 But, you know, being self taught, you don't want to take no for an answer and you want to keep pushing. Luckily, I had the funds to keep driving through, but that didn't mean that I didn't bleed and I bled like crazy. I even took about a six month break completely from trading because it just wasn't working out for me. I kept trying and trying and it was just no matter what I did, I made the problem worse. And every single time that I thought I had it figured out, I go right back down and give back all of my winnings that I had for that week or that month or whatever the case. And then I give back even more and say, what the heck am I doing? Welcome back to the after hours podcast. Today we have selling rips here. So welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate that. So for those that don't know a little bit about your story, can you kind of walk us through your trading history and how you got started briefly? Yeah, sure. So I was a business owner and entrepreneur and I actually had one of my buddies who was a entrepreneur as well in the space. He was dabbling in trading and I didn't really know much about it. In fact, when I first started hearing about trading, you know, when I was younger, much, much younger, I always thought that you had to have a very specific license or a specific background. You had to go to college for it. I didn't know that it was something that you could take on independently and you could just jump into as any, any person off the street. And so when he came into my office one day, he was telling me, said, Hey, rips, you know, there's this really cool thing with trading back in the day. It was a TD Ameritrade that he was on and he was trading with a product called Thinkerswim back in the day. It was about 10 years ago, came into my office. He was trading two leveraged ETFs that were for gold miners. It was Jnug and J dust. And basically Jnug was the ETF that you would trade if the miners were doing well that day. And then J dust would be the ticker that you would trade if they're doing terribly. So he showed me, he traded from my office that day and he killed it. And I was immediately hooked on that. And so I deposited into a brokerage account. In this case, it was TD Ameritrade deposited in that. And I had some really great success early on with it. Surprisingly, I mean, usually when you talk to people that they usually are at one end of the spectrum where they either had a really good foray, a good entry into their trading, or they had a really bad entry into their trading where they got completely run over. I ended up catching the bug because I had a really good entry into trading. And in the first week, I think I had a day where I made over $20,000. And so with that introduction into trading, I was hooked immediately. And it was one of those things where I just couldn't stop. And I learned very quickly that that was not the norm for trading. It wasn't that you're going to jump in and you're going to have $20,000 days because the very first time I started trading, you know, having a great day like that, sitting there thinking, wow, this is easy. I just got to be right. If the gold miners are doing well, I just jump into this one. If they're doing poorly, I jump into this one. This is easy. Anybody can do it. And then two weeks later, I've blown my account. Damn, that's wild. So you blow that first account and did you ever get into trading any small caps and stuff like that? Because I do watch a lot of your content and you do talk about how you have traded like small caps before. You've traded like a lot of different products. So maybe you could kind of talk about like maybe just like your journey and going through products, getting into futures and stuff like that. Sure. Yeah. So like I said, initially trading those leveraged ETFs, that was my initial foray into trading. And it was one of those things where I didn't know anything about trading or even what an ETF was at the time. I had no clue what that was. And so for me, you know, not knowing there was any other products out there. I knew that of course, there were stocks. I was really interested in stocks when I was younger. I had my own portfolio that I tracked when I was younger. I didn't trade any real money. I grew up super poor. So I ended up, you know, marking out things I'd seen the newspaper. This is how dated I am, but marking out stocks. I'd read in the newspaper and then seeing how they'd trade, you know, I tracked like IBM when I was younger forward and things of that nature. So I didn't really know much about the market outside of the fact that there was companies that you could invest in. And then when my buddy brought these ETFs to me, I thought it was like, okay, these are these specialized products. And so I traded a lot of those things early on. I learned about the spy. I learned about the triple cues. I learned about those ETFs and how they worked, but it wasn't until much later that I got introduced into small caps. We're talking years later. There was in fact a gap between meat trading these leveraged ETFs and then going into crypto and then eventually finding small caps and trading small caps and then learning about how you could short small caps. I did have a lot of success trading small caps during that COVID era, obviously around from 2019 up until 2022 or so. And trading during that time, it had a lot of different activities in the small cap realm specifically. So for me, it was, you know, waking up in the morning and seeing all these small caps that were going off. And I was part of the guys of the bag of idiots who are longing these things. And then once we'd take them up to the top side, I'd be shorting them back down. And it was a different time right back in COVID where you had 20 different tickers going to the top side that you could then short to the bottom side that would be just insane. You'd have tickers running 200, 300%. I just remember waking up one morning. There was like a ticker called eyes that was running and it wasn't only eyes. We also had feet. We had ears. We had toes. We had nose. Every single body part was running that day. And that's just the kind of market we're in. It made no sense completely nonsensical. And it was a beautiful thing. And so yeah, you know, I touched on all these different things throughout my trading career. I've been trading for almost a decade now full time since 2019. And so yeah, it's just been a long journey of seeing all these different things, all these different market cycles that we've been in the crypto cycle that I was in back in 2015 2016. I was one of the original buyers in Ethereum back when it was trading, you know, double digits. There was just so many different markets and overall they all kind of share this overarching kind of extension of one another where all these markets, they share little pieces. But by trading all of these different markets from crypto all the way to futures, small caps, large caps, leveraged ETFs, I learned a lot of different things and a lot of different pieces throughout the way and it helps me be a really well rounded trader that I've built myself into today. That's awesome. That's definitely super cool journey. You mentioned that you kind of like also did some entrepreneur stuff like that. Could you maybe kind of go in and touch on kind of some stuff like that because I know a lot of people would want to hear about, you know, how you got started in the entrepreneur space as well because that's also super cool. I was I was chilling with Connor, Connor now and this summer and we were talking about you and he's like, damn that guy's the coolest guy like ask him about like entrepreneur stuff and stuff like that. So definitely wanted to ask you some stuff about that and shout out Connor, of course. Yeah, absolutely. I've been a brand builder, you know, I've been building brands pretty much my whole early part of my life until I started really kind of focusing on trading for the last decade