 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, we are going to be talking about shiny object syndrome. And we've got a special guest today, Mr. Tim Weiss. Trading the markets can be difficult to master and seemingly just out of reach. Professional traders have a secret. Trading requires total mental and emotional control. It requires the Trade Hacker Mindset. All right, so let's jump into this topic of the shiny object syndrome. Like I said, we've got Mr. Tim Weiss with us today. Tim, say hello to Trade Hacker Nation. Hello, Trade Hackers. So I reached out to Tim and because I know that Tim is such a big mindset guy when it comes to trading. And I asked him if he had any topics that he would want to share with the Trade Hacker community on our podcast and he came up with several different topics and the first one that we're gonna be talking about and hopefully Tim enjoys this and he might come back for additional ones in the future but today we're gonna be talking about shiny object syndrome. And this is such a huge topic when it comes to specifically trading but really in a lot of other areas of life as well. For me as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, as a father, as a family person, as everything else that we do in life, shiny object syndrome, another way of saying that is the grass is always greener on the other side and we're constantly jumping around and losing focus on certain things and entering our focus on new things. And so it's no, with trading, it kind of compounds itself because there's so many different ways to trade. There are so many different vehicles to trade, stocks, options, futures, forex, crypto. There are so many different methodologies to trade. So it can be very difficult for a trader to focus on one thing and really become a master at that because of this shiny object syndrome. So I wanna jump into this topic and I'm gonna turn it over to you, Tim, to talk primarily because I really wanna hear your perspective. So if you would, why don't you give a little background on yourself from your trading career and then let's jump into this topic. Thank you for that introduction. And so just a little background on myself. First of all, I've been a trader full-time pretty much for about over 10 years now since the global financial crisis. I got hurt pretty bad and I vowed to myself that I would commit to learning how to trade the financial markets. And I've traded all types of markets except for crypto, believe it or not, and all types of trading strategies and systems that you might be able to think of. So, and that's been part of what I've done is jump from one thing to another over that entire period of time. So, you know, part of my background that I learned in this process was causing me a liability when it came to trading. And I do have a professional background, business background, entrepreneurial background as well as like Steve, which created this insatiable desire within me to always find something better. So I was also a turnaround specialist. So I'm always looking for what's broken and how to fix it and find something that's better. So when I approached trading, I wanted to screen all of the different trading services, trading systems, trading strategies. And, you know, I applied my critical mind to do that. And I was skeptical of everything and including the gurus that are out there. And so, you know, I couldn't really focus on myself as a result, focus on my own trading skills because I always had this attitude that the problem is outside of myself. If I'm not successful in trading, it's because I've got the wrong system, the wrong strategy, you know, the wrong service, the wrong market, whatever, not within myself. That wasn't the problem because I was smart. You know, I could, I'm a quick study. I can figure things out. So this led me to doing this, you know, jumping from one thing to another for quite a long period of time. About five years ago, I realized that, you know, this trading mindset, you know, trading psychology is something I needed to learn more about. You know, and I guess it was because some of the people that I started respecting were talking about and they were emphasizing it. And I said, well, I'll get to it one day. I'll get to it one day. But about five years ago, I did get to it. And I started really researching it and studying it quite a bit. So yeah, Mark Douglass trading in the zone is still the Bible for me. But I've looked at several other things, several other, you know, authors and trading coaches that have material on the subject. So what I started doing then was paying more attention to, you know, what was happening with Tim when Tim was trading basically is how I would put it. And I also learned that I needed to find services and coaches, trading coaches, mentors, whatever that I could trust. And how can I do that? Well, it's not easy. It's not easy because I'm trying to evaluate somebody with this critical mind I've got in trying to evaluate are they the real deal, you know, because there's unfortunately, I still believe this, the vast majority of the trading coaches out there do it to make, that's how they make their money. They're coaching and they're giving advice and they're not real traders. So the one thing that attracted me to navigation trading is everything's transparent. Steve does everything transparent puts his real trade results up there and the good, the bad and the ugly, you know, and also explains what was done right, what was done wrong and, you know, things that are gonna be done to correct it and follow rules and stuff like that. And I am very much an admirer of a rules-based trading approach. So that's what I've done is to really focus on what rules-based strategy system, whatever would work best for me. That's how I ended up with the red strategy. The, you know, weekly double calendar was everything that I've looked at seemed to be the best thing for me. And so what I just, just to wrap this up about the Sinai Object Syndrome, instead