Lance Breitstein’s Path to 8-Figure Trading Success: Key Insights and Strategies

Lance, I'd like to welcome your audience, as well as the general public to this conversation between Traders. It's really great to have you here and have a chance to sit down with you and pick your brain. I am Jonathan Chariton, a current Trillium Trader I have the pleasure to interview Lance Breitstein, a former top Trillium Trader for many years head of the Chicago office who is today a trading consultant and philanthropist did I get that right? I think that seems about right maybe also just stand up awesome dude! I can attest that that's true that's

true so as you know one of the things we do at Trillium is long form conversations with our Traders. It's a way of learning and spreading best practices across the firm but we've only ever done it with current Traders and those conversations have always been internal to the firm so today we are going to do something special and speak with you a former legendary Trillium Trader and share it publicly I have been really looking forward to this as you've been a tremendous mentor to many in the firm including a very close personal mentor to me

for many years I'm excited to have the chance to sit down with you and pick your brain. I have a ton I want to talk to you about and I'd really just like to say thank you for your time and for for doing this. My pleasure it's been great mentoring you and seeing you grow as a Trader and the friendship that gets built with it and I will say while we do have an outline for this conversation all of our playful banter is 100% unscripted and authentic. I love it I love it let's start at

the beginning beginning so how did you get into trading what brought you to Trillium sure so I think it was probably my sophomore year in college I read a random stock book and it seemed pretty fascinating and then I was looking on Amazon and I came up upon on the market Wizard series I ordered one of those books and the second I read it I was just obsessed and that really started the whole obsession of reading everything I could get my hands on starting to scour the internet and back then there wasn't the same online

presence on Twitter and everything else so I don't think there was the same level of education out there that there is now and the most obvious decision was then okay how do I work for a trading firm then as is true today you need to be so careful of what are the good firms what are the [ __ ] ones what are just the total bucket shops where you're you're you're screwed and obviously Trillium ended up sifting towards the top for being around so long and their reputation of building successful Traders and I was fortunate

enough to get the interview from on campus recruiting. So you come to Trillium and you ended up in the Jersey office how did that happen yeah so that's that's funny because I mean you know you well actually I'm not even gonna say his name because I've tried to keep him anonymous for the most part but what amazed me most about that is I was supposed to end up starting in the New York City office and so many Traders wanted to be in Manhattan so many people had that image of if I'm a real Trader you

need to work in New York City but for me I knew the caliber of this Trader I knew his ability to craft other successful Traders hold on we we have to take a step back because I think we have to do a little bit of a preamble that when you come to work at Trillium one of the things that every new Trader gets is a mentor a Trainor somebody with a vested interest in seeing you succeed who sits next to you who shows you how to trade so this is the person you're talking about and

so one one funny thing there is so many people on the internet ask oh why would you ever work for a trading firm I get to keep 100% of my profits and it's like well yeah sure but you're missing the other part what would your profits be if you did work for a great firm with great mentorship not only that but what would your probability of success be right so it's it's it's almost like would you really want 100% of zero if 99 out of 100 Traders don't succeed and if you take some of these

top firms like a Trillium the success rate is just so much higher right you're talking about I mean I don't know I feel like in the Chicago office we probably retained about like one in three or one in four trainees which for this industry is pretty damn after how long I don't know I'd say over like the couple year plus you know hitting like 100k plus you know like the 100K Milestone and so so I think probably the number one offering of of a really good firm is simply the mentorship right you're surrounded by by

Traders that all generally have Edge right like like Trillium is what I mean 120 plus people now and 120 plus probably Traders sorry I meant 120 plus Traders yeah and obviously some of those are newer but the absolute core of the firm has been around forever and you have all these Traders with Edge then you have essentially so much guidance as far as what types of strategies because the number one issue I've encountered in most retail Traders is obviously if you're a beginner they just purely don't have Edge and they're Fooled by Randomness so the

most valuable thing for most of these people is exactly that direct mentorship which both of us were so fortunate to have so fortunate I've had so many mentors including you at Trillium it's probably the number one reason and maybe the only reason I'm successful to be honest I mean I I truly don't think if I was on my own retail style I don't think I would have succeeded it was already so hard for me to begin with even with all the resources I wouldn't have had a clue and now I think the level of information

out there is is infinitely better than 15 years ago but it's it's it's still so difficult you need you need mentorship in some form without doubt so you end up in Jersey with the reason go out there is because that's the office of who was at the time the top Trader at trilo corre and you want it to be with the best y my my whole thinking was I just I don't I don't care about the New York City life I don't care about the social life the fun or whatever or the glamour all I

cared about is what is going to give me the highest chance of success at what was my dream job so you end up in Jersey with a top Trader is I mean I assume you're with the best are you just crushing it right away is that is that how it works tell whatever the opposite of crushing it right away is and I know I know later on in this series we were able to pull up that that P&L curve of myself over time but essentially I sucked our favorite Mr Cary Grill head of head of

HR I I remember quite well that he had to come down from from New York City to have a little talk with with myself and I remember it was like a nice summer day or something and maybe we were like maybe I was a year into the job or so and he comes down just to I mean carries the greatest guy on earth right and so we we he takes me out we're sitting outside on this bench and and it was the very very nice productive way of saying hey man you have all these resources

we're kind of you know we're we're just a little concerned about your progress How do you feel what can we do to better better support you which was the reality was hey man like you're getting some of the best mentorship in the business it's been a year and you're not showing too much growth like what what can we do like let's kick it into high gear and so it was it was a really slow it was a slow start like I struggled so much and it's it's a tough job and I think we can forget

that having our rookie years were so so long ago now but man the frustration you face and it's it's really tough and hard to relate to at this point but I try not to forget it when I when I mentor people because this this job is is just so uniquely difficult emotionally and psychologically and I mean actually I'm sure this will also come up but we both work with with Jonathan Katz and it it it helps you deal with the struggles of this job we're definitely going to talk about that Jonathan Katz by the way

is a performance coach a clinical psychologist who works primarily with Traders and athletes who is a who is a performance coach for both Lance and well myself because you recommended him but at this point I think we've both been working with him for years and he's been an invaluable resource so how what explain like a little bit about the like the atmosphere over in Jersey like obviously I can attest that you're one of the hardest working people and not just hard but one of the smartest working people I know so what was and you're you're

you have an amazing mentor what's the what's the issue what like what what's holding you back yeah and I think as as we know with with with trading a lot of Trades rhyme but none of them are exactly the same and I would just overall I think I'm a very reflective deep thinker I'm not a quick thinker some people are just Gunslingers shoot from the hips I'm a very slow deliberate thinker and that's not what this job requires especially at a firm like Trillium we're we're competing on those the the hyper limits of of human

performance and for me it was just trying to process all these different variables all at once and also learning from that traiter was like from drinking from a fire hose right he didn't have a couple simple plays he was doing so many different strategies and so many nuances and so many different scalps and there was was just so he had developed a system that was just so nuanced and so you would think oh a is exactly the same as B then he would be like what like how could you ever think a is like B

you're overlooking all these variables and you're like holy [ __ ] like you're your your head would just spin and it would just take it just took me so many times of getting so many reps in to just my my best analogy is it it's almost as if if we tried to hit a 90 mph fast right we would stand no chance whatsoever we would have no clue where it's going and to even stand a chance we would probably need what like 2,000 swings at at that ball and I think it just really takes a

long time to get those mental synapses and those processes firing so fast that you can make an intelligent decision and it was hard so at the time were you like was your primary focus to replicate his strategy or were you trying to take the things that he was teaching you and kind of create your own system yeah in in no way was I trying to create my own like and that's what I see so many new hires do is I mean I've trained for a while right especially at at the Chicago office and you see

so many people that not not in any malintention way but so many people try to reinvent the wheel and so much is like hey there's a lot of smart Traders at these firms if someone's telling you when a happens do B when X happens do y it's like you really just just want to follow that advice and refine it and so many people that I've trained have wasted time trying to carve their own path when it's like no monkey see monkey do for a while once you have your foundation then try to figure out your

own things so at least I was smart enough to be like hey Lance like don't be a dummy every single word this guy tells you just take it as gospel and ask questions to learn like I asked a zillion questions in fact I was I I would I was made fun of for how many questions I would always ask because I wanted to just know every piece of information and and never did I think okay I'm going to try and outsmart or reinvent the wheel at least in those early stages it makes no sense about

a year goes by and you're still not you know showing any performance by the way I don't think a year is really any huge length of time in this business especially not now I think I think the learning curve has gotten longer over time since I've started 15 years ago but it got so bad that you almost left the firm at one point right yeah no I was I was interviewing and I remember hiding the fact that I was interviewing because I was scared of of getting fired but I had student loans I had a

lot of bills to pay and it was it was concerning and it's frustrating and you you start to ask how much time do I want to give this if I'm not showing signs of Hope and so then one of our other buddies spoke with me and said look man I I think intellectually you're starting to grasp this stuff you just you're going to really regret it and I think if we think of the job itself as a trade if you succeed it's so asymmetric where you really do do want to give it the full stop

and I know a lot of the people out there watching this don't have the same resources we had right so if the resource if if the learning curve for us is two years if you don't have some of those advantages it's so much longer than that and you just really need to be in it for the long haul and so many people I try to tell them like build up your War chest do your savings whatever you need to do because if if you think okay I'm going to give this six to 12 months you

might as well not bother at all I think it's so and even a little bit more than like the specific time frame I agree with you you need to give it a little bit more time than that but the even more important than the specific time frame is to understand when you're actually making progress but the p&l is not showing it yet and this is something that I think that I learned from this is probably the the maybe the number one thing that I've learned from working with you which is so we're actually going to

put with your permission of course we're going to put a picture of the curve of your p&l from inception at Trillium to when you left just the curve to to make a point which is your learning curve is very different than most people it's slow slow slow like you just said that first year and then very very fast it's describing essentially an exponential curve and that's not an accident so I think that it's really a very revealing thing that you were able to do this so let's talk about you know your sort of attitude towards

what progress even is because I think that's going to really help explain how how a curve like this develops yeah so so full disclosure John did actually get me a bobble head present I did so I am actually biased when I say this but first thank you John and I think the bobblehead concept is so so important and a lot of people should keep in mind that so many of the concepts I discuss this wasn't Lance in 2011 or whatever didn't know these Concepts so many of these things I had to learn the hard way

and kind of develop and title and make make fun and by the way they seem intuitive I mean I feel like the the audience will listen to this and be like that's obvious but it's not obvious so many things seem obvious in retrospect are out there like like like the focus nowadays on on sleep in performance and nowadays you've got the huberman the AAS of the world all ranting about sleep and it's like man 15 years ago nobody was was the the the Traer mindset was just grind grind till till your death you know until

you're ready to drop with no sleep sure and so the bobblehead concept really dis is and focuses on rather than thinking about your p&l focus on is your expected value going up over time in other words I can still be losing money but if I'm learning from any of those mistakes I'm actually increasing my expected value and making it less negative or more positive and this becomes such a powerful mindset because if you take a really big rip and you lose 20 grand or 50 Grand you might feel awful but if you're able to learn

something and you're able to adapt AP and incorporate that and make your trading more robust and stronger and safer then guess what you lost that p&l but your expected value and how you're going to perform over time is so much better and I think especially once you start to really compete within the firm and compete with other Traders it's it's so easy to play that comparison game and get inside your head and that's when the psychology really matters and we we've we' we all know that struggle we all know those comparisons we all know pH

and how tilting everything can be and I think none of us are robots trading will always be emotional there's no way around it but the more we can recognize what's optimal and we can try to reprogram ourselves it just helps us so much better and even seeing your growth over the last couple years the things that used to tilt you or bother you you've developed such a stronger mindset and that comes from putting in the work and you're doing such a better job of of focusing on okay like even if I mess something up or

even if I miss a trade how can I learn from it how can I build a better process and how can I make sure I don't miss it and so one one thing that came up just because it's it's timely of the recording of this and and I know like a lot of firms out there aren't doing overnight trading but just just to make the point this was the second time where you where someone potentially could have participated in the overnight trading session of gme and I think what happens so often when you're training people

mentoring people you see that the good Traders can miss something but then immediately adapt and and fix that and the people that make the most progress and move their bobblehead up on that that curve the most the fastest are the people that don't need to see something happen five six seven eight nine times to learn the lesson and they see it the first time like if you were to take in in 2022 some of those CPI trades it's it's so important to adapt to that market where that was the theme so so quick how many

semiconductor breakouts do you want to see before you start participating or at least scanning for it or prepping it and thinking how to add it to your playbook and I think the really good Traders do a good job of like not taking a Mist trade or a loss too personally obviously it hurts like it's never not going to hurt but then how can I learn from this if there's nothing to learn or you've learned what there is to learn how can I then as as good old Ted lass would say just just be the Goldfish

and and move on and the other thing that I think is is important to both of us especially where where we are at our career is just the emotional Wellness aspect like nobody wants to live their whole career being miserable and I think there's it can be so easy to do that if you're always focusing on the the flaws or the mistakes you make rather than looking at where you've come from I actually think it's really hard to be really great at something if you're miserable at it I think that those two things go hand

in hand but before before I really dive into anything else let let me just say Public Service Announcement you mentioned the gme trade that just happened I should probably say that we're filming this as of June 3rd so there's a there was a trade in gme that just happened you can you can look it up so we're going to do two takes but gme is going to go up from here gme is going to go lower from here I think this is when you have to make your disclosure that you're not giving you know disclosure

this is not trading advice whatever I generally say on any recorded media the opposite always happens so essentially I think a lot of people have this intuitive idea and I did definitely did it myself when I started which is progress is you know p&l moving from the lower left to the upper right over time and that's how I would judge p&l looking back over whether it be a day a week a month a year Etc and what you showed me to do is you had this concept of your expected value or your present value as

a Trader on a chart and sort of the point on that chart is a little Lance bobblehead that would move up every time you would sort of increase your present value your expected value by by by learning something new or by or by doing something to make your expected value higher for the future so what were the ways the quote 1% improvements that you would do to to move that bobblehead up well one interesting thing that I'll I'll add actually is conceptually if you're going to have a long successful nice sustainable career by definition with

that same concept that means the p&l in the near term is actually generally going to be the least amount you ever make like most people that are in year two year four year five they're they're they're like oh my God I can't believe I missed this opportunity there's never going to be anything like that and what they don't recognize is that everything you do do in year one is going to be a rounding error in year three everything you do in year three is going to be a rounding error in year six then six and

10 and 15 and so on and so I think it's also good to maintain that that perspective as well because it's it really reinforces where the the real value comes from like wow if I become this Mega Trader and if I just keep on growing all of that dwarfs and makes makes the rest rounding a and I tried to have that mindset and one funny thing I used to do is when I would go in on Sundays to the Princeton office actually and this was when I was making literally zero dollars at the time I

I would tell myself every every hour I'm here I'm making 500 bucks and obviously I wasn't seeing the money go into my pocket but I just knew in future terms like me doing all this work one day it's it's it's going to pay whether I see it or Not My Bobblehead is moving higher I don't see it at all in the present but in the future and that that happened and so as far as those 1% improvements man they they were they were endless because there's really it's it's really an infinite set and so one

thing that's funny is to this day in my Evernote I still do a list of 1% improvements that's been going on for a couple years now they're not really traded related but but life related and it can be it can be things as simple as about breathing exercises to help you be more focused it can be improving your sleep it can be improving your diet it can be how can I better remove distractions small things like okay if if I missed this trade because I'm on my phone therefore I need to put my phone in

my desk during the trading hours it could be how can I improve a certain style of my trading it can be how can I reach out to a Trader to better incorporate options trading how can I reach out to a Trader to better incorporate earnings or whatever else and so pretty much every day I for for years I would not allow myself to leave the office unless I came up with what's this little 1% Improvement that's going to make me a little bit better and and some some of the guys in in our group together

of of our little pod they've been doing an amazing job and when you look back at that list I know we're probably thinking the same list right now when you look back at that list and you see what people can come up with in a whole year like it is it's no BS when you come up with 300 different ideas and you think wow this is really improving their game it it adds up a ton absolutely I mean this is something I learned from you but I do it the same way where I look at

p&l as a lagging indicator and every day I try to make a some 1% Improvement it could be a change or an improvement in some kind of filter or a piece of research or it could be some way to have faster situ situational awareness or put in orders in a different way and sort of the aggregation of that over time is so so powerful and it's easy to forget that when you look at it you know when you're just looking at the daily p&l or whatever and by the way this system it it is true

whether you're trying to improve it doesn't matter what your end goal is it doesn't matter if it's hitting home runs or you know you know phys physical exercise or just it's it's just as long as you are improving yourself for the future then you've done better today it doesn't matter what the results are and over time that really shows up the biggest crime you can make in trading is when ever you have a bad day to not learn the lesson and to just get frustrated and leave and I and I would just see that like

right when you train so many classes of of Traders you see who's the person that has a bad day and works harder who's the person that has a bad day and it bothers him so much that they just learn everything there is and who's the person that's just like ah screw this I'm out of here I'll figure this out tomorrow and those habits add up because ironically the most you have to gain is on your bad days if if you only reviewed on your good days you're learning probably one tenth as much as your bad

days it's so true on your on your good days that there's there's a tendency to be like you know this is great and hit the bar or whatever it is and go celebrate as opposed to you know really reflecting on how you could have gotten more out of the day and it's it's so true that if you get into the habit of when you know really learning from things that you didn't do right you end up really moving that bobblehead and over time it really shows off in such a big way I'm it's such a

profound concept and as as a beginner what what was my win what was my win rate as the first year or two I was probably I was probably neg 80% of days if I'm going to be frustrated and leave early and not get that work done guess what I'm not going anywhere because I'm only doing real work on on two out of the 10 days then and and that that sounds like an exaggeration but I've seen that happen to some degree just so so often where where where people people don't put in the work on

the bad days when that's that's literally what the job is to I would almost say a huge part of the job is just simply when I make mistakes and do things wrong and have bad days do I learn from them build systems to fix those mistakes and then just move forward it's a huge part so as a follow on to this 1% concept let's talk a little bit about Edge I remember when I started working with you I knew your reputation from from from The Firm you were one of the top Traders but you were

in Chicago I was in New York I didn't really know you personally all that well and you agreed to essentially mentor myself and a few other people and here I am I'm super excited and you know I expect we're about to have our first meeting here I am about to be read into the secrets of trading and the first question you asked me is tell me about your sleep and I'm thinking to myself Jesus this guy's a scam artist who's this hippie who wants to know about how I'm sleeping I just want to know how

he trades the way he does and I I was totally caught off guard and I'm thinking you know I came to realize very quickly thankfully why this is important because sleep is good Edge you can have a whole conversation we can do a whole podcast about sleep in and of itself but I think really the the the the most important thing is I want to talk to you about about Edge is that it's not it's not that there's one huge Edge that makes you the trader that you are it's that there's a lot of little

edges yeah and that's what makes the difference can you walk us through some examples of those small things that you know give you the edge yeah and I think what's funny is is so many people when they hear me talk about different process improvements and stuff they think I'm just like bsing and hiding the the top secret ways to improve and whenever I do videos online people don't realize that like oh wait this is the actual stuff I'm working on with with the Traders I help and so really Edge can come in many different ways

right and I think one good project for anyone in the audience is think is to just simply reflect what are the types of edge what are my specific edges and how can maximize them or build on them and so for Traders at Trillium you have a technological Edge you have generally an informational Edge from different news sources and everything you have an edge in experience right you have an edge in probably you're better capitalized than than the average Trader and then you also just have stuff like super fast internet super fast hot keys and and

and software and everything else you have super stable internet and software that's never really crashing and Edge as a Trader can even be psychological based right and if most people are going to panic and I'm someone that has seen this so many times from experience and I know that when I feel that panic in my stomach oh boy this is really really getting good that itself is even an edge and so I think it's so good and important for people to recognize what are my actual edges and why does why does that exist how can

