 The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Good morning traders. Can everybody hear me and see my screen? If you could just type yes in the questions there. Alright excellent. Okay, thanks guys. Okay, so well, thanks for coming. This is part of the book map professional trader webinar series here and today we have Brett Steenbarger here. If you don't know him or haven't read some of his books, I would recommend it. I've read two or three of his books, I believe here. He is a trader, a psychologist, trading a trader as well and an author of several books here as you guys can see. So, he has an interest in using historical patterns in the markets to finding an edge and is a performance coach for portfolio managers and traders at financial institutions. So, we're very pleased to have him here and I'll let Brett take it away. Before that, let me just go through the risk disclaimer, trading futures, equities and digital currencies involves substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for all investors. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results. Okay, well, thank you very much, Brett and take it away. Okay, well, thank you very much, Bruce. I appreciate the opportunity to be here with everyone and talk about the topic of evaluating our trading and improving ourselves as traders. So, we have a few slides. We'll go through some material, but we will have plenty of time for questions and answers as we go forward. I appreciate, Bruce, you doing the forwarding of the slides. My hands are tied up. I'm doing this from home and there is a crying cat on my lap who will not leave. So, my hands are rather tied up. Anyway, you can see my name and then the URL for trader feed by blog. And so, when we talk about topics today, if you Google Trader Feed and then the name of the topic, you will likely find a search for a number of different blog posts. So, it's a great way of reading up on specific trading psychology topics. There are well over 5,000 posts on Trader Feed. They touch on a wide variety of topics. So, it's a nice resource. If you want to go into greater depth, on a particular topic. Okay. So, before we get to the first slide, let's just talk about why it's so important to evaluate your trading. I have a blog post on this very topic right now. If you were to go to the Trader Feed site, you can see that. We want to stay on a solid learning curve as traders. Our learning is enhanced when we look at specific aspects of our trading and systematically go about improving those. So, we want to not just keep a journal in the sense of writing down what happened during a trading day or trading week. We want to observe specifically, concretely, what we've done well, what we haven't done so well, and what we are going to do, again specifically, what we're going to do going forward, to continue doing what we did well and to improve what we didn't do so well. So, you want each day's trading, each week's trading, to become a tool for learning. The way I've often put it is that any day or any week may or may not be positive in absolute P&L, but you want every day, every week, to be positive in terms of learning P&L. You want to get something out of your trading, even if the trading hasn't made money that particular period of time. So, there are a few ways of becoming more effective in evaluating our trading and moving forward our learning curve that I have learned from successful traders I've worked with and those are the things I would like to share with you today. And then, like I said, we will open it up for questions and for comments. So, let's go to the first slide. Because what we're doing is we're breaking trading down into a few component processes. This is very important. You know, when we talk about trading well, we're not just talking about doing one thing. There are a number of actions that contribute to our success as traders. So, the first one is idea generation, which means coming up with good ideas, ideas that are worth trading. I work with portfolio managers at a variety of different types of hedge funds, macro hedge funds, equity hedge funds, funds with very specialized strategies, fixed income strategies, commodity strategies. So, I've had an opportunity to see what the successful folks differently from the less successful ones. And one striking finding is that the successful traders work with new and different data. In other words, they are not looking at the same things as everyone else. Everyone else is looking at the daily bar chart, is looking at a 200-day moving average. The successful traders I work with are not doing that. They're looking at things that other people literally are not looking at. Now, this is really, really important because by looking at new and relevant important information, they are able to generate new and relevant trading ideas. Now, those of you familiar with Bookmap know that one of the things that Bookmap does is introduce new data, new things to look at. So, you're looking at order flow in real time, but uniquely, you're looking at that order flow in the context of historical order flow. In other words, you're looking at where bids and offers are now in the market, but you're looking at how that compares to where they have been. Now, when you look at a traditional depth of market display, like the dumb ladder, you're seeing in real time the bids and the offers. That is useful information. In fact, when I started working with traders in Chicago, that depth of market ladder was the new data. No one else was looking at that. Everyone was looking at bar charts, and looking at order flow was new and different, and that's why the traders were so successful trading on short time frames. Now, you look at order flow, but you put it into context. So, you see where buyers and sellers are placing their orders, but you're seeing how that differs from how they've behaved in the recent past, and that gives you some ideas about whether