or so. But yeah, building certain brands. Amazon makes it really easy for you to build brands now, but before Amazon again, I'm going to date myself before Amazon existed. There wasn't really kind of a go to marketplace with the sold everything back in my day when I first started Amazon was still just selling books and that was it just selling books and nothing else. And so it was a different experience back then but mainly starting companies on the internet and then finding ways to get buyers interested in those companies, building them up and then selling to those buyers. That was generally what I was doing and when it comes to entrepreneurship of that of that nature. So, you know, all sorts of different brands, whether you're talking about clothing brands or health brands, things of that nature. That's that's really where my experience comes from and where I've met a lot of the people that ended up going into trading as well. Like I said, my friend who came into my office, he was in a similar space that I was in at the time and he ended up ditching that space and then focusing specifically on trading alone. It sounds like you've traded pretty much every almost every available thing to be traded. So by doing that, I know you learned a lot from it but now that you've kind of matured over your 10 year journey, is there a specific market that you yourself have found the most edge in that you're most focused in or are you still trying to adapt and say, you know what, I see this is moving. I see that's moving. I'm just going to go where the money is. Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, there's a, there's a similar question that I had on the stream a couple days ago when I was streaming in the morning. I stream my trades live every single morning on YouTube and I was on there and somebody asked a very similar question. Right now I'm super locked in and focused into futures. I've always thought that futures is one of the most pure markets out there. It has obviously there's manipulation in all markets but when it comes to having a market that you can kind of go in day in and day out and you're not going to expect any surprises. It's very consistent. You're going to have a lot of room to grow in a market like that. And for me, my focus right now heavily is on futures as well as, you know, index options and trading markets that are of that nature. I've learned a lot from these different markets but I always come back to futures. I started futures probably about six years ago is when I first started trading futures. I took a break from it for a while for when we had that craziness into COVID and in that market, I was heavy into options into small caps and those markets, they're very similar but futures is something that's very reliable and you can use things like the auction process, market profile, learning market structure. These things you can use day in and day out and it's not one of those things where you're going to go into the market and you're going to say, well, I wish it was another day or I wish it had more volatility. I wish it had something. If you're trading Nasdaq futures for instance, every single day you're going to be able to get at least 10 points in the Nasdaq. If you're patient and you're waiting for it, you're going to be able to pick that up. The same can't be said for a lot of markets out there. For instance, in the COVID markets, the small caps were beautiful almost every single day. There was an opportunity almost every single day. There's going to be times when small caps dry up a little bit and for me, when COVID was kind of relaxing the COVID markets rather, we're relaxing around 2022. That's when I kind of took a step back from those markets and I started to kind of look out what other opportunities there were and that's what drew me back into trading index options and futures and that's what I'm focused on now. And can you kind of walk us through what your morning routine is or what your morning process is because I know that futures is a crazy game. You know, it's 24-7, right? Yeah. So what is your morning process? Like what time do you wake up? Do you hold positions overnight? Can you kind of walk us through it a little bit? So I generally, I'm on the West Coast. So I'm waking up at about 2 o'clock every single morning and that's just routine because I've been living in the East Coast for quite some time but I'm in the West Coast now and I wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning. I go to bed early. I go to bed at about 7 or 8 o'clock depending on whether or not there's a trade. Like you said, futures are trading pretty much around the clock. They rest Monday through Friday. There's an off period for about an hour from 5 p.m. until 6 p.m. But other than that, they're around the clock product and specifically the index futures there's trades all throughout these markets. There's a Tokyo session, a London session and New York session. And so it's around the clock and so there is a lot of preparation to do for it but there are zones in times where there's more liquidity being injected into the market versus not. Namely the Euro session, the Tokyo session. Those sessions, there's an injection of liquidity and if we're at a key point of market structure then it's worthwhile to trade that. But for the most part, I'm generally going to bed around 7 or 8 o'clock Pacific time and then I'm waking up at 2. Now when I wake up, I do practice of mindfulness. So I'm out in my yard and I'm doing some meditation. I'm getting myself focused for the day. Then after that, I'm preparing myself for my day and that's charting and preparing the morning call that I have in my room called Market Clubhouse. I'm doing a morning memo where I'm going over a comprehensive text plan of all the trades that we're watching for the day. So by doing that and formulating that for my group, I get a good look at the markets and I'm looking at the key pivot points in the market, the supply and demand areas, the zones that I'm going to be watching throughout that trading day. And then from there, it's just going on stream, doing my live trading session that I do, doing my morning call in my group, doing my live trading for my group and then going through and looking at if we're hitting any of those specific zones of interest for the day and if we are, we're trading around those zones and then we're doing it all over again the next day. Saturday, Sunday generally, pretty relaxed Sunday doing some more charting. Sunday actually futures are open. They open again at 6pm on Sunday. So again, like you said, it's pretty much an around the clock thing but it's mainly a lot of preparing very via charting, looking at the supply and demand zones, the market structure and the stuff that's going to formulate those trade plans. That's awesome. I wanted to kind of like go back and ask when you first got started, did you have any mentors or anyone that helped you out or did you just rough it out and just straight up go through it? Because I know that I have met people where they're learning curve was a little bit longer but they didn't have any mentors. They didn't have anyone who they kind of talked to and they were like pretty much a lone wolf. So how did you kind of going about like learning a lot of this stuff? Because you're a very like smart intelligent guy you know what you're talking about. So like, how did you acquire all that knowledge? Well, you know, I got really, really lucky but that came later. I'm self taught in a lot of things that I do in my life. I've been self taught through all of my the businesses that I've started. I've been self funded through all of them. I bootstrapped every single one of my businesses. I actually tried raising money one time for one of my companies and I ended up just giving up on it because I was more so just more interested in growing the company myself. So I've always been a self starter throughout my life for everything and trading was the same