the pocket aces comes up, they give their traders a ton of risk, and their traders bet huge, and so that makes up for so many issues, so many issues. And again, it all goes back to the poker analogy, that's exactly what you should be doing. Now think about this, if you were to bet equally on every poker hand, no matter how good you are, if you bet equally on every poker hand, you're going to lose, because guess what, you only get pocket aces and really good cards very rarely, the other 90% of cards you're going to lose with, right? And so if you were to bet equally on each hand, it's not going to work, the only way it's going to work is if when you do have a good hand, you make so much more to compensate for all, all the other crap. And so really good traders, not in the beginner stages, but I think as you, and actually let me pause, a lot of why trading is also so hard to learn from the internet is there aren't these, uh, disclaim, oh, this advice is for beginners, this is for intermediate, this is for advanced. And so I try to disclaim my stuff, this exponential and skewed bet sizing, this generally matters the most at the elite levels. So if you're a beginner, you just want to be consistent, safe, small, prudent, but as you progress and advance, that's when your bet sizing wants to get more and more skewed as you have more experience, uh, more skill set identifying these things, more cushion. And so then someone like myself at the very elite levels, that's where you have the cushion and the experience where generally I'm, I'm only playing the Aces, and I'm, I'm going really big.

In terms of, intuition, how much does that play into your trading or, or trading as a whole, because you, you hear about it a lot in terms of, especially in the retail space, um, is it a real thing? Is it something that traders, you know, will feel a certain kind of way towards a particular setup, or is that something that shouldn't be involved in trading? I think intuition is absolutely real, um, but the question is, do you have good intuition or bad intuition is true, and I don't think this is something you're born with. I think naturally as humans, assuming, and like I do think you could be, um, I, I do think most people, not, not everyone, like I do think there are people that just neurologically are so different from the norms where they don't feel these things the same way, like almost like the Michael Burry in, in, in The Big Short, right? And like if you don't have a trained intuition, you're going to see something go up and you're going to say, oh, I'm scared to buy, I'm scared to buy, then it starts really working and you buy it, and I did that every single time as a trainee, and you see every trainee do it, every trainee does the same thing where you're, you're scared and it's uncertain, scared, it's going up, it's going up, oh, it's definitely good, then you buy, then it goes down. And so in untrained intuition, I think you generally do the opposite, and that's why most people lose in the market, that's why most amateurs lose, and that's why the more you trade for most amateurs, the more you lose, because the market prays on the untrained psychology and emotions, when you're scared and you hit out, and when you're at max pain and you panic, that's almost always the bottom. And what happens is, as you gain experience, you retrain, you retrain yourself, and you reprogram all those emotions and those psychologies, so then when you feel that pit in your stomach because the stock is panicking, you're like, oh wow, this is, this is good. And so you train your intuition into something good. And so I also think the brain is an incredibly powerful pattern recognition machine, we know that as a fact, right? That's how we survived, like we were identifying, okay, which mushroom, you know, for the last thousand years, oh, this mushroom's going to make me high as a kite, this mushroom's gonna [ __ ] kill me, and this one's gonna taste delicious grilled over a fire, you know, like that's what we had to do for all these years. And so we're, okay, like, hm, it's, it's awkwardly too quiet, you know, like all of that is from our keen sense of trying to survive. And so what's amazing is if you try and program these strategies, these nuances that your eye just picks up, like that, there's so many nuances, it's so complex, like I can't program any of this stuff, but the eye is able to perceive a lot of it with experience. And so I think whether you're consciously doing it or not, if you've been trading 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 hours, you build this intuition, and that intuition becomes a good intuition, because, okay, some stock capitulated higher, you shorted the turn, and now it's still just hanging up here, and you're just like, what the hell, like, why, why is this not going down? This doesn't feel so good, how are, how are we still up here? And that thought process, that's your mind knowing that all these little nuances that should be happening aren't happening, and that Spider-Sense saying, uhoh, something's not right, that is intuition, and that's signal when it's trained, and then you say, man, I gotta bail on this thing. A lot of people that aren't attuned to that intuition, it's going to be gone. No, I think, uh, hopefully traders can really take that on board, because I think a lot of people have a big misconception when it comes to intuition. I think it's just like whatever they think, I need to start, an untrained intuition is bad, a trained one is good, that's it, that's it. And it kind of really is a key theme throughout the podcast in terms of being intentional and actually going deeper than just, you know, what the, your, your natural mind would just say to you, you need to go beyond that. So even when it comes to the learning, you know, meta-learning, actually going into much more intentional steps of your learning, uh, even with the risk side, even with, you know, the psychology that we did talk about, all of it is much deeper than the surface, and I think that's the huge difference between traders such as yourself and, and traders within, you know, traditional prop firms and, and the traders that you know of, um, versus the, the more retail independent space is that they, the, the level of detail and, and the work that goes into, uh, developing themselves as traders is much more minimal, and, and sometimes it's, you know, understandably so in terms of like, you know, the, the jobs that they're working and, and time restraints and, and family restraints and so on, uh, so it's understandable in terms of the amount of time they put in, but when they are putting time in, they're not going to the level they need to. I mean, take, take, you know, the Kobe Bryants or even, you know, LeBron, Steph Curry, whoever, do you think, do you think LeBron knows his percentage chance from every single place on the court depending on how many people are

Guarding him, he knows every single percentage of every single shot he's going to take. He knows who the people are, the worst defenders on him and the best. He knows who he's the best defender on and where they have the worst percent chances. He knows, um, you know, the sleep he needs to get to perform; all he knows when he needs to do more stretching; he knows when he needs to work on a certain aspect of his game.