I find more of it how can I maximize it so if you're someone that is a huge information-based Trader maybe your Edge is knowing all the context around certain news stories you know what what company has upcoming Court decisions you know the m&a status of every single deal going on you know what approvals certain biotechs are are waiting for and if that's the case where do those edges best present themselves how can you even even strengthen those but it's it's almost endless in different ways and I think so much as a Trader is our job

to to document all the different ways these edges pan out and then you build this database that you can just always refer to and I think what really happens as Traders is we build this database and it allows us to just get so many mental reps so that when we see stuff like like take golf Lima that one insurance company that had the the fuzzy Panda Research report right I was pretty bullish when that when that fully capitulated and I had a a guy helping me for for my trading course going through my Evernotes of

past short reports and he pulled up I think it was golf Delta Sierra and I don't maybe that was like a blue Orca short I can't remember the exact details but he pulled up that chart and what happened in is well as the daily like the daily chart after that short report was ex was pretty much exactly the same and he said holy [ __ ] did you did you know about this and I said of course these are all not that I remembered the exact tick or the situation but those are essentially the the

data points that get imprinted into your mind and I think some of the best Traders they just have nobody I definitely don't have photo memory and I don't think most people have photographic memory but what it is is when you spend so many hours studying charts it gets imprinted in your head and so even even take like Nate from investors underground right he's been doing this a long while and he's really good at saying oh ABC is just like XYZ and it's so important to be able to make those connections and know that in the

aggregate what kind of happens in these plays and that itself is is a form of edge right so this is like part of your 1% Improvement you know style where you're you're going to do all these different things to get all these different edges but of course it's not really like a checkbox where okay like speed check that box I'm fast now like everything is you know there there there's differences so my question is is it more important to have a lot of different edges or to have an enormous Edge in one particular you know

spot of the market yeah that's a good question I think for the most part if you have one huge Edge you can probably make the most money but the tradeoff is probably higher Vari doing so less opportunities less less trades in case anything goes wrong but I think if you have a bunch of small edges you probably can't make as much but you can have much lower variance in your trading and so there's a lot of Traders I know that are pretty much consistent consistently positive every single month every single year and a lot of

those guys have a very diverse toolkit of different trading strategies but I would say I've known the biggest Traders I've known aren't necessarily the most diverse the biggest in p&l they're always people that when they have pocket aces they know their pocket aces and they go really really really really big and oddly I think just based on personality Styles I do think one personality style tends to attract the more diverse less variant Playbook and another personality style does tend to attract the trader that wants to just go really big and burrow really deep so you

can tell me if agree with this but I've always thought about sort of edge as this pyramid and meaning let's just say there's $100 to be made on any particular play I disagree no I'm you know there's $100 to be made on any particular Play It's never the case that a hundred people are each going to make a dollar it never works that way it's usually the case that one person will make $90 and then a handful of people will get the other 10 and then the rest will lose money and that's that's such an

important Point you're bringing up it's there there's this quote by the way I think from Bruce Lee I think we've spoken about this that it's something it's I'm I'm probably going to you know destroy this but it's something to the effect of fear not the man who's practiced a thousand kicks fear the man who's practiced one kick a thousand times so I guess my point is is that when you have a deep edge in some specific thing that's the way you can make the most amount of money without a doubt on the other hand I'm

of the opinion that edge is sort of constantly eroding like it's never the case that like the Market's always trying to take your Edge away from you and so everything that I do all those small one % improvements are sort of like Edge seeds for the future you never know which you're Fighting Gravity essentially right you never know like which one is going to be sort of the next big thing or be that next deep edge but it's a way to make sure that I have that you know continuing Advantage for the future I I

think a couple things you said are so important so first of all if you were to I know we're both huge sports fans huge huge huge sports fans and if you were to take the realm of pro sarcasm by the way if any get that even with our our levels of social dysfunction we're like that is sarcasm and it's it's one of those things where even with with athletes what probably the top I don't know 20 athletes in the world might make like 90% of the total money like if you were to look at the

NBA it's a couple guys with almost all the salary right and endorsements and everything else and I think Traders need to realize that if you become super Elite in one area you really tend to get it's the Pareto principle right it's it's we saw we see this in in in The Firm all the time what's so cool about Trillium and probably like one of the most entertaining aspects is you know there's the actively traded page where you get all the aggregate stats for the Traders within the firm and you can see that a ticker might

have 50 Traders and the average p&l might be 500 bucks but there's one or two people that just blew out all the numbers Beyond imagination and so it's really like one or two people making the buy and share and so much of trading can be Winner Takes all and especially from an expected value standpoint there's only so much liquidity and whoever is getting those best prices you are by far in that best position and taking the least amount of risk and have the most reward and so that's important to recognize and and I think I

think that's why especially in the beginning you don't want to be a jack of all trades you want to just probably burrow in to one or two and until you get until you get good well the good thing is you don't have to choose right you can you can do both there's it's not like you have to it it took me a while to recognize this but I think you hear different advice like that and I think it gets so conflated because there's different advice that's right for certain stages and different periods of time if

your current strategies are really slow okay it's probably a good time to learn if your current strategies are Super Active you just want to be refining those and I think it's like there's no right answer because there's not supposed to be so the job of a Trader you have given the best answer to what the job of a Trader is that I have ever heard so can you tell us what the job of a Trader is sure so I think if you really think about our job what we're doing is we're trying to identify at

any given moment of time what do we expect or estimate that the expected value is and then based on that information how are we betting right because we'll see some trade where you think it's amazing and you might bet heavily then other people on The Firm didn't take the trade at all and and presumably they've seen many of the same ones and the question is okay why not they had a different view of expected value and so if you think about it every single thing we do is did I accurately estimate the expected value based

on experience and all the variables and everything then did I bet appropriately and I think so often what really really separated me was in times where people throughout the firm all really like the same trade if I recognized the trade as being really really good I would just bet so so so much more exponentially so the job of the Traders is essentially to identify expected value and bet accordingly yeah right so that that's that's the thing so I think that expected value is simply the most foundational Concept in trading and believe it or not even

amongst some Traders I think it's one of the most widely misunderstood things the amount of fallacies out there and and people that haven't deeply thought about expected value and like sure you can have some level of success without thinking about it but it truly impairs so many people's trading because they haven't actually done done the work and it it bleeds into their trading and their biases I am going to go so far as to say that you again you could be successful you could have a period of you know a great run without really fundamentally

understanding this but unless you fundamentally understand expected value and this is not rocket science at all I really don't think you can have a very long-term successful cure in creating or anything else that requires probabilistic thinking can you explain to us what expected value is so expected value really just comes down to over the long run what is the expectancy or in other words what is the result of doing this trade over an infinite number of times in other words right if if I flip a coin head or tails if if I win $1 for

heads lose $1 for Tails 50/50 odds in the long run I'm going to make $ Z and our goal as Traders is to find where do we have not necessarily a greater than 50/50 chance but where do we have a positive expectancy based on both the chance of success and the risk reward and so many people alone make the fallacy that they think oh I need a 60 70% win rate or or I need it's it's so I don't even know where fin twit comes up with some of this crap but so many people are

like oh I need a I need a three to one reward to risk no you don't and so many people will be like oh man like oh you you could the the risk was was 10x year aboard so what if what if you win 99.5% of the time right if your risk is 10 10x the reward you just need to size it appropriately and so many people don't understand that stuff and if that stuff sounds like gibberish you need to slow this video down and really think about it because that fundamental understanding like you said

is everything to our job so if that's sounds like gibberish to you then I think you should take the next slide we're going to put up here and pause and take a minute to watch it a few times because it might look like some horrible math formula but it is really not complicated and I think so when I started working with you one of the things that I did amongst a lot of things was I took every single trade that I made for a long period I don't know how long it was but it was

a long period of time and it it didn't matter if it was if I was risking a dollar it wasn't the size it was what was the expected value of that trade and obviously that's a you know it's a it's an estimate on my part but I wanted to get into the habit of thinking of every single trade in terms of what the expected value was not was I right was I wrong but what was the expected value and such a great exercise and so I did that for every single trade for I don't know

maybe six months until it was just ingrained in my head to think that way and this is the formula that I used so just a quick explanation if this you know if if math isn't your thing and this looks sort of horrible to you let me just run through it this is really not that complicated it is the probability of me being right in this example it's 90% And the reward is $5 and the risk is a dollar then it is 90% Time 5 minus 1us 0.9 so there's a 10% chance I'm going to be

wrong times one and all that's going to be times however many shares I think I can trade under those terms without moving the market such that th th those odds change so in this case when you do all that math the expected value of this trade comes to $44,000 this was the way that I forced myself to think about trading it was the foundational concept that really got me to the next level in my trading and I think that this is something that should be taught to everybody on day one what's what's so interesting is

is I think so many people and it's just human nature I I think for the most part so many people will overweight the really unlikely low probability worst case scenarios and for a lot of people it's just it's just a common human bias and we saw that during the the B the Silicon Valley banking crisis where when those stocks were halting I've had so many Traders debate with me halt risk and stuff and it's like okay like stocks can halt but again what's the probability that you're going to get caught in it during certain percents

and there was the famous W trade where the stock went from like 15 to like FY or something and people are worried about oh what if the stock gets halted but it's like dude that thing ended up going like 4X you know and and even even with stuff like gme and AMC moving around oh what happens if x tweet or Y tweet happens like okay it's totally valid to prepare and you want a game plan and you want to think about your risk and everything else like all those are smart things to do but if

you're going to think about those outlier risks you still need to ascribe a probability and if that probability is like oh man there's like a 1% chance the stock gets halted or a 3% chance or like okay there's like a 0. 1% chance roaring Kitty tweets out jk just kidding like this is all [ __ ] like the odds of that like it's totally fine to think about that but if the odds are like 0.1% that happens while you're in the trade you need to just essentially near discount that whole thing and the other thing

too is people will take these worst case scenarios and then they just totally forget about the fact they're able to get out of the trade like even if roaring Kitty was like oh he this was all [ __ ] that stock is not just going to magically go to $5 or something right even with the halt it's still not going to just there's still going to be some form of price Discovery and and I see it all the time where you really need to force traders to say like okay I understand that you're afraid of

that loss but but ascribe a probability yeah I mean the truth of the matter is just we live in a probabilistic world anytime you hear one of these people you know on you know TV or on the Internet whatever and they're talking about like this stock is going to go to X Y and Z and I know that I mean they don't know that the truth of the matter is there's too many variables in in the in the real world to to be able to say with 100% Clarity very many things so it's it it's

all a probability the question is what is the probability what's your risk what's your reward and you do the math to figure out on average what I'm going to make or lose in this trade if you look at that trade that I you know had just thrown up thrown up there on the screen before 10 times out of 100 I'm going to lose on that trade and those 10 times it was still a good trade y it just I just caught the wrong 10 times you want to know what makes me laugh too is all

this stuff is so pervasive in in the real world too where even if if if I'll pick on my mom for example anytime I'm I'm out out and about in the city she's like oh like be safe or even I posted once on on Twitter that I was taking the the subway in New York and people are like oh my God you're crazy and look the chance of some issue isn't zero but you still need to weight it by okay it's very very very low for the what tens of thousands of people riding the subway

every day and and then you still need to weigh it against the benefit and I I mean you're you're a longtime New Yorker right if if you're trying to get somewhere at 5:00 p.m Uptown to downtown in New York City there's generally one option because car is going to take you an hour and so many times people think oh man this worst case scenario but okay again what's the probability sure so when I started thinking in expected value by the way and and this came a lot when we started working together I realized some incredibly

profound things about my trading one of the things that I learned was that I wasn't varying my size enough based on expected value and instead I was varying my size meaning getting more size when I was most confident in a trade working but that is not necessarily the time to do it it's not when you know you could be most confident because I can be most confident on something but the reward could be very small and the risk could be enormous so that might not be the right time to size it's really when the expected

value is greatest the other thing that I realized is I was complacent in some of I don't know the most obvious trades just because they was they were obvious I had this tendency and I think I think a lot of people even at Trillium do this is that there's this tendency to want to get big and really want to crush like the sexy the crazy stuff like and you know what I'm not look there's a lot lot of money to be made in those trades I mean volatility is where opportunity is but a lot of

the time you can make you can pull so much expected value out of some of these like for lack of a better word like layup trades like that are not sexy that are not talked about on CNBC that's so much what I do with with my preaching about those Easy Money trades I think I think for almost any any beginner to intermed really almost any Trader honestly like certainly intermediate or Advanced the lowest hanging p&l is just sizing up your Easy Money trades and it's so often not the super crazy risky ones that are flying

all over the place a lot of times it's like which by the way everybody is looking at yeah yeah and and sometimes it can just be a really really simple easy trade for you where you might be able to risk one or two pennies and with 80% chance it goes 10 and most people will get 5,000 shares but they could have just as easily without slippage gotten 50,000 and if you start to take those layups and bet so much more on them that's what really started to elevate my game and what I've seen it with

so many so many Traders I work with is the biggest progress leaps come from when they're able to start sizing those those Easy Money trades then that gives them the cushion to then parlay it on on the big opportunities and that's when that curve just goes right right to the moon and this is I think probably one of the more profound things that I learned which was that it's not necessarily the case or it shouldn't even be your goal as a Trader to to to have more right ideas or be you know have a higher

hit rate instead your goal should be to capture more EV that's the way Elite Traders think that's the that's the that's the way to really improve your performance said another way it's possible to lose money but make the right decision and that be a good trade it's no different than if you ever watched the World Series of Poker those guys all they don't get better cards but at the World Series of Poker at the final table on any given year it's always three or four people that are the same people year in and year out

yeah they don't get better cards than anybody else what's different about them is that when they know that they have the best hand when they have the nuts or when they have the high expected value they get the most money in that pot as they possibly can that's the difference between those guys and that's what separates you know legendary Traders like you from the pack in my opinion so I wanted to go over if we could a few examples of some of those easy trades some of those you know some of those layup trades let's

do it all right so first let's talk about arm on April 17th 2024 yeah okay can you walk us through why that's such an easy layup trade for you sure so the reason why I like this trade was essentially the semis Nvidia smci arm had capitulated probably about a month later they got super euphoric huge blowoff candles and so arm then started to set up with support at $120 and then we had just consecutive lower highs against that support and a lot of the concepts that I talk about are pretty similar so some people have

seen me tweet or do videos on the the bouncy ball trade and while not quite the same the concept's there in that this formed support then we're having weaker and weaker bounces the trade is still technically the backside meaning we put in that euphoric top and what happened was even the prior day Nvidia and smci were really really strong arm couldn't bounce anywhere bounce anywhere and I think it was like nearly flat on the day and I was thinking wow if if these show any weakness and if this breaks 120 it's just it's just going

to crack and the floor is going to fall out and on so many there's so many different ways to trade this you can trade this intraday you can trade this as a swing trade which is I know something you're always interested in in expanding into and that $120 break it ended up trading just totally beautiful and this is something that can be premeditated it's not a super fast breaking news trade it's not a super crazy gme AMC wor about halts and and uncapped risk and stuff and it's a very defined trade that you can plan

for you can figure out how much you're willing to risk and that allows you to really hone in and and attack these much better than some of the faster ones and especially for me when I was starting out I struggled with the speed of the game so what really helped me find my footing was saying like Okay these are the couple categories of Trades that are too fast like some of the scalps is just too much for me what are these slowest replicable trades I can find and those slow trades even though they're not sexy

some of these are are just boring whatever things but they're they're just highly replicable trades and so even this is essentially just a daily chart pattern anyone can scan for this there's nothing that crazy but you've got a lot of eyes it's a super overvalued stock it's capitulated the technical is align and once that breaks it was just Look Out Below so you had I mean when we talk about easy trades I think it's really important to flush out that it's a matter of it's not it's not just conviction it's also the risk versus reward