thing. And like I said in the top of the call here, you know, that first week I thought I was on top of the world and unstoppable. Second week, the accounts blown and it's like, Oh God, I don't know anything. But you know, being self taught, you don't want to take no for an answer and you want to keep pushing. Luckily I had the funds to keep driving through but that didn't mean that I didn't bleed and I bled like crazy. It was to the point where I think early on I even took about a six month break completely from trading because it just wasn't working out for me. I kept trying and trying and it was just no matter what I did I made the problem worse and every single time that I thought I had it figured out I go right back down and give back all of my winnings that I had for that week or that month or whatever the case and then I give back even more and say what the heck am I doing? So later on in life I ended up moving to a place where there ended up being a lot of folks in the arena of trading in my neighborhood and it was one of those places that was like a tax haven and basically there was a lot of folks there. Peter Schiff was one of my neighbors and there's some other heavy hitters in the area there that were either market makers or that they were publicly traded company. They were the owners of that or CFOs. These large heavy hitters I would go to mixtures with these guys and get to talking about, you know the markets and everything obviously had an interest in it and these folks would come over to my house. I'd get them all liquored up and we'd have these after parties and then they'd start spilling all their secrets to me. So I learned a lot about what these small cap book runners are doing how they're running these books what these marketer makers are doing how they're providing liquidity and so I got to be buddied up with a lot of these folks in there and specifically market makers who taught me a lot about how to do this. I remember even one of the market makers he had a huge house there where he had a lot of quants that were writing algorithms for him and these guys would come over to my house I just get them smashed out on liquor. I don't even drink. I get them smashed out and they'd be telling me all their stories and everything. They'd have these algorithms they had one called like the blood seeker algorithm the predator algorithm these algorithms that go after retail traders and these things would just be insane it'd be blowing your mind and I couldn't even believe it half the time and it was just nuts. So I learned a lot from that and I picked up a couple mentors along the way two of my big mentors one of them worked at Morgan Stanley the other worked at Goldman Sachs. They taught me a lot. They managed a lot of money. They had a lot of one of them did management for a very high profile character and he taught me a lot about market making what they're doing when they're you know they get a billion dollars on their books they have to make a market for that day what they're doing how they're moving these stocks large cap stops. I you know I talked to one of the guys who was managing a lot of the positions at Tesla for Morgan Stanley. So a lot of these things you know just happened by meeting the right people being in the right circles and networking with these people and it gave me kind of the inside look at this stuff that you really can't find in any books. So that's where I instilled a lot of the knowledge that I have now that's where I picked it up from was these great relationships I've formed throughout the years. That's a really brilliant way to kind of get that stuff done especially because you don't drink. Yeah, I have two questions. So number one is when you're kind of going through that dark streak of like nothing was just really working what gave you that motivation to keep pushing through instead of just like saying, you know, maybe this isn't for me. And number two is I got to hear one of these market maker stories. You got to give me something, man. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, so okay. So starting with the first question. So what kept me going? And I think honestly like I said earlier in the call here, I think it was the fact that I had so much success early on and I was always kind of chasing that success because it felt so easy at the time. It felt that if I can know nothing about what I'm doing right now and I can pull that much money out of something with that little amount of time and effort, you know, I come from a background of growing companies. So for me, that takes a lot of time, a lot of effort. If I was just clicking buttons for, you know, a couple hours and able to pull $20,000 out of the market, this is 10 years ago, you know, I'm attracted to that. And so that's probably what kept me in the game for a long time. But then it became it became such a chasing my own tail kind of errand where like I said, I probably took about six months away from the markets and then it was just going back to that idea that, you know, it's working for some people out there. Obviously it's like a 90% failure rate. It's working for some people out there. It's got to be, there has to be a way that I can make it work for me. And that was the drive that kept me going and I'm not the kind of person who quits on anything. I'm usually the kind of person who just keeps persisting and pursuing what I'm interested in. And I was just very attracted to this idea that I could pull money out of this, you know, this money in the sky kind of thing and I could just pull money out of it if I worked as hard as I possibly could because if other people are doing it, then I'm going to figure out a way to do it. And that's what kept driving me to do it and get through the dark streets. And I mean, that wasn't the only dark streak I had. I mean, there's times where, you know, I would just be completely unprofitable for months and months and months at a time and you feel like giving up, but then you have, you know, one trade that gets you back and you're sitting there and you're like, okay, there's got to be a way that there's light at the end of this tunnel. For a market maker store, I'm trying to think here. There's just, I mean, there's so many times that these guys would just come over and get busted up in my house. A lot of them would ask me for feedback on the type of, I'm thinking back to, I had one of these quants that was an amazingly intelligent, brilliant man who'd be at my house and he would ask my opinion on things and I had very little know-how of what happened with, you know, what does it mean to make a market? What does it mean to provide liquidity? I didn't really understand much about it and that would kind of open up the door to the discussion of him kind of detailing exactly what that means to make liquidity in a market and provide liquidity. I guess, you know, him kind of showing me what it looks like when they're stacking liquidity at certain areas. That was really interesting to me. This is before, you know, I trade with book map every single day now. This is before that kind of stuff existed. So him kind of drawing it out on a paper at a whiteboard at my house too. I had to get these guys like drawing on a whiteboard but drawing like areas of liquidity and what this looked like and how markets are drawn to liquidity. That kind of premise blew my mind the first time I heard it and that got me interested in auction theory and market profile. But hearing them talk about, you know, if there's liquidity in an area how the auction process works, if it's going to go down and hit this area of liquidity, people think that if a market's dropping it's going to continue dropping when in reality it's seeking this liquidity down here that they're going to take that liquidity and drive it higher and then sell it to the people who are fooled by that liquidity. Things of that nature. You know, that's the kind of stuff that really opened my mind to where it's like, this is stuff you're just not going to read in any books is the stuff that you're not going to learn in school. That's what got me really, really interested in that kind of stuff. That's like the professional level stuff. That's like 3D chest type stuff. So it's crazy. And I could only imagine how much money these people were making, right? It's like astronomical. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the toys that these guys would have. And I mean, we're talking about the quants who lived at the house while they also lived in another house in the same neighborhood. And these guys like, you know, they had this huge mansion that was like, gosh, it was like an eight bedroom mansion. And this was just like where they, they worked out of during the day. And then it was like, they'd go there and throw parties there at night. And it's just like nobody actually lived there. It's just like kind of where they worked. And it was amazing house in the neighborhoods. Are they still in the game or what are they up to now? I think one of them is one of them actually branched off and he had a really cool business idea. This is back when Bitcoin was still trading. I want to say about five or 600 bucks. And he had a brilliant idea to get a bunch of storage containers and have them in cold areas like up in Canada in the great white North and have a bunch of mining computers in there. So you didn't have to pay for cooling and have them in these desolate areas where he'd set up these huge power plant, I guess things and he'd have crates and crates and crates of these mining rigs. And this is back when Bitcoin was under a thousand and back then he was pulling in like $30 million a month pre when Bitcoin was below a thousand bucks. So it's like, you know, you can only imagine where he's at now. Must be nice to be a baller. That's wild. Maybe you could kind of touch on some strategies that you use every day to trade. I know that you do a lot of kind of like, I guess like more like price action oriented trading like kind of like looking at that liquidity trying to get some squeeze some points from the upside or the downside or whatever off your trades. Maybe you could kind of touch on that a little bit. Yeah, so I'm big on auction theory just because of my history and what I've gone through all of the markets that I've traded. A lot of people look at the screen on the daily and they really don't think and sit back and realize that, you know, these are real people. These are actual people that are putting in orders into the market. Instead, they're just looking at a number that's flashing up and down on their screen and the more you think about it from an auction standpoint in the sense I was actually telling my group this today. You know, if you have an iPhone and you have a finite supply of iPhones and you're selling them for $10,000 for the brand new iPhone and that's the price of them. Yeah, there's going to be some buyers out there for them but not very many. Somebody's going to be out there and saying I want to buy an iPhone. I'll pay $10,000 for it. But then there's going to be, you know, a point when the price naturally has to drift down. And if you look at your tickers like that and you understand that everything is a market here and the prices of things are not going to remain high or remain low. It's going to be driven by the participants of the market. It starts to add color and life to the things that you're trading and so I'm big on market profile and auction theory when I'm looking at these tickers specifically something like futures. It's such a pure marketplace that you're going to have these areas where you go into consolidation and it's this push and pull of liquidity and this fight between buyers and sellers. When you resolve out of those areas generally you're going to get a snap higher or a push down lower and those are generally the areas that I'm hitting. We talk about this in my room where we go over market structural elements. In this case we talked about most recently we did a webinar on order blocks. It's similar to like a smart money concept but it's basically you know you're talking about areas of liquidity where something happened in the case of an order block you're looking at an area of liquidity where the market came up to it and sold down violently or the market came down to this area of interest and it bought up violently and it left behind a signature usually that's inefficiency in the market candles if you're looking at a bar chart it's going to be inefficiency in the market you're going to have a very inefficient market where orders were filled into the market and then they have to come back and retrace that area of liquidity. So it's a mix of all of these things auction theory, market profile, market structure, price action trading and I also fashion myself as a heavy momentum trader and that's a lot from how I used to trade small caps when there was the small caps heyday back in COVID. Very interesting. Another thing that I kind of wanted to ask is you seem to be like one of the only traders that I really see actively that like to trade into these news events not into them but you like to trade like during them a little bit I've seen and from a lot of traders that have heard they always say stay away from you know any market event stay away from that and then I see you trading it and you're like all right we got the decision out here all right we're ready to go all right so I'm just wondering like what's your kind of approach in those news events? So I've always been I mean you guys hear from talking to me I love talking about markets I've been a fan of the markets for years and years and years I just absolutely love this stuff it's always been one of my passions and so I pay a lot of attention to the macro environment thankfully we're actually in that cycle of the market right now we're in that crazy COVID cycle which everything was going up everything was going down huge volatility injections lots of liquidity a lot of newer traders coming into the market and just donating their money into the market so we had a big injection of volatility and liquidity but now we're in a different stage in the market right we have more smart money that's in the market now we have more long term seasoned traders that are in the market now but we're also in this market cycle that is heavily dependent on what the Fed is doing right now with the rates it's this FOMC rate hike cycle and the majority of the market is paying attention to these news events that will drive the market prices around these events so for instance tomorrow we have coming up we have the jobless claims so those are the unemployment numbers we're going to find out how many people are out of work we're going to compare it to the last week's read of those numbers and depending on that figure the markets either going to go up or down in this case for the cycle that we're in currently if there's not a lot of people in work right now it's actually bullish for the markets I know that sounds backwards but that means that the less people that we have in work right now the lower inflation is going to go why? because we have less money in the economy the less money that's in the economy from the less people working the more prices are going to drop it's simple supply and demand and so on a read like tomorrow like what we're going to get for the jobless claims numbers what I'm looking for in that case is an outlier print if we get an outlier print that says that we have less jobs in the market then the prices of the indices are going to go up so I'm going to be probably trading NQ or the E-mini S&P into that and I'll be looking for a print on that and if it's an outlier print to the downside let's say that there's a lot of people that are filing for jobless claims a lot of people out of work will get the market shooting up if we have less and less people that are actually in work and holding down jobs market should go down if