of just jumping from one thing to another and critically focusing on what was wrong with everything outside of myself, I started looking at it as an experimentation process so Tim could find out what is best for Tim. That's what I ended up doing. So by the time I got to navigation trading, I was fully in that mindset. You know, what is it about navigation trading that is gonna work best for me based upon what, you know, is my makeup? So, you know, I'm very analytical. I tried to adjust my lifestyle to fit what is best for, you know, each trading condition or trading system. And I learned the hard way that that doesn't work very well. What I needed to do was really find a way to trade that was gonna fit within my lifestyle and fit with my psychology. So options, trading options, unless you're just buying and selling, debit transactions, trading options is kind of for the thinking trader. You know, when you're selling premium, you're selling spreads and adjusting spreads, whatnot. It's for people who really are of that mindset, very analytical, want to actually have different ways to trade, different ways to, you know, adjust your trading outcome. And so options became something I decided for myself was what I was gonna really focus on. So, you know, I've traded all the other ways too. I mean, I'm a stock trader in the past. I'm a futures trader, forex trader. I've taken, you know, longer term positions, swing positions as well as, you know, day trading, you know, during the day. And anyways, so the option spread trading is what I really decided was gonna focus on and the weekly double calendar and my variation of it, the red. So it's really to say that you have tried every shiny object in the world of trading out there, sounds like. Just about, except for crypto, which actually came about kind of as I was changing, focusing on everything else and focusing on myself. I mean, crypto's relatively new in the last five years. So, yeah, and I can give somebody wants to know a particular experience about, you know, volatility trading or about news trading or whatever, watching CNBC and taking their tips. I mean, I've got all kinds of that experience, which is not pretty to say in my background. But this is really what works best for me is option spread trading, basically. So. Yeah, and I think that's just a critical thing for people to understand. And I, you know, I've obviously had conversations and interactions with now thousands of traders over the years. And, you know, I can always tell when somebody has not engaged their mental, the mindset piece of their trading or they're just new at trading all together because of the questions that they ask, you know, about, you know, I just had a question the other day about, I think it was posted on even like on a YouTube video of ours or something on our YouTube channel where somebody asked, what do you think about Tilray and what strategy would work best to trade this stock? You know, so it was a question like that, which obviously if you're asking a question like that, then you probably have not traded much. And I don't want anyone to think I'm talking down about new traders and don't ask questions because that's the only way that you learn. But the point is there's not, you know, just one best strategy to trade a stock, you know, it takes into account not only the market environment, not only the specific stock you're trading, not only what fits your lifestyle the best, but also just your mindset around what you want your methodology to be because we all have different personalities and we all see things differently. And so we are going to manage trades differently than somebody else. And someone else could have the exact same symbol, the exact same strategy, but one trader could be profitable with it and the other may lose money. And so what's the difference between the successful trader and the unsuccessful trader if they're both using the same strategy? Well, it's mindset, right? Right, right. So you do have to have a strategy that you know has an edge. You know, that you've talked about in that in your podcast that Mark Douglas talks about that. I mean, you do have to have confidence that the strategy you're using does have an edge. But the fallacy is looking at, of course, how do you know it has an edge? I mean, you're looking past performance, right? And the fallacy is taking that past performance and saying, well, this is what I'm going to do in the future, right? So that has been, you know, that's part of my sock shiny object syndrome is expecting that I can do just as soon as I start trading, I can do this kind of performance that it's generated in the past. And that's the other thing that I had to realize is that real world trading conditions are never going to be like the past. So every market, every moment in the market is unique. Some way in the future will not reflect the past. May have patterns that are similar, but, you know, it won't be exactly the same thing won't be exactly occurring at the same time that it did in the past. So there will be some variation and I had to realize that. I had to realize that anything can happen anytime in the market. So Mark Douglas harps on that quite a bit. And until I realized that I was not going to figure out what was going to happen in the market in the future. And I, you know, did have a trading strategy or system that I knew had an edge over the long term, but there's going to be variations in live trading. I was never just going to get past this, the mental hang up of trying to predict the future, trying to, you know, what's wrong, you know, it's not working out and, you know, that trading can't be very stressful. I mean, for those of us who've been trading for a while, we know that there's a lot of, you know, I call them emotional booby traps, but basically pitfalls, emotional pitfalls that we can fall into that we're our worst enemy. When that happens, we make our own stress, you know. So I just had to let go of that, right? And that's