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Welcome to this week's Alpha Mind Podcast.
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And our guest today is an old friend of the Alphemine Podcast, Matt Kenner, also known as Pax PAX, a former floor trader from Chicago, who now still still trades a little bit, but also educates traders.
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And he has been around for many years, starting in the 1990s, when the uh old Chicago floor trades were uh very much the day, and uh he had um he's had quite a turbulent and volatile career, achieving great success, um, then facing challenges, trials, and tribulations, and then coming back to really learn how to trade on screens and online.
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Um, and it's been quite a fascinating journey for him.
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Our first podcast interview proved to be one of our most popular.
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It was actually split up into two episodes back in 2022.
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Um, so it it it's absolutely a thrill for us to have have Matt back on the F-MAN podcast, and we hope you're going to benefit from listening to some of his story again and some of his uh experiences.
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Uh, before we go there, um, first a little bit about our podcast sponsor, the Society of Technical Analysts, the STA.
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They provide technical analysis education and services.
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Um, they also provide a fantastic uh diploma program and a home study course, but you can really go in deep and learn so much more about technical analysis than you learn on those five-minute YouTube videos.
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And that is available by going onto their website, technicalanalysts.com.
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And uh, if you do decide to uh explore the home study course, be be mindful that we can um Alpha Mind listeners can get a small discount on the price of that course.
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Just go onto our website alpha-mind.net to find out about that.
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Now, on with the podcast.
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So, welcome to this week's Alpha Mind Podcast with me, Stephen Goldstein.
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Um, my colleague Mark Randall, unfortunately, is not able to join us today.
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But we're delighted to have back one of our favorite and most popular guests of all time, Matt Pax Kenner.
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And uh welcome to the uh the Alf Mind Podcast again.
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Oh geez, Stephen, thank you for having me.
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And and what a what a what a great introduction.
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That makes me feel good.
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That makes me feel confident coming into this podcast, and I was I was one of your favorite guests.
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Oh yeah, it was a hugely popular one of one of our most popular episodes, or both both actually.
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And I think I think a big part of them were how honest and frank you were.
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Yeah.
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You know, you told your story, you you you left nothing out, you put everything on the table, uh and people really resonated with uh with what you said, which was uh just as a reminder, you know, you had a fascinating introduction um into the industry.
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I think you originally were going to join the priesthood, if I remember rightly.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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Um and um I think whilst uh whilst going through that journey, you you got introduced to the uh the world of futures in Chicago and the old open outcry place.
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Um and I guess you had an interesting choice.
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Well, I started um I graduated high school in 1986, and I was driving a truck for my uncle in on the south side of Chicago after I played football in college for a semester, got hurt, didn't go to school, and uh, but I was still living there and and it was a school in the city.
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So I was living in the dorms.
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Uh I wasn't and I wasn't going to school, I was working.
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My father found out that I was driving a truck and said, listen, you can't, you know, you can't you can't have a family, raise a family on what a truck driver makes.
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So you have to, you know, become a policeman or fireman in Chicago, or you know, which is a lot of what a lot of first uh second generation Irish do, or you know, get a trade, learn a trade.
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And I'm um I'm the least handy person in the history of handy men.
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So I that wasn't for me.
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Um I I had a guy, um, uh one of my closest friends was a runner, um, and uh and becoming a phone clerk at the Board of Trade.
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Um, there was a guy in our neighborhood, uh guy named Pat Gironda, who had grown up, you know, very dis on the south side of Chicago, very much the same way that we did, but he was the he was very wealthy in his mid-20s, and he was one of the biggest donors to the high school that we went to in his mid-20s.
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So I wanted to do what he did.
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And I I called my friend Frank and I said, Frankie, you know, can you get me a job?
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And he said, Yeah, I got a job as a runner at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in in January of 1988, which was just a couple of months after the crash of 87.
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So the markets were quiet, markets were dead.
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I made minimum wage, um,$89 a week.
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So I I uh um I didn't take that job to make minimum wage.
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I took that job to learn that business.
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But when I walked onto that trading floor, Stephen, I knew that whatever was going on down here, I was gonna find out what it was.
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It was, you know, the energy of the trading floor.
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The um, you know, I were uh was everything was on the same floor.
