Making Millions As The Worlds Best Trader - Lewis Borsellino

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Words of Rizdom
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I'm one of the best Traders ever velino had his best single trading day ever in 1987 $1.4 million that's the mentality of the Floor Trader I'm executing orders for Goldman Sachs Solomon Brothers EF Hutton Smith parney Marill Lynch I actually was going to go to law school and then uh two days after I graduated college my dad was murdered 28 years old making 4 million cuz bear in mind that's 4 million at that time essentially would be like almost 16 to to 20 million the first year I made $4 million I spent $2 million on
booing girls second 2 million I just blew it foolishly you went from going nearly thinking about quitting to then having 10% of the volume of the S&P so I walk in on that Tuesday afternoon and I make like 200,000 300 Grand Wednesday morning I do the same thing Thursday morning is the famous trade I walk into the pit and the Market opens up I'm long 300 S&P and the Market's not moving like 5 10 15 it's moving 300 500,000 I got 300 contracts on I handed the my cards to my clerk she came back like
15 minutes later she goes I think you made $1.5 million what she goes you made 1.5 million I just literally walked out of the pit went into the bathroom and threw up literally in 13 seconds when you're a FL Trader your opinions don't last more than seconds the key to trading is [Music] literally the number one podcast in the trading space the fastest growing and that's thanks to every single one of [Music] you welcome everyone back to the words of wisdom podcast still the number one podcast in the trading space and the fastest growing thanks
to all of you and our incredible guests talking of which we are joined by a 40-year plus trading veteran today is a complete honor he was once uh 10% of the S&P volume in the trading pits which is absolutely incredible and I had a very great opportunity to to research him and just watch some of the old interviews that he's done and I'm truly honored to be with leis Bor Selina I hope I said did I say that right yeah you said it properly it's absolutely honored to be here with you today and um you
know I'm excited to to learn more about your journey and and all the experience that you've gathered over the years and the Decades of experience uh but just to start off with like what was it about trading like how did you find and come across trading yeah so that's a pretty interesting story um I actually was going to go to law school I wanted to be a lawyer uh graduate ated college and then uh two days after I graduated college my dad was murdered and uh I ended up uh uh driving a truck after we
buried him he had a small trucking company I was driving a truck I was taking the lsats um going to try to pursue my my dream to become a lawyer and um I ended up um was reading the Wall Street Journal about gold Futures and how gold Futures had risen and the price of gold have risen uh so uh I ironically not even ironically it was for two is for me my mother actually was a legal secretary to a gentleman named my Kravitz and Mory Kravitz's partner was Leo mamad so you got Mory Kravitz and
Leo mamad and Mory um was probably the foremost authority in the in the world on gold um he went around the exchange floor before gold was even able to trade and asked all the different brokerage firms can I get your gold business if you ever trading gold and everybody just said sure because no one ever thought that would happen again um so my mom was their legal secretary um they had left to go to The Exchange um meanwhile there was a young uh attorney out of Notre Dame law school by the name of Jack sander
and my mom had gotten him um was typing briefs from him and doing different things in chores and uh he went to the Merc so um after my dad died I went to uh I was actually playing handball right so handball is a little different than racketball but back then we used to play handball you know we didn't have rackets and I was playing with a gentleman named Lou mat and he had a small trading firm on the floor of the CME and I told him I wanted to open an account to trade gold Futures
and he said leou you don't want to do that he goes why don't you come down here and see what this is about you're a young kid you this is the place to be and so uh the first day I walked on the floor of the exchange and I opened that door and the energy and the and the emotion and and the the sound of money was in the air right the people were just yelling and screaming and running back and forth with all these paper orders and uh I was sold that day and I
I took a job with him being a runner um so that's how I actually got to the floor wow and it's interesting how you say like especially when I speak to a lot of people with your sort of experience a lot of the time it wasn't something that they had on their radar originally when it comes to trading and they somehow whether it's through meeting someone else some little interest here then suddenly they find themselves on a floor and it's as they always say the energy that really drew them in yeah yeah it's uh and
and luckily right in anybody's career you have you got your um you know your hard work dedication things that you do to to to hin your uh skills but in anybody's life a little bit of luck has to come in right and so um I went to I went to the Merc um I was lucky of a couple things number one uh Chicago Futures was the king of the world I mean literally the you know the New York uh comx and New York NX those exchanges traded Commodities but they were they were like little babies
when it came to the New York uh or Chicago commodity exchange like you had the Chicago Board of Trade we had and the Chicago Merkel exchange two biggest exchanges in the world and when we offered when they started offering Financial Futures the growth of commodity training worldwide was incredible um still a small game you know back in the 80s you think about it there was uh probably back in the 80s there was like 450,000 people in the United States owned and traded stocks commodity Traders were like 40,000 so it's still was a neofight industry but
I I got there right at the right time in the 80s and the explosion of all the financial futures um but meanwhile as I was a runner I went to the to the gold pit with an order and I I knew myy I KN I I knew Mory since the time I was eight years old I mean he was just a fixure in our family so I tapped him on the shoulder and gave him a an order and he goes hey kid what are you doing here he talked like this he was a he was
a jovial guy he was like 5 foot five at one time he was 5 foot5 by 5 foot five in fact his badge was zzz Z because when he was talking to you sometimes he would fall asleep so uh uh but he goes hey kid what are you doing here I go well you know I got a job as a runner he goes come back in two weeks and you're going to be my clerk and that that was the you know you think about the the things that fell into my life like you know I
was on my my dad's um death was certainly a devastating time for me and my family yeah um I I always was trying to pursue my my career as a lawyer and um you know God shuts down one uh one door door and another one open right and so that's that's how I got started on the floor exchange I mean I literally went to college as an economics political science major so not that could use anything like that on the floor so you know in fact one of my professor economic professors visiting the floor one
day they tapped me on his shoulder and he was out there and I looked at him I go hey professor this is economics 101 in here and there's no widgets we're not making widgets we're making money but yeah it was It was a it was you know just a you know a lucky time not a lucky time well it was luck that the opportunity came to me and then I was able to take advantage of it but the growth of the exchanges was massive over the next 20 years definitely and just a touch on a
topic there like my my father actually passed away and was murdered uh when I was younger too and that watching this documentary that you had on on your story your mother mentioned that when that happened yourself and your brother said to her that you know we're going to just we're going to basically get revenge with success like we're going to become successful as our way of getting back at that situation um how much did that help you in terms of your mindset going into I know at the time maybe the exchange wasn't there or like
the trading route but just generally with your mindset of pursuing success and elevating yourself um yeah how much did that help you in your journey you know this is a very interesting question cuz on reflection when I you know wrote a couple books and I reflect upon my life and I look at different things you know I grew up um not in a very traditional family right everybody's seen these Italian M movies and things like that those kind of people were normal for me like that was our life you know that our friends were our
friends they all did the same thing all the guys did the same thing hung out together you know Italian Community but um you know my dad went away to jail when I was in like fourth grade came home for a little while I was in seventh grade want an appe peal when I came back so six years of my life growing up my father was gone and he was like my best friend uh and and my brother's best friend and and even though he he lived this sort of deviate lifestyle you know it's it wasn't
the you know traditional American Family lifestyle you know he did have his principles and morals that he kind of passed down to us and and one of the things um I look at is that I've been dealing with controversy since I've been in fourth grade yeah right so my point what I learned in a very early you know very early in my life you learn move forward just keep going you can't dwell on the past you can only take what life's given you and you know you hear those things from life coaches and all these
people out they're pretending to be life coaches nowadays and it's funny because when I was on the floor and trading and the world was turning into chaos like the crash of 87 like you know when when the markets were in fast markets and things were you know making the markets gate uh international news I mean we didn't have you know in the ' 80s we didn't have the internet that was you know democratization of information right where it was instantaneously like when we when we closed our trading um our trading uh days out uh if
we weren't flat there were no overnight markets and if there was a you know a bombing a war started you know something happened you couldn't get out of those positions until the market opened up but so my point was is that when you when you deal with controversy as young as I did and then you go through all the things that happened with my up to the my dad's murder it was just like what can you be in your life well being a traitor right is a probably good idea because you you know how to
you know how to kind of um Harvest your emotions you know how to make sense of what's not sensible and if you can keep it cool when everybody else is panicking it becomes a very great personality for uh you know making sound decisions definitely that's why I want to ask you because it's a very similar thing of handling those emotions being able to handle setbacks and adversity which as you say like we're not as Traders it's not something that is we're not used to like the everyday person when it comes to trading just does not
understand we're not designed as human beings to be Traders I think it's something that you have to develop sometimes there's certain circumstances that help you to develop that as well and as you said as well that there's moments where you could say look you could say maybe your mindset that allowed you to get into those positions too and how you m fed yourself into those positions that also allowed that look to take place if you will and those doors to open you mentioned being a runner what does that mean like what would that entail that
starting position yeah so on the floor of the exchange um let's take a break for a minute there guys because I want to tell you about one of our sponsors Alpha Capital now without our sponsors it's not possible for us to host such incredible podcasts around the world and get the level of guests that we are getting so again thanks to Alpha capital for sponsoring the podcast now Alpha capital is one of the best prop firms in the industry so so far this year alone they have done over $50 million in payouts which is absolutely
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is best for you now you can use and get the highest discount available at anywhere using Riz 25 so that's r i z25 for 25% off all challenges the links in the description below so let's get back to the episode they were different pits so we call them Trading octagons or trading pits so there would be the pork belly pit the cattle pit there would be the euro dollar pit the Japanese and dmark so every pit was named and so what would happen was that all the brokerage firms like maril Lynch Goldman Sachs uh Smith