part of, you know, my background too, right? When you're a business person, a professional person, you're into controlling a lot of your environment, a lot of what's going on around you. You're the expert and when it comes to the market and you start trading and all of a sudden you're no longer the expert, it's really, really hard to let go of that. So it was. And so you were trying all these things over the years and obviously the last couple of years, you have really become pretty laser focused on a strategy that, you know, you took kind of our weekly double calendar strategy, but you, as you say, you revised it, you enhanced it and which is what you came up with for the name red revised, enhanced double diagonal strategy. And so really for the last, and correct me if I'm wrong, but really for the last two years, you've almost nearly exclusively traded this red strategy. And how, how has that felt to you from a perspective of shiny object syndrome? I mean, how are you staying so focused on that one strategy when we know that shiny object syndrome can attack us at any time? And it has, it has during that time, it's attacked me. Particularly this year, performance is not as good as last year. So of course, you know, what's wrong, you know, what, what happened that I'm doing differently. Of course, I'm not doing anything differently. It's just that the market conditions were so much more conducive last year to this strategy than this year. I mean, it doesn't mean that this year's performance is bad. I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm doing, I'm doing better than the stock market with this system, this strategy this year. So I just had to, what, what I did was instead of saying something was wrong with the strategy, I realized that not all market conditions were the best for the strategy. And so what are the pitfalls for this strategy? What kind of conditions and is there a way to refine again, you know, do another refinement enhancement or multiple, as it turned out to be, multiple variations of it to deal with different market conditions. So, you know, I'm not gonna get into all the technical aspects here, but I've been able to do that this past year. In other words, turn what I would consider a challenging environment or at times, at times it's been challenging to my advantage. And that is, you know, now I have these different ways to trade red to make it so much more powerful and robust. Robust means, you know, it's gonna do well under more market, more, you know, real world market conditions. So instead of discarding it, right? The shiny object would have been, well, I gotta find something better. You know, something's gonna be better, you know, than this, which would have been my past MO to discard it and look for something better. So. So just to clarify for those who are not familiar with red. So now you really have, I think it's, is it six or seven or eight different variations of this strategy that are designed to take advantage of certain specific environments in the market, really based around implied volatility and price movement and those kind of things. Is that correct me if I'm wrong? How many variations of the strategy are there? There's eight and one of them is for new red traders, just for new red traders. So it's basically a simplistic version of the others. Yeah, I've got eight different ways to trade it now. So when I first started, there were really, there was really just one. There was just one. So I've been able to now refine it based upon what's happening. Yeah, implied volatility. We trade different with red. We trade, you know, the Wednesday options and Friday options, it's weekly. So we're in and out, you know, every week. I do have a two week trade now. I've got a five day weekend trade. So there's a lot of different ways that I've been able to supplement, you know, the sort of core foundation of the red double diagonal because of what's happened in the market. And quite frankly, if the market conditions were so easy like they were last year, would I have been motivated to develop all that stuff? No, no, I would have sat back, you know, my, you know what? And, you know, been out, you know, hiking and golfing and snorkeling. So I don't do it as a bad thing. It was sort of, you know, maybe what was necessary as part of my development as a trader. And in so doing, by the way, all that has led to me to focus more and more on my skill development. So as a trader, so I've got, you know, lots of positions on most of the time now. And I'm not freaked out. I'm used to what happens with those positions and I can let that stress go. I am laser focused on trading about an hour and a half every day. So, and that's really, except for Wednesdays now, Wednesdays is not going to be a trading day much for me, except to just look at what's happening with open positions in case I need to close some early. But anyways, I've been able to just say, okay, an hour and a half, I can be really focused on trading and then I can let the market do its thing and not be thinking about it or stressed out or anything after that. And so I think as a trader, I know for me, and it sounds like from listening to you as well, that the shiny object syndrome can really primarily come from two different areas. Number one, if something stops working as well as it used to, I think that's probably the number one driver of us wanting to start looking for a new strategy, right? Right. Number two is if we just have one single strategy or methodology in a little box and we're just doing that every day, we get bored, right? And so, to me, it's those two are two of the most powerful drivers of going to look elsewhere for that shiny object syndrome. And if I'm hearing you correctly or at least what I'm perceiving from what you're saying is, is A, you could have that if it didn't perform as well, like you said, as well as it did last year, but two, if you're just doing the exact same thing day in, day out, you kind of get bored. It's not