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The SP, you know, as you walked on, the S P was to the right.
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Behind that was the year dollar uh quadrant.
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On the other side was the currency quadrant where they traded, you know, all of the different Forex from Deutschmark to Swiss franc to Italian lira to Mexican peso to British pound, yeah, and so on and so forth.
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And then uh in the corner was smashed the meats.
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So he had cattle and pork bellies and live uh lean hogs.
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So all smashed onto one floor and we were bursting at the team.
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So they actually ended up starting a second floor.
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So I walked onto that floor and I wanted to know what was going on on there, and I wanted to be part of it.
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And it just, you know, I I I found my people, you know, my brain, my brain works quickly.
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I take in a lot of information and you know, and it slows down.
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So while I'm I might be talking quickly and thinking quickly, everything seems like slow motion to me.
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So and I and I I'm not very good with math, but I'm very good with patterns and I'm very good with, you know, like I can, I can uh if this I don't even know if this makes sense, but I can see sort of complicated mathematical equations naturally, you know, without really being able to explain it.
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So that helped.
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And I've got uh a great memory.
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That helped.
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So I I quickly rose through the ranks as a clerk, and I was making, you know, like I started off making$89 a week, and then I got a job holding a deck in the lumber pit.
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Uh, a deck is where the paper orders were written and ran to.
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And I was making$150 a week there, and then I learned the hand signals, you know, uh uh arbitrage, we called it, uh, to communicate in uh with the pit broker with the uh the customers, you know, uh that were all over the world with phone clerks.
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And I did that for$350 a week and I got good at that, and that led to a$500 a week raise, led to a$750 a week raise, led to$1,000 a week, and that's$52,000 a year.
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And I'm, you know, 19, 20 years old living at home, making 50 G.
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That was not bad.
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So my mother had gone to a place in uh Bosnia and Herzegovina called Medjigoria and and um had come home with a really renewed sense of our Catholic faith.
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We've always been Catholic, we always went to Mass, but there wasn't, you know, a whole lot of meaning behind it.
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Like it was just we are cultural Catholics.
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So I had she came home, she had come home, and my mother and I were very close.
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She had come home and and you know, we were she was going to rosary prayer groups, and I started to go with her.
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And you know, so here I am making a thousand a week, and I'm I'm I'm dating, you know, a beautiful woman, a big old you know, a girl that we were young.
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Um, but I just thought that there had something more to this, you know, I'm missing something.
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And you know, I'm going to mass almost every day at this point downtown.
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I I in my lunch break, I go to mass and I went to confession twice a month.
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And, you know, I'm really getting into, you know, and really learning the meaning behind the Catholic faith and and Christianity.
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And and and so I thought maybe I'll become a priest.
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So um we had a meeting, our group was expanding to every option in the pit.
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So almost every clerk was getting their membership, getting their seat.
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And I was gonna go fill orders in the second option with a guy who's still one of my best friends.
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And I raised my hand and said to my Jewish boss, Stephen, uh, his name was Steve Mendes, Stephen, I think I want to be a celibate man and become a priest.
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And he looked at me like I was I had three heads, but he said, All right, you know, uh before I sign this contract for three years, I think I have to go, you know, give this a shot.
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He said, Okay.
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Um so I did.
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And it was, it was uh uh I was there for three and a half years and I finished my my undergrad degree uh in philosophy with a uh double major in theology and a minor in history.
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It was a seminal experience of my life.
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I got a great education.
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Um I had structure to my life, you know, uh the seminary gave me that structure that I that I maybe lacked growing up.
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And I had, you know, I had learned a lot about a lot of things and was able to really kind of learn how to think and not only just think rationally and logically, but how to express myself and uh, you know, using my voice and writing, and you know, um, but my mother had gotten sick with lung cancer, and I was gonna go to Rome for my last four years.
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I I finished school in three and a half years.
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I was gonna go to Rome for my last four years.
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So I took a leave of of absence from the seminary, and um, and I went, you know, well, what am I gonna do?
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Well, my mother is is going through treatment.
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So I uh I went back to the Merck, and before you know it, I'm dating the woman that I would marry and uh my ex-wife.
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And and so I just, you know, I ended up leaving the seminary and I I started trading um about a year after that.