Barney EF Hutton um local firms would have desks and clients would call down to the desk on the floor to a clerk and say hey go buy 20 contracts of S&P futures at the market all right and they would write it on a piece of paper they would fold it and then that Runner would run it out to the to the designated uh pit where the order was supposed to be at and so that was like your first uh introduction to you know you were you were part of that you were part of that chain
that got the orders to the um to The Exchange to the to the broker who was going to execute the order what was the elevation like from there then because obious you started as a runner then you said you went to being a clerk and then from there eventually you obviously ended up in the pit trading itself right yeah so um hopefully when you become a runner the next thing is how do I make fun with a friends with a broker and can I get a broker who hire me as a clerk so if I'm
a clerk all those Runners that are coming with the different orders coming to my pit I grab those orders from them and then I organize them into what we call the deck and the deck is simply all the orders that were going so you got your market price and then you have all the orders that are below the market price and then you have your market price and all orders that are above it so you would then organize all those orders and then uh you put it in the deck and as the market moved up
and down the broker would execute those orders okay so on the upside of a of a deck you had what we call cells so if the market was at 10 and you were trying to sell them at 12 I would have sell orders resting in the pit and when it got to the 12 uh strike price I'd be offering you know 10 to 12 10 to 12 10 to 12 the only the other thing that was above the market price was what we call buy stops and buy stops are orders that are put in above
the market so let's just say you're short the market at your short to Market at 10 and you only want to risk $5 on the trade so you put a buy stop in at 15 so if the market doesn't go go uh lower because you're in pit that's why you shorted it and it starts going up you only wanted to risk that $5 dollar so the buy stop would be above the market and so then the broker would executed and that would be locking in a loss of $5 on that trade mhm so on the
downside you had their buys and your sell stops so as the market moved in uh descending order you would execute all the buys and then let's say you were along the market at $10 and you were risk you wanted to risk five you would put a sell stop at $5 so if the market moved from 10 down to five the broker would execute the order and then you've locked in your loss so um that's the way very simple in in a deck in order FL it's no no different than all the uh electronic domes that
you see now it was just by then it was all collected into into paper yeah yeah paper how many how much room for error must there have been though back in those back in with all this paper with all the from the desk getting the the orders to the runner sending it to the pit it's all on paper all these transactions yeah there was there's all kinds that's an interesting story there I mean there's all kinds of different ARS like for example the phone clerk could have taken the order and the guy said buy 20
and he wrote it down as a cell right um so that error can happen um the the the clerk could bring it to the wrong pit and then they can't execute it in that pit they got to finally finally get it back to the other one and then um the the runner gets it to the pit and the guy will put it into the deck and the broker could execute it wrongly what if he had a buy and he did to sell so that that's the communication errors that could happen but actually in the pit
when you were trading and you were standing with a bunch of people everybody had different symbols my symbol was LBJ um because I grew up in the in the 60s and LBJ my my initials were Lewis John porcelin ljb but you want you want sort of initials or acronyms that people are going to remember so I had LBJ because of the president so everybody kind of knew who Linda ban Johnson was but I used that as my acronym LBJ and there was other people have pow and wow and zap and Hulk and you know uh
mmm and zzz and hat um there were a lot of different Ace there were a lot of different uh you know symbols so now you're in the pit and you're you're trying to buy from um let's say you're you're uh standing across me and I'm I go you're offering 10 at 10 and I go buy 10 and the guy to you is offering 10 of 10 and he thinks I traded with you him right so you both check to trade with me but me you me and you are checking looking at each other checking the
trade but it's still the the hand signals were the same was hey I bought 10 I bought 10 I'm writing the town sold you and you go I sold you 10 yeah right I didn't realize the guy next to him was thinking that I was communicating with him so the next day now you have an out trade so you and you've got a I've got a client who thinks he bought the market at 10 all right which he did I executed the trade with you and then next day this broker and to the your right
my left is out to sell me 10 of 10 and I don't know it right well imagine if the market is at um at $15 it moved up overnight and he's looking for his buys a 10 right well I got the buys a 10 this guy guys out to sell me 10 of 10 and the market's at 15 we don't know it that's a winning out trade we would say to him I would say I didn't know it so let's just split it I take five and you get rid of five and we make $
five together but let's just say the market was at 10 and it opens up at five and that broker that I did not trade with is out to sell me 10 of 10 now we got a losing out trade mhm right and that's when all the arguments start I can imagine yeah whose fault was it I was your fault my fault no you know so you know the general you know when you have 500 PE people standing in the busiest pit in the world and the market is moving um you know a matter of seconds
and milliseconds every day it's some out trades were just a part of the game I can imagine in terms of Personality though because as you mentioned like you're having these same mistakes you have to handle those you have to work out who was who was that fault who wasn't you probably have to fight your case to try and make it so that it wasn't your fault Etc but just generally trading within those pits and that environment as you just the the day that door opened and all that Energy's there how important is it having a
certain personality to be able to handle the pressure the emotions and the the chaos if you will of the floor well you know it looks like chaos to the outside world but it's really organized chaos right everything had a had a put two different two different um mindsets right if you were a kind of person that knew that you weren't very good at Trading so you could have a job just executing orders and making brokerage commissions from the The Brokerage from from executing their orders and assuming that risk of executing the orders and there could
be out trads right um when I was recruiting traders that work for me and were backing them I kind of look for I used to look for people that were I don't want to say this negatively but less less cereal but more about discipline like so dividual on athletes College athletes people like that because they knew what it took to have the discipline to train their body now I just had to teach them how to train their mind when it comes to trading right so um for example you know you got to be able to
trade with a stop like I said you if you've got a plan I want to buy it at 10 if it goes up to 15 I want to get out if it goes down to five I need to get out well a lot of times what happens that people freeze they put a position on you know um I I always uh used to have a little saying do you how do you tell turn a day trader into a scalper or into a how do you turn a day trader um into a into a position Trader
right let the market go against him right so if he buys him at 10 he thinks well I love him at 10 let me buy him at eight and he loves him at eight he goes let me buy him at six then all of a sudden they're down to two and he's lost all his money and he's got to puke out of his position and the market turns around goes the other way right so you know that was that was a story that happened all the time right people just didn't they lost their discipline and
if you lose your discipline you know I used to have this little saying if you lose your discipline your ass is going to foul right and you know one of my rules would don't shoot your don't shoot your the whole out in one day you always want to be able to come back and trade the next day um so when it came to trading different mindset you got to be the kind of guy who can guy or person who can make a decision stick to the plan if it if it goes against you take your
loss and go on to the next trade and you know you know it's all kind of cliche now because everybody says the same thing but back in 1980 when I wrote the 10 rules of com of trading the you know the the rules I wrote were hey learn from your losers you learn more from your losers than you do from your winners right so you got to be able to um take rejection think think about the fact when you're wrong the Market's rejecting you saying you you literally have not made you know a good decision
it's and it's turned into a loss so what happens a lot when I was back in Traders is that they would get paralyzed they they make five losing trades in a world in a row you know they're uh you know they become toast if they become toast they're never going to be a good Trader if they can't put the pass behind them and move on then they're going to be paralyzed by their decisions they made in the past right did you ever have to like coach them coach people into that sort of mindset or was
it something that you would try and find naturally and then work you know build on that versus trying to help people accelerate their tra so when we had borcel trading um what we did is that we had three analysts that we paid to do all the market research right we had some people that were Gan experts we had some people that were uh reversal experts then we you know had people were technical anal experts and that there was like 10 of us that would sit in a room and then we would call the the uh
analyst in and they would give us their for their prediction for the market for that day we did this every day and um so we all had out you know where it was a buy where it was a sell what we think the Market's going to do what numbers are coming out today we got unemployment CPI whatever could affect the market that was their analyst's jobs right and they would come in independently and so what we were looking for was consensus with the three different analysts with three different disciplines right so then we would then
internalize it well out of those 10 Traders right maybe three of them were really good maybe three of them were average maybe three of them were terrible but at the end of the six months we knew the terrible guys and we we washed them out we brought in new guys but at the end of the day um you know those are kind of things that you know people think that you know you just you you people don't understand that when you're trading especially you're talking to your retail people they really are you know they're lost
you know they want to learn how to become a technician they want to become an analyst they want learn so on so it's kind of hard for somebody to do that part-time right this is something that you you know dedicate your life to it's 247 about information so uh so if you're not the kind of person that can make some losing trades and move on you're not going to be very good at trading was that something that you learned very quickly when coming into trading for sure I mean you know uh I used it was
the best business in the world was instant gratification M you made a trade from you you made ,000 it was in your account the next day W right and then when you lost for the day it was out of your account the next day so instant loss you know I used to call it the you know it was like a one minute every trade was like a one minute uh uh business plan yeah but uh yeah I mean and scalpers and and Traders that are just trying to take advantage of the of the market fluctuations
for the day are completely different than you know people that are you know creating hedge funds and creating um you know ETFs or U or anything that has to do with the market but um certainly when the S&P 500 was created it became it took a while for all the fund managers to understand how how to use it mhm and um so in the beginning it was terribly inefficient and by the time I left it was very efficient so what were the the pros and cons of that though because a lot of people would hear