challenging you mentally as it would. And so one of the ways that you've battled that is to find different variations and it really became almost a challenge to you to find, okay, well, if it's this market environment, then this little tweak to the strategy would work better. Instead of going out and completely scrapping it and saying, I'm gonna go find something else to do because this isn't working as well as it did before, you channeled that shiny object syndrome into just finding these different variations in a way that continued to challenge your mind, to challenge you as a trader. And I just, I think that that was a really, I don't know, I admire the way that you did that because I think it not only created some significant value in the strategy that you use, but it also kept you from going elsewhere and just getting back into that never ending cycle of trying to find something new or better. Yeah, I'm really glad you brought up being bored because I forgot to add that in my notes because I am naturally curious. That's part of what was working in my favor, hard worker, curious and getting bored easily. So I was always improving myself as a professional or business person. And as a trader, I considered I need to find, I mean, you know, I'm all these different ways I've traded in the past. So I mean, day trading is not like a bad thing necessarily. It's just, I appreciate it's a lot of the excitement and stuff. So how do I deal with now a more less action oriented strategy or basis for my trading and not get bored? I don't have the same kind of action that I did in the past always. So that is part of what I did was to investigate ways I can actually have the strategy be more reflective of different market conditions. So I get traded more often and have more positions on. So you don't get bored when you've got eight different setups and you've got, you know, primarily I trade three different underlines and I can have, you know, anywhere from a half a dozen to a two or three dozen positions on at once. So, you don't get bored then. So, but that was a hang up for me is how can I deal with this tendency to get bored and always wanting to find something to improve it or be better or something that's better than what I'm doing. So that is part of it. Yeah. And I talk a lot on this podcast about self-awareness. And so don't forget, if you're listening to this, shiny object syndrome is different for everyone, right? So in other words, you know, for me as an example, I mean, I day trade, I also do swing trade. I do double diagonals, double calendar. So I do those strategy. I also do iron condors and iron ducts and verticals. And so I do a lot of different things. I think for me, what it came down to was, you know, I used to do stocks and futures and forex and I've done crypto too. I've done, you know, so all these different things. Whereas now, I mean, I still dabble in other things, but my almost my core primary focus and the focus of navigation trading is all around options. And there's so many different aspects of options trading that you can learn and then they can help you. You know, I think, you know, understanding, you know, how iron condors and short strangles work is also a understanding that how those work can spill over into helping you understand how calendars and diagonals and other strategies work. So for me, it was really more mastering and focusing on options. And then you can play around, you can jump around in that playground. And so I think, you know, like I said, everybody's different from a shiny object syndrome standpoint, but I think if you can find your sandbox that really excites you, then you can kind of jump around within that sandbox as long as you don't jump out of the sandbox and go play somewhere else. That's a good way of putting it. Yeah, I mean, just option strategies alone, right? Is a pretty large universe. And especially when you consider all the different underlines that you can trade each one with. So that's a pretty big sandbox there. So yeah, at some point, at some point, you know, maybe it's age also with me, but I had to realize, you know, I have to just get better at being in one sandbox. I have to learn how to just really get good at that. And I made that commitment to myself. Yeah, when I started the red strategy and after I traded it a couple of months, I said, yeah, this has got to be what I'm really gonna focus on and get good at it. So we've got a sheet for, if you're listening by audio, you can't see this. We also post these podcasts on YouTube, but Tim just came up with some bullet points. We've already kind of hit on some of these one way or another fallacy of applying skills, especially very strong technical skills used in other professions of trading. You know, I think that's a big one. And just to add a little bit more to that is, you know, a lot of people come into trading who have been successful in other areas and they try to apply what's made them successful elsewhere into trading. And it doesn't really work. Tim, you kind of touched on it as a business owner, as an entrepreneur, as a, you know, somebody who fixed things. You, you know, if you're a business owner and you have a lot of employees, you can kind of control that environment to a degree. You try to control your employees. You try to control the environment of your business. If you try to come into trading and you try to control the markets, that's where a lot of times things don't work out so well for you. No, no. Yeah, you can't just hire and fire. A strategy or a trading coach. I mean, like you do an employee or like you do hiring, you know, a service for your business. So it's just, you know, you can try it like I did, but it's going to be an exercising futility, really is. And then we talked about your second bullet, the endless process of seeking and analyzing new trading system strategies. You know, I think as a new trader, you know, we've talked about finding the methodology that fits you and fits your personality. Well, sometimes