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So I left the seminary in '95, got married in '96, started trading in '97, and I made my first million by 99.
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So there went the seminary.
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Fantastic.
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Great story.
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I mean, good.
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Uh you it is an unusual one.
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Most people are sort of okay.
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Most people don't go down that path.
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No, no, no, they didn't.
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You know, my badge, my my trading badge, and what everybody knows me on Twitter and people still, you know, call me is is PAX.
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So when we got our when when we would get our membership, we had to, we we we chose, you know, an acronym that reflected who we were.
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And I think I have mine someplace here.
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And and I I had decided.
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Oh, here.
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Sorry for the noise.
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Oh no, those are trading cards.
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I had decided that I wanted my badge to mean something.
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So people would get their like their their initials, my initials were taken, um or or it'd spell like some derivative of their name, and that was taken.
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So I chose PAX, which means peace in Latin.
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Fantastic.
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Beautiful.
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Every so often when I would get in a fight with somebody in the pit, you know, or done punching each other in the face or pushing each other around, somebody would inevitably remind me that my badge means peace.
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That always pissed me off.
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Listen, that that that term, the pit, is it's alien to most people because those days are are gone.
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And um, you know, if if we go back to those days, you know, it was quite hard to become a trader if you weren't trading in a pit somewhere as a private trader.
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But we we live in a very different age now, and you know, anyone with a keyboard and and a few dollars um can can start trading, and that's the world we're at, and it's become uh hugely, hugely uh democratized, and uh everyone around the world is seeming to do it.
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I I know estimates uh are that at any one time there's somewhere between 200 million and 400 million people involved somewhere in trading.
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I don't know how they get those numbers, but um you know I'm not I'm not gonna argue with that.
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Um so I I I guess the the challenge is that very few people can actually make a success of it.
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Um you know, outside of the professional world where you get paid to do it, and so let's let's let's park that for now.
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Um there is a a challenge of whether you can actually make money, and there was a or how hard it is to make it.
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And there was a brilliant post and put out by by Ryan Scott last week um on Twitter, uh The Flowhorse at the Flowhorse, which kind of went viral.
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I think I think it's had um well over two million, I think nearly three million views.
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Um and I guess I wanted to talk about that a little bit because it it felt so right to talk about it with both of us having working in that world.
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Um and and the the the head the the the title of the post was you can make a fortune trading, but don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
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Um and that that was kind of a uh a whole newsletter post he wrote.
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Um and it you know it it it sparked a lot of debate because there's some people that say, well, you can't make money trading.
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Um something I don't believe, um, and never have believed because I work with a lot of private traders, I coach a lot of private traders who who do make a lot of money and have made a lot of money.
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And I don't coach them on the technical aspects um of trading.
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I I gather people like Flo Hawks and quite a lot of other people out there um work on that.
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Um but it is it is possible to be one of them, but you have to realize that a very small number, a very small percentage of people are able to make it um work for them.
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But I think most people go into it wrong, and I just wondered what your view on that was.
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I I I retweeted that article.
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That was a great article, Ryan, and it was very well written.
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I mean, if Ryan listens to this, man, that was really, really good.
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Um it is it's a statistical fact that 90% of us are gonna lose our money or or or lose at least our initial seed, right?
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You know, blown account, everybody talks about blown accounts, blown account, blown account.
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Um, but it's always been that, even when I was on the floor.
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And and on the trading floor, we human beings created the volume.
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You know, uh we moved, I uh I was a I was a very big, I was one of the biggest traders in the NASDAQ futures um in the pit.
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And I could move the Nasdaq by myself.
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I can move the Nasdaq a hundred points with the money in my account with my hands and my voice.
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We created the volume, we created the movement.
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That's our microprofile became important, uh, auction theory and all that other stuff.
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Um, but you know, as in 2003 computers began to take over, you know, uh uh talk about AI changing the business.
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It truly changed the business until gradually there was very little volume left in the pit.
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And I mean like by 2004 or five, the vast majority of the volume was on the screens.
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And and that was where the quants came into play.
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And and you know, and and and and it became harder and harder for for people to make money.
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Um, so you know, but it became easier and easier for people to become traders.
