 All right, now you can take the stage and just pick up and start the event. You got it. All right, well, again, thanks everybody for taking some time out to be here with us. I appreciate it. Thanks to all you guys for the opportunity. So appreciate that very much. As I said, this is kind of a time of contemplation and thankfulness as we go through a lot of turmoil in our economy. And ironically, that turmoil means capital needs to be redeployed and that means there's gonna be amazing lifetime altering once in a generation opportunities for those of us in the trading world. So I just can't emphasize that enough. But all that opportunity isn't really very valuable to you and if you're not a consistent trader and that's something people really struggle with. So today's presentation is really gonna be about the real pathway to total trading consistency. And I'm gonna walk you through what we need to do so that you can realistically get to a place where you can basically look back at your trading results to see a history of reliable consistency so that you can confidently project your results into the future. Kind of the same way you would cash flow for any other traditional business because really trading is just a non-traditional form of business. Far too many traders are really stuck in a place where they rely on hope for future profits and we wanna get you away from that to a place where you can really be confident, experience reliable, repeatable results from your trading efforts. Okay, so that's kind of our goal. Real quick, we gotta stay compliant with the law. You need to be aware of this government required disclaimer and the thing that I would always highlight is never, ever trade money you cannot afford to lose. It needs to be risk capital. And that's something that people often violate as we get into scary times, crash times, markets in turmoil, really, really important that you treat this as a business and use true risk capital. So there are other important factors there. If you wanna check that out, you can always check it out at the bottom of our corporate page at rbjfinancialgroup.com. So let's get into the good stuff here. Before you even think about the money that you wanna make from trading, you need to understand the reality of what professional career traders do to make their money from the markets with consistency. Because if you don't, you're just simply never going to be able to replicate their success. And even worse, you're gonna be constantly stuck jumping from one system, one strategy to another without ever accomplishing your performance expectations. And you're just gonna end up endlessly struggling to achieve a sustainable level of consistency from your efforts. You're just chasing your tail. So now to give you a little bit of context of what I'm about to share. As we said a little bit there in the beginning, I started trading for a living in the late 90s. And if you haven't traded, there's a lot of downtime in the markets while you wait for your trades to either make their appearance or to work themselves out. So during that time, I really tried to maximize my knowledge, constantly deepening my understanding, my skill set. I read, tested, studied just about every single way you can possibly analyze the markets. And so I soon realized that there was a ton of value in my body of work that could seriously help others speed up their learning curve, not make all the dumb mistakes that cost me that I did. So I started one of the very first real-time trading rooms, began writing articles, and that sort of naturally evolved into becoming an edge consultant and then an author in the financial industry. So I always specialized on matters of market analysis, trading risk management. And you can see, I've kind of done the circuit I've been in a lot of interviews, done a lot of magazine articles, again, written a couple of books from McGraw Hill and kind of have seen a lot of different, a lot of different traders, a lot of different cultures, a lot of different styles, which really gives me some interesting insights into what works and what doesn't. So I love business sort of at its core. And so I realized that I had been watching stocks, I've been watching these businesses vicariously, and I had a lot to learn about operations and management. So I decided to get an MBA from Boston University, which was really an amazing eye-opener. It brought me a lot of insight into the business of trading versus just the skill and execution of forecasting the markets and optimizing my edge. So I kind of rounded things out and was really valuable for me. But really the work I'm most proud of and probably best known for when I look back is that I literally wrote the book on how to optimize your trading edge, which was published by McGraw Hill. And it's also been translated into German and Japanese. So I'm really fortunate to impact traders and help them overcome their struggles in all a lot of different countries as well. Now in the book, I discuss a phenomenon in the market that I discovered and defined that all of you have experienced. I named it the payout payback cycle. Now payout payback cycle is based on an inherent flaw in the market, which I'll cover a little bit deeper in a bit. And it's actually the mechanical reason behind almost all your struggles, your inconsistency and all the frustrating experiences and humiliating losses. So when you're in a payout cycle, you're in alignment with the market environment that that particular setup or strategy that you're using was optimized for. And so you're making money and doing great and everything's good. But then sooner or later, the markets will shift and change as they always do. And then you start to experience the payback cycle in the market. And that's when the same strategy that used to work so well is out of alignment with the current market conditions. So it feels like everything just suddenly goes to hell on you and you're confused and frustrated and your performance starts to implode and you're just stuck there wondering what happened, right? So does that experience sound familiar? No, it should because this is a universal problem that all traditional setups and strategies share. Now the good news is that this roller coaster of winning and losing in a sort of manic depressive cycle isn't your fault. The hard reality of the payout payback cycle is that it's really a blind spot for most traders. And a lot of traders suffer needlessly from it without really even realizing what's causing this inconsistent performance. And this goes to even professionals. System creators especially are constantly victims of this fatal flaw. And again, that's just the unfortunate reality. And it's the reason why you or if you're developing your own systems or whatever gurus and teachers that you followed are always working really hard behind the scenes to keep one step ahead of the markets. They're always jumping from one strategy or system to another. I'm sure you've seen people update their work to maintain their access to edge. So I want you to pay close attention because now you're about to understand the real reason why everything you've tried up till now just hasn't worked for you long-term with any consistency. It works for a while and then it kind of leaves you at the altar. And because it's critical for you to be able to determine without emotions, totally with data, with objectivity if and when the odds are strongly stacked in your favor and when they are not. Because when the odds are against you what may have seen like a great potential trade to pull profits from even if the setup looked absolutely perfect when you took it those are the trades that often turn into the miserable ones. The ones that struggle and make you frustrated that lead to large uncomfortable drawdowns