you were never risking a ton of money in this trade you have this stock which is essentially essentially trading on air a little bit both for for variety of reasons valuation for structural reasons for the the move that it just had for its relative weakness relative to the rest of the industry and you have this kind of perfect level setup that once it breaks there's really no support underneath it so you could risk sort of I don't know what your actual out is but a small amount maybe a point or so whatever it might be

now you can tell us but in order to make this huge gap if the bottom falls out of it and because you've seen this happen so many times and because you you know you track the data and have watched things like this happen over and over and over again over your experience you know that the likelihood is actually pretty high yeah so the combination of those things is what makes it sort of an easy no-brain Nob braider trade to you instead of trying to figure out how to push your size in you know that risky

new thing let me figure out how I can get 10x 20 50x in this trade yep and so many people will try to leave their Lane rather than just say hey this is my strength this is what I'm doing well at I just need to add size as long as your expected value isn't being impaired if you've got good Edge you really want to push that gradually and prudently but push it to its maximum and so many people try and just always chase the shiny object rather than doing exactly that and even with with this

arm example I think a lot of people when we talk about data like the reality is I didn't do that much intense back testing more important than any back testing and the data was simply having a framework for how price action works and and knowing these chart patterns and like I said before every every chart Rhymes but none of them are exactly the same and that's one of the flaws of back testing how do you really back test something like arm that doesn't have even much price data how do you back test something where we've

never had semiconductors probably make that kind of move since I'd imagine I don't knowt or something and there's not really that many comparables how do you back test something that has that certain amount of float locked up and and all the other nuances it's super hard and instead it's way easier for me to just say look I know broadly the data on this but much more important is conceptually this is doing as a chart everything I really want it to do sure so let's talk about a trade that you already brought up which was GL

on April 11th this was a funny panda short but the irony of this is that if you look at the chart of this and we're going to put it up on the screen it's funny that you know it's kind of obvious that the trade is to shorted but your easy trade was actually buying it at the bottom I should I should add that's the best place to buy and I should say we tell you John and and for those who who who think that this is I don't know this is some sort I don't know

but I can I can I can attest that this is truly something that Lance is immaculately gifted at being able to read the bottom of these things I I am a student of his I'm still a student of his and yeah so just walk us through the variables the best way to buy at the bottom is to be the bottom and buy as much size to guarantee you're the bottom well that doesn't work out sometimes if but when it does you look like a legend yeah but I I'm familiar I'm very blessed to be familiar

with the criteria that you're looking at in order to buy that bottom and it is truly insightful can you walk us through some of the things that you were looking at that that really caught your eye in that trade sure and so I would say there there were there were two plays actually probably the the easier slightly easier trade was that breakdown after we had Consolidated and were unable to bounce like I think that's actually to some degree shorting it is a little bit safer play especially if if if you're a little bit newer I

think that short once we couldn't bounce after that that that first leg in that consolidation I think that's a pretty controlled way to to get involved so you're talking like right around like $90 or was no it it was later around like the 55 or whatever oh okay I thought you were talking more around like already done the leg 80 and capitulated down to 60 then Consolidated gotta yep and but I think what the the really kind of the best trade in it is once that did then break down and capitulate so that first breakdown

the short is a little bit safer definitely better for beginners but at least for me in my playbook and my expertise that move lower down towards 40 bucks that was getting just so incredibly juicy to me and again why does my view different from the market and other participants because I had so much experience to back it up and this is something I have cataloged and databased and traded so many times and so so many people don't have that information they don't have that data they don't have that experience so when they see this it

almost becomes this reflective process of oh if if we're so much it's got to be true no way this is going to bounce or else we'd be bouncing but what happens is you're able to recognize that hey wait a second like now this is just pure capitulation right the stock started at a hundred bucks some of these allegations are somewhat known not that I try to be an analyst like I don't think you want to interpret the news too much but nevertheless we had a stock go from 100 to 40 there's a lot of coverage

on this there's a lot of analysts out there there's a lot of people that have been following this and it really comes down to recogniz izing the expected value and knowing from past experience just how far something like this could could bounce and I didn't I didn't hold this one that that well but when you go back through the data of all these reports when something with these short reports really really capitulates some of those multi-day bounces can can be very very impressive I want to dig into that a little bit I think people are

saying okay everything you're saying makes sense but how do I know where to buy it how do I know it's at 40 and not 50 or 60 so what is it about this chart that screams capitulation to you at you know $40 specifically so I did actually try to buy small size initially at around 60 and but the bars weren't quite getting bigger the volume wasn't quite getting so so big this was kind of the first really big leg and so I think one of the most important Concepts in mean reversion which is so hard

for people to internalize because it's it's scary but the more legs something goes in One Direction the more probable reversal becomes and the bigger reward and the less the risk which is very rare very very rare right so let's say GL panicked all the way to $5 what's the risk you're risking at not even $5 even this company even if was bankrupt is still probably trading at a buck or something right it doesn't go to zero and that's in a worst case next day bankruptcy so your risk is really only three or four bucks and

1% of the time but if these allegations are just total [ __ ] or even if they're somewhat [ __ ] then your reward when this Stock's at $5 is so so massive and the probability of you getting some kind of Bounce is near 100% now obviously we we didn't go to five bucks but I like to use those polar extremes to really sus out these Concepts so if at five bucks you'd want hundreds of thousands of shares potentially maybe at 10 bucks you want less but as it goes higher there's certainly going to be

there should be at least some price where you're willing to buy because you recognize how good the the risk reward is at that point and so then we can do better than that that's just one variable other stuff I'm looking at is I want to look at what is the volume like during this what is the selling on the box what is the the aggression of people hitting the bid or offers is really coming low then of course one other thing that I talk about is then waiting for that turn and the only downside is

with some of these halts you need to be careful that this was at 40 bucks it was getting juicy enough that I was more scared that I wouldn't be able to get all the stock I wanted I was getting more towards way aggression than than defense but especially if you're a smaller Trader you can wait for that turn and by waiting for the turn that then allows you to have a stop that still increases your probability and so it isn't that I knew that was the bottom right because in fact I did buy small size

in the 60s and I think I I broke even or or lost minorly on that and so when you say you bought you bought small size in the 60s you're not fading this you bought it and then you you it you got out of the St yep yep and and especially in general I almost always have a stop right and so I did take one stab and it bounced in a way where like even though I didn't make money I didn't lose much either and the more important thing is once that consolidates and breaks down

and that goes another 20 points so many people take their take their licks and their losses and they say oh man I'm not going to try this or maybe they even bought it off the open at 85 bucks and and they lost or something and then they buy it at 60 and they say oh I've lost twice am I really going to lose a third time and that is actually the exactly wrong thing to do as long as you're still analyzing expected value properly because in my belief in my estimation expected value at 40 is

probably 5x to 10x better than it was at 60 and 20 to 40x better than what it was at like 85 or something and your size and your aggression should reflect that so I mean I don't know my exact position size at this point it's just so many months later but I I would assume I probably got like 10x more size at the low 40s than I did at around the 60s and again because that's driven by the expected value it's just so much better at that point again the balance is more probable I still

want to try and wait for that turn and get as much size as I can which then allows me to have a stop but it's recognizing that wow the meat on the bone when this stock is coming from 100 and we're now at 40 the meat on the bone is enormous there so I actually I think I want to point out for the audience that you're talking about a situation that is incredi you're the entire herd all of Wall Street on enormous volume you know this thing did 31 million shares that day is going in

One Direction and you're taking the opposite side of that that takes an incredible amount of focus and objectivity and I think that it's important to note that although I will say that you have some some of the best sort of some of the best mindset I've ever seen you're still an emotional psychological being and I'm curious how you go about you know holding your holding your objectivity in that moment because I would I would think that it's not that you were just born with this great gift although to a certain extent you may just have

that talent but I think it's because you've done this a thousand times and so some of that anxiety some of that fear of going against the green kind of comes out when you've done it a thousand times yep and I don't I don't think I really was born with any innate talent for this whatsoever by any means I in any aspect of training I don't think I had any innate talent I think I was very unnatural at it and much more deliberate in in my thinking than anything I really really needed but I think with

my trainer a lot of what he did was meanor version and when I was learning those first couple years you have normal human instincts when everyone is panicking you want to panic the the psychology and you literally feel it in your stomach I know you feel that adrenaline surch and that that oh holy [ __ ] especially when you see that your your p&l number red red red red red red red and there would be so many times where I would buy the first time and lose I would buy the second time and lose then

I would buy the front side on the third time and I would hit out at the bottom and my trainer would get huge size on that third time and I would be locking in a big loss and he would just crush the play and when you see that pan out dozens and dozens and dozens of times you realize oh wait I'm being the chump I'm doing the opposite and so p&l so one thing that that I I meant to say before it is it is true that sometimes you just have bad beats but I think

people overall talk themselves too much into saying oh just a bad beat so so often if you're ever taking a bad loss most times with most Traders I do think generally some interpretation was wrong and so when I was taking those losses and and my trainer was crushing it right one time can be random two can be less random when that happens 10 20 30 times and you're locking in the loss and your your your trainer's making money you need to start to realize oh wait I'm doing the opposite of what I should be doing

I'm playing the first and the second but then I'm missing missing the best one and or hitting out at the bottom on the best one or playing the front side when oh wait what I really need to be doing is minimal or not touching the first a little bit on the second then if it does happen on the third you really go big on that turn and sometimes that might mean I totally miss out on the first time and it just bounces right away so I'm okay missing a lot of the Nickels out there I

I don't I don't mind missing a lot of nickels in the smaller plays but I want to be so well positioned when craziness does happen cuz what's happening essentially people are puking out of the stock and we're getting this multi-standard deviation crazy move I the the biggest money is made at the biggest ends of the tales when when you really get the craziness to happen right even look at GameStop a couple weeks ago when it went to 80 in the pre-market so many of those people that are capitulating up there those are people that were

poorly positioned I want to be very selective and precise with where I do play so that I can be as well positioned to captured those best spots and a lot of that is recognizing those nuances and then just staying in the game and this came up with a video I did where where one one Trader Kyle Williams really really great guy he was trading GameStop a couple weeks ago and he took too many paper cuts in no man's land and then he missed when the play actually broke out and I see so many Traders they'll

trade the first couple but they're they're doing it for too much size or in too many places so that then when it's really good they're already out of the game and it's so so important to to position your risk and have Risk rules so that you're always there for when it really really gets good how many rookies have you seen locked out on some really big day and you're just like oh my God I can't why why' you hit your risk limit you never want to lock out on days like this of course I think

it's interesting though because in a situation like this well a couple of things but I think in a situation like GL first of all if I were to take you know a new person a rookie and show them a hundred examples of things that some epic capitulation and then bounce and then put them in a situation a live trading situation where they were you know supposed to trade one even though they've seen a 100 examples even if they had seen a thousand examples I don't think they'd be able to do it because emotion does take

over there's this there's this you know this devil on your shoulder or something that'll say you know this time is different it's not going to work out I'm scared everybody is you know shorting this like and and and I think that you know something you did there that I don't think I've never heard anybody point out but this is really somewhat unique to you I've actually also ironically seeing Elon Musk do this a lot of the time you have a tendency to think of arguments in the limit meaning like exes if if if G were

to go to $5 if it were if it were to go to zero would it be a good buy then and and that's a really interesting sort of formula to stay objective about something like this because if you have an argument in the limit in the most extreme case then your argument is probably good and if those test cases are so important to logic around yes right so in a situation like GL yes like it has all this negativity and and everything like that and one of the things that took me a long time to

learn in order to make a trade like this is this chart you will never ever ever get a chart like this but for there being some existential thing like hanging over it that's the only time a chart looks like this like some random stock a good company on a great day and a good tape is never just going to do this otherwise everyone wouldn't be buying it from and so so you need to have sort of that that that's the opportunity it's getting everybody sort of panick that creates the opportunity to allow the objective Trader

to be able to take the other side that's the it's it's not the you know it's not a What's the phrase that's going around now it's not the it's not the it's not a feature it's a bug something like that I've I've heard that one nice engineering you're definitely following Elon a lot yeah well for sure so I listen to his conference calls he a brilliant guy but one thing I want to point out too is you made the point that if a lot of people and trainees were to do this they'd still keep on

making the same mistake and I think that's right and I think then question becomes okay how do we reprogram those emotions then what's the best way to reprogram that and that's where I argue some of my meta learning stuff comes in into play where in the moment when it's real p&l you can't think rationally you're panicking and the best way to reprogram that is when it's not real money on the line and so what we really need to do is use some of the the trading simulator technology some of the paper trading stuff and or

recording your screen so that you can relive that moment when no pnl is on the line you don't feel the Panic you can let your rational mind Dominate and and build that rep and so I think so much of what separated me is I was making the same mistakes everyone else was but then I said how can I rep this and how can I get better at this outside of the moment when it's not the pressure and the nuances and moving so fast and maybe you start rewatching these things in half speed and you're like

wait a second this isn't so scary okay that's the big flush that's what the box and the tape looked like that's the turn this is it starting to get more stable and without the emotions involved you process so much more accurately and then when you get so many more reps when it actually happens look I'm not going to say you're you're 0% scared we're still human you're always going to feel that there's always going to be that uncertainty but you're infinitely more prepared and that that helps pan out for sure reps are definitely the key

and I think this is something like a tril you know you were the beneficiary and I was the beneficiary of we have some of the greatest technology like we have this we have a tool called Trader rerun which allows us to go and and watch a play and watch the level two Quil box and and and all the you know time and sales as they happened and watch that as many times as we would want and you know you can really gain a lot from that but I think that the the the most probably the

step that some people Miss is that you have to do the thought process to figure out what you're trying to accomplish first because if you you can get a thousand reps but if you haven't taken the time to sort of figure out you know the right way to do it and then rep it that way then you could take for example if you're swinging a baseball bat and you just go up in there and swing and you swing a thousand times the wrong way the only thing that you've done is make it you've ingrained even

more deeply a bad habit it's even now that so ironically you've put in all this work and you've made yourself worse off because you didn't first take the time to figure out okay what are the what are the physics of swinging a baseball Pat what am I trying to do and how do I do it the most efficient way and then repping that you see this with trainees so many people obsess over I put x amount of hours or work in I'd ra like obviously hours and work in general are good but only if they're

effective hours in work if you swung the bat wrong a thousand times do you really want some congratulations like do you think anyone's gonna in the trading world no one's going to Pat you on the back the Market's not going to say oh hey you you're doing the same shitty swing a thousand times good good job here's some money that's that's not how how it works and I see this with trainees the most important thing is to make sure that the things you're working on matter and I've seen this even even over the years in

in Trillium you'll have you'll have the person that relentlessly just studies the the Seeking Alpha articles and the analy analyst reports and stuff and it's like okay like I'm not saying it's useless but is it really all that effective but then they're not able to take the right stop they don't know what they're looking for and so so much of the process is are you doing work that's maximally effective then obviously if so the more the better this is the trade that you sort of ascribe as the trade that saved your career you were you

were kind of out the door you were you know interviewing and then this trade comes along and this was your setup and you went for it yeah and it's funny seeing it's a it's amazing isn't it that I was able to find all all the execs in the chart and when people talk about databasing and building building these I mean this is what over that's 11 years ago now and I was able to still find this in my notes in my records and it just goes to show the level of of work and the catalog