those buyers and sellers are more and less aggressive. Some of you know that I've also worked with something called Market Delta, where you are looking at actual transactions. You're not looking at the bids and offers, you're looking at transactions, and where those occur in the bid offer matrix. So, if a, I don't know, 100,000 share of what is transacted, does that occur nearer to the bid price or nearer to the offer price? When we see transactions nearer to the offer prices, buyers are being more aggressive, nearer to the bid prices, sellers are more aggressive, and over time you look at every single transaction, and what does that tell you? It tells you over time if buyers are becoming more aggressive and sellers are becoming more aggressive. Another thing I look at is the NYSE TICK, the number of upticks versus downticks. I also look at tick measures for the Dow stocks, or NASDAQ stocks. I look at the upticks and downticks for all traded stocks across the listed exchanges. And so that's telling you, is the stock trading on an uptick or downtick, but it's accumulating that over all stocks. That's new information you can see in real time if upticks are dominating or downticks are dominating, or buyers are more aggressive, sellers are more aggressive. That's in real time, and you can see the flows of that information. So much richness of information that you would never, ever get simply by looking at a normal bar chart. So those are examples of working with the new data. Networking is also a way we can improve our idea generation. Well, I mean by networking is connecting with people who themselves are doing unique things, looking at markets in unique ways. When we work closely with others, either on a trading floor, this happens at the teams I work with, at SMB for instance, you have a senior trader leading the team, you have junior traders working with them, but everyone's sharing information, everyone's sharing trades with everyone else. You can see how they're thinking, what they're doing, and you can look at the market through different lenses, which helps you generate ideas. But there are many people who are working online in teams, either with individuals or with some trading groups. The investors underground, the traders for a cause group is one of those. We have groups such as the ones run by modern rock that look at very short-term price action and share trade ideas in real time. And that becomes a way of networking with others, a way of interacting, but also a way of observing what other people are doing and how they're doing it to help us generate new ways of looking at markets. Ultimately what we're doing with new data and with networking is building our creativity. And this is something I talk about in my most recent book, the Trading Psychology 2.0, that markets are always changing. Sometimes they're trending, sometimes they're in a range, sometimes they're moving up, sometimes they're moving down. Recently we've had markets moving down quite a bit and up quite a bit. And so the setups that work are different in different markets. The information that helps us trade effectively will change as markets change. And so we always have to adapt to these market changes. And so when we can look at new data, when we can network with smart people, we build our ability to generate new and different ideas to fit market conditions. And that really is exercising our creativity. The idea of finding an edge and just sticking to that edge through all markets, that is completely false. I don't know any successful trader who actually does that over time. Because markets change, eventually the edges go away and have to be replaced by new ones. And that's where creativity comes in. That's where creativity comes in. Next slide. Okay, so creativity is all about generating the idea, right? But once we have an idea that's worth trading, we have to turn that idea into a trade. And so that's where position comes in. I have found a number of successful traders who will establish their positions based on their ideas, and then they will use the short-term price action to trade around those positions. And I'll explain to you in a minute one way, I do that. But what they're doing is, and this is a term I hear a lot among the SMB traders, is they're creating cash flow in the trade. In other words, let's say they get long and the market moves their way, they'll take a big piece of the position off and harvest some profits. And then the market comes in a bit and they might add to their position. And so they're flowing in and out of their positions, even while they hold some core position for the bigger picture move. Now that helps the trader psychologically because in a situation where you're building cash flow, you're making money on these pieces of the position. And let's say some news comes out and the idea doesn't work out and everything reverses and goes back to your entry point, you have harvested some profits. You haven't just made money in the trade and then given it all back. And so psychologically to ring the cash register with some frequency builds an internal sense of success. And the key is making sure that the core position is large enough to matter if it goes to your target and to take enough of the profits that that will matter if your bigger picture position doesn't go to its target. So you want to make your entries large enough so that you have room to take something off if the trade goes your way. And you want to be rule based about that. In other words, you'll have a first target, you'll have a second target. So for instance, if I identify a price level, I think a near term price level, I think we will take out that might be my first target. We take that out, boom, I take my profits. But there's another piece that runs because I see a second target. Maybe the second target is we're going to rise above the high of the previous day. So the first target might be the high from the overnight trade