and eventually another loss. So we wanna have an objective way to identify and avoid those from the start before you actually take risk and get stuck. All right, so let's just see one of the simple analysis steps that we use to measure and value in the markets on our side when it isn't just to kind of give you a little taste of what I'm talking about here. It needs to be something simple and repeatable like this next example which is just one layer of our full methodology. Now we all know the market cycle up and down that's kind of obvious but let's go a little bit deeper and think about why they ever move at all. This is a daily chart of Apple. It's a popular stock many people like to follow so I put it up there. Now you can see how this stock cycled up and down within its uptrend and also notice how its volatility also cycled, right? It gets very volatile, it moves very quickly and directionally then it kind of chops sideways and it makes a big directional move then it chops sideways. So these cycles are all over the market and this particular stock like any market traded asset is gonna experience phases in the cycle of expansive movement and then consolidation as the market digests and what it's doing is attracting new bullish interest new constituencies which help it break out and trend as it goes to a new high and obviously what we're experiencing most recently is when it breaks down it causes a new wave of fear and panic and you get a big selling cycle. So these surges of action or momentum whether they are bullish or bearish can be measured with a number of different technical tools. In this screenshot I'm using a stochastic indicator to measure and track the changes in buying and selling pressures in this particular example, but it is important to point out this is just one of the factors we look at but I just wanna keep it simple so I can quickly illustrate my point. Notice the cycles of buying and selling here, right? You see how the momentum indicator also cycles as well. If we look at the last cycle and the information that the momentum indicator offered to us, you can see that price cycled up and down but really kept bouncing pretty reliably off support, right? As it releases higher, comes down to support it bounces back up. Yet at the same time, you can see each down cycle within that little choppy range in the momentum indicator showed that there was actually increasing bearish pressure in each one of those waves of selling. Okay, this simple visual analysis gives us a very clear two-dimensional indication that the bulls are losing momentum in this market, right? So this totally valid technical buy signal, right? You got a pennant or a rising wedge whatever you'd like to call it. May actually have some hidden weakness that makes it likely to struggle and fail. So see how simple and intuitive this process of objective data analysis is. I mean, you just have to remember this is an asset that's being bought or sold. It has buying pressure, selling pressure like anything else, whether it's a housing market or some kind of a retail item, it's all the same stuff. Bottom line is I want you to start to think about any market and this is a stock but because it could be Forex, Futures, anything else as just simply a complex system of buying and selling pressures and understand that there are ways to measure the shifting pressures, the momentum behind them. And those are all, those pressures are what are really the true fundamentals because that's what creates the environment in which a market makes its moves. Okay, it seems really simple but people don't often realize that. And you can see here that this market did break out, right? Got a lot of people involved and quickly collapsed and stopped everybody out who took that breakout trade for another frustrating loss. So what I want you to think about for a minute is how amazing would it feel if you did this type of analysis, you passed on this trade, you watched as it failed without you, costing you a cent or putting another stop, right? It gives you this kind of happy smug feeling when your analysis is right, which is a lot of fun. You know, cause trading should be fun for a lot of people it's a miserable painful experience and just no reason for that to have to be. Now, because the bullish and bearish pressures exist in any market on the planet, these pressures can be identified on any chart for any symbol in any market and in any timeframe. So the beauty of this is you're never limited or restricted in what you want to trade in any way. Use the same skills, the same process of demand analysis whether you're a swing or a position trader, whether you're an intraday trader, a scalper, because it's based on these principles of pressure and energy in the market. So your analysis, the way that you approach your analysis doesn't change on you when you change your market or your timeframes, okay? That's really important and really valuable. Now, one thing I want to point out here is the fact that the market just simply cannot break a meaningful level of support or resistance and it cannot correct in a substantial way or even crash as we've experienced recently without coming into an environment that makes that move possible. This is the same as, think about it, it's impossible for it to rain on you unless you have a cloud overhead, right? You can't just step out under a clear blue sky and suddenly have it spontaneously rain on you. For the rain to precipitate, you gotta have clouds. And more importantly, you actually have to have the right conditions and the right pressures in the environment to allow those clouds to form and make it rain. And the best part is the fact that these forces that create the clouds and fill them with moisture until the rain comes down are actually very measurable. They take time to build and are therefore forecastable. And the markets buying and selling pressures work very much in the same way. So supply and demand pressures, when you understand what factors, what forces, what indications to look for and how to value them, act just like meteorologists who use their forces, barometric pressure, humidity, wind direction, to name a few, and use those forces and value them and parse that information to accurately forecast bad weather approaching. And the supply and demand forces in the market have similar inputs, so they're always gonna tell you what to expect before the market makes its moves. And once you understand how to analyze this info, you'll never look at or approach the market the same way ever again, because it just opens up a whole new world of confidence because you'll have accurate, very odds-based data-driven analysis, which leads to a really newfound level of performance and more importantly, consistency. So here's how we do this. In the simple-looking chart, there are six different indications which represent the bullish and bearish supply and demand pressures that need to be considered. We've got price itself, we have market geometry. Within price action, we have price patterns that form that can relate very specific information to us. We also have various pools of liquidity that form support and resistance areas in the charts. And then finally, going down to the most granular level, we have the candlesticks themselves. And each one of those is very important. Tells us information about what the market is doing and which direction it's leaning towards. And then finally, we have the momentum behind all these factors and pressures which we can measure. So what we wanna do is analyze the quality of each of those indications of bullish and bearish supply and demand pressures. And then we wanna look at those pressures from both a short, medium, and more importantly, a long-term perspective which gives us the underlying context of the