inefficient and think oh that's no good you know can't use that but then there would also be some pros too that I imagine especially being in the well the pros were when it was inefficient the guys on the floor made a ton of money for us uh but the the cons were there really weren't any cons I mean it's just people learning by their mistakes and you know then then you know uh hedge fund managers let's just assume they were doing A&P you know a SPO or S&P 500 Index and they were long all the
stocks and the Market's up 6% in the first quarter and they're worried about the second quarter they could literally go into the Futures market sell their position out be short Futures long the stocks and be Market neutral right so things like that started um evolving where fund managers were using it professionally right and when you're on the floor and you're a retail Trader in this space you're really really really just providing liquidity for the the institutional guys to execute their orders and what happens is that when they have a big order they throw the market
out of equilibrium and so let's just say you know they come in and they buy a thousand lot they move the market from $10 to $17 the guys that short against that that institutional guys are hoping the market move back to around you know back to $10 because that was equilibrium at the point so those are the kind of traders that are you know providing liquidity for the institutional Traders so you got to remember that you're you're trading against the institutional traders who are have long-term goals and different strategies applied in the market I always
find it fascinating when speaking to more professional Traders and and people who have that wealth of experience because you hear about more Alo different roles in terms of having analysis having then the trader having the say risk Department Etc versus the average retail Traders trying to fulfill all those roles in one yeah and then as you mentioned as well a lot of the time you have to dedicate your life to you have to be full-time essentially to really build these skill sets and I think that's where it's really interesting because most Traders are always rushing
retail Traders they're always trying to rush this to become a successful Trader to have freedom Etc and I do believe there's a very big misconception when it comes to trading because yes it can grant you Freedom you can live life on your terms Etc cool but that freedom doesn't look like you wake up and just do whatever you want all day you still the discipline of what trading requires to pres present that life is you essentially replace your job wherever that may be with the job of trading which if anything could probably be more stressful
be more heartache because of the ups and downs that comes with it but at the end of the day for those who are dedicated the reward is is there um but it's understanding that it's going to take a lot like when you hear of say Traders trying to become a professional full-time Trad I say professional but full-time retail Trader within the space of 12 to 24 months for example like what does that make you think after you know having all the experience that you have and and have seen the space grow and evolve in the
way it has over the years as well profitable trading really boils down to two things opportunity and volatility and that is why the podcast is partnered with Market Journal because between the years 2016 and 2020 the amount of opportunity that was available as well as volatility to take advantage of was at the highest has ever been and all of that really pointed towards one man president Donald Trump during his period in office all it took was one tweet and that would present so much volatility and the right Traders would take advantage of that and would
create their record pnls and that is why those same Traders are so excited for this new period between 2025 to 2029 when we have president Donald Trump back in office now Market Journal is going to give you the weekly insights you need across crypto Forex Futures and the stock market so regardless of what happens whether it's a tweet a particular stock running up hundreds of percent whatever volatility and opportunity that market Journal can identify it is going to share with you every single week so you can purely focus on taking advantage of those opportunities and
taking advantage of that volatility to create your record p&l now Market Journal is abs absolutely free all you do is click the link in the description below put in your email and you will receive key updates on the markets every single week so you are always up to date with what's going on and ready to execute when the time is right links in the description below thank you for enjoying this episode I had two types of Traders I had Floor Traders and upst upster Traders um so it's the same thing literally I had a rule
of thumb if I could get a Trader to break even after one year broke even covered his commissions he had a good chance of making it as a Trader right if they if it it so meaning one year of being in the in the market buying and selling every day putting your losses in putting your winners and doing all your research right there's a we what we used to call it was ready aim fire ready was let's do our research aim okay these are the targets we're looking for Market gster fire put the order in
right and then at that point then you manage the risk then you have to have a stop and so on so you have to go through that process thousands of times thousands of times before you become number one comfortable with it number two to understand what it's going to take to turn out profits every day right we us I used to have a rule about guys that traded on the floor or traded upstairs and they said I made money every day for a year I go show me a guy who makes every money every day
for a year two years three years and that's the guy who's going to get indicted because he's got Insight information right um so um you know it it's really about money management and and going through that routine in day in day out and like I said it's less cerebral you know the research cerebral but at the end of the day the execution part of it is just robotic mhm right and this is you know this used to be the the big um uh sort of argument between computerized Traders and discretionary Traders right and I used
to look at the computerized Traders and say yeah I got it until you're until you're uh program doesn't is not you know you know spits out like 10 non-profitable trades and then you're in their uh optimizing right so my point is is that whatever your philosophy ends up being more computerized more uh you know discretionary you got to do that in it day in day out and hone your discipline to be able to stay with your systems right and that that's a that's a difficult situation and and and things have changed dramatically from when I
traded I mean we had all the information when all the order flow is going through the exchange and then into a pit we had all the information right so I always like to tell people you know you got to understand that we were the original high frequency Traders so literally what we would do is we'd be standing in the pit and we could see the order flows coming in we try to get in front of the order flow right and you got you see all these Brokers buying and and and the market's at 10 now
it's at 12 now it's at 15 well let's just say I assumed you know I saw the order flow coming in so I bought the 12s and I bought the 13s and now the guy the the order fulfiller filling that that Institution order is bid it up to 15 so I you know I bought 20 contracts at between 12 and 13 and I turn around and say sold and sell them 20 at 15 well I make you know literally three and2 doll profit on those exchanges and if I could do that you know 10 15
times a day I'm making myself three to $5,000 a day you know and the other thing about retail Traders is they've got to they're going to have to understand that where their risk tolerance is right there's some guys that can trade one and two lots okay and they make the best decision decisions ever as soon as you kick them up to a five lot or a 10 lot and you increase that risk their judgment gets U skewed and and what happens is that the two things that you cannot measure about trading is that you know
everyone has a different propensity for greed right and risk and so when um when you when the smaller Trader steps up to be a bigger Trader can he handle that that risk because now when he loses he's not losing $200 he's losing $2,000 right so that's another thing that that um uh retail Traders need to learn that it's that's going to be a you got to understand I used to call it one of my rules was know yourself know what you're comfortable with cuz if you try to um to get outside your comfort zone you're
going to make bad decisions do you feel like everyone has a limit that there's just a certain limit that you can't train Beyond you can't read a certain book about or learn to get past like every human being just has a limit that the risk tolerance just gets too out of whack so it's a real good limit test is uh when you have a position on and you feel like you're going to throw up maybe it's too big definitely yeah but yeah you know um there there's different training I I used to I used to
in the day I used to compareed to all these Bank Traders you know all they trade hundreds of million dollars of yeah well they had the bank's money you know and they had the book behind them and they had all these different things I was on the floor trading my own money against Goldman Sachs right so um it's a little it's a little different right when it comes to uh you know who's who's laying the risk out and you know who has to assume that risk what do you think it was for yourself then to
be able to handle that much risk you know like I said um I was able to uh become Mor's clerk um and literally um I tell the story all the time I was there for a year a year and a half and I wasn't making any money I was making money filling orders but I wasn't making money trading and then I would have an out trade and I was getting very distraught thinking about leaving wow and then um I don't know whole jar but do you remember the Falcon Islands when the Falcon Islands uh uh
this would be like mid 80s 1985 or so I'm trying to think maybe 83 so U the the Falcon Islands decided they were going to succeed from uh or they got they got attacked by Grenada and then they they were going to succeed from British the British Empire and then they sent ships down there well gold rallied like 55 $50 $60 in like three days MH because of the you threat of a war right and then um they made a they they made a an announcement during the day that uh no that the strips are
turning around and they're going to surrender there's not going to be a war and then gold dropped like $80 in about two minutes so I was filling orders in the gold pit at the time and and when you used to fill orders you know you'd be in there you know trade with you know 30 40 50 guys and then the Market's in a fast market so that means the tape goes to fast so the order flow is not coming out and so what would happen is that I would fill orders with the different people and
I would I would write on the order who I did I would just put the guy in the price and stick it in my pocket so I did my pockets literally I had probably 50 orders in each pocket and my clerk had so now the market slows down and we're and I'm verifying all my trades with different people the guy next to me uh his name was Mike manini his badge was mmmm and I look at him and I go hey I sold you uh you know 25 contracts on the low he goes he shakes
his head and I go what do you mean he goes no I sold you 25 so we had what we call a sell cell MH and the market was 50 went down to the low and then it rallied back because they said they didn't surrender and then war is on and so now him and I had what we called a sell cell mhm so the way we resolved it was he bought mine I bought his the market was already $50 higher and I made $75,000 on that trade wow he made 775,000 on that trade now
the S&P S&P pit opens up I'm you know in that year I've got you know like a 100 Grand in my account and I got a year and a half of experience I go into the S&P pit and now I'm killing it like I know what I'm doing I'm not making mistakes um I start building a deck like we had in the goal pit and then uh the S&P pit just exploded well talking of exploded then there was one point where you were responsible for 10% of the volume if I'm not mistaken yeah that was
for for what I used to trade and my customers so I was I was um executing orders for Goldman Sachs Solomon Brothers uh EF Hutton uh Smith parney maril Lynch um Mory and I put together a pretty big deck and all the big local firms and at that point I was you know I had a a client here in New York York that was um Solomon Brothers and they were gigantic and the guy here that was in charge of that company was a guy named he was a partner was uh Stanley shop corn and he
loved the way I filled my orders and uh so I got that and then that that went all the way to 1987 86 and then 1986 the The Merc um literally uh Outlaw du dual trading in the S&P pit it was the only Commodities future ever to Outlaw dual trading W so I gave up the deck and I just became a Trader in ' 87 wow but to think about that turn of events though we just go back like you went from going nearly thinking about quitting yeah to then having 10% of the volume of