it's a nothing burger print market will stay sideways and probably won't take a trade on that and that's just one example that's just one day out of the week we have the FOMC meeting next Wednesday this is being recorded on October 25th so next Wednesday we have the FOMC meeting the rate decision the money markets have already priced that in that that's going to be a pause but what we're looking for on that event is to find out whether or not there's going to be an additional rate hike in December right now the money markets are pricing about 39% chance of that so we're looking at all these little pieces and all these little puzzles for volatility injections now if you don't know any of this stuff and you're not paying attention any of it I mean I talk about this every single day on my morning call in Market Clubhouse we talk about extensively into the macro picture what we're looking for what are the news events what's going on in the world what's going on the geopolitical spectrum in this case we have the Middle Eastern conflict going on right now we're talking about all these things because these things matter because you could be in a trade during the middle of the day and all of a sudden there's a headline that comes out and you don't want to be sitting there saying well why is the market dropping what's happening right here why is this dropping right now the more you understand about that the more this this veil gets lifted on this mystery of the market and so just paying attention to it every single week paying attention all these press releases the news releases that are going on the scheduled releases the Fed speakers all of these things matter and if you're paying attention more and more and more of them each week you'll form a picture of what's going on and allow you to trade these things with success and so it offers a beautiful opportunity right now in the markets because you know what to expect you know what generally the reaction is going to be on these prints and then you trade around those reactions you mentioned right now that we're in kind of like that full FOMC cycle where like a lot of what's going on is depending on what happens with the Fed what's your kind of strategy as far as like adapting to different market cycles and different trends you know because I know that we talked about before that you trade have traded a lot of products you know you went from small caps now into more so into the futures how like how do you kind of adapt is an easy thing for you now because you've been around for so long or is it still a little bit higher harder where you're like hmm that worked a couple months ago but that's not working anymore yeah it's interesting you know I've gone through there's been so many points of my career where I've completely fumbled the ball and I'm big on journaling right so if I have a misstep during the day which happens to me every single day I'm going to have something where I have a misstep I will get in my journal I'll start writing that even if I don't go back and read that page of my journal just writing it down is not only cathartic because it makes you feel better about writing down your missteps but it also it allows you to contemplate in that moment what you can do from a growth perspective and so for me when I'm looking at all the times where the market has taught me some type of lesson I'm usually journaling that lesson and pulling that down and committing that to my trading memory and so for all of these cycles that I've been through all of the market cycles that I've traded through it's given me these little pieces and little nuggets of knowledge that I'm able to apply to the next market for instance I mean I would love it right now if the COVID market was back and I could be trading small caps like a crazy person again like I would love that more than anything I'd be long in the crap out of all these names and then shorten the pants off them believe me but the market cycle I'm in right now that I find success in is the FOMC market cycle right now so that's where I'm focusing my attention obviously I'm learning from that every single day and I know that we're going to die down from that pre COVID there was a sort of a press release market so that you'd have a press release out from Apple the price would spike and then you'd be able to short that price spike on that or you know you get some kind of news about NVIDIA we still have these kinds of news and press release things that happen during the day but they just don't have the same type of effect that we're seeing from like trading around the FOMC numbers the Fed speakers and the numbers that are applying to the rate decision for that instance so it's about adapting and focusing what market you're in currently finding where you can have the most edge and extract the most edge because we all have the same amount of hours to trade in the day what works for you may not work for me and what may work for me may not work for you so you want to find as as a trader you know I pride myself as a momentum trader so I look for opportunities that give me that type of momentum or that injection of liquidity and volatility I'm focused on those type of opportunities every trader is different so you want to lean into what's working for you makes sense I know you mentioned that you journal very often but can you kind of walk us through how you relieve stress after a tough day because trading is really difficult there's some days that you feel on top of the world and those days never feel as good as the shitty days that you lose money so how do you relieve stress after a tough day I work out a lot that's actually like I mean that's that's the key thing for me it's it's getting that physical release so if I have a terrible terrible day I'm usually out in my backyard and that's where I have my gym and I'm out there and I'm lifting weights and I'm getting that physical exertion and I'm getting those natural endorphins released outside of that it is just journaling for me journaling meditation and very contemplative self inflection and that's usually all done within while I'm journaling so I'm really really self inflective on what I'm writing when I'm writing my journal entries and I'm going over specifically what can I do to improve how did I screw this up and you know I do digital journaling now I used to write back in the day but now I do digital journaling so I have screenshots I'm circling areas on the chart and my journal you know if somebody else went and read it they probably wouldn't glean as much information that I get from it myself but if I go back and I read a lot of the pages I can put myself right back in that moment that I was in and I can be very self introspective on that moment reflect on what it was that made the trade not go well what was really frustrating about that trade and usually what I can do to improve that trade for next time but like you said you know there's really no antidote the worst thing ever for me was when I'd have a great week and then give it all back on Friday and then I'm the knucklehead sitting there at four o'clock in the afternoon trying to trade these stupid small cap tickers in the after hours trying to pick back up any kind of pieces I can and then I'm giving back more money in the market I have so many stories like that where I'd be Friday afternoon and I'd just hate myself I'd sit there and be like rips what the heck are you doing? Why did you do this? And you know it's like you said it's it could be the most aggravating thing in the world that could be the worst feeling in the world and there really is no instant solve antidote for that it's usually just time away from the market it's like breaking up with the market for a little bit and just having that time away from the market and just taking a step back and seeing what you could do to improve for next time worst thing you could do going on tilt and trying to make it back or you're in a drawdown you're focused on