indications that we care about. And now we've gone from two dimensions into three. And this three-dimensional approach enables us to get both a quality score as well as a probability score for each buy or sell signal that you discover in any given market. It's like looking at a business to buy. Just because you wanna buy, I don't know, a gas station doesn't mean that all gas stations are equal, right? They have different values. That's what we're doing here. So hopefully you're beginning to see how this instrument-centered process gives us an objective and reliable way through data to consistently figure out the probability of how each support or resistance level which is tested will impact price. And when all these different things are put together, we get an incredible map of where the market is likely to go next with a great degree of confidence. So if we take all these different inputs, we add them up and we find out that a particular trade opportunity has, let's say a 70% and 80% or even a 90% chance to produce a profitable outcome, well, then you've defined the odds for success with total objectivity. There's no motion, there's no subjectivity involved. You now have the information to make a very adult decision and be in total control over your market experience because data is data. The methodology doesn't tell you what you wanna hear. It tells you the truth. And that truth about the odds allows you to be as aggressive or as conservative as you choose for your particular circumstances. So in other words, every time the market comes to a level of price support or resistance and creates a price pattern or setup, our group of analysis tools will show us what environment we're in, what the odds are for that environment to impact price and its ability to be strong enough to either hold or maybe break through a level of support or resistance and just all the information that's relevant to our trade and our trade management. So think about how your trading experience could be transformed if, for example, you were buying into a level of support and you knew because you've done the analysis that that support had an 80 or 90% probability of holding. You're gonna have a lot more confidence. You're not gonna be questioning or feeling scared as you take that trade. So simply put with odds analysis like this, you're able to identify the odds of what you can expect the market to do next with a great degree of accuracy well before you enter a trade. So you avoid nasty market surprises. So hopefully now, whether you're a beginner or an experienced trader, you're gonna understand a little bit about what you need, which is an objective process of discovering where the true environmental supply and demand pressures are and where they lie in context with any opportunity that provides you an indication or a signal, some kind of a buy or sell signal well before you have to commit to it. And that's the key. Know this, money made consistently from the markets is the byproduct of correct trading behavior. Most everyone goes into the markets and chases after profits. It's actually the other way around. If you really focus on your trading, the money just flows and you don't have to really bother with it. Now for me, time and locational freedom are huge, huge benefits of the trading lifestyles. We've talked about a little bit earlier. I live in Portland, Maine. It's an unbelievably beautiful place. I can leave my house and be on the boat here as you see within six minutes. I mean, I can be skiing within 45 for a day skiing or a really great skiing in about two hours. There's islands, there's all kinds of wonderful lakes if you're a fisherman. It's a really cool place to be. I couldn't live here if I didn't have this portable lifestyle. So for me, in order to be able to do this long-term and again, I've been doing this since 1997, I have to have an objective rules-based process because that allows me to produce a systemic range of outcomes that will allow me to satisfy my goals and lifestyles. It's like a business. You can project what you're gonna get. You can project how hard you need to work and you can kind of plan out your life. So here you can see me doing one of the things I love most to do with my extra time, which is sailboat racing. So that's me with the red arrow pointing at my head as I skip the boat that my team and I compete with. And over here, these pictures is taking a little bit more of a cruise sail on my way to Maine from New York City. That was a lot of fun. We literally passed by Wall Street, it's a great image there. And on these kinds of trips, the way that the cell modem technology has come up, I can get a solid LTE signal as much as seven miles offshore. So I bring my laptop. And if I want, I can kind of check positions and maybe even take some trades from the boat. You can see that there. It's the ultimate skill in lifestyle. So what's your why? Why do you want to trade? Because you have to put some time and effort into this. It's not easy. So why would you want to do this? And how serious are you about really learning the skill, the way that all career traders have to learn in order to make a real living from it? Spend some time thinking about that. Look in the mirror. Think about, why are you here? Are you willing to do the work to get really good at this? Because I'm here to tell you the honest truth. While this is a really, really, really simple business, it's not an easy one. So instead of constantly looking for shortcuts, falling for the get rich quick systems and strategies that continue to let you down and might even make you dependent on others, I mean, who possibly care more about your money than you do, right? You need to learn a skill. So please make a commitment right now and understand you'd ever want to be disappointed again and really look at your pathway to trading for a living as starting a business and operating a business. It's going to serve you really well, right? Because here's the problem. It's seductive. Trading should be super easy. Buy low, sell high, right? Not that hard of a concept to understand. So what really is it that stands in your way of getting to your goals for your trading? Well, there's a basic misunderstanding about what really generates profits from the markets because most pro traders are simply asset flippers, which is just a fancier way to make money than buying some cool stuff at a flea market than like cleaning it up and flipping it out for a profit on eBay, right? Markets are these giant pools of liquidity, which allow you to buy and sell at will. Now, to be successful at this, consistency is critical. And if you want to be consistent, then you must surrender, surrender being the operative word to an objective systematic process and become a total consistency junkie. And that means that you must make and stick to a proven trading ritual because of consistency of execution that leads to consistency of profits. And you also need to really lean into the certainty of the probability of your analysis. The math of EV, expected value, we'll talk about that in a minute. And you also, and this is something a lot of people slack on, you gotta keep a trade log so that you always know where your numbers are. Can you imagine if you went and got money from a bank and opened a, I don't know, a retail business or some kind of hot dog stand for goodness sakes and you kept no books and had no clue, whether you're doing well or poorly or whether you're making money or losing money. I mean, that's, it seems ridiculous when I described that, but yet that's how some people approach their trading. So you gotta end that. So now let's talk about reality because I love to talk theory but I also wanna really bring some things home from somebody who's lived this for a long period of time. Let's reverse