the S&P yeah you and and and like I said think about retail Traders they got to go through that process all the time right well what I was very really really comfortable with after a year and a half was buying you know if I got in order to buy a thousand I bought a thousand if I got an order to sell a th I sold a thousand right so I got really good at executing orders so I was really good in the process of buying and selling so it just became normal where I kind of
disguised what I was buying and selling for myself in the order flow that's another reason the bigger order for of the the bigger uh players and the like Solomon Brothers Goldman that they had Traders they didn't want him to know it was them so they would just say Lewis you know buy a thousand give up yourself so I would just say it's me the next day we would have a what they call an out trade was uh just called the house out where you make a switch of the clearing firms okay but uh yeah that
the fact that I was executing so many orders just made me very comfortable with numbers you know big numbers so would it be a case where in your mind you're you're focusing more on the the buys and sells the contracts versus dollar amounts and profit amounts and yeah it was all about making sure I'm you're doing your buys your sells and making it uh executable making it so that there wasn't a problem so one of the things that I was attributed at the Merc that nobody liked in the beginning but then everybody did it was
I I had all this risk right and I'm trading with all these different people and I'm getting orders coming in and so sometimes it was really physically impossible because what the rules of the exchange said was that I had to look at you we had to acknowledge each other we had to write down the five things on the on the uh on on the trading card so if I was the buyer you were the seller I would have um the buy that said bought 10 from you let's say your badge was AKA and then I
put aka and then you would say you're Merl Lynch I would put down the number 560 and the price and then he have to put on your card I sold T LBJ these Goldman Sachs here's the price and then we had what we call a br was a time bracket like every 15 minutes there was a time bracket those are the the was it one two three four five things that had to go on a trading card right and we had to we had to acknowledge this together well imagine when the Market's moving you know
fast markets then I don't have that much time all I could say is I bought 10 price that's it so I would take it and put it in my pocket what I did then was I hired a clerk to go around and check all my double check all my trades so I didn't have out trades yeah and then you know some guys fought it to the end and say uh you know my clerk would go to check the trade and they would don't bother me he should be checking the trade with me you know and
then I would go up to the guys listen if you don't check the trades with my guys and we ever have an out trade you're you're going to eat it not me six months later everybody had an out I created a whole new job on the floor out trade CL that verified traits so that that did a lot to excuse me that did a lot to to um literally um keep out trades to a minimum you know because you you could find right out right during the day right you didn't have to wait till the
next day and some catastrophic event happening um and that would you know could could uh literally um change your trading career I mean there there were there were some gigantic out trades in the millions of dollars while I was down there I could imagine I can only imagine so then you've helped to sort of try and remedy that by creating a role which would and verify in the moment on the day yeah versus just leaving everybody did it then literally I would say within 6 months everybody had a trade Checker well well it's necessary though
as you said once you're trading that sort of size and and as you say the markets are moving so fast trying to note down all those things yourself while trying to continue to trade and that Trader actually that trade Checker became an extension of your you and if you had a good one and the other guys had good ones they knew each other they literally knew hey I you know I got a 10 laot with Lewis boom boom boom boom they they would reconcile it how important would be like maintaining good relationships be as part
of pit trading with the who as part of pit trading like having those maintaining those relationships because you're trading with each other every single day yeah yeah you know um when I was filling orders I never would try to lay away what we call local right so if I had a big order and I started bidding the market up let's say I had a couple thousand to buy and you you hit me like on a 10 L I would ignore you and then he would I so and I would just shake my head you know
I don't want you to sell me a 10 lot and then I'm going to race the mark up another 200 points yeah so we had this like symbiotic relationship with everybody in the pit right our goal was to provide liquidity for the institutional Traders and we did and hopefully we could make some uh like I said provide liquidity and then make some money off of the off the uh the institutional artist that came into the pit you know you know of course personalities are what they are and um so there were some people you got
along with better than others but uh most likely Mo mostly people respected each other we respected for what we did and we're all there trying to make money we weren't trying to you know hurt anybody you shouldn't try to hurt anybody so in terms of M maintaining those relationships were there ever moments where things do get heated and and things get a bit out of control I can imagine are you asking that because you already know those things I've heard I've heard rumors I've heard rumors of uh you had uh not only for the 10%
of the S&P and obviously being a phenomenal Trader but also having a reputation on the floor yeah I did uh and I I not something I'm proud of but I did have the most fines on the floor for what they called undo Force so uh you know being the bigger big you know one of the biggest Traders in the pit um I would turn markets sometimes right and I would go you know half bid 70 bid 80 Bid And if you make those bids and people are offering them and now there's 500 people in the
pit you should get all those contracts well there were what I used to call the the Bottom Feeders the shark feed you know they they used to you know I would turn the market no one thinking the Market's going higher you know a lot of people used to follow me right so um and I see somebody sell this guy a five lot when I turned the market that W to me that was not right so I would go up to that person and strongly suggest that they don't ever do that to me again right yeah
there were times to where you know you know other people got in fights and pushing and shoving uh the number one thing was where you could stand because the higher more elevation you had in the pit um you had better line of sight people were all always jostling For You Know Places to stand you know people get their like 5:30 in the morning the Market's so and have a card and standing on the floor in their spot so they could have that spot um so it was very physical very uh uh you know it's all
about sight being seen and yes I did have uh uh a lot of different uh finds for that but uh you know that came with part of the territory being the bigger Trader and so on but uh it's funny because I would be playing golf with guys sometimes and uh guy go um you know I I um what do you do I go I I trade s smps on the floor you know s so I go yeah I know him he stands in the pit with me and uh the guy who was playing golf with
would meet the Traer and say hey I met this guy who's the nicest guy in the world this guy LS borsellino and he goes what you met Lewis he goes you met Joey Joey's my brother he goes no I met Lewis played golf him what a great guy he goes well you shouldn't be standing in the pit with him but then that's what the job demands I guess yeah you know I look I wasn't there to make friends I was there to make money right and so um you know there was a you know Unwritten
lie and it was funny cuz like the the the smaller Traders gave um sort of gave respect to the bigger Traders and allow so like there were times that I take a 100 lot down from somebody there' be like three or four guys around me say Lou can I have two can I have five can I have three and I would go yeah yeah yeah don't worry about it and and I would give it to him you know uh but you know um there they're being definitely a hierarchy in the trading world I one you
know how much volume were you doing two how good were you you know people respected you one of the things they had to know was that if I made a trade with you it was good meaning I wasn't going to back out of trade I mean in the early days before they had what we call dupe cards um there were guys sometimes who make a trade with you in the pit and if it went their way they just ripped the card up and say I never traded with you right so but you weed those people
out you know um I'll tell you what think think about this hundreds of billions of dollars with training hands every day okay without a lawyer right was a handshake your word is your Bine you make your trade and you go from there right so I love what you're saying there because it really gives an insight into what I would imagine most people don't really understand like we look at old videos of the pits we see the the as as we would say chaos and we would say oh wow that must be absolutely insane to be
part of absolutely also incredible in ways too but as you already suggested it's more organized chaos especially when you're involved right it's it's there's an order to things but then we get to learn about the hierarchy we get to learn about the levels of respect that Traders will have with each other also the people who may try and cut Corners like we the deeper levels that us as retail Traders really wouldn't see behind the curtain but it's really insightful to to learn about yeah so you know think about how efficient it was right and here's
here's here's the things that I if I can give may put it in a little um point of reference for you so let's say you run a business okay and you're doing business with this guy over here and you're making a good profit with that as a customer and um somebody goes in there and undercuts you and takes that customer away you're angry at that spot but you really you go well you know that's part of doing business and then when you really get angry is when you see what it does to your your your
p&l a month or two months from then when you're on the floor and somebody misses you on a trade and you can't get out or get in you know right away hey that you missing me on that trade cost me $10,000 immediately so it's it instant loss and instant gratification with that kind of a high stake pressure on people it didn't bring the best out of people in all the time right at the end of the day you know money is the root of all evil right so um it was it's different right so you
know i' you know I've started several businesses and done a lot of things but the things that really bother you in business end up affecting your bottom line a month or two months now in trading it's it's right there I mean you're looking at that person and the person just cost you $110,000 so it's a different uh you know especially floor trading uh retail trading you're going to get mad at the the order the screen you're it's going to be the your order entry system didn't work I put the order in you're GNA get mad
right and then you're G to miss a trade and then you're gonna run the risk of overtrading all right you know you us to have a a bunch of different rules about overtrading and trading you know but um yeah it's uh you know you you'll find out because if you're trying to you know if you're trying to leave your business right here's another analogy I just make so let's say you work for somebody and you're making $50 an hour okay and you work all week you work out two weeks and then you get your paycheck
right well let's just assume the business uh you know it they didn't make any profit for that month right but you still got your paycheck right so that risk is on the owner of the business so think about trading I used to tell people this is the only only thing that you could work all month and not have any profits MH right that becomes like I was fortunate cuz I was a Floor Trader I I probably I think over from 1981 to 2003 maybe had two or three losing months right um and and then you
know there were times where I would you know maybe go three or four days where i' been making money and I'd wake up in the middle of the night you know and cold SWAT going and I lost it I lost it you know but you know those are the kind of things that you know that happen I mean because literally you you are your business I mean um I in my height you know when I was trading the most I had you know I was making a couple million dollars a year and I had one