To be a really good trader, to even have a career at this, it's the equivalent of being in the league at any sport. Like you need to be exceptionally good just to be in the game, and people don't realize that. And if you're not willing to do what it takes to reach that level, again, it's a long, it's a long process to make it. Don't even embark on that trip if you're not ready to put it in. Definitely. Yeah, definitely.

And there's two things, I've got two quotes that we'll finish on, but before we get there, of course, we need to talk about Traders for a Cause, and we need to talk about, uh, Magnus Opus, Magnum Opus. Yeah, yeah. Um, to give us a breakdown of the name, because why did you pick a Latin name? Yeah. So, Magnum Opus is Latin for one's most significant piece of work. And, and so especially for me, I mean, minus this year, which ended up so active, I really want to start to wind down my trading, start to pursue other habits. And I really wanted to take all of my knowledge and make sure it lives on, and this was going to kind of be my legacy project for the trading world and kind of my gift to give back to the community. And, and also to raise money for charity and everything else, and it seemed like an appropriate name for just making the most comprehensive trading course available and also making a version of it that's just going to be 100% free, so that hopefully 10,000 plus, 100,000 plus people can learn how to think about trading right.

Yes, I share my methods, but most of all, I'm explaining the concepts, like we started to do on this podcast. I'm helping people think critically, helping people think about price action and trading and how to actually develop who they are as a trader. I love that. I absolutely love that. I love the name. I, I don't know why, anything to do with Latin is just like intriguing, you know, but I know you put in so much time and effort into it because I think it's, if I'm not mistaken, like a year plus project of you recording and, and, uh, you know, adding elements to it and building it out. And it just shows that it's not something that you just, let me just do this. People cannot even imagine what is in store for them and what went into this. I am, I am so confident nothing like this will ever be created because I know nobody in their right mind would ever spend the money or the time on this. And it was, trading is difficult; this was also so mentally difficult because I'm putting, like I just remember being two or three months in, and you're just like, wow, like I've spent so many hours and I've got to be like 5% done or something. And it's, it's just a work of passion and pride to create something just like beautiful and incredible. And so we'll see what people think. I've definitely shown some people some sneak peek. The amount of just time, effort, and dedication that's gone into it, that's what we like to hear; that's what we like to hear. And I'm excited for that. I think it's later this month, I believe. Yeah, January 21st. There we go. I love that.

And, uh, Traders For A Cause, right? Um, essentially you retired from from trading, so you retired from, uh, prop from trading; still traded this year, phenomenal trading year, um, which was interesting; there was another question that we'll come back to, but Traders for a Cause, tell us about that. Why? So, for me, I'm of the general philosophy that when you give back to others, it helps you be happier. And so some people think, oh, charity, all that is is selfless, but I think especially when you get lost in the trading world with all the P&Ls, the comparison game, you're so focused on your screen, you forget about the world out there. And I think most of us are happiest when we're interacting with others, when we're helping others, and we have community. And I do a lot of nonprofit work, and that's actually why I love trading, is to run a nonprofit called the Impact Competition. And while dealing with the charity work I do, you see populations that don't have homes; you see populations that are going hungry; you see populations that are dealing with, uh, gun violence, uh, drug issues. Uh, recently last year, I worked with a nonprofit that helps young adults with Down syndrome transition to the real world. And you know, some of this stuff, it, it, it makes me emotional because, because you don't, how, how many times in your life have you thought about what it would be like to have Down syndrome and your career opportunities? Because if you spent a little bit of research, you would find that your, your career opportunity is pretty much like, whereas we're able to be like, oh, I want to be a doctor; I want to be a trader; I want to be a podcaster; your career opportunity is, I'm gonna be a greeter at Walmart. And not that there's anything wrong with that, but that is your future for the, for the next however many years, God willing, you will be a greeter, um, at, at some of, at, at some supermarket. And, and that's about all, all the attention and capacity and responsibility someone will trust you with. And you go from this structured life in high school with resources, and then it's like, oh, the congrats, you're, you're, you're an adult now; have, have fun figuring out like life is hard enough, I think, even for any normal person. Then it's like, oh, wow, like you know, everyone's going to college, and, and you're just starting a job that you're going to be doing for a long time. Yeah. And, um, and you see what those experiences are like and what people struggle with, and then all of a sudden you say like, hey, like, you know, life, life is good; I'm, I'm fortunate, and I want to help others. And so then Traders For A Cause, I was introduced to thanks to Mike Bellur of S&B Capital, and it's an organization that educates traders, provides networking opportunities, and then all proceeds from the events go back to charity. And so that's something they do, a big Keystone event generally in Vegas each year, so I've been proud to speak at that event for many years. I've made many friends from that event; um, I've sponsored and donated for it, and then most of all, been on the board to promote their cause and help other traders, uh, make new trader friends, network, learn, and, and ultimately realize the power of giving back.