engineer the trader's needs. In other words, are not, okay? So let's get to freedom. That's the goal here and build a solid financial foundation first. Then you can worry about the Ferrari and the boats and whatever your thing is on the luxury side. So $4,000 a month for housing related expenses. That'll get you a nice apartment or a decent little house someplace, pretty much anywhere in the U.S. or even the world that I've seen. Again, we're not talking about palatial mansions here. You're getting to freedom, right? You're replacing your income and you can build from there. $1,000 a month for car related expenses, right? You can lease a nice car for that, no problem. $1,000 a month for food. That may become a little more challenging here as we see more food inflation, but still it's decent amount of money for food. And then let's not be monks, $1,000 for fun and entertainment. And again, we wanna be responsible at this and treat this like a business. So we're not just gonna spend everything we make. We wanna keep at least $3,000 a month for savings and reinvestments. We can continue to grow our capital and grow our earnings, all right? So that comes out to a nice round, $10,000 per month and spendable cash. So when people get into trading, they go, well, geez, if I could just make 10 grand a month trading, life would be perfect. Well, then reality kicks because our primary partner, the tax man, is gonna take his pound of flesh. So I just went and found a little salary calculator for the state of Maine. We have pretty high taxes, but it's a gorgeous place to live. So, I mean, it seems cheap after New York living in Manhattan. So I guess it's all relative. But anyway, I calculated it out and basically you need to make 15 grand a month, 7,500 every two week pay period in order to come up with 10,000 and actual take-home salary, spendable cash to sustain this lifestyle that we've just described here. Okay, so those are the parameters. We now know what our needs are. How are we gonna create a business plan to generate those profits with reliable consistency? Well, now we come to the ugly truth, which is research, which is just a code word for hard work, right? You didn't really think they just give you the money, did they? It's, you know, the old joke, if you're at a poker table and you can't spot the sucker, it's you. Markets are kind of the same way. If you're not willing to work hard and build a skill, there are gonna be people like me out there who are just gonna take your money hand over fist and grin all the way to the boat after doing so. So this is a competition. It's a sport. You gotta be good at it. So it shouldn't be surprising to anybody. So now if you wanna do all the work yourself, my book, Optimize Your Trading Edge, has all the info you need to define and optimize a statistical edge in the markets. And you can always grab a copy on that from Amazon or anywhere books are sold. And if you wanna go through all that effort, that's fine. That's, there you go. But today I wanna talk to you about avoiding a lot of the work you'd have to do. And instead I wanna simplify your life and save you a huge amount of time crunching numbers in front of a spreadsheet, all right? So the first step to that is to figure out the basic framework you need to work within in order to get from where you are now to where you'd like to be in the future. So no matter what you're doing, I don't care, I'm very agnostic if you can't tell to strategies and setups, they come and they go. And whatever you're doing, if you like it and it works for you, that's awesome. Now it's time to find out basically the margin in that particular strategy or setup. So whatever you're using, whatever you're doing, whatever you like to trade, however you like to approach the market, you're gonna have some kind of a buy and sell signal. So you need to figure out what your EV is for that particular setup. So let's look at a very cartoonishly simple example so you understand how this works. We have a trade that triggers, based on a certain set of market behaviors that we have predefined and tested. We know from our statistical testing which is where all the work is and time and effort, hunting for that treasure that there's a 70% chance to reach our profit objective and that our profit objective will average one to one or a 100% return on risk. You risk a dollar, you make a dollar. You risk $1,000, you make $1,000, okay? Pretty straightforward. We're gonna assume that we have 100 trades taken because that's a nice round sample size. And if the statistical norms hold, then we would expect to see about 70 winners which will earn us, let's just keep the simple a dollar for every, you know, every time we risk a dollar, we'd expect to make a dollar on 70 of those opportunities and we'd expect to lose 30 times, right? 70%, 70 winners, 30 losers. So that's $30, you know, yeah, that goes, takes back our profits. So what's our net? Well, we make 70, we lose 30, we end up with 40 net. And if we take that $40 in profit divided by the 100 trades that we're taking, we now have a 40 cent per trade per dollar risked, EV or expected value. And you'll see why I break this down to the single dollar ratio in the next slide. So my experience shows that there are two to four quality opportunities per 15 hours a week that you commit to trading on average. Again, you gotta not be rigid here, you know, we're talking about averages, right? The world and the market are lumpy. There are gonna be times where you're trading frantically and you can barely keep up. And there are gonna be times where you might even go for days or maybe even a week without finding a qualified trade. So on average, two to four is what I've seen. That's eight to 16 trades per month. Now, so if the EV of a trading strategy that we're talking about here is as we've calculated, 40 cents per dollar risked in the trade, then to achieve earnings of $15,000 per month, which is what our nut is for this exercise, we would need to do the following math. $15,000 in profit that we want to earn divided by the EV per dollar risked is 15 grand divided by 0.4 or we would need to risk roughly $37,500 total risk for the month. Basic modeling, 37,500 divided by the 16 trades that we would see is about a $2,300 risk per trade. And in order to keep your trade risk below 3%, which is important because the more you lose, the bigger the drawdown, the higher the percentage you have to make in order to get it all back. So you wanna keep your drawdowns small, not only for math reasons, but also for psychology, because taking a big drawdown really hurts the ego. So we wanna keep our trade risk below 3%. So that means you need basically 100 grand in your account to realistically achieve this level of earnings. All right, great, pretty straightforward, pretty simple. Well, but what if you don't have 100 grand? We'll get into that in a minute. So again, I always think about these things in terms of ratios, you risk a dollar, you make 40 cents with this particular example. That's basically, again, about $1,500 per month and income for every $10,000 that you're trading with. So you can now scale this up or down based on your own needs, your own expectations, your own trading nut, so to speak. So let's look at this from the 30,000 foot viewpoint. If you don't have 100 grand, that's fine. Most people have five. So let's take a look here from almost like the casino's expectation, right? If you're thinking about, because casinos go through the same process, they've got a positive expectancy, they've got an edge that they're exploiting against the gamblers, that's why the house always wins. And we're doing the same here. Now, again, this is the world's lumpy, so you're not gonna have a nice smooth curve, but again, we're modeling broad strokes here. If you started with five grand and you risk with an EV of 0.4, right? 