oh I only got 20 grand left of this drawdown I got to get it out I got to get it out that kind of thing we all been there man we all been there absolutely yeah yeah you and you mentioned right there about kind of like Friday afternoon like you have an amazing week you know you end up giving it back at the end of the week but a lot of people don't realize that those are kind of like emotional triggers you know where you start to lose a little bit on Friday and then you spiral and you spiral and you spiral there's kind of a good quote on Twitter where it's like you know my edge is like knowing that I'm one fucking bad trade away from acting like an idiot or knowing that I'm too bad trades away from acting like an idiot or whatever and managing those triggers is hard that's probably one of the hardest things that we have to do every day is just being able to manage ourselves and saying okay I lost there but I'm not going to revenge back or you know I that was a good idea I was on the right track but I'm not going to go revenge and gamble for the rest of the day and 100% how did you kind of train yourself to you know get that self-talk down to get that kind of like triggerless trading you know kind of down pat in order for you to kind of be successful yeah it's a really good question and I can even reflect on something that happened today so today I was trading spy options off the open we were into puts and I had a really good entry and I have all these charts up I have a really nice setup here where I have a bunch of different screens and I have a bunch of different charts that I'm watching and I wanted to trade NQ futures off the open today but I traded spy options instead I was in spy puts and they were a decent profit like 80% profit on it which is you know really decent for options and a quick resolution is about an 8 minute trade but I was looking over at NQ and NQ produced a hundred handles worth of Alpha almost instantly on one single contract that's going to be $2,000 so I missed out on something immediately I wouldn't be trading just one single contract on that I'd be levered into that move because it was such a clear and concise clean cut move to the downside and so immediately I could feel myself getting triggered by that even though I made profit on my trade I felt like I was left wanting because I didn't make the profit that I wanted from you know being able to trade the NQ so I moved over into trading the NQ and instead of barreling it in full size and going in full tilt into that even though it would have made a profit I limited myself and I said I'm only going to trade one contract from here on out and the moment that I have a losing trade I'm going to stop trading and so knowing yourself knowing your triggers knowing in the past that this is what got you in trouble because in the past I would have barreled into the NQ the moment it pops I'm in the red now I'm tripling on my size you're doing all the knucklehead things that you shouldn't be doing and by doing all these wrong moves over and over again you start to realize that there really is no way out of this other than stopping yourself right and that's easier said than done of course now for me it's a physical thing I can feel it it's behind my ears behind my ears when I start to get hot behind my ears I can physically feel it and I know that I need to put my caution flag out that's me specifically and it wasn't for years that I didn't realize that I had a physical tell that that was going to happen and so for me specifically that was by tell the moment I feel that anytime I start to trade my caution flags out my rules completely change I'm in a completely cautious mode where I'm looking for the next one or two trades that I'm losing I'm pretty much locked up for the day today could have been a multiple five figure day for me I end up making about five thousand bucks today which is not bad by any means but today was the kind of day that if I had been locked into the zone today I could have made multiple five figures now in the past that would have really disturbed me as a trader but I look at this as a win because I didn't let myself get away from myself trading is truly about self mastery and if you don't have self mastery you're out of control you may have outlier days where you do really really well but until you commit to that self mastery and mastery of one self you're never going to have consistent profitability and that's what I realized early on especially in one of my big down spells I kept on trying to rush the process get out of a drawdown and it just all came back to the same thing you need to master yourself first you have to have that self mastery and until you have that you're never going to be consistently profitable that's really important and I think something to mention as well is those lessons were probably losses expensive lessons to get to that point of being like you know what I've lost so many times being on tilt how many thousands of hundreds of thousands if not maybe even millions of dollars over the years would I have had if I just stopped and I think a lot of newer traders that you know maybe six months a year two years into the game is they don't understand that lesson yet because they have not learned it through their losses so I think it's just really important for people to understand that like you don't have to lose money to learn these lessons but some people like me maybe like you were like a little bit stubborn it takes it takes me to touch the hot stove a hundred times to be like you know what and on the hundred a hundred first time like you know maybe not this time and then just you know like some people are just some people are just wired different so like I think people really need to understand the fact that like these lessons are learned through losing money it's called market tuition so yeah and for me personally it was one lightning bolt moment for me and it's different for everybody I'm sure you have your own lightning bolt moment but for me what finally got a got me out of being a knucklehead consistently was that I looked at it as being a jerkoff boss who's taking paperwork and putting it on your desk because every single time that I'd make a knucklehead move what I'm doing is I'm digging a hole and I'm creating more work for my future self that I have to handle in the future for instance if I stop trading I'm not going to take a loss because I'm not trading any longer however if I'm a knucklehead and I continue to trade and let's say I lose an extra five thousand dollars on top that's five thousand dollars I need to make the next trading session or the next few trading sessions that I have to take care of just to get me back to baseline so that's a bunch of paperwork I'm putting on my desk and for me that was kind of this visual that I imagined my head actually wrote it out in my journal I drew this graph of a person digging a hole and I said you know this person is digging this hole they're putting paperwork on my desk I need to put a stop to this and the moment I started thinking like that that was my lightning bolt moment where I said okay all I need to do is stop being a knucklehead and then the next day is going to come I'm going to feel back at baseline and I will be financially back at baseline without that extra work that I'm causing myself No, that's a no, I think that's really good we also had Sang Luchi on the podcast as well and he talked a lot about the same thing that you're talking about where like you feel a loss coming in your body before the loss even comes you know you feel it you just need to act on your own intuition and you just need to act on that feeling that's coming the thing is is that like we're all in trade and we feel it not going our way a little bit and that's the time that we should probably either just get out of it for break even or take small loss or whatever it's that stubbornness when it starts to go down a little bit starts to go down a little