if I'm training the futures like the S&P futures. So I think we'll take out the based on the order flow based on the aggressiveness of the buyers. I think we'll take out the overnight high. That's my first target. Second target is the high from the previous day. And so there are some rules I have around that that give some structure to the trading. So the position management allows us to be flexible with respect to market conditions and of course allows us to add two trades if we see them working out. So we may take out that first target and then sellers come in, but the sellers really can't push it below the open. We had a little bit of something like that in this morning in the S&P trade. If you follow the futures, we open strong and then we have a little bit of a pullback, but we couldn't go below the open price. And so here was a nice, very short-term oversold point where we could put on a position, take out the previous high. So using some short-term indications of overbought and oversold can be helpful in this position management. I use in much of my trading a two-period RSI. So it's a very short-term overbought oversold indication. And when we are oversold at higher price lows, I want to think about being a buyer. And when we are overbought at lower price highs, I want to think about selling. And so the short-term oscillator becomes a decision support tool for some of that cash flow trading. Next slide. Improving risk management. This is so important, so important, so important. One observation some successful traders have made with me is that a large portion of their total profitability comes from a relative handful of trades or a handful of periods of time in the market. In other words, they have some periods where they really make a good amount of money. And then the majority of periods they make a little, they lose a little. Hopefully they're not positive. And they don't have many periods where they have big losses. And so there's a skew where they have a lot more big winning periods than big losing periods. And when we see traders fail very often, it's not that their hit rate on trades is so horrible. It's that they have bigger losers than winners. And so we want to be able to break down our trading to see if our average win size is greater than our average loss size. And if we have more winners than losers in our trading. It's not too uncommon that we see someone who has a pretty good hit rate on their trades. They're like 50-50 wins and losses. But again, the losses are larger than the wins. The average loss is greater than the average win. So they lose money on average. That's a situation where they could improve their risk management. Now there are two ways of improving risk management. One is they need to be better at setting stops and utilizing stops that keep losses from getting out of hand. That's the usual way traders think about this. But there's another aspect to risk management that's so important, and that I call opportunity management. Many times, the average win size is not much greater or maybe smaller than the average loss size because the trader is cutting their winners short. They're not letting the winners run to those proper targets that we talked about. And so as a result, they are managing risk, but they're not managing opportunity. They're not getting enough big winners. With the traders I work with at SMB, for example, they have daily loss limits, daily amounts of money that they're allowed to go down in a size position so that they're not going to get stopped out on the day. But if they're trading very well, they want to have some winning days that approach that loss limit. In other words, if their loss limit is $5,000 on a day, let's say, they want to have some days where they're making close to $5,000 or more than $5,000. So that's good opportunity management on top of good risk management. And we can measure that on a daily basis by tracking the outcomes of our trades. The SMB folks use a program called TraderView for that purpose, and I have a link to that on my blog post, my most recent blog post, where it spits out all these statistics for you so that you can see if you're getting more of the big wins than the big losses. And finally, we want to reverse engineer those big wins and big losses. In other words, we want to figure out, what did we do well? What did the market set up when we made a good amount of money so that we can be prepared for the next possibility? And we want to figure out what did we do wrong? What did we miss in the market? What did we miss in our position management when we took big losses? And we set goals for improving that. So by studying, studying, studying our big winners, studying, studying, studying our big losers, we can do more and more of what works for us, and we can improve, improve, improve on what we haven't done well. Next slide. So up to this point, we've been talking about your processes as a trader, generating ideas, managing positions, managing risk. But there's another side to the equation, and that's managing ourselves. And so if we are improving, evaluating and improving ourselves as traders, we want to evaluate what we are doing and it is what we're doing working for us in our trading. So I talk quite a bit about successful traders having routines for their trading. They have routines in the morning hours for preparing for the market day. They have routines for taking breaks in the trading day and they might not be seeing things well or when they might be losing their focus and getting a little too involved in the short-term price action. They have a routine for taking breaks, for calming themselves and improving their focus. Many traders use meditation, for instance, for this purpose. They also have personal routines. So these are routines outside of trading that keep them at their best. And so those routines could involve sleeping well, eating well, physical fitness, doing things in relationships that