40 cents on the dollar, your risk is 3%. That's $150 in risk. Your profit expectation per trade mathematically is 60 bucks. Doesn't seem like much, right? It seems like a waste of time. That's because people don't have a long-term vision. So let's go fast forward now. You can see that if we just go through 26 trades here, the account's gone from 5,000 to roughly 6,700. Again, if the EV holds, that would be a reasonable expectation. Notice what's happened to our risk in dollars. Our risk has gone up 50% from 150 to 200 bucks. Now, we're making 80 bucks as our EV, right? So if we push this through to its logical conclusion, you can see here, after 253 trades, you'd finally get to the place where you had 100 grand in your account. And then all of this math we've been talking about would work. You would be making about 15 grand a month. And you could consider dumping your full-time job and replacing it with this kind of endeavor, okay? So let's think about that. If we assume four trades per week, 16 trades per month, it'll take about 16 months to achieve this milestone, okay? And with an EV of 1200 bucks or so per trade, assuming an average of 16 trades per month, that puts your income above the 15 grand, not to 19. So you're doing really well. So that's kind of a little bit of a slap of realism of what it could take. You should be very excited to see that it's certainly possible to go from a small account within just a couple of, what, 16 months to actually get to a place where you could quit your job and switch over to trading full-time. And again, I want you to not be rigid because these results will go up and down. Things are lumpy, but the bigger your EV, right, the better your trade, the more trades you find, the harder you work, the faster you'll get to your goals. This exercise wasn't designed to make some kind of a promise or projection, but instead I wanted to show you the levers. I wanted to show you how to determine from where you are now, where you'd like to be, how realistic is it that you're gonna get there? What's the ballpark time estimate for the edge that you're currently trading? Just the same way that you'd look at any other business. A lot of small businesses, what are the statistics? They don't make money for two or three years, so you could look that up, but it takes some time to really turn things around and trading is a business. So think of it like a business and things will open up for you. So will this be easy? No, absolutely not, but will it be worth it? Well, I think so, absolutely. So here's really the major question. Are you willing to work hard for a year or two? This means giving up watching TV and goofing off or whatever. You're working 10 to 15 hours a week. Luckily the markets are 24-7. You can trade when you're outside the hours of your normal job, but are you really willing to work for a year or two to execute your vision without taking any money out, without spending it, without taking fancy vacations or buying a car or whatever so that you can compound your account to buy your freedom? In other words, do you have the guts to stick with this and really compound to a level where you can put on a trade that'll cause you to lose three, four grand, five grand, 10 grand if you're wrong? That's really what separates the haves from the have-nots. So bottom line, you have to pick one thing and stick to it. You need to implement a consistent approach for consistent results. Nobody's gonna start a business without a clear business plan and a strategy for success. Yet again, as I said, traders will put their life savings into a new trading business without any structure to keep them safe. It's just, it's crazy to me and it's so hard to watch people jump into something foolishly and stupidly and blow themselves up because that's just gambling. And again, people like me out there and Fausto and all the folks here on this panel are the ones who are taking your money because we are the casino. And if you're gambling, I'm gonna take your money and you just can't approach the market with arrogance and expect to succeed. So save yourself the trauma of losing everything if you don't have a plan, if you don't really wanna stick with this, you don't really wanna build a skill and truly know what your odds are, you're better off doing something else, okay? But if you wanna do this, it's absolutely possible. Our clients do it all the time and it's wonderful to see people break free from the matrix so to speak and really get to that graduation moment where they quit their job and are now full-time traders. So what you gotta do is stay consistent with your execution, consistency of approach breeds consistency of performance. So you're gonna plan your trading day and stick to that schedule. You need to create a trading ritual so you have a consistent way of approaching your executions. And again, are you willing to put in the work and ride out the lumpy ups and downs to get to your true EV, your expected value for that particular strategy or setup? You know, remember even a 90% win rate, you're gonna lose 10 times out of 100, right? There's no perfection anywhere in the world and in the market for sure, and there's no easy money. There is, however, a way to make exponential returns with the exact same effort in the markets. Think about this just for a second. It takes the exact same amount of work to enter, manage and exit a trade if there is a 10,000 or a $1 million account behind it. You're just pushing buttons. There's no difference. The only difference is between your ears and in your bank account at the end of that profitable outcome, okay? So exponential returns is a very unique thing that we have that really no other business has. You know, what other business can you go in, get a salary that's maybe great and have it grow 10x, 100x over a five-year period. It's just that just doesn't happen. Well, it can in trading. And it'll only happen if you focus on process and consistency, not performance because performance actually is the byproduct of a good and stable process as you go towards your expectations. That's a really critical point. Okay, so now you hopefully realize that if you wanna be consistent over time and long-term is key, because that's where you're gonna get exponential returns and build an account from wherever you are now to something very substantial, you gotta overcome the inherent flaw, which means you have to have a proven process that is specifically designed to beat the payback cycle. And there are two ways to beat the payback cycle. And there's the hard way and the easy way. So I spent the first 15 years of my career going at the hard way. And that's this way here. You organize multiple edges. And this is what I write about in my book so that you have a number of different approaches that work in many different kinds of markets, right? You got a different arrow in your quiver for each kind of market condition. You then need to measure, track, and graph out all the changes in EV for all edges because EV is constantly shifting, so you create a moving average for it. And then you'll actually be able to see and analyze the payback cycles as they shift forward against you. So you know what strategies you should be trading, what you should be avoiding, in that particular market condition or circumstance. Then you bounce from one trade setup strategy, analysis modality to the next as you constantly chase the payout cycles. And this is exhausting. It's a lot of work, but it does work and it does create consistency. And I did it for 15 years. Now the second way to overcome the payout payback cycle is something that my current partner and the creator and developer of the methodology that we use, the Market Vulnerability Index, he came