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You know, on the floor, you had to go through, you know I mean, you had to, you either had to have a ton of money behind you and then go through membership, or you know, to to just a lot of other things to become a trader.
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Or if you were like me, you had to earn your shot.
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You had to stand out from the three or four thousand other clerks on the floor that wanted to become traders, and you you had to work for five, 10 years to find a backer.
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Um, you know, now all you have to do is open an account, and you're you're you know, especially with the advent of these these uh these funding companies that call themselves prop, they have um, you know, anybody can trade.
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And the vast majority of them, those, those people are going to at least blow account after account after account before they learn.
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So, you know, if um Steven, there was, you know, what the biggest independent trader ever was a woman named Margie Teller.
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She was uh there there have been some huge traders, some incredibly successful traders that were independent traders, but Margie, I think, is the biggest.
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She was 10% of the Eurodollar, um, which is now the sofa.
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She was 10% of the open interest, not the volume, but the open interest.
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That's bigger than most banks.
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So um uh I was having a conversation with her and a bunch of other traders one day, and she said, You're looking at the same technicals as you, you're looking at the same so you got you have the same sport and resistance, you're looking at the same wedges, the same triangles, the same trend lines, the same everything.
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What separates you from you, from you, from you?
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Why will you fail?
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You fail, you fail, but you become wealthy, you'll blow that money, you'll keep it, you'll do this, you'll do that.
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You know, and I I listened to that and I took it to heart and I thought over and over and over again about what that meant.
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So ultimately, the difference maker is me.
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You know, it's not the technicals, it's what I'm bringing to the screens.
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You know, I I ran into Terry Duffy, the chairman of the CME group, who was who was a very good friend of mine for many years, and I hadn't seen him for a little bit.
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And, you know, uh, um, uh, did you ever start an HFT?
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You know, a high-frequency trading company.
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No, no, I figured it out on my own.
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It took me a long time to figure out how to trade on the screens, but you know, I figured it out.
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And that was a journey.
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Most of us coming from the floor to the screens couldn't trade, and we failed because you know, it was a different world, completely different world.
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But also, it was a, you know, the hardest part was computers were moving the market, humans didn't.
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So the things that worked in the past didn't work anymore.
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Now we had to figure it out.
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It wasn't until like 2013, maybe 14, that it became, at least among the independent traders that I knew, that it became, or even 15, that it became more and more acceptable that independent traders can, in fact, and are making money and are doing it consistently.
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And again, it's not about the technicals as much, I think, as it is about what's in your heart, what's in your mind, what you're bringing to the screens, you know, what your personal makeup is.
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That's why, that's why I talk about my journey, you know, and and I talk about having generational life-changing money.
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And then 12 years later, after divorce, after the Great Recession, after remarriage and the Great Recession, and after MF Global and all kinds of other natural disaster, you know, the disasters that happen in my life that I didn't cause, I blew myself up.
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You know, I went from having a gigantic net worth to driving Uber and starting all over again.
00:18:56.720 --> 00:19:01.759
And I when I started over again, Stephen, I knew that it was more about what was in my heart and soul.
00:19:01.839 --> 00:19:04.400
I I had I knew it was more about my fear.
00:19:04.640 --> 00:19:06.079
What were my fears?
00:19:06.400 --> 00:19:28.079
When I didn't have any money left, um, when when all I had was was uh a God that was faithful to me and the love of my beautiful wife and the the love of my five kids, when that's all I I had, and I realized that that's all I actually needed, I became grateful for the experience that I had because I knew I can build on it.
00:19:28.400 --> 00:19:31.200
I dropped the fear that I was carrying, you know.
00:19:31.359 --> 00:19:35.519
If this is the worst that can happen to me besides death, well, this is okay.
00:19:35.680 --> 00:19:38.319
We have a roof over our head, it might not be the roof we want.
00:19:38.480 --> 00:19:46.960
We have foods in our stomach, it might be not be, you know, uh wagyu, grass-fed beef or whatever, you know, but it's food and we have clothes on our back.
00:19:47.039 --> 00:19:54.799
It might not be our money and it might not be, you know, uh uh uh whatever, but you know, we have clothes in our back and we're okay.
00:19:55.039 --> 00:19:59.119
So I didn't fear failing anymore, I didn't fear success anymore.