keep them fresh. Those personal routines are every bit as structured as the trading routine so that we are continually doing the things that keep us at our peak. The idea is to maximize our energy level and our overall psychological well-being. The research in psychology is unanimous in telling us that when we have high levels of well-being, when we have a good amount of happiness and joy, when we have a good amount of fulfillment, when we have a good amount of energy, and when we have a good amount of closeness in our relationships, those four things, we perform better. We have better focus and concentration. We are more creative. We are more productive. And in fact, when we have a good level of overall well-being, we tend to be physically healthier as well. I have a blog post I did some time ago. I'll link to it in an upcoming post. Actually, I think I linked to it. Yeah, I linked to the most recent post. But I linked to it in the most recent post on why energy is so important, and it references one of my other cats, Mia Bella. And the idea here, and this is really an important psychological principle, the idea here is that our energy level determines our access to our strengths. In other words, we have strengths. We have abilities, competencies, as traders and as people. If we are at low energy, we lose our access to those. So we could be a very creative human being, but if we are run down, physically depleted, emotionally troubled, we can't access that creativity literally to the same degree. So by creating daily routines, that maximize our energy, our physical energy, our intellectual energy by stimulating us, our closeness to others. By creating personal routines that maximize our energy, we keep ourselves at a peak for our trading time. So the personal processes are extremely important to our success as traders. And of course the key for our learning curves is putting all this together. So we have ways of improving our idea generation, our position management, our risk management, and ways of improving ourselves as people. That whole package keeps us learning and developing and increases our learning curve so that we have greater odds of being successful and staying successful. So with that, I promise to leave a good amount of time for questions, comments, wise observations. So please, by all means, feel free to type into Bruce and we'll see what we can do. All right. Excellent, Brett. Just excellent. Thank you very much. So, yeah, please get your questions in, guys, and I will read them out to Brett. Brett, in the meantime, I've forwarded or put in the chat for everybody, your trader blog here. And I'm not sure if this is the article you're talking about for the trader psychology and managing your energy. Well, this is one of them. Yeah, there's one that is, if you Google trader feed, Nia, MIA, Bella, trader feed, MIA, Bella, you'll find that post that talks about how our energy level determines our access to our strengths. And the reason the cat's on there is that it was through our cat that I came up with this principle and then found psychology research that Okay, I'm sorry. So, what was it again, if I Google what that? Actually, if you just pull up my current post, my most recent post, and it's linked in there. Yes, so go to most recent blog post and you click there. Yeah, there you go. Perfect, perfect. And look, there's book map. It's linked. And let's see, let's see, let's see. This is it? Yeah, here's the book map. You know what, it's in the previous post. My bad, my bad. Well, where I talk about energy. So, if you scroll down, you'll see the most recent post and it's in there. But a very important concept and happy to answer any questions about that. Okay, let's see here. Well, let's just kick it off and get to the questions. Okay, so, someone's asking about SMB Capital, has an online course, would you recommend taking that course? Have you worked with them, et cetera? Yeah, yeah. So, I work with a number of different firms. I'm not an employee of SMB or Kershner. The two firms work together. So, I'm not an employee of them. So, I don't have a reason here to talk my own books, so to speak. But I work with them because I think they do an excellent job in developing traders. The courses that I've seen have been helpful, have been useful. There are some other tools that they have. I think they're also helpful and useful. Do I think you can learn trading just by taking a course? I am skeptical. I think it can be helpful. I think it can be a great introduction to finding new engines in markets. But, would I take a course to be a successful tennis player or to be a successful basketball player? No, it's a performance skill you have to learn by doing. So, the coursework gives you valuable information, but you have to really learn at the desk. You have to learn with other successful traders to take that information, take that knowledge and turn it into real skills. You know, I teach at a medical school in Syracuse, New York, and the medical school curriculum reflects that. The first two years traditionally are basic science years where you learn anatomy and physiology and you learn about the body and you learn about the processes of the body. And then in your third year you start working with patients. No one pretends that you're going to become a successful doctor just by taking courses in the body. You have to actually learn by doing. And so that's what your subsequent education is all about. They train in some very much the same way. The courses are very helpful. I know the people at SMB. I think they have great learning to share. But that's the first step in your learning journey, certainly not the last one. Okay, let's see here. Okay, users here. Training is much an art as science. It's oriented and he's asking, what can you do on a daily basis to improve his artistic mentality? Okay, yeah. And I work with traders. I do quantify some things myself. There's some very good websites