I it's thousands and thousands and thousands of charts and so this trade was special because on The Daily this was the daily chart this was an exhaustion Gap pattern this was a pattern that I had studied quite a bit it was something that we we viewed as a higher probability pattern and we had our little system of of where to Short where to add and while the while the executions on the chart might look a little chaotic and this is what also I laugh about with with the Twitter world is everyone's like oh my God

show me the exacts show me the exacts but you can't really see the size related to them which which obviously convolutes some of it but the most important part was I had this system and this expectation of where this stock will end up and it was something I had seen before it is something I had built those reps in this was much like that arm trade we previously discussed this was something that I was able to premeditate we knew the stock was gapping up pre-market and then we knew exactly at what prices we wanted it

we knew what we wanted to see we knew we wanted to see this huge influx of volume get sucked in off the open then a hard fail and what happened it shot up to about 9750 the volume was super super massive that added to our conviction then as it starts to roll over add add add then our Target was this would kind of exhaust towards that that balling and that's exactly what happened and this trade I think I made I think I made like 10,000 11,000 or so in it but that was literally a career

changing trade because that told me that I I can do this and I think my my boss probably made 20x what I did but I recognized that wow we did the same thing if I can just build this skill set that's that's life-changing money sure so I thought maybe quickly I would run through just you know as somebody who's learned from you but who definitely trades differently I'm a little bit more of a news Trader I would run through just one or two just quick easy trades of my own so this qys from February 6th

this was this had gone down a lot on the the day before on an analyst note that they had lost a Microsoft contract and then in the middle of the day they put out a press release that they were rescheduling their earnings and the read through that I had was why would you reschedule your earnings with your stock down that much unless you had a pretty good response and I was able to Simply buy this thinking that the Market's going to think this is this is a this is a this is you know this is

a this is a positive development they're going to have positive things to say I don't think that I took a lot of risk and I was able to scale it up just because this is some of the some of the stuff that we worked on and and to add some context to this I would say you as a Trader this is in your wheelhouse right your Edge tends to be your speed your Precision in processing these headlines your ability to sift through the noise versus what's relevant and know that context how many Traders out there

were able to piece together so quickly oh wait this qys this is the stock that that was was was down and I've seen this before I have other examples where their desire to have their earnings report early you connected those dots from pattern recognition and experience and that speed gave you some of the best expected value in the market right if you can get some of those early prints that is unbelievable because even if even if you're wrong right you can lose a couple points but that ended up going over 10 points and that's that's

some amazing risk reward with with very high probability because I've seen that same I've seen you know and I've cataloged this that when companies have something negative to say they tend to push that announcement out as long as they can when they have positive things to you know to say they tend to push it up that's just something I've noticed it seems like an obvious simple observation but that's only obvious and simple with experience with experience it's obvious and simple when you can sift that one data point out of sort of the ocean of data

points and I think that does come with experience that's that's that's part of the you know everybody gets better with experience yeah of course the other one I wanted to mention was this this is a biotech stock that was actually acquired this was an m&a thing and for anybody who's never you know seen the way a a a buyout Target or a company that's being acquired trades it typically trades like a brick it trades in a very very narrow band because it's being acquired for a defined price on this day there was one of the

most respected bio Tech analysts analyst reporters on the street Adam Feuerstein he writes for the stat news came out and said he didn't think the deal was going to close for a variety of reasons that there was a problem with the drug and that that it wouldn't ultimately get FDA approval and they didn't think that the deal was going to close and to me it didn't it wasn't whether I agree with them or not to the point that there's this there's this amazing analyst who's coming out and this is his opinion that's new information and

given that the risk is so limited because they're being acquired for a price just just north of where we are now the expected value on this is really really good because if he's right your risk is so defined it's so defined if he's right the deal falls apart so I was able to get short this really quickly and you know putting that together that okay this isn't just like a random tweet this is you know Adam forstein putting out opinion on an mmaa deal those are the type of things and even the context there though

what percentage of the audience knows Adam furin what percentage of the audience follows him what percentage of the audience has all of his past Market moving tweets documented and has those analogies in their head like you did and then you're taking again your edge with with some of these headlines and knowing the context and and being in the right spot and being able to apply that to wherever the relevant headline is I think that the most important thing is that in the past I would have looked at something like that and been like okay this

is obvious everyone's going to see this and I would have shorted some and as and and you know some of our work together it was that instinct is just complacency and instead I should realize that this is one of those easy trades that it's not as obvious as it might seem to me and look at what the expected value is and take advantage of that every situation sort of has this you know the the situation and then the setup they're two different things in my opinion so you want to talk for example about like GMU

that's going on right now where it's having another one of these you know Meme sort of explosions so I think the situation is sort of that you know the stock shouldn't be trading here on any fundamental basis there's no reason for it it's being you know go back to 2020 for example it was it was being bit up by an army of you know mean people on Reddit using money that they received from the government it was more than 100% short there was a whole bunch of you know structural reasons why they should be going

up so we have a situation where the stock should not be trading where it is we know that but the setup is terrible right like you never know where this is going to end like it's an amazing it's probably the biggest short squeeze I've personally ever seen and and the thing that I took away from that was when you have a you know a setup where there's the situation and the setup and those two things are in Conflict the setup has to win because it's not about knowing that a stock should go somewhere it's about

how you prosecute that idea that's where all the money comes from and I I would almost I think the more common word for situation is almost having a view and I think there's so many Traders out there with views but a view is worthless and it's not about having a view where you really make money is when you have a view plus the setup confirms that view then you can capitalize on it right you might have the view that arm is overvalued or that arm will go lower if you're shorting on the way up at

110 and It Go blows out to 160 well guess what you blew up to it doesn't do anything so what you really need is the the view or the situation combined with the setup and I think that's where so many people get themselves into trouble and actually that's one of the areas where where I've seen you grow a lot how many times have you had an interpretation of of a headline and there's times where you can be totally right but you need the the setup to confirm your view and when that magic happens when those

see it moments that's when you can really really go for it and that's I think what you've really corrected and made a lot of progress in yeah I think that's true I I guess the the point I'm making though is that when you have sort of a great setup even if the situation is not you know something as obvious as GMA if you have a great setup you probably have an easy trade because you probably have a situation where your risk is defined where if you're right you're going to make you know a nice reward

because it always comes down to the math at the end of the day the setup's everything sure by the way for example just in just in terms of expected value I think that trade I I would say that the chances of this deal probably blowing up were probably quite low I don't think that those were very high but the expected the expected value was high because there was so little risk in in putting that position up so that's just a really good example of you don't need to be right very often for that trade to

have enormous expected value in the context of expected value we talked about identifying expected value and betting accordingly can you explain to me what you mean by betting accordingly yep so obviously within your risk limits and your your tolerance you want to bet more as the expected value gets higher and one rule of thumb that I've actually come up with in in the more recent years is you never want to bet more than an amount that will negatively psychologically impact you and I think you me all of us as Traders we know that you can

get in such a negative feedback loop from some of these losses and so even if you your lockout might be 50,000 or H 100,000 if a $20,000 loss is going to ruin your motivation you're going to be like depressed and upset well guess what you don't want to risk that amount and so much of progress is being being on this positive feedback loop where you're motivated you're really ready to do work you're feeling energized and so if something is really really really good you want to bet approaching that amount that is large but still won't

negatively hurt you two questions the first is expected value is going to tell you over time if you're going to make money or lose money if the expected value is positive why not bet as much as you can every single time yep so for starters because some stuff you start to have variance so the expected value might be positive but what if the skew is like super good but your win rate is only 5% if you start betting 10% on a 5% win rate trade you're probably going to blow up and so a lot of

that is recognizing okay it's not just about positive expected value because there's also some opportunity cost if you're focusing on a trade where you can make one penny is there some trade with an expected value out there of $1 or if you're going to bet on something that only makes you a penny but it's highly variant will some of those downswings again affect your psychology and so it's really trying to allocate your capital in in selectively in the right spots with the highest expected value so this is one of those things that I was talking

about about how you tend to play arguments out in the limit that so what you pointed out is effectively that even though there might be high expected value if the risk of that particular trade is a Wipeout risk that means you know your career will be over so to speak then even though the expected value might be high it might not be worth it if you catch that one time that it's that that you lose so in that sense that's one limitation of that's one example where you would not want to you know bet just

because the expected value is positive other other other examples where you might not want to other than just psychologically like you know are there other just tangible reasons I mean probably the most common is just simply cost like even if we talk about buying power or or Capital or if or if the expected value of the play might be very good but you yourself as a Trader if your decision-making is impaired perhaps you perceive the trade to have positive expected value but you're really on tilt maybe you've lost the last five trades and you're you're

yelling and screaming well guess what even if it's a good trade you probably don't want to take it right now you probably just want to take a break get in the right mindset so there are some some factors like that but but ultimately it's just are you able to accurately judge EV and then just bet in a way that's not going to impair your senses and and you're trading otherwise and one of the things for me is a lot of people I think will get you know two-thirds of the way down thinking this way and

they they'll bet you know linearly higher amounts so for example you'll have one unit of expected value they'll bet one two units they'll bet two three units they'll bet three you don't do that you bet bet exponentially so if you have one unit you might bet one if you have two units you might bet 10 and if you have three you might bet 50 so how did you come to that way of thinking and how do you handle that psychologically well I think a lot is just recognizing the math and and a lot of that

I just saw experientially from my trainer and he was just so innately great at going huge in the best opportunities and it just paid off again and again and again and then you would sit there having bet the same amount and you're just like wow this was a standout opportunity and if my good days are 200 bucks I made 200 bucks but this was really a$1 thousand day and it's it's that recognition and that's the other benefit of working for a firm is you're able to see like oh wait today was special people didn't bet

their normal amount of risk people bet so much so much more and so when you do the math it's much like in poker right on the average hand you might want to just fold but there are while there's no the nuts where you you can't lose and there's there's no risk in trading there are some insanely amazing expected value hands and when you bet really really really big that's actually the safest strategy it's actually safest to bet big when the odds are most in your favor it's actually riskiest to bet uniformly if you're playing every

hand in poker the same bet you're going to lose you're going to be wiped out and so the really good Traders they avoid so much of the in between middle hands but then they go really really big on the ones that are skewed and that's actually the safest counterintuitively that's it's it's such a you know obvious thing but it it it's it's such a profound concept look look even even at Buffett he sits on a good chunk of cash a lot lot of the time but then when when the [ __ ] really hits the

fan he's going huge and he's leaving himself in a position to bet really really big M when the expected value is the best the other thing I think is you know important to note is that you know we're not expected value is a best estimate right so if you're expected I think Buffett said it's something like this like if you're if your expected value needs to be calculated out three or four decimal points then you probably don't have the greatest trade of all time right you need a margin of safety so you know in even

in that trade that you know we spoke about you know the beginning of this you know I wasn't really 90% sure that's a guess it might have been 80 it might have been 95 so you know that that that that's just another thing like this this is it's just an estimate it's just a best guess and over time you learned to sort of own it yeah so I want to talk about a little bit more about the the 1% improvements so when we talk about these 1% improvements what really what we're usually talking about is

sort of these Timeless things so in general just a way that I can make myself faster or faster situational awareness or deeper Insight something that's going to be good sort of for all time but in reality markets are always changing they're very Dynamic and it's not appropriate to say to yourself I'm not going to take advantage of some opportunity because it might not be there forever so you invented I think you invented it but you certainly invented it as far as I'm concerned. This notion of what you call the broken slot machine Lance original. This

is a Lancism I get a royalty every time you say it well I don't know who it's coming from it's not coming from me say it again come on but tell us what the broken slot machine is so I thought up this analogy because and I I I love analogies especially casino and poker ones because there are so many parallels and if you walk into a casino and you play a normal slot machine you're you're over the long run you might win a little but in the long run you're losing with 100% certainty and people

will be fooled by that Randomness and think oh my God this is this is good or I might win when it's like no you're you're just playing pure Randomness and noise and you will lose and a lot of trading is like that if we've seen it at Trillium right how many how many inefficient tickers really exist each day I mean we're we're talking what there's probably three to five tickers that the firm does very well on each day sure the firm might trade 40 50 tickers plus but it's it's really probably three to five tickers

making up 90% of the profits and so you really need to recognize that stock selection is so so so important and sometimes there's stocks that are like a broken slot machine they're no longer just random there's times where very precise moments where there's a huge amount of Edge and the beauty of working for a firm is you see the tickers that everyone else is trading and that alone is a Priceless benefit because if I was on my own trying to learn trading and you don't even know where to start like you're what are you going

to start with you're going to start with like the the big cap efficient names oh I'm gonna just watch Tesla every day I'm gonna watch Microsoft every day not that those tickers can't have Edge but if you do only the the big tickers you miss a lot of the stuff like the GameStop the AMC or whatever else is some of the low caps that people really love and the most important thing is I want to find like to even stand a chance at winning at that casino I want to find the game that's offering me

the most the best odds and if you don't do that you don't stand a chance if you do that's just not it's necessary but not sufficient to win you still need to bet in the right places and still have the right system much like with poker if you sit down at a poker table you have the potential to win but you still need to play the right hands you still need to bet appropriately you still need to have the right outs and and that's how I really relate that analogy so the analogy being that if

you were to walk into a casino and you saw you know a row of slot machines and they were all paying out you know once every hundred times or whatever and there was one that was paying out 20 times for every hundred the obvious thing to do is to play that particular slot machine right so the the the the metaphor is that in the market even though most things are efficient most of the time in certain markets you get certain pockets of the market that are just totally inefficient and offering way better EXP expected value

for you and so in those situations even though it's not going to last forever even though some security officer is going to come and fix the slot machine eventually you want to take as much out of that slot machine as you can and and I think what what in Trillium world we don't realize but there's so many people out there with these limiting beliefs and biases they say oh I'm an es Futures Trader I'm an NQ Trader or I'm a Forex Trader and imagine only trading the the S&P yet then stuff like GameStop and AMC

are making these crazy moves and you're like oh not not not my bag and it's like what like why would you not at least study and watch some of this stuff there's so many like the edge you can get in Trillium has gotten in certain plays or some of the the trades you touched on is so staggering that yet that then it's just unmatched in some of the more efficient products like like the Futures generally and it's so true because you know I'll talk to guys from different areas there there are guys I know who

do m&a there are guys like like like a merger ARB fund there's guys that I know that do biotech and so they won't even you know I think when you have it could be it could be really helpful in certain ways to specialize but it is also limiting in the sense that there could be opportunity in a place and you just won't touch it because it's outside of your purview I think that's something that Trillium does really really well that's a competitive advantage of being a day trader by definition we don't have a mandate we

can hop around wherever this week I'm I'm a mem stock Trader I am a pro mem stock Trader next week I might be a pro macro inflation Trader correct who who the hell knows I've been all of those things you were a biotech Trader so can we talk a little bit about some of those you know specific you know broken slot machines just to give the audience sort of an idea of some of the examples that we've had in the recent past sure and I think it's it's so important to always reflect on what what

kind of Market are we in and what is the like the slot machine the broken slot machine of each market and and each context and look there's going to be some stuff where you're just not good at it's not in your repertoire that's fine you can just study it and so if we even take 2024 so far I would divide this year up probably into into three phases I think the beginning of the year was kind of cryptomania we've seen opportunities in the coin bases the maras the the the Bitcoin ETFs themselves so that's how

I would view the year starting and those offered good opportunities and that's where most at at Trillium and even myself I think most Pro Traders p&l probably was then we very quickly went into the the bull bullish AI semiconductor space right we saw the breakouts of Nvidia smci arm and that was the big theme in February that was huge and if you're not trading that stuff like again you don't need to trade everything but it's it at least worth being open-minded to what's really working then we started to walk into AMC gme which also spurred

some of the meme stocks and some of the the the low float stuff like FF the other the other week and if if you're not moving to some of those plays or at least considering them I I do think you're doing yourself a disservice sure I mean just to throw out a couple of other examples I think there was so if you go back to like the the time frame of 20 to 22 there was there was a time frame where there were these spaxs out there spaxs are just these sort of shell companies that

Acquire another company whenever they would do an acquisition didn't matter who they acquired didn't matter what the terms were the terms were and it these things would just go berserk and so you had it it was it was just a broken slot machine that if on any Spa deal you were able to buy as much as you could chances are you were going to make a lot of money and that's it doesn't make any sense but that's the market we were in if I I don't have the real data on this but it would be

it would be pretty interesting I would say most years you have these couple themes if I were a betting man which I am I I would I would bet that 80% of Trillium's P&L each year probably comes from those big themes so in 2018 there was the the the Trump China tariff Wars that was probably easily 80% of the firm's P&L and like then what last year was was the Silicon Valley banking crisis or was that two years ago I don't know I don't I don't know either we'll fact check it but but I'm sure

that was a huge portion and like in the trading World especially at the the pro firm level so much is that Paro principle like it's probably what like I would imagine 5% of tickers probably make up 90% of the P&L and even it's it's it's true at a Trader level it's true at a trade level it's true at a firm level it's a very asymmetric game and if you're not allowing yourself to play at the most broken slot machines you're missing out on so much of that asymmetry the interesting thing is I find that those

1% improvements in those things that are that are sort of Timeless will help me do the Daily Grind they help well they'll also help me in these situations but the it is true that there are there are just certain times in the market where things get so detached from reality that the opportunity is enormous I would tell you that I think my lifetime p&l I would bet you half of it comes from no more than a dozen trading days I would bet you oh I wouldn't doubt that one bit I I think mine was equally

crazy if if I had a guess I think I I would bet probably 10 trading days a year made up 809 % of my p&l or something but but again I think it's you know to go back to that phrase that's going around the feature not a bug I remember it now it's you know it's it's that's I think that's the way it's supposed to be right like that's that's because those those are the hands where you're essentially getting the nuts and so then if you're betting uniformly guess what that means if you're betting uniformly

you're you're going to make your p&l would be 20% as much M that's crazy so you have you know very kind of succinctly talk talk about your trading strategy is you know to boil down to one sentence is I just want to be with the trend that's your whole strategy but in reality obviously there's an incredible amount of nuance that goes into that but you've kind of identified a number of different patterns that you've seen in order to be with that Trend that you've been public about some sort of identifying a counter Trend some identifying

the beginning of a trend so I want to talk about some of those specific examples that you know you've called out as your own sort of being with the trend sort of easy trades so the first is the right side of the V which is something we've spoken a little about in GL this is identifying a counter Trend so for those people who don't really understand the right side of the v there's nothing so special so much about the shape it's that the expected value if you have a v if you have a stock that's

going down and then going up so a stock that goes from example for 100 to 50 and you want to buy it at 52 the difference in expected value of buying it in 52 two on the left side of the V which is on the way down is orders of magnitude different from buying it at the same price in the same stock at 52 on the right side of the V on the way up so can you just flush out this concept I think so many people won't really give the proper thought and internalize that

because it's it's what it's really saying is you can buy something at the same price but just because it's at the same price does not mean it's got the same expected value and this applies to so many things so imagine with some of your headline trades if you buy I don't know 16 bucks on a news headline and then it takes off and then it all it comes all the way back and you buy $16 because the headline came all the way back three minutes later that expected value is not the same not at all

one is probably a very great amazing trade and the second one is probably a very bad trade right and this even happens with breakouts right and a lot of people have heard me say the best trades immediately work and the best trades go on your favor so if you're buying a $5 breakout if you're able to buy 501 502 if you buy it right when it breaks that's way way different than if you're buying it because oh man this stock couldn't go anywhere and we've pulled back like six times now if you're buying it after

it's pulled back six times the odds of you not losing on that is so much less than the first time and so specifically with some of the mean reversion stuff the beauty of buying on the right side of the V is this is after the turn so I would argue not only are your probabilities better because you're now going with the trend where it's bouncing rather than going on the downside and the other benefit is you also now have a stop and so I had to learn this the hard way with some of my early

stage Med reversion trading is so many stocks end up going so much further than you think so if you're buying too early in stuff like a g you can really really get hosed when that goes so much further than you'd imagine and when you're buying that way what is your stop you don't you don't have one unless you're just saying I'm going to stop out once I lock out which really is just arbitrary and ineffective so not only are your probability of success worse but also there's no stop and so once you wait for that