00:19:59.359 --> 00:20:02.480
My kids needed to eat, you know, I needed to provide for my family again.
00:20:02.559 --> 00:20:03.839
And how can I do that?
00:20:04.799 --> 00:20:07.759
So I dropped a lot of that fear, you know.
00:20:07.920 --> 00:20:25.279
Now I am not as as Ryan wrote in this piece, I am not competing with the quads, I am not competing with the HFTs, I can't compete with an HFT that trades thousands of SP contracts in a picosecond, you know, and trading every tick and moving the market all over the place for a thousand different reasons.
00:20:25.359 --> 00:20:26.240
I can't do that.
00:20:26.559 --> 00:20:28.960
I don't have that speed, I don't have that ability.
00:20:29.599 --> 00:20:31.279
I'm competing with myself.
00:20:31.440 --> 00:20:37.039
And when I realized that I had no more fear, all I had to do was learn how to be consistent again.
00:20:37.519 --> 00:20:40.480
All I had to do was learn how to make money again.
00:20:40.640 --> 00:20:43.519
All I had to do was learn how to be successful again.
00:20:43.759 --> 00:20:48.160
And so I started to move forward again without any other baggage.
00:20:48.319 --> 00:20:50.799
The baggage was gone, the fear was gone.
00:20:51.039 --> 00:20:53.200
So I had nothing but blue skies ahead of me.
00:20:53.279 --> 00:20:55.839
I had nothing but things to accomplish and things to do.
00:20:56.079 --> 00:21:00.720
I had nothing but success and in and the ability to be able to visualize that success to move into.
00:21:01.039 --> 00:21:05.440
And so I did one lot at a time, one trade at a time.
00:21:05.599 --> 00:21:10.799
And I quickly realized as an independent trader that the less I traded, the more money I made.
00:21:11.200 --> 00:21:14.400
Not the less uh size, the less round turns.
00:21:14.559 --> 00:21:19.519
You know, if I if I make more than five or 10 trades in a day, I'm losing money.
00:21:19.920 --> 00:21:27.440
Um now, uh uh uh now, you know, I mean those when when the like today, I stopped trading about you know 10 minutes after the open.
00:21:28.240 --> 00:21:33.039
I anyway, that that's me, you know, my my my style of trading or my process.
00:21:33.200 --> 00:21:36.880
I I I do two shows on Ninja Trader live a week to explain my process.
00:21:36.960 --> 00:21:39.039
I'm not gonna do it here, and I do it on Twitter a lot.
00:21:39.119 --> 00:21:40.400
So follow me on Twitter if you want.
00:21:40.559 --> 00:21:46.480
But the point is, is that I uh I I knew at that point that my only competition was me.
00:21:46.720 --> 00:21:52.160
So I had to be consistent and then I had to repeat it, and then I needed to learn how to scale it.
00:21:52.640 --> 00:21:59.680
So whatever your situation is, whatever your trading process or trading methodology is, make sure that it is consistent.
00:22:00.799 --> 00:22:09.519
Make sure it is repeatable and make sure that you can scale it up, scale it down, and have a mechanism to help you decide when not to trade.
00:22:09.759 --> 00:22:13.279
Go big, go small, or not at all, as Anthony Cardelli says.
00:22:14.319 --> 00:22:15.200
So that was great.
00:22:15.279 --> 00:22:23.440
And by the way, we'll we'll put if anyone's listening to this, we'll put Paxy's contact details on there, his Twitter account, etc., on the on the notes for the show.
00:22:23.519 --> 00:22:25.279
You'll see them if you just click on that.
00:22:25.759 --> 00:22:31.599
Um, but uh, you know, so so what is it uh for you that gets in the way for most people?
00:22:31.680 --> 00:22:36.799
What were you you you kind of said what got in the way for you, the fear, the worries, the anxieties.
00:22:37.599 --> 00:22:45.119
Um you know, for for me, this this this this trading is a giant game of poker, it's a huge game of poker.
00:22:45.519 --> 00:22:49.920
Um, and like in a in a giant game of poker, there can only be really be one winner.
00:22:50.480 --> 00:23:01.839
Um in in the markets, if you take that in percentage terms, um, you know, there's only a tiny percentage that can ever win, um, you know, by dint of the math.