into my life about 10 years ago now as a consulting client. When I saw what he had done, which was he had independently discovered the payout payback cycle, but he had a different approach. My approach was to be good at a bunch of different things and to bounce from thing to thing to thing as the vagaries of the market shifted. Roger's approach was a little different. He utilized a consistent, principle-based set of indications and processes which self-adapt to changing market conditions. So you learn one thing and you're left to be, in this great position where you're always where the market, you know where the market environmental pressures are, no matter what they are, what the current conditions are or how they behave, right? Self-adapting, it's almost self-learning in a way. And you're not focusing on setups. Instead, you're focusing on filtration. These filters which help you objectively determine which setups are forming in a payout environment which produces quick and easy profits versus a payback environment which produces tough gains, if any, and mostly trades that wallow, struggle, lots of stopouts, okay? So this approach allows you to bypass all that research, all those modeling, all the spreadsheets, the constant updates of all the different EVs, all the graphing that you needed to build, optimize, and maintain a consistent edge in the markets. It's the equivalent to running around like a crazy person pushing the merry-go-round and just standing still and letting the merry-go-round circle by and come back to you, right? It's awesome. So for the last 10 years, I haven't had to go into the lab and do all that work. And it's made my life a lot easier. I've had a lot more free time to do the things that I enjoy in my life. So the question is, would you like help in learning the robust analysis process that provides you with this consistency you need and want in order to accomplish your trading goals with confidence and thus avoid the roller coaster trap that keeps you jumping from system to system and you finally are gonna get your consistent results that you've been looking for from your trading. This is exactly what my partners and I at RBJ Financial Group teach to a select group of traders each year. Now, before I tell you the details of the program, I wanna share some direct feedback from our clients because I suspect you don't really care about me, about Roger, how we trade ourselves. Instead, you would care about how effective we are at helping others, right? How can we affect change in other people? So this is from Randy. Randy says, hello, Masters, Roger and Bo. I'm Roger Corey, my partner at RBJ. I hope this message finds you both in good health and spirits. One of the biggest past challenges I've always had has been to completely trust and believe in any trading system I was trying out. I've just been burnt too many times, but was impressed that you'd actually trade your methodology live. A lot of what we do is based around live analysis, live interactions. So that's a big part of what we do. It gives a lot of confidence to people. So anyway, he saw that. I signed up and you certainly are walking your talk, your commitment to making sure your students learn is absolutely unparalleled in this industry. You're covering every aspect required to transform inconsistent traders into consistent traders, kudos to you. And so he was giving us some of his results, took 20 trades, 19 winners, zero losers. He had one break even, he made a bunch of ticks. But what I'm most proud of is that his overall trading experience was the no stress express. So many people approached the market with white knuckles and gritted teeth and high stress, high blood pressure. It's just not necessary. So I love freeing people from that negativity so they can actually enjoy trading. It's like doing a crossword puzzle instead of trying to get slapped around with a wet noodle all the time. This is from Victor. Victor trades, he's a professional wind surfer in the Canary Islands and he trades to basically pay his bills while he works on his wind surfing career. So pretty awesome story. Fun fact, with the results I've got from having the sessions with Bo and you on my real account with the percentages I've made, I've paid the expenses. So basically by doing these sessions, they have paid for themselves, ha ha, it's just awesome to see. Then we've got this from Alex. Alex is an airline pilot. Also, I'd like to add that I'm really loving this approach to learning how to forecast the markets. You guys were absolutely correct. This is what I've been searching for. This is the approach to trading that I want to develop and master moving forward. It has provided me a newfound confidence and optimism in believing that I will ultimately be able to have consistency in my trading once and for all. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you for teaching us these skills and principles. You guys really are changing people's lives in massively positive ways. Sincerely, Alex. You know, that's the fuel for why we do what we do. I mean, we could go off and hide in our ivory towers and trade and make the money we needed and kind of walk away from things. But there's a high, honestly after 20 plus years of trading, it's boring. It's boring as can be and this keeps me motivated, keeps me excited, keeps me engaged. The high that you get when somebody removes themselves from the matrix of their cubicle farm and becomes a full-time trader is just so sexy. I love it. So it is a wonderful symbiosis here where we're able to help people and they're actually able to help keep us juiced up and engaged in the markets, which is pretty boring after a long period of time of doing this. This is Michael, he's from Australia. And so he was a bit frustrated with some of the quiet markets when he was available outside of his normal working hours. He said, it's also, it amazes me how much fun forecasting is when you can apply it to a market that's actually moving. Previously, I would practice forecasting and try not to fall asleep when doing it. So he had switched to futures where it was a little bit more movement from Forex, I believe is where this is coming from. I have recorded one loss and one break even over the last 15 trades and I can not only see this continuing, but also I see a lot more trades coming my way. Thank you so much for your help and getting me where I am. I know I wouldn't be able to do it without you. And then Sirah is a gentleman who was, had sort of finished his work career as he was driving Uber and working on learning how to trade. And he wrote to us on his one-year anniversary. Just completed my one-year anniversary since getting the 3D Apex system. I have celebrated with a short session with Roger Corey, thanks Roger. Here are my trades since then. All micro, NQ and ESC, Ching, 19 out of 20, not one loss, one break even. We've seen a pattern here. It's a very high probability methodology when you can forecast markets, you then have the ability to choose what kind of experience you want. Do you want really high probability trades which are less off, they come on less often, but are very high probability and low stress. Are you more aggressive? Do you wanna trade more often? You can decide what you'd like to do. So the question that is, are you interested in a very intensive hands-on online trading solution? Our experience shows that people tend to drift when they're on their own. For this reason, we don't really, we don't have sort of static courses and things. And we really, for the last 10 years, have focused our work on very high end, very intensive mentoring, which is based around live interactions and real-time market forecasting sessions, right? You know, we're working virtually in the way that you might expect if we had, I don't