Absolutely love that, and we definitely need more of that. I, you won't be able to tell, but earlier this year I ran a marathon. Oh, nice. In two months of training. That's more impressive. Yeah. Well, it took me six hours; it wasn't as impressive in terms of performance. You're not supposed to, we'll edit that part out. Yeah, yeah, we'll beep it. But, but, um, but yeah, for the exact same reason, I've always had a passion for, you trying to help; that that was the whole nature of the podcast, trying to help people, um, but especially in our space, our space is all about money, right? And that's why I never understand a lot of the, the furus, because at least if you're going to do a f, at least try and give back in char in some sort of charitable way and promote that as well, so that other people do the same. Um, yeah, so that's what I started doing when I, when I did the, the marathon, I was like, going on my story saying, all of you guys who've come on my podcast and said you made $100,000 this year, I know you have money, so you need to donate. So we donated it quite quickly. One funny thing I found, well, it's not funny at all actually, but, um, most, most traders, because money is their scorecard and P&L is their scorecard, you end up with people that are extremely, extremely rich, but if that's your identity and that's your totem pole of the world, and hey, I'm better than because of, yeah, this, then all of a sudden you, you don't give back; you stash acorns, and that's how you view success and the world around you, when like money is an easy objective, you know, people can estimate this or that and reverse engineer, oh, me, like it's, but it, the more important thing is, like, at least to me, is like, one, am I happy? Like I don't care about the money; I don't care about anyone's money. Like the more important metric is, hey, is that person happy? Am I happy? But then more important, too, is like, you know, are they happy and are they doing, doing good, so others can be happy. And there's no, there's no, that's also the issue with social media. I can post, look, if you want to see me on a yacht, posting a yacht and me looking, oh, look how like, but that's, that's, it's all just [ __ ], it's people's highlight reel, yeah, you know, and like none of that really does anyone any good, when the more important thing is like, are you deep down happy? And if so, who cares what's on the internet? And two, then are, are you just helping other people? That's it. And I'll finish with this quote here, uh, which unfortunately doesn't relate to what we were just talking about, but, um, it's a quote from the point is, this is what he said, the point is, and it's in regards to edge, the quote is from UL Lance, and it says, I love money; I hope this dumb damn world burns. Like, yeah. That was a couple beers. I tricked you by setting up the charitable talk first, but you said essentially in regards to edge erosion and keeping it edge secretive is the point is you can be secretive and overly worry about edge erosion, but it comes at a cost and limits your potential of finding the bigger pots of gold.

Could we just quick, very quickly expand on that, just ever so slightly? Yep. So we spoke about trading pots before, and I think so many people are afraid to give or share or link up with others because they don't want people learning their strategies, learning their edge, or taking a piece of their pie. So they think, I make, I make X dollar a year; I make $1 a year. If I start sharing with other people, if I start sharing on Twitter or with my trading pod or whatever else, they're going to start taking my edge, and then I'm only going to make 90 cents or 80 cents a year. And first of all, I'm skeptical of that to begin with, like I think a lot of things we do have more than enough liquidity, unless you're truly maximizing every single share that there is, like, okay, fine, but if there's excess liquidity, you're not really harming yourself. But I get that mindset; that's fine, like if that's really how you think, I understand the rationale there, but I do think those people that think that way, they're only weighing that side of the ledger; they're not weighing the other part: what am I able to gain from working with a bunch of other good, amazing people? Like so often, and we see this at SB Capital all the time, what you get is, when A and B work together, that's great, but sometimes all of a sudden A, B, and C work together, and the summation of the parts is so much more amazing than they could have ever imagined. So yes, if maybe I work with with three other people, my $1 might become 80 cents, that's true, but you're not making any adjustment for what you're going to gain and learn. If I'm working with the senior trader that helps me push my size, then I learn some new strategy, or maybe if I'm just able to spot more of my own opportunities, like maybe they learn my strategy, but now as a result, yes, I make 20% less, but I see 50% more of these opportunities; you're making more money. And so, so often people only weigh the, oh, no, people might infringe on my liquidity that I'm somehow god-given and it's mine, then they don't factor in the other side, which is, hey, how am I going to grow, learn, be motivated, and improve and just be able to sustain and thrive at this job more, which I think is so often more than offsets if you find the right people.

100%, and it kind of relays on something else that you said previously, which is, um, you know, too, too often traders will focus on the worst-case scenario, the doom, versus if they just focus on what would actually help them elevate, then they would end up actually, in the end, performing better. It's a very similar analogy. But Lance, I, I know we could keep going; I know we are going to keep going, you know, because we're heading over to the SNB, uh, Capital offices for an amazing roundtable, which I'm very much looking forward to as well. But links for Lance will be in the description below, so make sure you check out every single one of those. Drop a comment of your biggest takeaway from this episode. I know there was so much that we covered, so make sure you've taken notes and go over it again, um, but hit subscribe; other episodes are on screen, and until next time, take care.