employee I had two employees you know you know I've started businesses where I've had 800 employees wow right so um different risk different mindset you know um and and different sets of pressure pressure in terms of the trading site when you mentioned that you went from say having that losing period where you thought about quitting and then obviously started to really perform well yeah and started to really believe in yourself and and what your your capabilities were as a Trader especially in the pits what was your mindset like though as you started you know through
that process in terms of your mindset being like um you know were you confident in yourself or you just kind of going with the Motions or were you confident that okay I've got this now because as you just mentioned there there were moments where you might have not made money for a few days and then suddenly think okay I've lost it yeah well tell tell us about that sort of roller coaster of the mindset and trading let's take a break for a minute there guys cuz I want to tell you about the best trading tool
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was there's no no better feeling than making a great trade no no better feeling I don't I don't care what people tell you right um and there's no better feeling of the independence of being a traiter right I mean I grew up I raised between my wife and I raised seven kids wow I was the football coach the baseball coach I was that I mean it it gave us a freedom you know two vacations a year you know as SP skiing uh doing all those things private jets and and my kids you know grew up
in a life that was you know Second To None you know but uh it you know that that mindset uh once you got it it's like you know it's a big ego and you gota and I also said one of my R rules was if you lose you know if you lose your head your ass will foul right so you that's one of the things that the Market's the only thing that humbles everybody yeah right it was funny because we could have kids who basically barely got out of high school making a million dollars a
year because they got into the pit they learned how to put themselves in a good position and they were able to scalp back and forth every day right then I had guys that were Harvard NBA standing in the pit that struggled with it because they were they were taught to be more opinionated like I think this is where the Market's going to go I'm going to buy it here I'm going to get out here and like I said before two things you can't you cannot chart fear greed everybody has different fear and greed so um
it's a it's a Once you have that Swagger and you're in the environment um you know there you know I I originally started out I'm make $500 $500 a day then I went to I'm G to make a $1,000 a day then I went to $2,500 a day and then it was I'm gonna make as much as I can any day right and um you my typical uh my my typical uh ritual was I traded in the morning to about 10:30 central time you know opening to about 2 hours and came back in the afternoon
uh because the market tended in the in the middle tended to uh just kind of float right so that was my typical thing then towards my end of my career um my goal was to make 5,000 a day if I made 5,000 I left but uh you know it's uh you know in in 1987 in the crash um I made over $4 million and I was 28 years old and it was like you know you're on top of the world and I became a genius because everybody in the world was calling me up saying hey
I got this great investment for you with your money and my brains you know we can make more money and I'm like you know why can't we just use my brains you know but uh yeah you know it's just um I I'll tell you what it's it's it's it's the highest highest and lowest low yeah highest highs and lowest lows right and you got to be able to deal with that fluctuation definitely and that fluctuation I think can get pretty wild as well when those higher Highs are like you say $4 million are 28 years
old yeah and then were there low low moments after that for example that came well and and that was 87 ' 88 it made 150 Grand because the market dried up you know that's the worst thing when you have Market crashes in different things like 20 like you know when you think of 87 crash you think about the currency devaluation in the 90s um you think about um 2000 the.com right when liquidity drives up it's hard right and then we used to have a we used to have like an untold story on the on the
floor and and even anybody wal stre people tell you when the Democrats are in it's a party everybody's spending money and things are going crazy right you know when Reagan got in and he stabilize the markets we were all there looking at ourselves because there was no volatility right so you know we wants to if you're day trading you want you want Market chaos you want uh the ability uh you want liquidity you want uh um um Market volatility that's how you make money definitely yeah when you were 28 years old making 4 million because
bear in mind that's 4 million at that time because I did a quick research before I came here yeah and then 4 million at that time is essentially it's almost like a 5x so essentially it would be like almost 16 to to 20 million yeah in today's money yeah which is absolutely insane it was insane I you know I did some good things you know I bought memberships I bought real estate I did things like that um you know we used to have this funny saying in the pit right uh all the guys you know
we were single too you're you're single guys I go yeah the first year I made $4 million I spent $2 million on uh booze and girls the second two million I just you know blew it foolishly man I guess when you're making money like that even though it's not like let's say easy but it's like um it's it could feel I imagine like infire in a sense because you're not actually seeing it but you're trading it yeah um it must be feel like that it must feel so easy then to very euphoric yeah very euphoric
but you know I and the key to that is staying grounded right if you don't stay grounded um you know a lot of guys I saw went down deep deep rabbit poles with drugs and things like that I fortunately I didn't have that any of those habits like booze drugs I didn't have any of that um always kind of stayed grounded you know kept my physical body and shape and things like that so I could you know you know um I don't know if you anybody who's ever played any organized Sports especially a higher level
right you know there's practice day and then there's game day right and then there's even practice intensity but because you're trying to duplicate what it's going to be like on game day but it's not game day mhm right so when you're a Trader it's game day every day right and if you don't learn to control those motions and do the things of physical stuff those um the the endorsements that are released good and bad are going to get you the flight and flee is in constant play that flight and flea response which will do like
towards the end of my career I would I would just pull in the building and get tension headaches really yeah so uh it's it it's that's a real stress that puts a real toll on your body so one thing I was going to ask you actually in regards to that going back just quickly before we get into that was more so into um you know what was the mindset like for a lot of Traders because you went past obviously 87 and 88 you you contined to trade but I can imagine there were traders who are
in that eoric feeling you know making the say millions of dollars tens of millions obviously in today's money for example then the next year it's all dried up the the whole Market's changed and they won't be able to then progress beyond that point well there's a sad commentary on that right because the reason I left is that towards the late 90s um you know all these electronic markets opened up I in fact I remember I was in Jack Sanders's office when they what they when they announced uh the launch of 247 trading which at the
time it was going to be called PMT which was post market trading you know we all laughed at it we didn't know what it was but I did and Jack said what do you think about this I said I go what do I think about what that you're going to do 247 trading on a computer at night he goes yeah I go how long is it before it takes over the pits right I knew I knew right there as soon as it became electronic then we were very very we were going to be um eliminated
yeah well now that was like early 90s right it took 10 13 years 15 years I think there's only now one pit left there and the are the option pits and then the option pits are the only thing where you can't total electronic like because you got to execute different strike prices at once so only Brokers can do it but um I saw the writing on the wall in like the late 90s and my book I said that we're going to be gone I I predicted two things Floor Traders would be gone and the board
and the the Merc and the board were going to merge um and and um it did I mean literally uh what happened when we lost our Edge in the S&P pit it's half the orderflow was going into the eminis so that we didn't have um 100% pure information I want an order flow because some of was on the screen some of was the bit how'd that make you feel at the time so see seeing and forecasting in the future of like essentially everything that my Edge and everything that I'm doing and have built so far
is going to be fading away yeah so uh anxious so I did a couple things um I don't know I how far you got into the documentary but one of the things I did was I started a company with uh two people Jerry putam and this guy and margin and Stuart towns in and we started the first NASDAQ stock trading room in Chicago which was going to be the What's called the so Bandits um which is very well documented now we went to a 9-year litigation um behind my back when we were Partners they just
started they started archipelago and then archipelago became um uh and let's say we started the company in 96 1996 in 1990 1997 or 1998 we had a dispute I sued him and said look just give me my information just give me the the show show me how much money make what this is so on they never disclosed archipelago to me so um then Goldman Sach spot archipelago as everybody knows and then archipelago became arax and they merged with the New York Stock Exchange within a 10-year period uh I sued Jerry putam and margin I sued
archipelago Goldman Sachs I sued them all uh it was a nine-year litigation I won a fraud case against my ex Partners archipelago was was thrown out of the case but I literally get to sit here and tell people I started a company became the New York Stock Exchange right so I literally um that the one thing that was great about being a Trader um is that you have a knack um well you understand the Fast Business economics right because you're you got to buy low sell high or sell high and high low right so you
got to take that mindset and put it into other things um I always kind of felt that um you know I found the exchange and I used to say I hope this last five years I hope this last five years so I did other things that I thought would you know I had some good instincts on and uh so the electronic trading was the one thing uh that I I started preparing for and I was right you know it just didn't make any money on it yeah and going back into towards obviously when you mentioned
about keeping yourself in shape you know game day every single day what was the mindset in doing that CU as we discussed like other people they would make the money and they would find themselves Vic and then they would end up in a pit you know of their own yeah um you know what was it that allowed you to be different uh I think my sense of family mhm my kids you know and my wife meant everything to me we were literally you know I had a home up in Lake Sheva Wisconsin which is sort
of like our Hampton's you know uh uh I had a private plane a twin engine uh was it a baron twin engine Baron my wife would move up there with the kids I would fly in the Megs field every day 18-minute flight work for a couple hours fly back to Wisconsin be with my kids on the boat tubing skiing so I knew what kind of Lifestyle I generated and what it's going to take to maintain that lifestyle and if I was one of these guys that was seated to you know you know just had a
bad lot of bad habits that only not didn't affect me it affected all the people in my life so um I guess this sense of purpose family being you know the the bread winner the supporter you know you know my wife did not work and you know I would not didn't want her to work right she she raised seven kids did a great job all her kids are productive you know and it's you know mainly because of her yeah for sure you know uh but uh I think that you know it's it's easy I used