turn you might often get the same price and I was always so concerned like oh man like I'm not going to be able to get the same liquidity but what I found Is Not only was I still often able to get the liquidity I wanted but I was taking so much less heat on the way down because I wouldn't have stock there that I wasn't in such a better place to get way more aggressive on that turn and it just allowed me to stress so much less and that simple I probably started to internalize a

lot of that in 2018 and 2019 and that just changed my trading around like I was able to get so much more aggressive because I was recognizing just what a better expected value that that that was for me sure and I think this is I think this does go back to something that I mentioned before which is and I see this happen to so many people who are who are new to trading which is that they really focus on sort of the situations like knowing like okay like for example that GL like okay I think

it's going to bounce I can think it's going to bounce and like we can both have the same you know the hypothesis that it's going to bounce but the difference and the magic and what separates a great Trader from somebody who's going to lose money in this trade is how you prosecute that idea if you just buy like in the example that I gave buying execute rather than prosecute but I'll I'll sure whatever the right word is but like you know the the the idea is that if I buy it at 52 on the way

down I'm fighting the trend whereas if I buy it on the way up I'm with the trend I have momentum and gravity going with me you want to know what's interesting to me that I that I don't lose sight of if you recall back to to your really rookie days or or from other rookies you've mentored say someone gets caught in a really really big Panic they're they're buying on the way down the bottom really flushes out what's the most common place for like a total rookie to sell once they hold through the panic then

it starts to bounce probably as soon as they're in the money yeah right right around their average price right and that is actually the exact opposite of the right side of the V you're taking all the heat then the turn happens it gets close to your average price so so often right where you're supposed to be buying is where you intuitively as an amateur want to sell and that is actually a magical thing because I think both of us as as prot Traders we recognize that your base psychology and your base emotions the market really

has an amateur by the top and hit out of the bottom psychologically of every single move and it's almost one of those things where when you see a novice making that mistake you can invert that logic like wait this is what they're it's so common in human nature to do that what if I invert that if they're selling there what if I buy there and for all those reasons It's so dead on on the right move and so dead on the wrong move for those amateurs which we've all done a thousand times without a doubt

sure these are just a handful of examples I want to throw up on the on the screen in terms of the right side of the V because this is one of your this is one of the I think this is probably one of the first things that I learned from you which is you know this particular style of trading so Mara on January 16th 2024 we'll throw up the chart this you know chart sort of speaks for itself it's a perfect example of that avgo on May 30th 23 again yeah that was an epic epic

move yep I think you did a video on this one specifically yeah I think it's possible yeah this this had the incredible daily chart and and the intraday where they both aligned and man if if you're shorting too early on that one you're you're getting hos because that is a hell of a move and then the last one was RV on August 22nd 2022 which is just another really perfect example of the right side of the V sort of in action Y and there's nothing so so magic about this stuff but I do think that

like just based on human psychology and and just liquidity and everything else things do tend to Trend at times then you have the weaker hands that make the Tails of those Trends and you get the people that puke it both ways to the downside or to the upside and and around those Tails if you can just wait and position yourself to be around for for after that turn is in it's it's just incredible expected value generally so another you know classic Lance-ism that you've brought in is you mentioned this a little bit when we talked

about arm was the concept of a bouncy ball can you walk us through this bouncy ball strategy of yours yeah so and again most of these Concepts a lot aren't necessarily so original but a little little little twist and so really the bouncy ball pattern almost like we were discussing with with the the arm daily chart you have some type of of catalyst that makes a a stock do a leg lower or a leg higher and you either form generally support in the case of the bouncy ball and you have this support level and then

you do subsequent lower highs against that support then it breaks and so often that allows for a very very defined significant level where when that breaks it's such a good risk reward short and so the nuances always matter and so so many people will be like oh is this a bouncy ball trade and it's like well no not really because it might not make consecutive lower highs or there might not be it might not be an Inplay stock or there might not be a good news Catalyst or there might not be a good daily chart

and so it's really finding all these nuances together and then the qualities of the setup how good's the consolidation how weak are those bounces into the break like like AMC actually in GameStop not not this time around but but back in in the middle of last month those those did on the big days where they blew out to like 11 and 80 bucks those were bouncy balles but they weren't quite sitting on lows so like that setup that it rhymed and the concept was kind of there but it wasn't perfect and so a lot is

just trying to interpret those nuances so but you know when you come up with these you know Lan ISM names for these things like right side of the V or bouncy ball whatever else we're going to talk about you know a lot of times you're just making a simplistic name for an actually very nuanced topic so the concept of sort of the bouncy ball is really you have this stock that first of all you mentioned it which is kind of you know I see this on Twitter all the time which is people are asking if

everything is a bouncy B but you really do have to have that fundamental Catalyst of some sort in the beginning because otherwise I can look you know on any given day I can bring up any chart and probably find like a bouncy ball somewhere in the midst of that that's the concept of finding in place stocks stocks that are really moving with with volume and and emotion sure so you want something that had some Catalyst to drive it somewhere and then it sort of will consolidate or sort of pick a level at a certain point

but it's still trying to find itself and it's either it's weak and getting weaker and then eventually cracks or in the opposite strong and getting stronger and then we'll crack to the upside so that's just an this is an example by the way cdna on January 26 2024 I think this is your example if I'm not mistaken but this is you know just another example if you look like around around 950 if you see sort of how it has that that move down from 11 down to $10 trying to figure itself out it's making you

know lower highs and eventually it consolidates and just breaks that low and cracks yeah and so often if I can interrupt like people be like oh but why didn't you take that that first short at around 130 it went to lows and stuff or what what about closer to 2 o'clock and that's where the Nuance is like the quality and length of the consolidation really matter and so why does it matter that's y so so often Traders will have the right idea but because of these nuances that they're missing they take too many stabs and

just paper cut themselves and that's also where that no man's land concept also comes from but essentially consolidation is a level of price acceptance so around around 1:30 and and 2:00 p.m. I mean I can't see the exact times from here but you have it's a little bit too rangy where if you break to lows there still might be people that are looking to take covers or people that are looking to buy but when you really sit and consolidate on level very very tightly once that level breaks and everybody knows it there's nobody like there's

nobody in the world really that wants to buy arm at $19.90 you know or like remember some of the mega Tesla breakouts what was the big level I think it was what like 900 or something pre pre-split but it's like if 900 is this big level that everybody's watching you never want to be the chump that is selling at 901 902 9003 so that's actually I was actually thinking about something else so you mentioned the the the you know the fact that there's not going to be there anybody to to buy after already breaks down

but I was actually thinking about the risks so if you have a very rangy stock well then your out needs to really be at the top of that range because an out it's really important isn't just some arbitrary amount it has to be it has to be kind of a place where your expected value is you're wrong where that's where that's where you're willing to throw in the towel and say this isn't right like I'm wrong so if you're going to short it in that you know kind of rangy part of the chart then you

have to be willing to give it to the top of that range but if you have a very tight consolidation then you only have to give it to the top of the consolidation so your risk has gone down so much and you're you're touching on one of my favorite Concepts which I plan on doing much much more on in the future and that's really the geometry of these charts and understanding that like wait if I'm using prior bar bars or the highs of this range if this range is much rangier if this bar is coming

from all the way out out out here then your risk is so much higher and therefore your risk rewarded and expected value are so much lower so those nuances of the proportions and the ratios of how these charts set up it really really matters to that expected value and yeah sorry both factors really it's it's both so I would argue what we're touching on is you're touching on that the rangier it is the bigger the risk which impairs the expected value and I'm touching on that the worse the consolidation is the worse the probability of

a clean successful move so both of those factors are impairing the expected value and and when you align these factors properly that's why you're getting all all your all your things aligned all all of your things are helping you and your expected value might go from negative way better and we only touched on you know two things the the the range of the consolidation and you know and the and the level being broken down but there's also there there's so much more you know you also have you know the something that you very famously talk

about the quote boringness unquote of the security like is it something that's a really volatile security or is it something that's not is it you know an m&a headline with a defined price or is it some news Catal what if 950 in that chart is a huge daily support level right what's the market doing there's a I mean there there's there's there's there what's the liquidity like what's the volume like there's there's there's just so many different nuances that you have to you know you you can't just say like I'm looking for a bouncy ball

pattern and draw it on a chart and say I figure it out now there's there's all these different nuances that change the expected value box a level two sure and so it's really important to to to to make sure that you're you know you're you're looking at your data to figure out what are the what are the variables that would change us and waiting them appropriately another trade that I don't think we've had an opportunity to speak about is something that I don't know if you gave it this name or I just decided it's what

it's called what I called it the crack trade it's just this this idea of the gamma squeeze where eventually something is just trading on thin air we trade equities no no crack come on John we're professionals and a and a and a chart will just collapse and one example that I know you traded very well was smci on March 14th of 2024 so this is just you know I'll let you walk through it but this is another Lan ISM yeah and so sometimes I kind of talk about not that i' I don't think I've ever

done a good video or or well defined some of this but that that will come but the pendulum concept and and the rubber band essentially where sometimes these things get so so stretched in One Direction then you're dealing with gravity just really pulling it back down not that it can't go further but once that Trend does change Look Out Below and so SM C was riding the AI craze and oh my God it blew out earnings and guidance and it starts exploding and that feedback loop just starts to really really send it and through every

measure whether it's Ballinger bands distance to the moving average the size of the bars RSI I think it had some like the highest RSI ever recorded or something like that and no matter how you measure it the stock was very very overextended and then it's a matter of how can you define what that turn looks like and and what you look for in a turn and and a change of trend or a break of trend and then how do you play it and so smci was something that went up up up up up then it

finally reached capulator exhaustion levels after what was otherwise a pretty orderly up move right so I think I think the the thing that you just touched on is that this has a great story everybody will acknowledge this is a great story everybody is going to acknowledge that AI is going to be a huge deal and that this compan is going to make a lot of money and everything is going to be great but a situation like this never happens absent that type of catalyst but what you also have is a situation where a stock just

basically ran 700 straight points in a in a in a really short period of time that it's never done anything like before and so a lot of that optimism is starting to get priced in and if you have sort of a change in that Trend well a lot of people could Panic what's what's always so funny is there's always going to be a kernel of Truth like people will say oh my God but what if XYZ goes bankrupt but oh my God what if this really does grow by some rate of course anything can happen

but it's that same Euphoria where everyone takes it as assumed that creates the super euphoric up moves or the super capitulo panics and it's not about could it happen it's again just simply what's the probability and what's the rate of change are is there an incremental buyer still willing to buy smci at 12200 when the stock was at 800 a week ago and or is there somebody willing to buy a stock at or sell a stock at $4 when it was at $10 a couple days ago and so that logic of it's not just about

the math it's about the the rate of change and and it's not necessarily logic but it's a real Market there needs to be buyers and sellers and if if every buyer that's ever going to buy had the opportunity to buy and it's gone euphoric then then who's left and you almost get that vacuum once that that momentum does you know it's so interesting because this really isn't sort of this isn't like you're not deconstructing you know the fundamentals of this stock or even I mean you're disc constructing a chart but what you're actually getting to

like the root cause of this is really just like human emotion it's really just human thought it's that when everybody stops thinking about you know the the Title Wave coming behind me about oh the AI and this is going to go to the moon and everybody and it starts to roll over and that that hint of Doubt comes in and everybody's like well this just ran 7 like what if this what what if what if 600 is the right price or what if 800 most stuff is very reflective where the these are feedback loops and

thoughts once the stock was at like 800 or or like a th000 everybody's like oh my God analysts 1400 12200 oh I knew this was going to be a ,000 stock it's like what where why didn't you tell me that at $400 why don't you tell me that at $450 y it's it's this feedback loop but eventually that feedback loop it stalls and then once things turn it's like oh my God that was too capitator that was too euphoric it it it's it's funny how you you even see that in the people you talk to

and other Traders and the analysts and and Twitter and everything this by the way as a little bit of an asade but this was a situation where not only were you able to capture you know and identify a move but because you were going to identify it that it's happening right now you were actually able to capitalize this and leverage this in a big Way by using the options Market as opposed to the common stock Y and and one thing that's been interesting this year I don't think obviously we saw this in in 2021 and

and 2020 with with GameStop AMC in all sorts of different areas but I'd say since 2021 this is the first time where in 2024 the options Market is clearly just the tail wagging the dog at this point because we've just seen it in too many trades to be coincidental where the amount of options trading if you look at options volume data it is ridiculous how much volume is going through in the options market now that never used to exist and what's even amazing to me is how quickly I will get options how quickly all sorts

of stocks right when ffii has weekly options what yeah short dated zero zero zero dist that to never that would never have existed five years ago and so I think so much with this just total Boon for options trading obviously that's profitable for the market makers the exchanges it's the just everybody so they really endorse this but it's become that a lot of the options flow really controls the stock and I think that leads to those feedback loops even more where you have all these market makers that are short or or whatever and when that

stock really starts to crack to Delta hedge all that exposure it's there's just no there's no liquidity yeah and we saw with GameStop to the upside sure that was actually really interesting because just as a little bit of a side with GameStop on the first day this is I don't remember the exact date but when Roaring Kitty put out that you know his first tweet after years of not doing anything so much volume went off in the overnight in the in the overnight session which is I think like there's a handful of Brokers that started

offering I think Robin Hood and interactive brokers totally new like they started offering this you know ability to trade overnight I'll be honest I don't understand exactly the Dynamics of how they get that all done but what's interesting about it is that for all that volume that went off the options Market was closed so all of that is essentially you're not being able to hedge any of those positions with options so it's just the common stock trading so there's a lot of like sort of work to be done in the morning when the stock opens

and sure enough you saw like enormous moves yeah it's fascinating like you cannot Overlook the options Market anymore yeah so another Lanceism this is not a Lanceism this is a Timeless another Lanceism winning this is this is something that's been around for a long time but this is something that I think you've really taken the next level in terms of identifying and taking advantage of which is consolidation breakouts so we spoke a little bit about just like in general what consolidation is and what does it mean and again just the standard sort of disclaimer which

is that there's always going to be consolidation if you type out any random chart I guarantee you if you type up Microsoft right now unless something happens to be going on there's probably going to be like a decent period of consolidation on that daily chart somewhere but if you're looking at a stock that's in play and you're finding a period of consolidation you've been able to to to to create a system where you're identifying breakouts or breakdowns in those charts so a good example is urgn from 727 2023 this is just what I'm going to

throw up there why don't you like maybe explain a little bit about the consolidation breakout concept and maybe a little bit about this you know this chart in particular yep and I think the same way I talk about those that bouncy ball concept it's it's so important to find and really all the trading is is a mix of all these Concepts right because you need to find an Inplay stock that's serving as broken slot machine and doing something just idiosyncratic from the market and so many people ask me oh do you care what the market

does and I say no I want to be trading stuff that's not moving with the market the market generally is too noisy I want to be doing stuff that like this urgn when that breaks that is that doesn't give two craps what the S&P 500 is doing that thing is going to go and you want to find these tickers with fresh catalysts like really big volume big moves big emotions and and you get that opening leg it's a beautiful I don't know $3 move from where it opens and everything we can solidate the consolidation starts

to get Tighter and Tighter the the volume you generally want to see the volume start to die off midday then as we tighten up against those highs the volume starts to come back in we break those highs and so now we've got a stock that's in play a stock that's held up pretty well at least in in in the upper half of of its tra range and then really really tightened into that breakout and then it it breaks out on enormous enormous volume and so so often when people back test stuff they're not really being

nuanced about all those things and actually I did a recent rant that so much of of the observations of of retail Traders they're not following so much is there breaking news on the stock or not and those catalysts and these variables like the volume like the percentile of the consolidation those are nuances that really stack your odds in your favor and again going back to that analogy to succeed at this game markets are so efficient it's so difficult you need so many variables all in your favor if you're only looking at two variables and the

other four are shouting no that's not good enough in this game you need everything to align only when everything aligns can you finally get past the the Zer doll expected value and so you want setups like that that offer very precise entries very controlled risk and and just all the nuances saying this is a go let's talk a little bit you know we talked a little bit about how you know your the things that you that you do and and some of your system but let's talk about the process you use to get there so

a couple of just important ancillary things for example like like sleep Health diet exercise things like that but how do you prepare for the day so I think now now days which was not true when we both were starting our career is a holistic view on performance is so much more accepted and we both work with Dr Jonathan Katz and he's been professing these things for decades before we were even even trading and this was part of his whole dissertation and everything but it's it's now accepted that okay like like sleep matters at least we

accept it I'll still see people on Twitter that are like oh my God these people talking about sleep are are crazy and idiots it's like well maybe you're the idiot but it it's it's so important that if you're trying to make these decisions you need to be performing at your best and I always tell the story that I started to learn about sleep and how how important it was and it became blatantly obvious which as we said all things are obvious in retrospect but the correlation between my p&l and performance with how well rested I

was if I was sick if I was hung over if I was tired and my worst days were always correlated with that and then I started to do the math and figure out how much p&l was I giving up not just in losses but on green days where they should have been so much Greener and once you go down that rabbit hole you say wow like trading is really really hard I need every Edge every Performance Edge I can get and so that's what led me to doing steroids no I'm just kidding and so that's

what led me to really focusing on sleep because sleep actually is probably the the the trader steroid honestly and not just Traders a lot of other people and actually yeah for a lot of people and we're making really tough really fast really emotional decisions decisions that deal on risk decisions that in influence our cortisol and our adrenaline and when you're not well slept all of those factors go in the wrong direction and we are so impaired but the the hard part is you don't recognize it and I've had so many Traders I've worked with say

oh I feel fine I I don't need more sleep and it's just because you've adapted to that and as I've worked with these Traders on fixing their sleep once they fix it then they say oh man I can't believe I ever operated like that and so things that I would do so first of all it starts with even really before before bed like the next trading day starts before bed you need your phone away you can't be doing emails you can't be checking the markets you can't be doing work close to bed you really want