and services that provide scientific quantitative ideas about markets. Rob Hannah does a subscription service called Quantifiable Edges. It's at quantifiableedges.com. And he shares quite a bit of information on his website. There is a service called Market Tells from Renny Yang. This is quite helpful. And there are services available if you go to Quantocracy where you can gather research studies. Yeah, that's Rob Hannah's site. Excellent. And so you can become more scientific in that sense in generating ideas as opposed to relying on quote-unquote artistry. And I find these services to be helpful. I'd be happy to talk more about that, how I use those. But when we talk about developing the art of trading, we're really talking, I think, about the creativity aspect and the ability to see edges that others don't perceive. So for example, in my trading, this gets back to the point about looking at new information or looking at existing information in new ways. I break down any given market into a trend component and into one or more cyclical components. In other words, I look for cycles in the market. But to effectively find cycles in the market, I have to look at a different time series than what normal people look at. Normal people look at like five-minute charts or they look at daily charts. Here, the information I look at is not based on time. It's based on trading volume or it's based on volatility, the amount of movement or the number of contracts traded. The amount of price changes in the contracts traded. And so you're creating different bars altogether. So if you're using volume bars, you are helping standardize the time series by drawing fewer bars during slow periods like midday and overnight and more bars during the busy periods like first thing in the morning. And so evens out the number of bars through the day which helps you identify cycles more cleanly. And so I use the troughs of cycles to enter it up trend and the peaks of cycles to enter a down trend. And so it's a different way of looking at the market and trading the market. There's a bit of science behind it but also a bit of artistry. Okay, excellent. Let's see here moving along. Let's see. Lina from Sweden is asking about how about longer term trend following still cash flow trading? I'm not sure exactly what she means but anyway. Yeah, so you definitely can apply and hello to Sweden. I love Stockholm. My wife and I went not too long ago and the people were wonderful. It's a great place, great place. So any time frame we can do the cash flow trading. So for instance what you would do if you are a longer term trend follower is you would look to lighten up on medium term overbought points and maybe add to positions on medium term oversold points. One of the indicators I look at is from a website called indexindicators.com and they track the percentage of stocks trading above their various short term moving averages. So for instance we can identify the percentage of S&P stocks trading above their five day moving averages or 20 day moving averages. So that creates an oscillator on a medium time frame. So we can be a buyer. Let's say we're in an uptrend. We can be a buyer when the percentage of stocks trading above their five day moving averages goes below 50 and we can lighten up when we get to 70 or above and so forth. And so we can create some rules with some indicators that would help us do some of that cash flow trading even though we're holding core positions over a longer time frame. In fact, that's what many, many hedge fund portfolio managers do. Okay. Good question here about having trouble increasing contracts or size due to fear of losses. How to overcome this? Yeah. It's a common problem with developing traders and what ends up happening is they trade small to avoid losses, but they're trading small also ensures that their profits are small as well. And so they really never develop the confidence to grow their trading. The key here is to increase the size incrementally so that it is not psychologically disruptive. So for instance, if my common position size and I'm just making this up is 10 contracts, I don't want to jump to 20, 30, 40 contracts because the volatility of the resulting P and L is going to translate into emotional volatility. So we want to do that incrementally. Once we're successful and consistent for a period of time trading 10 contracts, then we bump it up. We can bump it up to 12 contracts and then the 15 contracts. And then eventually we're going to get to 20 contracts. But we establish our consistency and our success at the higher level before we bump it up to the next level. And we do that steadily. We do that in an ongoing way so that we're becoming successful at one level, bumping it to a new level, becoming successful at that level, bumping it to a new level. The analogy I've used on my blog is working out in the weight room. We lift a certain amount of weight and we get to the point where we can do three sets of 10 repetitions very well at that weight. And so we bump it up to the next weight. We don't go from lifting 150 pounds to lifting 350 pounds. We go from 150 to maybe 175. And once we can easily do three sets of 10 reps at 175, we bump it to 200 and then to 225. And that's how we build our strengths in the weight room. That's how we build our trading. Okay, excellent. We have a trader here. He's 25 years old who spends quite a bit of time in front of the screens. He's talking about or in your book you had written that a lot of traders are not clock punchers. They're following kind of flow or state here. So in terms of personal relationships like with his girlfriend here, overcoming guilt, being at the screen all the time, any tips for trying to deal with that? It's a great question. It's a great question. And it's precisely because of what I was mentioning in terms of maximizing our energy that we do have to nurture our relationships and our other interests. If we spend all of our