know, an office someplace that you could come into. Luckily, we have all these wonderful distance tools which we're using right now, which allow us to share screens in real-time and look at, you know, do trade reviews and all the things that we do. Our core mentoring process is a 12-month program. And because we work with people so intensely, we wanna really enjoy the folks that we work with. We wanna make sure they also have the right attitude and that they're gonna follow through. We're very committed to them. We wanna make sure they're committed to us and to themselves, most importantly. So our program is by application only. It's not for the masses and it has a pretty strict set of minimum capital requirements and also an in-depth evaluation process before a candidate is accepted into the program. So I've tried to leave space here for some questions. There's no way in an hour I could give you all the information, proof and details that you'd need in order to make an intelligent decision about investing that kind of time and money. So what we've done is we've put together kind of a market manifesto to describe what we do as well as a five-day free training on our breakthrough process, which has just tons of proof elements and descriptions. And that's all available for free at MarketForecastingAcademy.com. And also, by the way, I think that's up now. On the page, you're gonna see a video which shows how we forecasted the corona crash. And once you grab your copy of the manifesto, which is free again, just go to MarketForecastingAcademy.com. One of the videos that's in there in the five-day training shows how the process that we use keeps people safe ahead of nasty market surprises. Because remember, no market can crash or even just put it in a substantial correction without the environment being conducive. So we can see that and you get a heads up. It's very valuable. We've saved people a lot of pain and suffering in this corona crash. So just think about it. If you still have your money invested in stocks, you've been writing this up and down in your retirement account, how valuable would it have been to have known well ahead of time and be able to move into cash out of harm's way? Got a lot of friends and family I've been able to put into that lifeboat and they kind of gave me some guff. And because don't forget, everything's supposed to be perfect in the economy. And then all of a sudden the bottom fell out and now they're very thankful. So again, it makes me feel really good. And if I didn't mention it already, this proprietary method of analysis that we have is really a filter. And so it's agnostic to set up our strategy. It enables you to take any set up or strategy that you've invested in or developed yourself and you can transform that into a consistent performer because you're gonna be able to pick out which instances of that setup are occurring in a payout or a payback environment. And this really is an A to Z solution. So if you don't have a strategy or set up, if you're just coming into the market because the crash has kind of shocked you into realizing that there's this skill set out there and if you learned it, you'd be able to predict these things ahead of time, that's okay too because we will teach optimized strategies for entry and exit in the training as well. Okay, so now with this training, because of how careful we are and with who we work with, we can guarantee that this will be the last trading solution you'll ever need. Because it's self-adjusting, it's dynamic. You're never ever gonna have to worry about looking for the next new thing in your efforts to stay ahead of the markets. So we can guarantee with this process, there's never a version 2.0, we never have to update it. It's been static for the last 10 years, we've seen lots of different market environments in those last 10 years and the performance levels have stayed within the similar range of results. So you don't have to worry, it's just gonna suddenly stop working for you. This isn't a gimmick, this isn't a strategy, this is a skill, this is a real bona fide skill of how to objectively, through data and measurement, accurately analyze and forecast market conditions, direction, and high probability turning points. So that skill will faithfully serve you for as long as you'd like to trade. So if you're a self-motivated and driven trader with a good work ethic, I'd love to offer this to you. If you go to marketforecastingacademy.com, you can get access to this complete training and solve your struggles with inconsistency once and for all. It's not gonna take too much time, it's not a, the market manifesto is not terribly long. Highly recommend you go through it and then it follows up five days of free training, which show you a lot of good proof elements, a lot of forecasts, a lot of description about how this works, why this works and what's different about it. If you go through the five-day training and you think this is a good fit, then we'd love for you to fill out an application and we'll get on the phone either with myself or with Roger and have a one-on-one conversation about where you came from, what your goals are, and if it's a good fit for us, then we can help you learn to forecast market prices and gain that confidence and accuracy in your trading. So that's what I got for you here. Awesome, we've got about 10 minutes for questions. Let me go find the question area and let me see if I can answer some questions. I'm sure that there's some things that have popped up here. All right, let me take this back here and put that up so you can have that URL. All right, let's see. I'm scrolling back here. Make sure I didn't miss anybody. All right. All right, is this recorded for review later? Yes, these recordings will be, will go out. Yeah, the Market Forecasting Academy.com is the URL. People are asking what the cost of the training is. Well, it really depends on the person. We have a bunch of different options. We deal with people from seven, eight figure accounts down to folks who are learning to trade. You gotta have some capital, you gotta have some willingness to invest in yourself and not have that investment hurt you. We're not gonna take money from you if that's gonna basically be your trading account. So it's not cheap, but you're getting 12 months of very hands-on mentoring. At the end of it, you're going to be a Market Forecaster. You're going to have the ability to see what the market is likely to do next in a way that's really remarkable and unique. Hey, Bo, it's me. Just wanna jump in here really quick and just kind of say something. So, people don't understand, and we do the same thing here at Cybertree University. I was trying to explain to everyone that not everyone's really qualified to trade. And I said, that's okay. And unfortunately there are other, I'm not looking to bash any of the schools right there, but some people just like to just, here's a course, here's 800 hours of videos and go knock yourself out. And one of the things I really appreciate what you said, and I hope everyone comes to stand it and maybe you can explain it again, because sometimes they need to hear from multiple people, but why would you interview somebody before you train them? Well, in our case, we literally guarantee their success. So we're not gonna work with somebody, we can't help. Think of us like a doctor, right? I'm a heart doctor, and you come in with an ingrown toenail, I can't help you. That's not what I do. But he wants to. But with the wrong, but no, that's the same, watch it. But another person says, oh yeah, I could do it. You know, I got a license. You know what I mean? Right, yep. I think honestly, and it's, you know, Faso, you're in the same boat where you really care about your people. It's not just a burn and churn meat