that pre-bed routine as clean as possible no alcohol you want to be eating dinner early as far as sleeping envir you want super dark you want a cool bedroom you want it quiet and stuff like an ey mask can can can help in stuff and you want 7 to eight hours of sleep which people conflate with being time in bed no no no no no if you're getting eight hours in bed you're probably more realistically doing seven hours of sleep or seven and a half and once you start to optimize these things you're going to

get a better night's sleep then in the morning as hard as it is I really try to not immediately check my phone sometimes it's it's urgent if you've got overnight positions or if anything you know is going to be happening crazy premarket like we knew GameStop and AMC we going to do something dumb today and outside of those days you really want to protect that wakeup period And so even on the big days when a lot of people would be kind of in a panic rushing to work and stuff I would I would give myself

room to get to work a little bit early but I really didn't want to change my routine in my process I did not want to go in on the really big days and be flustered I wanted to be cool calm and collected and so I would probably get in 8:00 am Eastern and then I would start to read up on the news I'd start to prepare my watch list I'd start to do all the prep to make sure I'm informed for the market open make sure I'm I'm awake and ready in case there's any headlines

at 8:30 or 9 and then during the trading day most especially at Trillium we were hyperfocused right like I mean there's no other firm I think that stays as focused during the day and no minimal I mean by by Trader decision and and voluntarily not really taking the lunch breaks and and eating at their desk and everything else and then after I think a lot really like I would at least for me and in my preferences I would relate after hours to being where the real progress was made the morning was prepping for the day

the trading day was essentially playing the game and competing then after hours with studying the tape and doing the review so I would like to point out that the things that you know for for those of you who are going to watch this video and say that I'm going to implement you know Lance's Lance's process it's important to know that if you can't do everything that he just said as far as sleep that it's not the end of the world we do what we can as somebody who has you know two young kids sleep is

very important to me but somebody always has a bad dream and you have to deal with those things and life goes on you do the best that you can it's it's it's not it's not a yes or no type thing it's not binary it's just a question of doing the best you can you can also measure do a little bit better for you in your situation and I'm still so far from perfect right years of of trading and God knows what is is not done me any favors I do think that there's an element here

of what gets measured what is what gets improved and if you think that you know you have your sleep dialed in I would encourage you to get some sort of sleep tracker I personally like the a ring but there's other ones out there and you know really try to see like are you getting good sleep and how some of the things that you do how are they affecting your sleep differently because the truth of the matter is if you just take it's it's just a really simple concept just think about it in the limit if

you take two Traders with the same things in front of them and their same Talent one of them has slept well and one of them's not who has the edge oh it's it's it's so night and day and I would argue even even with your situation having young kids which is common for many Traders out there there's also some strengths to that I would I would ask and you don't need to disclose but how many nights a week are you going out drinking late probably zero zero how many nights a week are you going out

and eating dinner at 9:00 p.m. until 11:00 not usually not usually right and so at least as far as eating dinner and avoiding alcohol that almost gets easier in some regards so it's like if that's going to be your superpower you can say my family with with with with our kids we are going to eat dinner every single day at 6 p.m. I'm going to get my last bite by S I'm not going to have any drink past 6:30 so that can actually be like a nice little strength so it's just doing a little bit

better for you and your situation nobody is perfect I work with some really good coaches and we're all human and and we all struggle so now that we've prepared for the day we've slept well now we're midday we're noon o00 what you you do this thing called a temperature check so run me through what that is yeah so even premarket based on that sleep score just because I found it was so important and not just the Sleep score but do I have any other distractions going on maybe there's some I don't know real estate thing

or maybe some investment thing or maybe my apartment has a leak and there's going to be contractors calling me all day you really want to recognize that like if I just got in a fight with a girlfriend like my my head's not in in the right space if I just got off a call with a contractor because he's locked out of the building or locked my keys somewhere I can't trade properly if if you have if you have a family member in in the hospital or dealing with a health issue you're you're not trading at

the same level you're not making the same quality decisions you don't have the same focus and I would say that coupled with with sleep and everything else that really needs to be incorporated and so I think one of the smartest but now obvious things I did was I started to have a very Dynamic risk limit and this was self-imposed right my my Trillium gave me a daily stop but then I would have something that would be so often so much tighter and what amazes people is there would be tons of days where not only just

my ability to focus but then what's the market offering if I'm distracted and the market is offering super crappy opportunities and it's slower why do I even want to risk more than five grand I could be A3 billion Trader if it's a super slow crappy day why risk more money than than you should and so that's that alone is just such a simple process and habit that people can really make a big difference on right and some of the things that you mentioned I think when you really think about it and this this one you

can't have by the way this is trademarked I came up with it all royalties apply but it's called Negative Edge right like if you didn't sleep or if you are distracted by contractors or a fight or whatever it might be or a million different things in your to-do list you're not as objective you're not as checked in if there's another Trader who is more checked in and more objective they have Edge over you that's that's that concept I speak of called not positive Edge right that's the same thing so if we could start using that

say right so not positive Edge is a real thing and you can it but what but the nice thing about it is by doing some of these processes you can identify it and you can avoid the negative consequen to p&l that are sure to follow from it it's just such free money some of that stuff like the amount of money I gave away just trading in in Dumb states to to what benefit it's it's it's it's that's just such loow hanging fruit and and even working with so many Traders like people still don't take this

the sleep stuff seriously and some of this stuff because it's the the reality is a it takes conscious effort and trade-off and sacrifice to to do this stuff and it's just not easy psychologically but but but man oh man like the markets are hard and it's way easier to really refine some of this stuff than than trying to extract more Edge out of a system sure and I'm actually going to talk about another well you know let's talk about it now so the the next another part of your process is something called the DRC The

Daily report card and this is something that you're that's trademarked as well by the way well that's fine I don't you can you can go ahead with that one but Negative Edge is mine go ahead what so explain the DRC so the DRC is a way to avoid not positive Edge and it's really about trying to deliberately focus on one specific area and trading encompasses so much stuff and improving it trading can be really overwhelming and my first couple years I was incredibly overwhelmed and you don't even know where where to start and so that's

where you just pick what is the one thing that will have the largest effect on my trading if I'm able to fix it what is the the lowest hanging fruit and that it doesn't even need to be trading related it could literally be that sleep that sleep routine and figuring out that one thing and relentlessly focusing and Building Systems and processes to fix that and judging your day and Grading your day solely based on whether you achieved that goal and you stick with it until it's habitualized and then you pick a new one but that

forces traders to first of all you're defining the most important effective area for you to improve on then you're blocking out a lot of the noise and honing in on this one area and then again moving away from judging Yourself by p&l and more towards the bobblehead concept you're judging yourself for getting the red and green but simply did I improve in this one specific area another thing that I did that I learned from that I've added to my DRC and I think we're going to touch on this when we talk a little bit about

Jonathan Katz but I had a huge tendency to sort of Trend in a very weird way so I and I think this is common of some segment of Traders I have at least five or six times followed my best day with my absolute worst and a lot of that you know that that's too big of a coincidence it comes from the fact that I was overconfident right and things like that are important for me to know that if I had a particularly good day today that now in my DRC is to keep me alert for

tomorrow to to don't you know just because you're had a great day today you're not you you didn't figure it all out you're not you know some genius you had a great day today but tomorrow starts fresh and that has saved me from so many losses by by just realizing that you want to know what's what's a good saying and you probably remember M deera and he he was one of the the hedge fund managers at at Trillium who I'm still friends with sure and great guy he has the advice that he's told me before

which is every single day you just just H you want to handicap it as a new day and so whatever losses or wins you might have taken the prior day whatever preconceived notions every single day you're just starting fresh and you don't want to have okay I made 20 grand in GMC or sorry gme the prior day oh my God that means I need to trade gme today because it's going to be good again today no no no no no this is a new day is it independently setting up to be opportunistic or am I

just playing off that bias and the opposite also holds true you could have lost money in gme 20 days in a row but that has the market doesn't know that you lost money in GMA 20 days in a row if day 21 something sets up the fact that that ticker is G it might as well be another ticker it it's just about the expected value that fun thing is is so many people will say oh this is a bad ticker for me there's no such thing as as a bad ticker only bad setups and just

because a ticker I know man I've had some bad tickers but okay well there you go we just found another way for for you to improve this is this is on air mentorship right now but but think about what a silly bias that is there like come on what did that ticker do to you it doesn't care about you and if that ticker sets up really really nicely guess what you need to let it you need to allow for it to be a good ticker and that's different than if you're just making a biased decision

right if it's a biased decision that's a different story but if it's objectively setting up really really awesome and write to your playbook say there's some amazing headline in it or or whatever else you're doing yourself a disservice to not not play that and and those those small Li limiting beliefs would add up so much with the average Trader like having mentored so many people it's just incredible the amount of people that say oh I can't do this type of trading or oh I can never be good at that or or oh this isn't my

ticker oh that's not my style oh whatever the excuse is rather than just being like wait a second like this this ticker the reason why it worked this time is because it was a objectively a better setup for these variables the reasons why I lost these three or four times is because it just it just wasn't a good setup and the mistake was with me and not not the ticker so another thing that you do is monthly reviews by the way I'll give you a plug you do them I watch them every month on patreon

there there're it's a great it's a great rate to review the month you're a little behind now I think you're like on April or something like that but that's fine anyway why why like you know it's pretty pretty self-explanatory but what's the importance of going over the previous month so it's it's so important to just get that big picture view and I would say the the way to really take take this quick conversation is for a lot of these processes it's an important question to ask how can you make this fun how can you make

this fun and and valuable to you and a monthly review is such an amazing opportunity to sync up with a couple Trader buddies and write up your month and share with them and then have them write up their months and and learn what they did well and so then you can see oh wow where we both overlapping how can we help each other do even better in these strategies or see more of these setups or then also what are they doing that I might not be doing and the other thing that's almost almost free money

in a way at at a firm or just if you're trading as part of a group is if I'm doing a review with three people and these people we each made five mistakes each and I can learn from their 15 mistakes I'm learning three times faster than I otherwise would have been and that is just so amazing where if if and this is actually your pod does an amazing job with this I I got to give you guys a lot of credit you guys do so well where you share those 1% improvements so there's times

where if each of you come up with I don't know 50 1% improvements each year when you multiply it by the whole group that is just such a huge difference and when when you guys each make 10 big mistakes each year and you learn from each other that really matters too and so it's just a big picture way to take a step back and do the analysis because a lot of times if you don't do that analysis you repeat the same mistakes and you don't you pay the tuition but you don't learn the lesson for

sure and it's also really nice to have some like you just it's very hard to see everything if you're just one person but if you're four or five and you're kind of working together to side a to to share drc's or to share monthly reviews or something like that you have a lot more eyes on it you can really see things in a way you never saw it before really helps it can it can really expand sort of your perspective y now I know we've spoke a lot about there's no just like one Harbinger that

you can that you can use to sort of make a trade but are there but are there any specific tools or indicators that you use to really help Define your setups yeah I've got a trademarked indicator now oh yeah now so so really I'm pretty straightforward as far as indicators go and what everybody needs to understand is at the end of the day there's there's only a couple innate variables in data there's the price there's the time and the volume going off at those prices and times right and no matter what indicator you use it's

some derivative of those three basic pieces of information and the bigger point is it's not that any of these are magic like I think I think you need to use volume as a Trader I think you need to use price and you need to use time like yes I use Bounder bands but it's just a measure a visual measure of overextended you could probably use RSI you could use different moving averages so I don't think that there's anything that's right or wrong it's just what's right for me and a lot is then building up the

Reps to know how to interpret the different indicators but then more so apply it to your system so I know when a Ballinger band is relevant to me or when it's not I know when a setup breaks out I might want to see really really good volume so it's it's not so much about any of these things being magic but have you put the time in to figure out how to make it your own for for the style you do what would you say about the importance of news sources yeah so as as we touched

on like and even speaking for for you trilam your career and and even my career being queued into news is just so so so important and the way I think of news is it's essentially some of the fundamental ways that stocks repic if company a is to buy Company B for $50 per share that company is going to shoot to near $50 based on a couple variables and if you're blind to some of that stuff and it could be stuff like m&a it could be earnings it could be offerings it could be reverse splits could

be guidance or it could be something as dumb as the Roaring Kitty tweets and so the question is like how can you be like without making a a judgment on the interpretation of the news how dumb it is like so many people are like oh my God another meme tweet are we really going to do this again and it's like well I mean yeah if if you like money you you like whether you agree with it or not we're not here to make judgments on what is dumb news or what's dumb meme crap or not

it's it's like ultimately you're just trying to make the right decision and so if I need to be queued into to what roaring Kitty tweets I'm going to do that if I need to be queued in to Reddit and dfvs posts I'm going to do that and so it's just so important to again find out where can I find the stuff that gives me an edge how can I study of this and how can I be advantaged with it we we've spoken a lot about psychology I think that as much as computers and you know

they have taken over the market and taken over everything else I think at the end of the day the owners of stocks are human beings and human beings are psychological beings so psychology really matters we're prone to having emotions and non-objectivity I have actually a real a quote that I really like from a top Trillium Trader I'll try to keep him anonymous but he you know he once said to me is like you know give me the the give me the best the greatest Market in the world if I'm in the wrong mindset I'm going

to find a way to screw it up so I found that to be tremendously true can you talk a little bit about how important do you think psychology is as a Trader and at what stage in your development becomes you know sort of more important than less so I think at the beginning most Traders truly lack Edge that's their number one issue it's not the psychology or so much of the risk management not that that doesn't play a role of course it does but I think in those beginning stages where psychology matters the most is

in keeping the positive feedback loop you need to be keeping your routine you need to be motivated you need to be just energized to study and and do the hard work so protecting that feedback loop I think is number one early on as far as psychology goes like as long as you're doing that the rest will probably take care of itself once you start to have edge and a system and some progress and it's more so about like if again taking extremes like like like we discussed earlier at the beginner extreme it's all about the

feedback loop and and not so much about your trading because you need to still develop the system develop Edge at a truly Elite Trader level you already have your system and your Edge and it's all about execution want to know what impairs or what what decides how well you execute your psychology and so that's where I think if you've been trading 5 8 10 15 20 years the more experienced you are it's just am I showing up and executing right like if if some Steph Curry or Lebron they already know the basics it's just are

they able to execute when they're on the court and for us it's like what's getting in our way and that's where the psychology is so so important to make sure that you're you have safeguards and constraints because it's also when it's most costly right if you or I go on tilt or if we rage trade or if we make some super boneheaded decision that is so so so so costly and so that's where stuff like using a trading psychologist and taking that stuff more seriously starts to really become a creative yeah and I actually do

I actually do you can tell me if you agree with this but I do think when we started working together for example I do think that it it gets exponentially more towards the psychology side as you become more and more M I agree with you on that point but like when we started working together you were a much more successful Trader than me you're the top Trader in The Firm by far I actually don't think there was a huge gap in our knowledge of Market structure or specific things I re I think that your Psychology

was far more far better and far more efficient than mine I think that was probably the you know 90% of the difference between I think I think you're right and I think this is an important point to emphasize because I think what happens at the really really Elite level to be a good Trader at Trillium you need to have Edge right you're you're you're a top 10 Trader to be at that level you you are good no question about it and you've got your strategies your playbook you've been doing it for a while so what

separates say 10 from number one it's recognizing that edge then being able to go really really really big and execute again and again and again and especially to push the size I think that's where psychology matters so much and then to avoid the really big law losses because we're all going to take our our scraps here and there we're all going to our scrapes we're all going to make some mistakes and everything you can't we're we're just humans at the end of the day and I think where that really big outperformance comes from is having

the psychology and the foundation there so that I can go really really big be confident in my decision- making and if it doesn't work out it doesn't it doesn't ruin me it doesn't snowball I think that really is that that Elite Performance difference couldn't agree with so let's talk about I want to talk about a couple of specific psychological situations that I've seen develop many many times some of which by the way are my own and some of which are people I've seen but very very common situation so the first one let's talk about just

this forward progress bias basically you're prioritizing consistency over maximizing p&l how would you like how common is that and what do you think about that well I think ultimately everybody falls somewhere on the Spectrum that's that's right for them and me being more of a home run hitter it would it would be wrong for me to say to someone like you who's very consistent and enjoys the lower variants it would be wrong for me to tell you that you're wrong like because it's it's a value decision based on you and what's going to be best

for you and there's some Traders where if they get in a hole it just ruins them and they're they don't enjoy it they're super unhappy and they don't care about the extra pnl and if that's true like what you're doing is dead dead right so I think it's like and actually this has come up sometimes and you've you've sought to grow and you've taken steps towards increasing your size so often when people do that they will try to bite off a little bit too much for their tolerance then they take a loss or two and

rather than recognizing that the mistake was oh I just bit off a little bit more than I I should have you then go back to right where you started and say oh man like I I touched the stove it was hot I don't want to do this and it's so much about finding like what's the incremental Improvement I can make that gets me a little bit closer to where I'm headed without doing anything that's that's too big of a shift yeah no of course I couldn't agree with you more that like not everybody's goals need

to be the same not everybody needs to you know seek to maximize p&l or anything like that just like if your goal is to you know make enough money to provide for family and not take you know huge losses there is absolutely nothing wrong with that you should do that that's great I think the problem that I was referencing is when like in my case for example I put a huge a huge emphasis on consistency I definitely maximized that consistency over maximizing P but I did it subconsciously it wasn't something I wanted to do it

was something that I was predisposed to be a conservative person which I don't think is bad or good I just think it is everybody has their own Tendencies but I but I was subconsciously doing that so I wanted to maximize p&l and I was subconsciously preserving consistency that's a problem yeah and the the real question even for me is if I didn't have the trainer I had would I have emphasized the home runs much like I did I don't know right so much is your Trader parent per se and and the the trading childhood you