time day after day in the screens, guess what? We're going to burn out. And when we are burned out, we don't have creativity. We don't have focus and concentration. Our trading suffers. So it depends on the types of trading we're doing. But even the short-term traders I work with, and I trade short-term myself. I wouldn't call myself a scalper, but I trade short-term. But even the short-term traders in my own trading will take a break midday, get away from the screens, and start to refresh, rejuvenate. That could be done with physical exercise. It could be a power nap. It could be talking with someone we're close to and just re-establishing the bond. So that all works. That can keep us fresh for the afternoon then. In fact, as I've discussed with many traders, a practice that has worked very well since I observed it in Chicago when I first started working with traders is that they will break the trading day into two trading days. Morning will be a trading day in quotes, and the afternoon will be a trading day. And they keep a separate P&L for the morning trading and then a separate P&L for their afternoon trading. And they take a break in between to keep themselves fresh. But then, once the market closes, so does their screen, so to speak, yes, they go over their trading and yes, they will prepare for the next day. But in fact, they close the screens down and they exercise other strengths in their lives. And so they use the time after trading to have quality time in the relationships, quality time with their kids, with their spouses, with their significant others, quality time and physical exercise, having fun, doing things with friends. And yes, they'll use time, maybe the next morning to research new ideas and to review their trading and so forth. But each day they are doing something to stay connected with quality time to the people who matter to them. So they're nurturing their relationships. Without that, like I say, it's very easy to burn out. Okay, excellent. Another question here about coming back from traumatic experiences, how to overcome that and trying to get back your losses or get back at the market. Yeah, with good risk management, we never have traumatic losses. We have losses, that's for sure. But we don't have traumatic losses. One of the important aspects of risk management is keeping our losses down to the point where they don't traumatize us, where they don't so interfere with our psychology that we can't make good decisions going forward. And so as I mentioned, day traders will have daily loss limits. They have monthly loss limits. In hedge funds, if people start losing money and they're not seeing markets well, they will reduce their size, reduce their size, reduce their size, trade smaller, smaller, smaller until they get their rhythm back until they get their consistency back. All to avoid being traumatized. So the best cure is prevention, just like in medicine. We want to have risk management rules where the losses that we take, the size that we trade out and the losses we take are manageable. If we do become traumatized, the only way to overcome trauma and you can look up Google Trader Feed and Trauma and you'll see, I'll suppose, the only way to overcome trauma is through safe, successful experience. So what I have done with traumatized traders and what I have done with myself when I've gone through difficult losses is literally go back to trading on the simulator. And yes, you know, it's tumbling and it might feel like a step back but in fact, by taking the P&L out of the equation, we can focus on trading process and making good decisions and we can get back in the rhythm of making good decisions and then we start putting on small size and we start making money and then we put on somewhat larger size and we make money and that's how our confidence grows back after something that has shaken us up. Okay. Another question that's kind of related here but any suggestions on techniques to employ during the trading session when you have suffered issues or losses early in the session, then that affects your risk appetite for the rest of the session. So how do you regain your focus? Yeah, another good question. So I'll tell you what I've done in my trading that's been super helpful. I track my trades as a function of time of day. So we can look at trades that we enter between, I'll use Eastern Time, between 9.30 and 10. What's our hit rate? What's our success rate with trades between 9.30 to 10? 10 to 10.30, 10.30 to 11 and so forth. Okay. And so I know historically that if I place trades early in the New York session that 9.30 to 10 period, the success rate is relatively low because we have lots of different flows coming in and out of the market as buyers and sellers sort themselves out early in trade. So I know that my hit rate is on a lower side. So I will specifically size my first trades on the small side. I'll look for a good entry. I'll look for a good idea. I'll size it purposely on the small side and then if it gets started and it stops out, I use that as information that maybe the flows are going a different way. I reevaluate the market and if I see, this is like in today's market, the sellers early in the session couldn't push us down past the open. If I see that then I will flip my position and enter with larger size during a time of day that has worked better for me. So you're using the early losses as information and it's easier to do that when those positions are not sized very large. If you are incurring losses early in the trading day that are impairing your risk taking later in the trading day then you're probably sized too large early on. Okay. Yeah, Brett, I'm just going to jump over to book map very quickly here because what you had mentioned early on really struck a chord with me and relates to this answer as well. And that is the something really rather unique I think here in book map is the I found it just so helpful and other traders have mentioned