bit more or starts to go up a little bit if you're short or whatever it starts to go in the other direction that stubbornness is kind of you know you can just prevent so many losses that way yeah and it's I just call it being a knucklehead you know the less that you can be a knucklehead the better yeah exactly um one thing that I wanted to kind of ask you about is the market clubhouse you know because you've been streaming on YouTube I've seen that you've been posting a lot of like Instagram shorts and stuff like that so maybe you could kind of just like touch on that a little bit maybe even like some lessons that you've learned just from mentoring other people because all three of us have mentored people before on calls with people before you know talk to people before and you really learn a lot not only about like yourself but other people as well and their views and their approaches to the market and you know it's very interesting so maybe you could kind of talk a little bit about that your experience yeah definitely so I started market clubhouse about a year ago and prior to that I was individually mentoring people and doing just one-on-one with people and I started doing that around COVID time when I had a lot of friends that had never traded before and they knew that I'd been trading for some time and they were always asked me oh hey ribs can you teach me how to trade or you know I got a Robin Hood account what do I do that kind of thing or how options work you know the classic stuff and so I was mentoring a lot of people I started putting out a newsletter at the time just for friends and family you know this this stock is going to go up really really easy because every stock was going up at the time right so you know I'll buy into Facebook buy an Nvidia buy into Google buy this you know and it was a it was great and it gave me a lot of satisfaction I've you know like I said I've owned a lot of companies in my past I've always enjoyed helping people I've always enjoyed being in that in that position where I can help people I can teach people something it's just natural it's it's something that's in my genes right and so for for mentoring people it became overwhelming at one point and I was just doing too much and I had my wife actually talked to me about this she said you know you're spending more time on the people that you're mentoring than your own trades and is that a problem for you I said no you know I love doing it I really enjoy I get a lot of satisfaction I've done really well in love in life for myself at this point so I have the luxury of being able to you know spend my time helping other people and so for me personally it was I got fulfillment out of it but she was like there's got to be a better way to do this and that's when I started toying around with the idea of of starting a community and that's what I did I started it I got a really good response from it because I wanted to see you know if if people were enjoying the style of teaching that I did in mass and and there was really good feedback so I continued pursuing it and you know fast forward to about a year later where we are now and we're really strong family really strong community we have a lot of great members in there and like you said you know you learn so much being the mentor when you have so many people that are coming to you and they're they all have sort of a common thread with one another they're struggling all in some certain similar standpoint and it allows you to see you know what's the best effective method to show people the right way to do things not maybe not the right way but a different perspective on how to trade or a different perspective on how to approach the markets and that opens up their eyes to it and it also opens up my eyes to being a better mentor for these people and so for the last year it's really been eye-opening I've refined a lot of my process and when I have a really common thread of you know whether it's a misunderstanding in the market or not knowing how to effectively trade a certain style of market that goes into a webinar and I'm doing that and producing that content into a webinar-based format and that's extremely helpful for people because they can watch it you know at their leisure and they don't have to sit and you know do sort of a one-on-one back-and-forth style of thing so yeah it's I love mentoring people I love seeing people succeed that you get a real satisfaction as a mentor being able to help people and see that success on this side it's it's a beautiful thing yeah I think it's really important like you said it helps you get better too because if you are regurgitating all this information eventually it kind of sticks in your head as well what to do right so you've been trading for 10 years now you've found a lot of success trading now my question is how do you diversify your income outside the market how do you protect yourself in case of you know whether it be like a couple of months of the market being tough or what do you do to kind of set up yourself for the future any capital that I have that I can deploy I'm usually putting that into Fixies so putting that into Treasury bonds t-bills putting that into something where I don't really have to manage that money I did have a long-term portfolio but I exited most of the majority of those positions recently within like the last year year and a half so that's that's generally where I have any of my excess capital that's where that's working and if it's not in there it's in real estate so and right now the real real estate market nobody's really moving right now because the mortgage rates in fact the mortgage rates actually hit the highest since the year 2000 today they did the the mortgage application number so it's really interesting what I predict is what's going to happen next year is that when we finally get the FOMC they're going to lower rates that'll bring mortgage rates down we're going to get a flood of products into the market we're going to get a lot of supply into the market a lot of real estate product and that's going to bring prices significantly down we're probably going to experience a crash sometimes in the 2024 but to answer your question and in fixed income products or into real estate yeah that's a thank you for your answer another thing that you another thing I mentioned was that you have a wife and it takes a certain type of female to be able to kind of like manage you know us traders so can you kind of talk about how supportive she's kind of been or maybe she wasn't supportive at all but feeling that she was yeah no she's always been my rock in this she's always been my number one fan which is you know it's a good thing and a bad thing because you always question you know am I really doing that good of a job of this person is going to be my number one fan regardless right but she's always been supportive through everything she's seen the ups and downs in trading and you know when you look back on your journey in trading there's so many down moments and if you don't have any support I was lucky enough to have her throughout my entire 10-year journey here we've been together for a very long time I was very lucky to have her here for the entire trading journey and she was there with me for you know my entrepreneurial spirit and all the businesses that I started and sold she's been with me for a very long time so she got to see the ups and downs in businesses as well and like I said I've been very blessed in my life to fortunately to have been able to be doing well in life and she's been there throughout all of that and so when it comes to trading she's seen me at my lowest and and sort of question like this isn't the same person that was that entrepreneur guy that I knew when we first met you know trading can turn you into the weakest human being on the planet it can bring you to your knees which is insane because it's like it's just this simple thing you buy and it goes up or you're selling it