to call The Humbling effect right so I had a brand new Mercedes I'm driving down the street I stop at the stoplight and I look over and there's a guy in a brand new Rolls-Royce and I'm Going H what is that guy doing better than me right so you know it's like every time you think you're um good you're GNA find somebody better yeah right so if you don't keep that sort of mindset um you know you lose your head and your ass follows right what they tell you so it's it's it's it's you know
I'm not saying that I I do you know a robot I made my fair share of mistakes but you learn from them definitely and would you say as well that obviously making all this money especially in the the way the fashion that we've described in terms of basically how fin air and it's very euphoric did you ever find yourself chasing money not in terms of trading wise just generally in terms of like I need to be richer as you just gave an example there like you're in the Mercedes there's a Rolls-Royce yeah did you ever
find yourself in that sort of notion of like the more money I make the more happier I'll be the more out be respected etc etc well I mean that presupposes that what you do what you were doing had to do with making money so I I say this all the time when I was trading it was more about me competing with you me competing against the market me competing with the other guys in the pit right and buying and selling and at the end of the day there was a profit I wanted to be the
best I wanted to be in the in there and the byproduct was money but if you're going to do be in that environment being in the master of that environment being able to to be constantly um more right than you are wrong that's a challenge right so I always looked at the challenge of how do I become the best today I'm GNA be I want to be the better myself and some days it meant more money some days it meant I didn't lose any money right so I was all I was more about the process
right than I was about the money it was making and yeah do you want to make more money well then you kind of you know you kind of you gotta understand that um I was making money on 100% of my efforts MH which becomes a very hard thing to do day in and day out right so I did other things where I backed Traders and I took a percentage of their winners and I started the The Trading Company um I started a website uh called teach trade.com and I was on CNBC you know twice a
week week and so on within months I had 30,000 people on my website wow right and I tell this story all the time because it's very very you want to talk about your retail Traders right so we did everything on this website one of the things that we did was that we had you know introduction to um U uh what do you call it the financial analysis or like charting we had charting and um so we we were teaching people how to become you know how to do uh your basic charting right buy points sell
point so on right then we had the Ten Commandments trading then we had here's the difference of all the brokerage firms right so it was more of an education site for retail trailers what we did is that we would put a morning comment out about the SP Futures Dow futures right and so we would do all that and then we do a midday comment and then we do a closing comment right and then we would have a story like a a pit story you know from the stories from the pits well when I did the
web Trend thing so this is 1996 I was absolutely enamored and floored by the power of the internet I was looking at this thing and going I'm getting a million impressions a day I got 20,000 people on my website and when you do an analysis of a web Trend it tells you where people go and spend their time where do you think they were going spending all their time introduction to technical oh another thing I did was kind of clever on my spread was my wife had a a book you know like Esquire magazine Glamour
and if you reading is your husband a good lover right they'd have all these questions right so what I did was I went to University of Chicago hooked up with this uh psychiatrist or the guy who was a you know sociologist I go here's all the traits it takes to be a a good traitor make me a quiz I want to see if you got a personality trait of course you know at the end everybody had a personality trait right so but what I did here are the 20 questions to take to take the quiz
you had to give me all your information what's your name where do you live how much money you make what education are you at do you have a trading account so I was building a database I didn't even know it was going to be valuable right um so when we did the web Trend everybody like I said where do you think they were going were they going introduction to technical analysis they went to the quiz where did they go or going to the commentary yeah they were spending most of their time on what I thought
the market was going to do what I said midday when I said at the end of the day so I you know I have this little Paradox I tell people all the time you walk into your best friend walks up to you and says I've been I've been doing all this charting and I think that this company is going to go from $20 to $40 in the next six months you should be all in and buy it and you look at him and say wow that's great I'm glad you you know you've done that that
work and it's really you've done all this work and back testing and all these things goes yeah the next day one of your other friends goes up and says hey I know the CEO and the CFO of this company they're telling me that that this is going from 20 to 40 you're going to buy that 20 to 40 from the guy who said he has Insight information first trying to do the work yourself think about that yeah right it's a typical of everybody people that want to shortcut the system and this is the really thing
that things I look at when you're talking about your retail Traders right if you're going to be retail Traders you need to learn this to do it yourself so what we did we started expanding our Market commentary or every 15 minutes right and I met this gentleman out of Houston Texas who worked for Baker use and he was building trading systems but he he was a computer scientist right and he calls me up he says hey would you trade this system for me I go yeah he goes he goes if I give you the system
when you trade it and you know we can I can make some profits I go I'll tell you what give me the system and I'll trade it for you and within six months in about three months I made him about 300 Grand trading the system I made it profit for him and then I had my own right and then we started developing a relationship and he said to me in 1996 he goes leis what do you want me to do I'll take over your website make sure that it's you know what do you want it
to do and I said you know what I want is I want to be able to type our information in and when we say it when we put it in into the website it pops up on their screen he says to me yeah there's this new thing called Java I'm an expert at Java language and in 48 hours he created a popup window so that when we were if you left us minimize as soon as we typed in somebody hey Market's doing this blah blah blah blah you could read it and then minimize it that
created a market of I had people I had 6,000 people using my my site for six hours a day wow and then I decided well how you going to monetize this so I went around to all the like I said um commodity future mer I s Comm out of future Merchants svms right so I went to all them all the different ones that had retail business and said hey why don't you sponsor my papa you know sponsored by you know Goldman Sachs sponsored by you know uh RJ o' brownley sponsored by whatever and then they'd
have my commentary and then they could get those people to clear them because that was their business is getting people to clear uh nobody understood what I was doing in 1996 you know I like to say I invented Twitter but you know what are you going to do right I was forced I was literally was doing popup stuff in 1996 and so um uh I that failed meaning they didn't want it until I went to Michael Bloomberg and showed him our traction and said I want to give this away for free on the Blue Book
terminal for six months he goes I'll give you 30 days and so we did it for 30 days and at the end of 30 days we had 30 hedge funds paying us $300 a month for the service wow so I kind of got off topic but at the end of the day people would rather hear from the experts than do the work themselves 100% yeah right so um beware right I when I used to go to the trading shows I used to be out there and and I would laugh I go did you guys everybody
find the Holy Grail while you're here they'd all start laughing I'd go you want you want to know why there's no Holy Grail I said because if you had something to let you make money every day would you share it with people what would you sell it for right so yeah it's you know you know the the the trading world is you know what have you done for me lately you know I I I got done after a 20y year you know very very successful career very well known and I couldn't walk into Goldman Sachs
and say hey give me a job making a half a million a year and I'll tell you everything I know right they just want to see what your last trading was so the trading system is uh trading world is very efficient losers win and or no losers you know Fade Out and the winners keep going yeah it's fascinating what you said there because that was I was actually going to ask you about that but then you expanded It Anyway which was in terms of the process you were saying how you focused on the process it
wasn't about the money you know as a byproduct of focusing on that process the money ended up being there and I think that's so important to highlight because as you've mentioned that everyone look is looking for the commentary everyone's looking for the signal everyone's looking for the fast route the fast pass the Holy Grail nowadays it's the hack whatever the the trading hack is that allows them to be successful overnight and I think it's so important to really highlight that and for someone obious you know from where you're positioned um for people to listen from
someone like yourself is so important for them to start focusing on that process yeah um on multiple levels as well because it is still unfortunately and it shows really how how interesting it is like you even though technology the markets everything has changed and evolved over the last 40 plus years people haven't people haven't yeah they still showing the same um you sort of negative traits the same greed the same rushing um you principles versus you would think by now that everyone's been saying it or every all the successful Traders pretty much share the same
point of view their strategies are different right and the way they they may say that you know you can't Scout I've had people where they say scaling doesn't work or this doesn't work and that's fine because that's their their opinion right but in terms of what it takes to be a profitable Trader or successful Trader it's always the same yeah no one listen still to this day yeah um how what does that make you feel though as as you as you've seen like everything evolved but you see the same thing when it comes to the
retail Trader or the average Trader going through the exact same mistakes yeah I mean if if you look up my the rules that I wrote in 1996 everyone's written rules they're all my 10 rules they all have at least seven of them in the rules right and it was just like 20 years of experience saying these are all the things that it took me to mature these are all the mistakes I made these are all the shortcuts I tried to make and so on and you it's like you know um when I left I started
um a couple things I started a healthc care company and uh currently you know uh I'm I'm in um so like if you're going to be in trading so when I started the Healthcare company I actually was buying nursing home homes and creating ccc's cuz I love the demographics it was baby Boomer's retiring this is 2003 and you just think about how that market has exploded in the last you know since 2003 I was buying nursing home beds and um Assisted Living beds for 25 to 40,000 a bed those beds now go for $250,000 a
bed right um I sold that company and then I and and I you know what What attracted me to it was the demographics it was going to get bigger and it was and there were going to be more players 80% of the market at that time was um Mom and Pop like where a person owns three nursing homes and two assistant livings and so on the big players haven't even entered the market yet the national chains but the demographics of the market I could I could see that you know how how there was an opportunity
to make money there same thing when you're trading you need to trade things that are liquid you need to trade things that have give you the opportunity to when you're wrong it just doesn't sit there right so you got to be able to you know get into a a place when you find liquidity and demand the more liquidity and demand the more volatility the more volatility gives you an opportunity to make money right you're not GNA get you can't can't make money training illiquid markets right unless unless you know something everybody else doesn't know right