had if you grew up under a trainer that was super super consistent and emphasized hitting singles which I think is super important early on in your career that was probably advantageous to you early on but became less adaptive later on whereas for me the Home Run style of my trainer was probably a negative for me early on but then became adaptive later on it's weird how that works that is such a great point because for me like one of the things that oh wait yeah I now that I think about it yeah I know you're

you're you're trainer so yeah a lot of that holds true well one of the things that Trillium in general and I think and I think well anytime you're going to work at a firm I think most you know trading firms are going to take somebody who's new to trading and they're going to they're going to reward consistency right they they want you to be consistent they're going to encourage that they're not going to want you to be all kinds of volatile when you don't know how you're you know how to trade so essentially you get

all that feedback loop of positivity from getting you know consistent p&l and ironically when you when you develop that edge when you become a better Trader it's that same thing that you've now been conditioned to incentivize right to to to to prioritize that you that you really don't want to do if your goal is to maximize p&l like my goal right now is not to be the most consistent to make money every single that's not the goal it it it it's to maximize p&l but I I still have that sort of it's hard to rewrite

that program and that's training psychology really matters it's like what got you here isn't going to get you to the next level yeah and to this day I still experience that in in different ways right like even as I've tried to step back from Trading it's really hard to know your friends are trading or there's big opportunities AMC GameStops going crazy it's almost like anchor man you know blowing the conell you know I'm like oh no Roaring Kitty tweeted must must trade I'm like no I I can't stop myself yeah and those are because of

past habits really a decade plus of habits where it's it's like you build a skill set but then it's like oh man this isn't really what I'm so aligned with anymore hard it's also really hard when you get good at something like for example like you see this with the athletes all the time if you see like like I am a little bit of a baseball fan so if you watch like like a baseball player like they could be hitting well they could be consistent they could be doing great but they're making a mistake and

they could be doing better the moment they make that switch and like it takes time and it takes reps to get to to to Really sort of Master that new swing they immediately want to go back to the old thing that was working and they don't want to get over that hump and that's that's the same thing that could happen in trading so another one is like just a common psychological trap is reason see bias so I think I I touch on this a little bit where I I have a personal tendency to follow my

best days with my worst because I get into this mindset of I've conquered trading and I know it all and I have to like I have to really take a step back and talk myself out of it I actually I actually a long time ago what I did was I plotted my daily p&l for every day that I've been trading over a lifetime to look at the curve and then what I realized was some of these like intraday or daily or even weekly fluctuations you couldn't even see it on the chart and it was important

for me to sort of recognize it puts it in perspective but I think that this really is a bias that affects more people than it should it it affects everyone and I think it's the thing with biases is it's so easy to intellectually recognize a bias but that doesn't mean that it still doesn't exist there's actually a bias that even if you're aware of a bias it still affects you and so it's not just about being intellectually aware of this stuff it's then how do you build a system that protects you from the bias and

so maybe you set up some type of rule where okay I put up if I make above x on a certain day I'm going to with with my pod maybe rate the next trading day and then unless it's a really really good8 out of 10 n out of 10 I'm going to size down by 50% as much or even if it's a good day maybe you still size down by x amount so it's less about the I mean step one is always awareness and intellectually but then it's then building the process and then iterating over

that process to make sure you're protected by it sure so here's another one fomo so not that I'm the best at this but our illustrious managing director of trade tring Ben Baller walked into the studio not 5 minutes before we started to casually tell me that the firm just crushed some trade while I was you know sitting here talking to you which is great and and you haven't thought of a single other thing since I you know first of all I would never say a negative thing about you know our head of trading ever but

yeah that was annoying no a while ago that would have really you know Jonathan's really ashamed with you right now a while ago that would have really bothered me like it would have I'm not saying it doesn't bother me but like it would have really bothered me it would have ruined the rest of my day the fact that I that I missed out on something but this is something that Traders deal with you know all the time this you know this fear of missing out and it's something that it's it canot only just like destroy

you on a personal level but it also can really destroy your trading if you start trying to force trades because you're worried somebody else might do something well in it yeah and and it's it's like it's like you have on the side like so often like what really is our fear of missing out especially when you're working in in a trading po or for a firm so much ends up really being I'm not upset that I missed this trade I'm upset that I missed this trade but other people I know probably captured it and if

nobody like there was always a running joke at at Trillium like I don't care if I didn't make money as long as nobody else did or like you know can't can't we just close the market so everyone can have a break and because it wasn't really about just our performance we weren't judging ourselves internally on our own expectation we were judging ourselves relative to others externally and that's when it becomes so so damaging and I'd argue some of the best stuff I've done with with Jonathan Katz is building up that awareness and those systems to

recognize and so even with my own habits of trying to step away from Trading if I look at it from a p&l perspective obviously I'm making far less money than if I was full-time trading there's there's no doubt about that but then what I need to do as a person is I need to focus on all the good things and all the positives like being able to do this podcast being able to do the Twitter content being able to share trading knowledge with others that's something I've gained that I otherwise wouldn't have and so it's

a lot of like exploring these emotions and recognizing that they're human but then how can you make them from maladaptive to Adaptive yeah I actually think you conf related to things that I would sort of separate out as two distinct biases so fomo right fear of missing out is I imagine the situation where I'm looking at some trade and I don't really love the trade but I think that other people are going to love the trade I think they're going to go for it and I think they're going to make a lot of money and

as a result I put myself in a position in a trade that I really don't like and I end up bearing the negative consequences of a trade I either don't really understand or what more likely than not is just not such a great tra the comparison game is a different thing where I think after the fact I might have had my Best Day Ever I might have done the best that I Jonathan Sheridan could have done but somebody else Lance brighten did better and I get down on myself even though there's no chance I'm the

kid that always set the curve so everyone hates me right even even though there's no chance that I could have done what you did because I didn't have the knowledge or the or whatever it was that you did you did I get down on myself and and that I think first of all it's a lot of wasted time that you could be otherwise being spent towards productive use oh it's just and those feelings that it's just not healthy it's not fun like the average Trader like how much you would you would actually probably be willing

to take a slight p&l hit to never feel those feelings just from purely just the quality of life perspective and so one one book that I've recommended to some some Traders and actually one of the the top guys in Chicago really enjoyed this is the book The Gap in the gain and what the whole concept is is everyone's focusing on the Gap where they could have been vers their ideal or where like what if oh man if I was just there I could have done so much better than than whoever else rather than simply focusing

on man look at where I was and look at where I am now and so a lot of this stuff is just how we reframe stuff in our heads and it's not about oh man I missed this trade it's oh man look at all the amazing trades I was around for this year and oh man I don't know if you're having a good year but I hope you are and oh man like I'm so lucky to be having a good year and what I've gained is I'm having this super interesting intriguing conversation with my trading

hero Lance who I look up to so much and that's what you're gaining and it's it's it's that reframing of of this stuff we actually have in my pod we have we have two people who will Who will call me out right away and say John you're in the Gap again or you're in the game again like my buddy in Chicago has me to do exactly that and it's good it's good to have accountability like those are really good practices yeah it's important what do you feel about overworking on the wrong things this is something

I see probably too much I wish I recognized it more in myself when I was newer trading but sometimes I'll see just people just doing busy work because they feel like working hard is is the way to do it but they're not accomplishing a damn thing and I feel sorry for them yep and so many people obsess with the crappy mediocre stuff and it's like no you really want to spend right if if between the Easy Money trades and the Home Run trades those probably make up just so much of our p&l despite you and

I probably take a zillion trades in between right like I'm on the average day was probably trading 10 to 15 tickers and hundreds of thousands millions of shares but there was probably just like one or maybe two trades a day and rather than focusing on all that stuff every day in my review I need to say wait I don't need to do this stuff what I do need to focus on is a and b as long as I have a pristine picture of a and b and all I focus on is in the coming days

this is what I want not the rest then it's so much better than doing yeah it it's it's working smart and then you can work hard if you're doing it smartly but if you're working hard without the right things it's it's like we discussed earlier it's useless how do you feel about trading out of a hole this is something that anybody with you know a long enough career is going to have to deal with but I've seen it I've seen people do it successfully and I've seen it just consume people yeah it's it's never fun

and I think it never gets easy but I do think the most powerful thing I did is every time you've been in whole you have that experience and you've clawed out and you know it's it's almost like a breakup where your first breakup is super emotional and you act out of scarcity and fear and oh my God is am I ever going to have another you know girlfriend ever again and once you've been through breakups you're able to take that bigger step back and say whoa whoa whoa wait a second Mr emotions like you're not

being rational just given the fact that I've been through this before I know life does go on it will be okay I will work my way out of this and so with the trading hole so often it's being able to take the step back from experience and say look I've been in holes before I'm now even more experienced I'm more successful than I was in the past and I've been through lless and I know that I need to just stay to my practice I need to learn the lesson and then focus on the bhead and

it's never easy we're always human but you really want to go back to just the basics doing your daily report card focusing on sleep doubling down on all of your best practices that lead to your success and then just focusing on the Easy Money trades the lower Varian trades that you can just hit again and again and again but it's never fun and no matter how good you are even me at my Prime when I got in a hole it was just oh crap I hope this doesn't become quicksand I hope this doesn't snowball and

so no you're you're never immune and I think that's part of the game and that's also part of what gives us a moe when you're experienced it makes it makes the barrier of Entry to be a successful established sustainable Trader much harder and that's that's good for those that can overcome it and I know one of the things that I've that that has helped me through this is to just I sort of think about it as it's going to happen it's it's bound to happen it's a statistical almost part of the job yeah I did

recently just internalize it is part of the job right what you signed up for when it does happen it occurred from one of two ways either you made a bad trade which you you're you're going to learn from and and now you're head has gone up or you it was a bad beat and he that's like and which was a good trade that didn't work out so I just feel like it's always helpful just for me to think about like this is this is inevitable that it's something that has to happen it's the natural course

of things what about tilt how do you feel about tilt this is more common by the way amongst the truly active Traders not this isn't really going to apply to swing TR probably everyone to some degree but it's it's more sensitive I think when you're glued to the desk and you're getting so many reps each day and the best thing is really Jonathan cats's analogy on if you're running a marathon and you're waiting to drink until you're thirsty it's too late the damage is already done you're not going to magically UND dehydrate yourself it's it's

too late and so often what happens is people will have one bad trade and they'll get two out of 10 frustrated they'll have the second bad trade they'll get five out of 10 frustrated then the third they get eight out of 10 then they think oh maybe I should take a break then they do the fourth and they're 10 out of 10 frustrated and they say their keyboard punch a punch a hole through the Monitor and kick a dog right and it's like oh man I really shouldn't have you know done that fourth trade I

should have done something about that and it's like well like by the time you're already slamming the keyboard and punching the monitor like you can't be like hey yeah you should probably calm down now like no you're gonna just punch that person in the face right that it's too late and so with so much of that stuff it's it's being proactive before it happens and recognizing like okay like maybe maybe at a two just being aware then when you're at a five saying okay I need to go take a walk I need to go take

a break and I'm not going to resit down until I'm in a clear State and I find there's there really is something magical about getting outside first of all getting out of your desk and away from the screens then getting outside it just adds so much perspective and you see you you get some fresh air and I found it's it's such a just reset for for the head yeah I mean also just one other psych psychological kind of trap that I really wanted to to talk about is I think this was a this might have

been a Kobe like a Kobe Bryant thing that I that I heard somewhere but but at some point I heard about this this this idea of like the mountain and people set their goals as to like climb the mountain and see themselves at the top of the mountain meaning like somebody will come at the beginning of the year and say you know I'm going to I'm going to be better than this guy in terms of trading or I'm going to hit some p&l Target which by the way is the worst thing you could do but

but for me it's always been like this this recognition that the best thing that I could do is instead of thinking about these sort of macro goals is to think about pulling the most I can about the next thing that's in front of me just one step at a time and marathon runners will tell you the same thing they'll they'll tell you like if you start you know on day one thinking you have to run 26 miles you're not going to do it you have to think about it like I have to make the next

100 yards and the next 100 yards and sometimes it's the next 10 ft and you know but and then eventually you run 26 miles the way to do it but it's it's it's so critical to spend the most amount of time thinking about the problem right in front of you rather than some lofty macro goal 100% agree and I would generally do a macro goal like I would do some big picture goals I would even sometimes do p&l goals but more more importantly those p&l goals or those lofty big picture goals I would break down

and figure out okay if I'm to reach these goals where do I need to be at Point a b and c then what are the processes and steps at each current moment that I need to be taking to to get there so yes you want to take the big picture goals and bring it down into daily habits and process to make it make it happen so to expand on psychology a little bit we've mentioned his name Dr Jonathan Katz quite you know quite a few times but let's just flush out a little bit who he

is so Jonathan Katz is a performance coach who's a clinical psychologist by trading that both you and I use and he his practice is essentially dedicated to high performers I think it's mostly if not only Elite athletes and Traders is that yeah to my knowledge well I guess he couldn't really speak too much about otherwise but I think I think for to my knowledge it's mostly athletes and Traders at this so I started working with them on your recommendation it's been an invaluable relationship with me and like I said I really do believe that the

further you get along your career definitely in trading but I think this is probably true in anything where there's Elite Performance involved I really do believe that a bigger and bigger percentage of the gains are going to come from the psychological shift rather than sort of the tangible changes so I don't know for me he's changed the entire lens at which I look through my trading I thought that unless you want to do this a little bit differently I thought you know I would talk about you know I'm pretty open about some of the things

that he's helped me correct if you want you can talk about some of the things that he's helped you correct but I'm you know I'm I'm I'm very open about it like the biggest thing that I think he's helped me correct is this focus on short-term p&l specifically not necessarily like the bobblehead but you know I learned it from you but sometimes you have like this tendency like you can explain an idea but you need somebody to really kind of get in ways help get in get in your head and really kind of help explain

like why you're thinking about the way you're thinking and really show you from a perspective that you hadn't thought of he really helped me focus on you know my own bobblehead and you know freeing me to think about sort of progress in that way has really opened me up that over time it's compounded into just a wave of better performance overall well yeah and as much as I I bust your chops I I do have a lot of love for you and the the progress you've made here has has been very huge and what I

think is interesting and I I've touched on this before is a psychologist has is an explicit cost and Katz is you know he's he's he's he's great and it comes at a price and he's expensive and he's very good yeah exactly and so many people see that price tag and and they will say oh my God who who would ever pay that and but to me that's the dumbest thing in the world obviously if you're a new Trader like yeah of course you're not going to pay that but if you're a high performing Trader it's

not about what is his cost it's what is that impact going to be on your trading and your quality of life and so for the couple years you've been working with him and I've been working with you it's it's it's been incredible to see on areas like FOMO and the comparison game and pushing the size and none of that is linear like you took it you took your your punches to the chin here and there you've had your bad moments the amount of times where I get the the the John text hey man you got

to talk me off off off the ledge like I had I had another you know bad whatever often and it's it's important to talk about that like no this this stuff doesn't happen magically you put in the work with Katz you put in the work on your own and it it didn't happen overnight but where you are versus a couple years ago look you felt some fomo about missing this other trade you're not perfect we're human you never will be perfect and that's when you focus on that Gap but if you focus on that gain

of where you were that was just two years ago you know I'll tell you some of the things that it's not you know I it's not all just like talking a lot of it is okay identifying what the problem is and what can I do to to to to change it and some of it is is mindset some of it is just sort of internalizing that these are the things you need to work on but there's also tangible things and I'll give you one kind of big one that I think I don't think you agree

with I think I know you don't agree with it but whatever I took p&l off my screen alt together for a while I took it off the screen and then I put it back but I put it back in such a way that I can't see my daily p&l I can only see sort of an aggregate pnl from a long time ago and what that helped me do what it helped me to avoid void this myopic focus on you know am I where am I at on the day or the week or the month and

really look at the trade right in front of me in a bigger perspective and that was you know this was that was an idea that came out of the work with him there's been other ideas like that as well another thing that I did for example is I just changed my keys to the point that basically I, I have no way to get anything but large size in certain situations like it's just and it's so important because you're doing solutions that are right for you and the other thing I love is what you recognize is

sometimes you take too myopic a view of your performance and you looking at that chart of your lifetime p&l and recognizing that overall it's going from the bottom left to the top right and every single bump in there you were probably upset oh my God like I'm never going to make money again yada yada but you persevered and ultimately that Trend held and so there's this other Trader I'm working with out of Texas really talented Trader has made tens of millions of dollars in his career and he was in a a sizable hole in 2022

the biggest of his career and he really struggled with it until he started to frame it in the perspective of that Lifetime p&l and that curve if you looked at and and we actually joked about this if you looked at that curve as a chart it's a beautiful line with these little microscopic consolidations he was in a consolidation where he was in this you know little little hole working back towards alltime highs then he broke out of the hole and like a beautiful chart it's gone and I think it's it's just another way of just

saying look I'm gonna I'm G to zoom out and and it's going to go in the right sometimes freeing yourself in that way could just be just be the difference I'll give you like another example which was I had a I work with in Trillium right so I have you know I'm within sort of a structure and other Traders and I had this tendency again subconscious but it was never like pushed upon Me by The Firm or anything like that but I would have a tendency to to to push my own risk limits and my

own size sort of in relation to what the people around me at a similar level were doing and that was a silly way to think because it's only what's right for me right it's not what's right for anybody else and so some of the work that I did with cats was able to sort of say to myself like okay never mind what anybody else is doing what is the right size and this what is the expected value and what is this trade worth for me and that and and start and start from there and figure

out funny is you're not necessarily going to have the same expected value as other Traders because you might not trade it the same way so for them it might justify 20,000 shares and be an A+ for them for you it might be a c and that's fine and it's it's I would say there's no black and white like because obviously there's ways to use information in situations adaptively or maladaptively right having the p&l on your screen can be adaptive if used properly or maladaptive looking at the actively traded with with the firmwide stats can be

used adaptively to learn or maladaptively and even like one of the big things that I attribute a lot of My Success to was my trainer being such a big Trader I always had a big imagination of what's out there and oh my God like I can make I can make 50 Grand in a day or a 100 Grand in a day that was astronomical I was making 500 bucks a week and that gave me the imagination and was adaptive so it's it's the context matters but we can control that context and it's important that we

do so for sure and you know another thing is we we mentioned this before about like how at the beginning of trading you know consistency is really rewarded and you get that sort of evolutionary response to sort of oh I should be consistent right be ponan response that's the I would to say it's ironic but that's not like an intuitive Discovery right like sometimes like you need somebody to point that out to you and to say like this is the reason you prioritize this and this is the reason it's not right for you now and

so I think just like a very sort of skilled identifier of those types of causes and effect can really change around somebody's perspective when it comes to you know a game like this yeah 100% And A lot of times you need that outside perspective and because ultimately we are changing our values do change and we need to adapt with it but sometimes it's not easy is there anything particular like that you are comfortable talking about that you know specifically he helped you sort of grow out of so the big surprise I think for most people

is I don't know if I've ever dis discussed trading like actual trading details with cats because I knew that you've told me that yeah because even from when I was working with with Jonathan my trading like my my my always bigger priority is is is health and wellness and being happy and and fulfilled and already even back then I was doing a lot of my nonprofit work and so I think the more important thing was a lot of the Mal adoptive Habits Like like the comparison game and and fomo and and stressing like how can