factory, which a lot of these places are. I mean, how many people have we seen come in, make a bunch of promises, you know, become fairly dominant in the industry and then blow themselves up spectacularly because of shady business practices, you know, being shut down by the FTC just happened. I mean, you know, these fly by night, people put up a good front and they have a lot of nice, fancy marketing, but you know, look at people who've been around a long time. Look at Faso, don't look at me. You know, look at other people in this industry who've put some time into this. We've learned the hard way that there are certain people that just plain don't do the work. You know, I don't know if you've had this experience, but I in the past have sold, you know, newsletters and things like that, that were login-based, you know, static products and the people would pay a couple of thousand dollars for access, it's horrifying how few people actually signed in and went through all the videos. You know, so by being in a mentorship, by being in a live trading room, like I know you do Faso, like, you know, what we do with all the trade reviews that we do, we hold people accountable. We are constantly, you know, telling them, do not suffer in silence. If you're stuck, if you're frustrated, if you're having difficulties, reach out to us. That's why you paid us, that's why we're here. You know, that's why we don't work with 10,000 people a year. We work with a very, very small select few because we really wanna get into a relationship with that person and get them from, you know, whatever their past experiences have been and break them through to the other side. One of my, you know, some of my favorite clients are people who've been struggling for five, 10, 15 years even and they tried everything, they're smart, like, you know, they just, they haven't gotten it. And if you can kind of hold their hand and, you know, sometimes, you know, push them a little bit, get them outside their comfort zone, then you'd be surprised at what they can achieve. And, oh my God, if you have somebody who's been fighting the market for 10 years and you break them through, just the joy, child-like excitement and joy on that person's face is just so cool. You just can't, you can't really describe what that feels like to break somebody out of that, that, you know, that jail of inconsistency. So anyway, that's why we do it. We're picky. Plus the other thing too is we do this for, you know, for our own enjoyment as well as helping others. So, you know, every time I see somebody who's in my trading family and we really do think of, you know, ourselves as the RVJ trading family, if I go, oh, geez, there's that guy again. You know, then I've screwed up, right? I want to be going, oh, there's somebody who has a problem I can fix. Ooh, there's somebody that I enjoy talking to, you know. So that's our reasons why the interview process is there. Again, if you, well, you know, have a conversation, it's not going to cost you anything. That's another nice thing about what we do is, you know, the information is free. If it's a good fit, you know, we've opened the door wide. We've rolled out the red carpet, reach out to us. We'd love to have a conversation with you, but it's not going to be easy. We're going to hold you to task. It's going to take some work. It's going to take some effort. It's going to take some consistency and we'll get you where you want to go. But we have to have the confidence that person has that kind of, you know, oomph to actually follow through. You know, it's just like, it's just like some business owners out there. And I always kind of remind everyone, how many people have business, have a business, have employees, and like, damn, I should have got rid of that guy a long time ago, or I shouldn't have hired him before. And next thing you know, you finally get rid of them, and then you get, I don't know about where you are, but over here in New York, you know, I mean, you're not too far from me. But then you get, now you get someone who filed unemployment. And it's like, wait a minute, this guy filed unemployment after two months, it worked for me. And now I got to pay for the next two, and next thing you know, like, hopefully he gets a job. And the next thing you know, it's like, a year later, he's still in unemployment. And he's like, obviously, I didn't do my due diligence. So my point is this, that some of you business owners, I'm bringing this up, that's why you really have to do your due diligence before you hire someone, just like training someone, because it's not for everybody. And that's why I wanted Bo to come on and kind of talk about it. Because like Bo mentioned, we've been around for so long, we've been, I've been doing this 25 years, Bo, I think you've been doing it for over 20 years, I mean, almost as long as I have. And when you could last through the crashes that we've last through, you know- How many of them, like three or four now? Yeah, I mean, look, the financial crisis, the internet bubble, you know, 9-11, all these, I mean, going back, I mean, even 95, I forgot the name of that crash, but there was another one, the flash crash, people don't realize it. So the thing is this, when you surround yourself with good traders, you become a good trader, but you know, I just thought one of the greatest things that you mentioned, because I mentioned all the time, is the biggest things you gotta, everyone's gotta be cared of, be careful of. Be careful of clickbait that you find on like YouTube and Facebook. Be careful of being in a room with 1,000 traders, okay? Because I don't understand how someone can even learn something being in a room with 1,000 traders, other than just, you know, just racking them, whatever they can. You know, listen, I know people like the chaos, but you know, you wanna do it right, you're gonna have to pay for it, but you also gotta be interviewed. That's really where it comes down to it. But with that said, Bo, listen, and last minute things, you know, whatever, but thanks for coming. I just gotta, yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. It's fun to kind of reconnect, and you'll have the same perspective. How foolish is it to weasel, you know, about some $300, $600, $1,000, you know, a thing where it's just like a book or a course or whatever, when you're not, unfortunately, most people don't open them or actually use them. First of all, number one, so it makes you wonder why they bought them. But also, you know, do you wanna cheap brain surgeon? Do you wanna two-for-one boob job, right? You get what you pay for. So when you have somebody who's willing to open up and really get into a relationship with you and really experience that mentoring, and you know, Faso was talking about, I would do the events at the expo. They were live trading events. People were actually standing there, trading live in front of a group. It takes a lot of balls to do that. It takes a lot of confidence to do that. Those are the people that you want to be involved with. They're where you wanna be. They're showing you why and how and what it takes, which is often a little bit different than the fantasy you might have. You know, and different people have different fits. There's plenty of room for great people in this industry and there are a lot of them out there. So Faso, you're one of the good ones. Thanks for the opportunity. I've enjoyed it. Anybody who wants information, it's all there for free, marketforecastingacademy.com. If you're a good fit, we'd love to chat with you. Take care and enjoy this market crash. I'm telling you, you know, the crash hurts a lot of people, which is unfortunate, but it is just a bonanza for the active trader. So it's a neat time to be involved in the markets and make sure you get your piece of it.