so um in 2017 okay I started a cyber security company a cyber security company great timing I mean right now they're saying that it's a$2 trillion dollar industry Venture Capital poured 14 billion and created 6,000 companies over the last five years right um there's so much I there's so much different everybody specialized in cyber security there's just so much demand out there that it it you know we hit it at the right time we went from two employees to 120 employees so you know it's the same process right like when I look at my investments
and what I do it's a process right now I'm not a bean countering process I look at I look at market trends and I look at um the size of the market right can it will it be scalable well th those are the kind of things that I learned from Trading right you just got to have some good instincts and then you have to kind of pair down the risk and then you have to execute your plan right and so um yeah so if you're going to be a retail Trader um it's not something you
can just do part time and and you're going to have to put yourself uh out there and and it's a 247 uh decision process I loved what you said just then in terms of the comparison between your trading mind and the experience and how that's allowed you to go into the outside world in terms of Investments and how you look at those and how you sort of can try and predict those trends and and that demand and that growth and volatility essentially that you're looking for you know how helpful was that in terms of you've
already mentioned obviously you got that from Trading the plan the risk yeah would you say that those traits are there you know in terms of successful trading really can translate to I would say because you've already made the comparison as well previously of uh you know being an athlete and sort of the mindset and discipline that's necessary there and how that translate trading because I've always been of the belief and I've shared many times in terms of success is a blueprint regardless of whether it's trade trading has its own nuances and niche as well but
overall if you want to be successful that you know being able to take risks being able to back yourself being able to uh notice and and pay attention to detail be disciplined be hardworking be switched on essentially 247 like I feel that that's quite Universal regardless of what you do what are your thoughts yeah so um I I I feel kind of lucky because um I've never had a job right right I mean I worked uh in in high school and college but literally I came out of college became a clerk then just traded for
myself for 22 years then I started a Healthcare company and I was the owner of the company right and then I started the cyber security company I was the owner of the company so um I I think that I have a personality type that's not risk adverse um but you know when I was um I I had a bunch of guys from MIT approach me when they were got kicked out of Las Vegas for car counting right and they came to me and said look we like we like to be a Trader you know here's
what we did at uh you know got kicked out of Las Vegas and I'm like I looked at the guys and they had the right mindset because they were looking to play odds they were looking to say how do when the ads are in my favor I increase my bet and so on right then I would have people come now those are kind of people I that I gravitated to those are the kind of people because they had a they had a a market plan right so when you're looking at at putting on a trade
that's when you want to put your best best execution on why am I doing it you know so on and so forth but you know um then I would have people come to me and say you know I go to Vegas and if I'm up money I just keep laying it in you know I'm I'm the best Gambler there is and I look at him go you're not gonna make it as a Trader right because it's not gambling it's really it's called risk return right and that's why there's so many different strategies out there now
like look people are making money doing cover calls right buying uh buying ETFs and then trading the options around them right and everybody's just looking with all these new products that have been invented becomes infin inefficiencies and everybody's just looking how do I can take advantage of those inefficiencies so there there's a lot of opportunity out there and there's a lot of things going on that you have to conceptualize today as a Trader and you know um it's it's just like you know starting a business you just got to find your Niche and then uh
try to you know play Within that Niche and be S you know make the right decisions going back into your career there was a moment I know this's like a a very famous trade I don't know if it was your largest trade yeah but I think it was during the crash in ' 87 right yeah and I think you made over a million dollar or $1.5 million in a matter of seconds right can can you break that down for us yeah so it was um the week prior to the crash that Wednesday Thursday Friday markets
were extremely volatile and I I made like 300,000 so far for the week but I had already planned to go to Europe with a bunch of guys that were friends of mine that were older they're all about 10 years older than me but I met him at the country club was playing golf and i' never been to Europe so they said come on we're going to go to Italy we're going to go to Switzerland we're going to go go here right so um I I you know we we we get on the plane but when
when I was getting to the the plane I had a 20 lot position on when I left the market because I went in in the morning and I called my clerks on the floor and I said hey what's going on she goes the Market's almost limit down she goes you're up about 200,000 on that position I go really she goes yeah I go get me out make sure you get me out I said because Monday I think there's going to be a big bounce on the way up so we go to Europe we leave that
Friday friends go you know everything okay I go yeah I'm going to have a good time I just made 200 Grand we have some fun out there so uh we get to Europe we're in Italy Saturday Sunday we end up in in Lucan Switzerland and um I checked into booty buot Hotel drove down took a cab into the City and um I was sitting in PJ M and as I was sitting in P I'm looking out the window and I could see the ticker tape I think it was the Swiss Bank building the time and
it said uh the New York or the the Dow was down uh 500 and I go hey uh there's something wrong with that ticket date right now you got to remember this is 1987 if the Dow moved 25 points it was a big deal the high of the Dow was 3500 okay and now it was down 500 points in a day and this is before any circuit breakers anything that was you know uh put in the market no one ever thought a market could go down that much yeah literally it from Thursday to the Monday
morning it was down 50% wow right so what's the Dow at now was it the I don't even know what it's at right now he like over 30,000 yeah 30,000 right so imagine you wake up next tomorrow it's at 15,000 you know people are going to be throwing out window right and so um so I I I walk I tell the the the clerk I go I'm not buying that watch I was buying a watch for my wife to kind of smooth things over because I went to to Italy with a bunch of guys you
know uh and and so when I get back to the the room my brother's on the phone my wife's on the phone let me message you got to come you know this Market's crazy it's I don't think this place is going to be here anymore um they threw all you know half the people out of the out of the uh the pit they couldn't trade anymore so I had to get back um it was funny cuz I had left with a a position and I was long a, Euro Euro doll calls at 94 and they
went into the cabinet so they were worthless basically um and the Mark was like 91 and a half okay um so I start calling around and the only thing I could do to get back fast was fly to London M get on the Concord fly to New York and from New York get to the trading floor so that's what I did I had to pay $15,000 for one way back in 1987 on the Concord right how much that would be in today's money like nearly 100 Grand yeah so I freaking go home I get on
the floor and um my EUR dollar calls right I I walk on the trading floor at noon on Tuesday so my euro dollar calls on that Monday morning uh opened up at 94 and a half but I on Tuesday morning they opened up at 94 and a half which means they were in the money mhm I I was on a plane I I couldn't call anybody to to do anything right so uh when I walk on the floor the options I had like a $300,000 profit on the options so I took the profit on the
options but if I was there when it opened I could have sold the Thousand at 94 a half because I was long I had the right to beong at 94 and I would have been would had like they call synthetic put on then what happened then was the market went back to '92 mhm so that was worth like a $2 million trade but I couldn't put the execute the trade because it wasn't on the floor so I took the profits in there and then it was a Tuesday afternoon I made about 200 Grand just trading
in the S&P pit but the funny thing was everybody like there was used to be like 400 people in the pit there was only 200 people in the pick yeah a lot of the order fillers were taken out of the pick CU nobody wanted to risk because the market was going up and down so fast they didn't want out trades they want this they didn't want that um a lot of guys didn't have a lot enough money in their account the clearing firms were taking them out of the out of the pit so I walk
in on that Tuesday afternoon I make like two 200,000 300 Grand then Wednesday morning I do the same thing I make another 200,000 then Thursday morning is the famous trade and what happens is I walk into the pit and the shearon broker comes in and he's going uh he's looking at me goes what are you doing I go what are you doing he goes I'm a seller I go I'm a seller too right and he goes well I'm a th000 lower I go I'm 2,000 lower he goes well I'm 3,000 lower I'm 4,000 lower and
the Market opens up like 5,000 lower and I want to go buy his trade and the guy behind me tackled me and said hey I'll show you 300 I go where he goes I don't care the low you can have the low and so now I'm logging I'm long 300 S&P and the Market's not moving like 5 10 15 it's moving 300 500 a thousand like literally and I got 300 contracts on right so um I catch the the broker on the other side I go what are you doing he goes I'm a buyer I
go sold I made a bunch of other trades I handed the the the the my cards and my clerk and I said go figure out where I'm at she came back like 15 minutes later she goes I think you made $1.5 million and I go I what she goes you made5 1.5 5 million I just literally walked out of the pit went in the bathroom and threw up I was like and and it wasn't because of the uh the fua of making the money when I had bought that 300 it was total silence like the
market kept going could have went to zero who knew right I could have lost everything I worked for up to them um but I didn't and it it's been recorded as one of the top 10 trades ever made so it's incredible absolutely incredible literally in 13 seconds yeah and really and that was ended up being the for famous George Soros mistake um uh he used to clear all his trades through sherson he didn't to this day so until they went out of business but uh they put the order in backwards twice so they were supposed
to sell 2500 they sold 5,000 wow then they had to get out of 2500 so uh the market was crazy like I said when the world's melting just stay cool MH right it's absolutely insane cuz even that 1.5 million in a matter of seconds but in today's money probably 5 six million yeah in a matter of seconds and as you say you threw up because it could have been the opposite it could have gone the complete other way yeah and therefore completely wiped you out what was it what was it in that moment that made
you make that call I was just doing what I do right I mean 5,000 low around an opening was a little oversold to me right um but you know who who knows who it could have you know we didn't know that there was a double order put in that caused everything to open up that low what if there was really a world catastrophic event that was really CA you know the you know the issue you know when they did all the investigation after the crash of 87 they tried to point the finger at the Futures
pit as the the tail that was wagging the dog because all these people that were long stocks instead of selling their stock position out they were hedging in the Futures market so it was literally letting them you know offset their their their physical stock um uh positions and and there were no circuit breakers in involved yet right like so you know at the New York Stock Exchange if you were a market maker you could close a stock if the market if it was falling too fast right um we never we didn't have any of that
stuff in so you know afterwards there was a big you know big uh you know you know the S the cftc and SE and I was actually on the on the committee that did the study of what caused the crash and things like that uh but um you know it's just a matter of Market maturing and and learning how to you know Safeguard the things right it was funny because I was I was sitting in the it's kind of there was event that changed my frame of reference on the world um I'm sitting in my