I focus Less on that and especially because I was starting to work more on my nonprofit you're going to miss stuff even even to this day right I'm probably 90% external work 10% trading and I'm I will miss you know maybe not the big Ops but definitely the majority of of of little Ops and it's recognizing to be okay with that and to recognize again the gain rather than the Gap and to be true to my values and one of the biggest things is just like I've learned so much from seeing other like there's so

many Rich successful traders that are just super depressed and unhappy and there's and that's true for any Walk of Life and so often you really are just seeing the Highlight Reel or you're seeing just solely what what what people are good at right like oh Lance is you know a n out of 10 trading but maybe I'm like a three out of 10 I mean I'm a happy guy I'll you know but like but you don't necessarily know that right and like it's it's so easy to perceive that just cuz someone has success in one

visible area that like oh man like they're they're family life is good that this is good that they're happy that oh my man everything's going great over there because they posted a a positive photo on Instagram or something and so much more important to me was just like look I just want to play my own game that's true to my values and and true to what I want to achieve and and it's it's that's probably the one of the biggest things then the other biggest thing was just how to have the difficult conversations I think

more important to me always than than trading is interpersonal relationships like like friends family partners and it's just can you have the important conversations can you have them productively can you be a good listener like even even your trainer right right he's someone that's that's really big on communication and improving in these areas and and those skill sets just help for life mentorship you have been a mentor to many within Trillium and outside of Trillium I'm very honored to be included in that list how do you view the impact of teaching on your own growth

as a Trader as a person why do you do it you don't need to do it yep and I think despite all the crazy conspiracies online really and you know me as as a person and that's what I always laugh about is obviously cats knows all my inner deep dark secrets and people just don't want to imagine or can't imagine that there's somebody that would do things relatively selflessly and a lot of it is just a philosophical belief that the world operates better when people care about those external to them and obviously you need to

take care of yourself first if anything cats has helped me realize that I need to set better boundaries and take care of my needs and express those needs more than I do as generally a more peop pleaser type but ultimately once your needs are covered I want to help others find happiness and fulfillment and so there there really isn't some crazy catch but it's more so My Philosophy that hopefully people pay it forward and what's been so cool about doing this online platform is the reach has been far more than I ever imagine iMed and

you get so many people I had a text this weekend hey man I had my first six fig month thank you so much I I have a dinner later tonight where there was there was a Trader I work with who was in a big hole for a while and he's finally out of the hole and he's he gave me a call and he's like look man I just and this was someone I had invested time and actually even even a little bit of money in and he gave me a call and he was like dude

like you believed in me when nobody else did and like in in all reality you probably changed the course of my my life to some degree and so it brings me immense happiness to know that there there are probably a lot of people out there that in some small little way are going to live better lives and pay it forward and even with the nonprofit work I do it's it's all based on the belief that that positive change compounds and that we can make a really big difference and if everyone did that hey well guess

what you know the world would probably be be a better place so in all your work and mentorship with people what has there has there been any like set of skills that you've identified in people that separates those who succeed from those who don't you know I I always think about this and one thing that I found pretty shockingly hard and and did fail at and I think everyone kind of fails at is when you're recruiting for Trillium or or for any trading job it's so hard to actually predict success like you can find what

traits are necessary but a lot aren't they might be necessary but not sufficient and so it's obvious that you need to have a passion for markets it's obvious that you need to have some degree of intelligence some degree of Mo motivation you need to understand math like all those are are given but what I found so shocking is that there's so many different combinations of traits that allow one to succeed and I know people that are super smart I know people that are less smart I know people that are good coders I know good people

that are good back testers I know good people that haven't play booked or written up a single chart in their whole career and there's just so many ways to succeed and people are so different so if anything I'm just more open over time to the fact that people from all sorts of backgrounds and skill sets can succeed at this minus the passion and the hard work and the perseverance and and really just avoiding a lot of I mean everybody has limiting beliefs even even so so it's it's yeah no I mean like I agree it's

like it's like baking or something like that everybody knows you need like some sugar and some of this and whatever but in in the right proportions in the wrong proportions you get garbage but it's it's I do think you probably need some degree of coachability and humility and and and just like the willingness to iterate and go through it like those are things that are just Universal what's so weird though is like I do know traders that that are stubborn are egotistical are greedy are like everything that you could think of as oh no way

this person would succeed but like it's just i' I've just found it's not as straightforward as you would imagine and but yes you need a lot of those but other skills can compensate that what would be your top advice for someone watching this three different types of people so one is somebody sitting at home trying to decide if they're going to get into trading another one is you know somebody who's already trading looking to get good and then the third would be a good Trader really looking to be elite so this will sound crazy but

I think if you have any doubt in your mind whether you want to become a Trader and if you're if you're in it for the money or you just want to do it because it seems cool or whatever if you're not truly passionate and gonna stick it out just don't even bother like if you're really considering oh should I or should I not just don't the job's just too hard the failure rate's too high you really need to be all in at this job and the people that hear that advice and say oh screw you

Lance like trading's the best I'm doing this anyways those are the people you need and you want to self- select for because if you're even remotely thinking oh I could be doing these five other jobs or I'm interested in these seven other things it's just too easy and out when when the job inevitably gets tough because the learning curve is so so long for people that are Traders and and want to be good the single best piece of advice I could give is size up your Easy Money trades and find more of them find more

of them expand your Easy Money Trade repertoire from from other Traders around you then add size for people that want to go from good to great and Elite it would it would really just be to prudently focus on exponential bet sizing so that when you really get the the aces or or the nuts you really really really go big because so much of elite level trading is that par principle where it's going to be 10 trades a year making up 80% of your p&l that's some good advice that was that's some good advice right there

that's one of those one minute Clips that'll change your life so I'm in the awkward position of having to say nice things about you right now but I'm going to just do it so we're going to have we're going to have to make it through so one of the things I I honestly admire about you is that I feel like you live your life with remarkable pers perspective I've admired this about you since since the beginning because it's it's something that I've struggled with to and have to learn how to do what I mean by

that is first of all I think that you left your trading career at the absolute Peak and by the way in trading it's not like you know I know timing is everything in this game yeah but it's not like it's not like you're an athlete and like by the time you turn 38 39 or 40 it's like your career is already over like you were at the peak and you only had like you know just just just better better things ahead of you and you left to basically be I know it's not full-time I know

it's you know you still trade but to essentially be a full-time philanthropist and the thing that I think is so interesting I think if you ask somebody early on in their career sort of all right not everybody's motivated by p&l some people could be M by other accomplishments but let's just say in terms of money just like what's your number what do you have to make in order to do something else and a lot of people I'm going to make X and then I'm going to go climb Everest or I'm going to you know do

I don't know I'm going to do whatever I'm going to do it's it's so funny in the trading world because when you work for a trading firm you start with people right we've we've all been doing our decade plus now and every single person at age 22 24 26 28 they all have their number in their head sure and then some don't make it and and and cut it in the job others hit that number and the goal po no one everyone's hit the number nobody's ever reached the the goal post where just keeps moving

keep moving the post and people will never people will truly never ever believe it but it's psychologically it is so so hard to say I have enough and what happens is I know so many Traders where the scarcity mindset still totally dominates them and you need to eventually just make a conscious decision whatever that number is and right you might think oh like without judgement some people think this number is silly or that number is silly whatever that number is you need to objectively say like what is my enough and will I be able to

hold myself to that and if you reach there it's like well what's what's your excuse if you if then it moves again well in addition to the scarcity mindset which is one thing but in your case it was it was a true opportunity cost like when you're leaving at the time that you did I get it and and I understand what you wanted to do and we're going to talk about that in a minute because I think it's incredible and it is incredible but the opportunity cost of your time to go and do that is

enormous because of the level you've you you've established yourself at yeah I mean I it was a decision I did not take lightly obviously and it was some I remember discussing it with with one of my mentors and he pretty much heard me out he he's a good listener and then he's like he's like Lance like the amount of people on Earth that can be at the top of their craft making what you're making and just mic drop and walk away it's almost nobody like it is it is an absolutely crazy decision that you're making

but like I I hear you and it's it sounds it sounds right for you and I think a lot of that is just being very true to your values and recog like like ultimately life is is short the the real currency isn't money it's time right and and God knows how much time we actually have and based on upbringing and everything else everyone has their own perspective of what old AG is and everything everything else but it's like you just don't know how much you have and for me it was like as I saw my

values changing and the philanthropy stuff becoming more important there's there's always going to be the ability to make more money that that that argument is always going to be there so what are you what are you going to do like never never walk away and and be true to your values and so even though I was at the peak of my craft you I had to make a very difficult decision which is look this isn't where my heart is anymore this isn't where my values lie and those conversations and that's also the benefit of of

having a psychologist and and mentorship to to really have those discussions and then also if if things don't pan out say just say like look look as a reminder Lance like you did this like I still get fomo when I miss big opportunities like there's been so many times I've been at a nonprofit event or I I've missed something big and I know everybody else around me I get all the text oh did you crush so and so oh my God you must have made so much money how how many million are you up and

I'm like I'm literally just like out of school right now and again it comes back to just really focusing on on the values and recognizing that that life is is short and you either got to live true to them or like most people just never will they they're always going to fall for for just scarcity of of of of money and be unable to walk away I think that's so true and if the if you keep moving the goal Po in like in a way like you you'll never be sort of satisfied with yourself I

think that there's an extremely small population on the planet that can be successful in at in in a business as as competitive as trading so hard to and I think that somebody who could be truly elite at it is just an extraordinarily small group of people and somebody who could be truly as Elite as you can get and then walk away from it to do good things for the world and for other people is honestly one of the most impressive things that I've personally ever seen and I think it's incredible I think it's a credit

to the world we need more people like you and that's about as much nice things that I can say about you without really you know pushing the envelope but thank you and and so one one thing I'll say that's that's been really fulfilling to see is in in the conversation with the CEO of Trillium when when I was having that very very difficult decision because obviously you know my my heart my friends everything my whole literally my only career really was was there and Barry made the comment so so you're telling me if if you

could one day reach a 100,000 people if you could reach a 100,000 people you would you would walk away and do this and we both we both laughed right I didn't even have a Twitter account then right I was I was I was a nobody and like a 100,000 was some astronomical unfathomable amount but I'm like yeah if if if one day I could do that like yeah that would that would be incredible to help so many people at scale now fast forward two years I guarantee you we're going to send this interview to the

moon and a 100,000 people are hopefully going to be able to hear this story and see that and so it's it's one of those things where it wasn't an easy decision but it was just recognizing that hey maybe I can just help a lot of people and and find greater balance for myself at a job that is just notoriously brutal especially at the level I was competing at so I wanted to make sure we reserve some time and talk about the specific way that you're doing philanthropy because it's so lens right like it's anybody you

know at your level it's very easy to just write a check to this organization or that organization this one that happens to have touched your life or is close to you and that's great but that almost wasn't enough for you to just write a check it was the same way you look at stocks like it's you have to find Edge somewhere and you have to make sure that you're getting the most out of your money that you can and so what you did is brilliant because you were able to create this sort of flywheel effect

that not only leverages the money you're putting in but also gets other people to to to to put themselves into nonprofit work and I'm very happy to have sponsored you know my own school and I want you to talk about a little bit about the impact competition it's it's it's such an amazing program yeah and so one thing I'll add even even before that is because we were talking about the moving gold goalpost and never having enough nobody will believe me when I say this but I don't think you ever there is no enough as

long as you live in that perspective and I think once you start giving back and especially seeing how many people out there are less fortunate than you and how many people there's a lot of suffering out there and as Traders we're often so lucky generally we're in air conditioning we're not we're we're in safe we're in safe spaces we're earning a a pretty damn good living when a lot of people don't even have the chance like their lives are so unfathomable to us and only through appreciation for your current situation that's what removes scarcity that's

what gives you a mindset of excess so I don't I don't do this stuff out of some like pure like yes philosophically but it it is also that you when you do these things you appreciate your own situation and have gratitude and it develops the opposite of scarcity it says wait I have more than enough I'm grateful and it builds gratitude and I think people just are so unbelieving that that could even be possible that they don't even try to experience it but like if you get involved and make it experiential to something meaningful to

you you recognize and that's that's why is part of your pod I've tried to bring a lot of you guys to some of these competitions and so essentially what we do is we fund universities that challenge students at each school to solve a different local social issue so we'll have ski we we have kids and students addressing housing in security or food insecurity or this year at Villanova we did helping young adults with disabilities transition into the workforce and into adulthood we had you Chicago dealing with homeless Business Solutions and we've tackled all these different

social issues and I've got to learn about them which is it's such a different world viiew from our normal trading career and then bringing some of you all to attend the competitions it makes it fun because we get to have a good time together we all get to learn about these issues and we all get to give back and feel good about it so can you talk a little bit about the flywheel effect though like so basically you start with so maybe I'll describe a little bit the program you can correct me if I got

it wrong but essentially you come up with a challenge whatever it might might be low-income housing which I know was the issue in Indiana if I'm not mistaken where you went to school so you challenge the groups of students to essentially solve for the issue of low-income housing in Indiana they get a small budget to basically try to figure out a way to do it and then there's the judges vote on and whoever wins gets a much bigger budget to go ahead and actually Implement that so that's what's so cool about this is it's not

it's not these just made up useless hypothetical not useless but it's not these madeup hypothetical case competitions that never see the light of day these Solutions get judged by the actual nonprofit and and different judges and the winning solution the winning team gets a cash prize then they get implementation money to actually assist the nonprofit and make the winning solution a reality so real change actually comes from these ideas and most of these nonprofits they're resource strapped they don't have the the all the skill sets all all the all the labor all the or the

money to do this so when you get a team of students able to help them out and these are top caliber students it can really make a big difference for these organizations and then the students get this incredible experience so the students win the university wins the nonprofit wins and their constituents are also better off so it really is this big flywheel that's such an important thing though because you're getting these students at a time at a very impressionable time in their lives right when they're focused on their future and you know majors and they're

internships and Etc and you're getting them to get their foot in the door in a nonprofit work and they're getting a budget and they get to see the results of what happens when you you know you you you you make an effort for somebody other than yourself and that has an impact for the rest of those people's lives right and how many people are they going to touch right and it creates that flywheel effect and it's just it's such an ingenious way to do it I am very proud to be a part of it I

think it's such an amazing thing for those people who want to learn more about it want to get involved want to sponsor what how do how do I get more involved in it sure so for for starters the easiest thing anyone can do is follow us on Instagram or Twitter the the Twitter is just in my normal Twitter profile and it's impactor comp the Instagram's a little bit different but simply social media support is is really great donations are really great or if you're connected to a a university that might be interested and share the

values of this type of programming and have the resources to implement it we're always open we've got an awesome contact page on our website and above all else just spreading the good word and helping promote us and and most importantly for most people the best thing you can do is just find what's experiential and important to you and just do it in some minor way because it'll it all makes a difference awesome so we'll make sure to put up the URL and all the Social Media stuff on the screen can you tell us just I

don't know you spent the last I don't I don't even know how long we're doing this but several hours seven days talking you know about Trillium and and and trading and philanthropy what's your personal plans and your you know where you're a young guy you're you're you've completely reinvented your career not as young as I once was what are what are your plans for the future so really the big thing in the trading world is I'm working on this trading course that's going to be mostly free and I say it as being the compendium of

everything I've learned over my career and I call it Magnum Opus and way not to Hype it it is if you knew the amount of work and how all in I'm going on this thing I do know the hype is real because there's nothing else like this and it really is going going to be top quality and and legendary and I hope it's going to help ideally tens of thousands of people there will be a premium part then part of that's going to end up going to charity so we we're going to win both ways

and help philanthropies while helping a lot of Traders and then I'd also love to just start to move on to just just new passions I love health and wellness it's something I'm always trying to optimize Within Myself I'm always trying to learn more on it and then ideally a lot of more more peace mindfulness balance relationships giving back and just wherever leaving capacity for wherever the win takes me I love it I love you I love you too Lance this has been an incredible several hours this just this thank you so much for doing this

for for everything you do for for for both the philanthropic world and for the trading World frankly I'm a subscriber of all your videos I'm sure I'll be watching your Magnum Opus thank you for sharing your wisdom and for being a mentor to myself and to so many others this has been great and really appreciate it thank you John and it's been a pleasure working with you.