it as well how you can track all of your orders. It's over time here. So just like the way book map is showing the liquidity and volume over time here so is your trading. So for example I'm moving some of these entries here limit sell orders or limit buy orders here but I can see all of my actions. So this is when I entered with this beige dot here with this limit buy order and this is when I moved it here and now it's up here at this 2901.5. So going back in debriefing your trading after this is so helpful be able to understand and be accountable for precisely what you were doing like you have to hold yourself to it. Like these were my actions. Why did I do it and you can't really escape it. Yeah, that's very nice Bruce where you can go back to the screens and see what you did when and review that and look at what you might have play what you did well. So it all shows up there on the screen. Very, very nice. Yeah, yeah. It's been really, really helpful to debrief and then learn from your trading activity. So anyway, I wanted to mention that. Let's jump back into the questions here. Let's see here. The next question was regarding besides meditation and listening to complex music what type of diet supplements or anything to help improve your focus or intuition or trading performance that you recommend. Yeah, yeah. In terms of focus I do think the meditation work can help. There's biofeedback work that I mentioned in the blog. Certainly eating well eating the right things does our blood trigger levels affect our focus our concentration and so eating in a healthy way and regulating that could be very useful and I find that taking frequent short breaks from the screens and getting away coming back with fresh eyes that can pace us through the market day just like we would pace ourselves in a distance race and that can very much help. The last thing would be structuring your environment where you train so that you minimize distractions and you create an environment that really helps you focus. All of those are things that traders do that I work with that help them. Some traders find an environment where they're constantly interacting with others to be very helpful others find it tremendously distracting so you've got to figure out what type of environment for you brings out your best decision making. Okay, there was a question about that as well about how to start to develop your networking any recommendations. Being visible online is a great way so if you join services you participate in online conversations there's there are a number of trader related groups that are out there and participating in their events and in their discussions could certainly be one way of doing that being active in Twitter following people and interacting with them in that way could be very, very helpful. But I would say seeking out trading communities looking for communities that are doing the type of trading you'd be interested in and following some of the people by Twitter who are posting on topics that are of interest also reading trading related blogs there are some really good blogs and podcasts and you can quickly figure out who's doing some quality work and reach out to them that's very helpful. Okay, and I've put in the chat here several times for everybody Brett's blog here and some other links that he's referred to so you guys can come back or click on that and visit his blog here as well as some of the other links as well. Let's see here. Brett, I appreciate that. Yeah, we're moving on in time and maybe one more question. Okay, yep, sounds good. So sorry to everybody if we didn't get to your question here. Let me just take a look here. Is it equally important to identify your state of emotion when entering or exiting a trade as compared to the profit and loss of a trade? It's a good question and self-awareness is really important and so being aware of our state and are we agitated? Are we focused? That's very, very helpful because if we see that we are in a disrupted state either because of distraction or emotional arousal if we see that we are disrupted we can stand back and say, wait a minute this is not the state in which I make my best decisions let's calm down and look at the market fresh and decide what to do. On the other hand if we're in a good state and we see that we've hit a target and we act on that that's great. You only want to be focused on the market psychology the trading psychology when that psychology could interfere with your best decision making. Yeah, it's an interesting question relates to making a distinction between profit and loss and your emotional state. Either way, we could be disrupted, right? Correct. Okay, so in the end the overriding principle here is emotional state. The overriding principle is that you are aware of yourself at the same time that you're aware of markets and that you are using that self-awareness to step back from trading when you're not in your optimal state and that ability to step back and recognize when you're in the wrong state is something that develops with time and is something we can systematically work on journaling in our goal setting. But the broad issue that we're talking about today is observing our trading evaluating ourselves as traders learning from mistakes learning from what we do well and structuring our trading in such a way that we're making continual improvements. I wish everyone and I appreciate the opportunity to get together. Yeah, thank you very much, Brett. This is excellent. I just wanted to mention to everybody there's been some a lot of thank yous in the questions here, Brett. So very, very, very appreciative here. And just wanted to mention everybody we will tweet out the recording when it is available on our Twitter feed at bookmap underscore pro so you guys can check out the recording. Okay. Brett, thank you very much. We really appreciate it. Okay. Thank you for organizing this. Okay. All right, everybody, take care. Bye-bye.