goes down right it's the most basic thing and when you get that wrong it cuts at your poor at least for me I'm like I said I'm very passionate about trading I could sit here and talk about trading for the next 10 hours no problem I love trading and so something that I love like that when I couldn't master it early on in my career it really cut deep and it really was one of those things that brought me to my knees I feel like if you've never cried after a very bad day of trading you've never really had your worst day of trading yet I think every real trader that's been doing this for long enough has at least one session where they had that was so bad that brought them to tears I've had at least one of those sessions myself and it's going through that bringing yourself reduced down to that where you're literally on your knees asking what the heck is going on it takes that to go through if I didn't have her support through that I don't know if I would have continued trading to be honest now that I think about that that's a great question I don't know that I would have continued trading without her support but it was her that believed in me and she said you know I've seen you do everything I've seen you knock things out of the park I've seen you come back from big draw downs I've seen you go through this before and I believe in you and that belief instilled my own belief in being able to do this and continue to do this so yeah without her support who knows where I'd be right now but there were so many times where I was trading really really brought me to my knees and having that support was so super helpful she's always been there in my corner she's never once really been the person who would say ah maybe it's time to hang it up no she's the person who always said I believe in you keep going so very fortunate to have that character in my corner yeah that's super super amazing and super expiring kind of story another thing that you did talk about was not drinking but also meditation and could you maybe touch on two things because I know it seems like you're pretty passionate about not getting drunk as shit every weekend you're pretty passionate about a very healthy lifestyle and meditating and running and stuff like that so maybe you could talk about that kind of like impact as far as like on your life and then your trading too absolutely I think that if the more discipline that you have outside of trading the more that discipline bleeds into everything else and it could be something as simple as waking up at a certain time in the morning and going bed going to bed at a certain time at night something that simple just starting there I get a lot of questions actually about that from the people that I mentor asking you know how do I start building discipline habits and a lot of it comes down to just making simple changes like that obviously now I mean I've lived a very disciplined and structured life for a very long time because that's where I found the most success in my life is when I'm disciplined and structured I had a period in my life where I was you know going out and partying when I was much younger and it was a lot of fun and of course you know that was a very key pivotal moment in my life that was amazing I had a great time doing it I wouldn't trade those experiences for the world but now you know being the age that I am I'm a little bit older now I stopped drinking probably about six or seven years ago now and it's not something that I miss whatsoever I don't miss it at all and you know I will go to social events with my friends and my family and I won't even be thinking about drinking alcohol and it's because of the effects that I get from that the the fact is that I'm never hungover I don't have to ever worry about nursing a hangover I think it was like when I turned 30 I started getting hangovers I used to drink so much back in my early 20s and I could handle just partying non-stop and it was great but then probably when I hit about 30 that's when I started getting hangovers I was like ah this is terrible I started thinking about maybe stop drinking but yeah you know having drank now for about six or seven years don't miss it at all it just produces mental clarity I also intermittent fast I've been doing that for about six seven eight years and that's just I have my first meal at noon and my last meal at about three or four p.m. and I'm fasting otherwise and it sounds crazy to people who don't do it but you know I've been doing it for so long now it's just natural I don't get hungry until about noon and I'm not really hungry after three or four p.m. but by doing these things you get an intense amount of mental clarity you get a lot of focus and your body starts to operate at a different level when I was younger and you know drinking all the time partying all the time going out to eat all the time not watching my diet there's a lack of mindfulness and there's a lack of lack of self introspection and with the way that I live my life now it's a very pure way of living and it feels very natural it feels like that's where my body's baseline should be and it's also where my mind's mental baseline should be everything feels more clear now because of these things and these practices and meditation just goes hand in hand with that I wake up in the morning and I jump out of bed like I love waking up when it's still dark outside go outside my yard and there's still crickets chirping moons out sometimes it's a beautiful thing and I really enjoy that and getting that connection of being one with nature and being out in you know just me and I'm just look up and see the stars and it's just it's a beautiful thing and there's something about that that I really treasure and it's about finding you know what it is that makes you feel very clear and just crisp in your mind for me it's just having those moments of mindfulness not drinking not doing any drugs not smoking not doing any of that crap and just focused on having a really healthy diet and having that mindfulness that is just a byproduct of all those things yeah just just from the way you talk I can tell that you've been through the ringer trading you've been through the highs you've been through the lows and that kind of brings me to I guess my final question is you think you'll be trading forever Oh man I mean I would I love trading this much and I don't think it's one of those things that I could just hang up I've been doing it for so long now I think that I may be able to take a break from it at some point but I'm always going to be interested in either talking about it or teaching people how to trade or maybe just once a week I don't know I just can't imagine that I'd ever stop trading I love doing it so much and I feel like if this is not something you're passionate about a lot of people I know who try to get in trading because they think they're going to get rich overnight you never will it's this is like three to five years minimum before you start going to see real change in profitability and you know it's it's something where if you're not passionate about this I can't imagine that you're going to do it and the people who are still doing it for long enough that they are consistently profitable it's a great question because I think the answer is going to be no I know traders that have been doing this that traders that used to work at big banks they're still trading independently with their own money because they love it so much I think that if you're doing this long term you love it and you just don't ever want to stop you know perfect and we are coming up on that kind of around that one hour mark so we're going to wrap it up here but thank you rips this was a really kind of insightful conversation talking about you know everything from liquidity to not drinking and not getting fucked up so yeah I'd like to just say a big thank you and thanks Alex and thank you for coming on thank you so much for having me thank you so much really appreciate it