when you come in as a new trader, you know, I don't know anybody that came in and knew exactly what kind of trader they wanted to be before they even started. So, you know, part of it, part of the process of learning to trade is figuring that out and testing different system strategies, methods, vehicles, you know, all those different things. But, you know, what we talk about with shiny object syndrome is the problem is once you find something that you gravitate to, that's probably what you want to focus on. You know, if you come in and you can't stand holding positions overnight, if you like being flat by the end of the day, you probably want to focus on day trading. If you are the type of person who comes and you can't stand the, you know, the stress or the anxiety or the fast-paced motion of day trading and you want something that can kind of play out over a period of time, then day trading is not for you, right? And so, you know, I think the quicker that you can scale down and really define what it is that excites you the most and or fits your personality the quickest, the better off you're going to be with trading. Right. Yep, couldn't agree more, couldn't agree more. And your third bullet point here, failure to appreciate that regardless of how strong they are, none of these will be perfect and all will have periodic setbacks during real-world trading conditions. Every moment in the market is unique in some way. The future will not reflect the past. And so, as you talked about with, you know, trying to, you know, and I see services all the time advertising, you know, this strategy had a 90% win rate over the last three years and there's so much garbage being sold online where people are just simply going through and doing cherry-picked back tests, taking that strategy and selling it to the public as if it's something valid because of a back test that they did. And so that bullet point that you put, I mean, it hits home very clearly because, yeah, there are always going to be certain things that perform well during certain periods of time, but how you trade and how it performs in the real world and real-world trading conditions is a completely different ballgame. Right. Yeah, I hate to see that too. And I was unfortunately a sucker for a lot of those many years ago when I was naive, but, you know, it's very easy to conduct a bad back test and put in, you know, whatever you need to optimize it and claim that, you know, this has great performance and, you know, you could put up the typical disclaimer, but the implication, obviously, is that that performance is going to continue when, you know, you're trying to sell it. That's what you're looking to attract is people that buy into that. And I was, you know, like I said, I fell for that, but now I understand so much more about markets that I don't, I take that stuff for a grain of salt. You know, and I do back tests. I mean, for red, as people know, I mean, I've done lots of back testing because I just understand the nuances. It does help you understand the ins and outs and the nuances of a certain strategy or system, especially when it is somewhat complicated like red is, so. Yeah, I think just not to dig too deep on back testing in this episode, but, you know, back testing, there's a right way and a wrong way to back test. You know, if you use a back tester to find a strategy, you're always gonna find one, right? You're always gonna find something that worked over a certain period of time. And if that's how you start, if that's how you try to trade, unfortunately it's never gonna work cause you're always chasing what happened in the recent past. The way that, as you mentioned, the way that you back test is really define how different aspects of trading your strategy, which you already know works. You already know it has an edge. Using back testing to find little variations of how it worked in different market environments, that's the right way to back test. Yeah, thank you. Couldn't have said it better. When it comes to shiny object syndrome, it really comes down to you finding something that excites you, find variations of that trading style or methodology that can help you stay within the, like I said, within a sandbox of strategies around a similar type thing so that you don't veer too far off your path and to find a way that it's gonna excite you and perform well and so that you won't get bored. So I hope this episode was helpful. Tim, any last words to the trade hackers before we say goodbye? I just wish everybody a successful trading don't give up right before you find what you need to find to make it all come together and work for you. That would be that, cause I've reached those points several times where I was ready to give up. And I'm glad I didn't. I'm glad I found navigation trading in Steve in particular. That's for sure. Well, I think right before you really started focusing in a couple of years ago before you really started developing red, in fact, we had an email exchange where you essentially were going to quit, right? I mean, you were going to, you were about to go start day trading or doing something completely different. And had you done that, red would never have been developed. That's true. That's all because of the coaching you gave me at that time is what led to the development of red. That's exactly true. Well, that's awesome. Congrats on your success with the strategy and your continued development of it. I know that a lot of folks in our community loves the strategy and speaking of our community if you wanna be part of a community of like-minded traders, just go to community.navigationtrading.com. You can join for free. You'll see Tim interacting in there and we've got different channels for different strategies that we have. So folks are in there not only sharing trade ideas, we're talking about the mindset stuff that we talk about here on this podcast. So community.navigationtrading.com. We'll see you on the inside and we'll see you in the next episode.