in Jack sander who's the chairman of the exchange at the time and uh I had about $4 million in my trading account and I go hey I got to get a check check for like 3 million he goes I can't give you a check I go why he goes we can't make our margin calls and then literally his secretary goes hey Jack I got uh Ellen Greenspan on the phone for you and I'm I'm on the speaker phone listening and he says don't worry Jack we're gonna we're going to free up the money supply we're
going to make sure everybody's good right so it's was the first time 28 years old I'm taking a look at who is this Federal Reserve why are they doing this m how do they operate right you know this is a you know then I you know this is a private group of banks this a has nothing to do with the government and so kind of it's it became I became more uh you know in tune with the way the markets work like the first thing I thought about was I wish there was electronic trading so
I could have traded the bonds I I I heard the chairman of the Federal Reserve say he's going to loosen up the money supply right that means if rates are going down MH so what what's it like in terms of having the edge in the pit as you said like when you made that trade you could you're seeing the Panic you're feeling like it's oversold like is there was there a long a strong sense of edge just being in the pit and reading the emotions in the room and in the environment well the edge was
that I was the biggest Trader so people had the biggest auras was going I was I'm I could see what they were doing right so um as you know being the bigger Trader people didn't care at that what was happening in those days the days of the crash and days after all they cared about was price was was Buy sell price was we figured that out later they just wanted to make sure you were selling I was buying we didn't have an out trade so it it was literally there were four different markets being traded
in that pit like there was 300 guys it could be $20 over here and $15 on the other side of the pit but they didn't care because the world was panicking yeah you know I mean think about that I mean if we woke up tomorrow and that was at 15,000 the world will be a massive meltdown 100% because there's a lot a lot of talk to be fair I know obviously during covid we had quite a strong rally uh not Rally sorry but a decline then a strong rally thereafter yeah um completely and then now
alltime highs I literally wrote I I literally wrote A Thing uh on my LinkedIn um about the Co mhm and told people not to panic here's all the things I've experienced right um Market's going to come back that got about 20,000 views um you know I I got like 6,000 people follow me on LinkedIn but it it you know I I trle basically said listen you know Co this is something we've never seen But at the end of the day you know it's going to work its way through the markets will you know come back
um so yeah I haven't I've never seen anything that we haven't been able to come back from you know I've seen a lot of a lot of you know different things uh including the Michael milikin scandals uh uh insider trading scandals the two the two things I the two constants that happen in trading that is you know the end of the day when there's a scandal it's either inside information right or pony scheme MH the two things have never changed over the last you know since 1980 right right um so uh even the matad off
thing um you I knew madof I I had a fund that I started that I was in Bermuda and I had knew people that had money with them and I said why you give me some money he goes look this guy's made me 1% a year for the last five years no draw downs and I I looked at him I go that's not possible he goes what do you mean I go it's not possible I go so I you know I'm one of the best Traders ever I go and I have draw Downs right so
but people didn't want to believe right then you know if it looks like a duck walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck right so um there there there's there's there's no way to ever be putting money at risk and capital that you can't have a draw down just doesn't happen it's interesting you say that because the majority of retail Traders I say majority I always I kind of accidentally say majority quite often but there's a lot of retail traders who are on the hunt as we talked about before about a
Holy Grail they searching for something that allows them to predict the market tick for tick point for Point um looking for something that doesn't have draw Downs just profitable multiple um you know say tens of percent per month sort of returns that's the strategy they're hunting for I've seen Traders where they had a profitable Edge where they worked it as well worked and you know got disciplined had a plan free form months they're showing good returns you know it could be 3 4% a month right not saying that there won't be draw downs but like
for that period of time while they were learning they showed a a good Edge but then they drop that edge to go learn something else because they're hunting for something that allows them to predict um what are your thoughts on that when you hear something like that well I mean there's so listen no one can pick bottoms no one can pick tops all right if you do pick a bottom and pick a top just chalk it up the luck you're not a genius Okay so the key to trading is uh is is literally following the
money flow right guys people I deal with now um that we've talked about different trading strategies um it's about me beating the money flows like you know money flows you know out of Chip stocks into Health Care stocks or from out of Health Care stocks into ril roll stocks because everybody wants to be Market neutral or have some pained dividend so the key now is getting a strategy that gets in front of the money flow when the institutions are going from one one um vertical to another trying to to time that movement with the mass
amount of money that they're putting into it that's the only ways you're you're going to make money you just want to get on the ride especially if you're only a technical analysis Trader like if if you're a fundamental Trader you may be able to create a basket of stock that's not correlated to the S&P that's very successful for you but it's going to take a lot of testing back testing you know doing all those things so you know to this day it's still about beating the money flows you you want to you want to be
on the the trend you the trend is your friend right so um the think that you could pick a bottom and pick a top if it happs like I said it was luck it's not something you can do all the time so it's essentially not just pick a trend in terms of what the market is showing that say bullish or bearish but also where people are putting the money where the large portion of the money is flowing into trying to get trying to observe and understand where that's going to be ahead of time position yourself
accordingly or at least recognize when that's starting to shift and position yourself accordingly and regardless of what that edge looks like as long as you're doing that I'll give you I'll give you like an example all right how it that thought process okay can transcend so when I got into the cyber security business well I first heard about Bitcoin was at like $300 $400 I went to a I went to a a Bitcoin convention in Las Vegas saw a bunch of old Traders or a bunch of guys coming out to hey you Louis borsellino blah
and you know I'm trying to look look at Bitcoin now this is 2017 and I'm looking at Bitcoin going How could somebody tell me they're a Bitcoin Trader all you could do is buy it right so you really can't get shorted all you do is buy it so I I'm looking in 2017 towards uh probably the spring of no I'm sorry 2018 the spring of 2018 um Bitcoin went from $1,000 to $2,000 and I'm going wow I can't believe that it jump up like that first of all went from 400 to a th000 right and
everybody's talking know the Euphoria around cryptocurrencies and I'm going well why would this jump in a matter of 3 weeks double in price and then what came out was the wac cry virus where 150 countries people got hacked and they were encrypted and all of a sudden people had to pay their ransoms in Bitcoin I'm go this is interesting right I'm in cyber security I see this Hackle and all of a sudden I see the I see the the price of Bitcoin go up but the price of Bitcoin went up before they announced the WRA
virus had hacked everybody so that means the people that were encrypted had to go and buy Bitcoin to pay the ransoms to the people that encrypted them then I'm watching it and then it went from 2,000 to 4,000 in the fall what do you think happened then Equifax right so the aquax breach happened 150 million americ Amer uh uh credentials were uh released on the dark web so when I got into the when I got into the um uh into the cyber security company I really got into the dark web started spending hours and hours
and hours on the dark web and really understanding how to function and so what it really functioned as is it's a Marketplace for illegal activity M right and so now I'm thinking well now the W then eox came out it doubled again so I basically wrote a LinkedIn article that said bitcoin price is a lead leading economic indicator for a cyber crime right so and then I said you know it's at 2,000 it's at 4,000 I go there and the reason you know they had the F and then what would happen was you're going to
see all those all those people on the dark web that were buying the data they were starting to sell it to people like databases credentials and so on and then the CME announced that they were going to um literally um release Futures on Bitcoins so as soon as they did that then I said now you can trade them you literally have a way to get short Bitcoin right now the the margins weren't very conducive for trading they were very large like 50% margins or whatever at the point but I wrote an article that said I
think Bitcoin now that the Futures are coming out are going to go from 4,000 to 10,000 after 10,000 I really don't have a market call but the expansion of Bitcoin not only happened with speculation but it was also what was going on for cyber crime right so um you know got a little bit off top topic but there was a reason for the price you know people come to see what do you think of Bitcoin I go as long as there cyber crime we going to need Bitcoin right so um that that was you know
Market Trend that I found you know quickly right and we used to tell our our clients we still tell our clients you know watch the fluctuation of Bitcoin when it comes at um because it's still the way that people pay the ransoms no there's not changing and cyber Crim is only going to be on the rise the way that we're going it's a it's A2 trillion dollar industry right now wow well crypto right now crypto is a very in a very hot topic you know it has been for a very long time and and probably
will continue to be as it expands we've seeing lot of ETFs now we have Bitcoin we have ethereum um we're coming towards the end segment of of the podcast there was one uh thing that you've said previously which was everyone's always trying to hit a home run and and you say that really every Trader should be trying to hit singles yeah I I I I could tell you that from all the years that I stood in that pit it was the singles at the end of the week right um I used to tell my it
was funny you were talking about if you lose control of uh you know you're of the value of a dollar right I just ask my my secretary I go how much are the bills for the month 50,000 all right I'll be back and go down to the floor and make 50,000 to pay the bills it was like an ATM ATM machine for but uh yeah everyone because I was such a big Trader thought I was always swinging for the fences I I had a goal if I you know if it was Market went off at
8:30 by 9:30 if I was up 5,000 or more I left right I didn't want to stay there because you know many of times I did that and lost what I made right so um it's just about taking what the market gives you right and then when the those big days come you just you know you're ready for them but uh it's not because you're swinging for the fences it's because the market opportunity at the time allowed you to put a bigger position on that was more volatile and generated more money yeah same same strategy
just more volatility more more volume do you feel like you ever miss the the the chaos the organized chaos no yeah I missed the money no I miss the fast money right like I said I used to look at my at my clerk and say what's the bills 50,000 all right I'll be back you know I mean you want to have a a jaded not jaded but you want to have a a distorted look on life right I I was having lunch with my one day and I know breakfast and it was like I $15
a bill was right and I did I gave the girl like a a all I had was like a 20 you know and I gave her a 20 and another five and he goes you just gave her A5 $10 tip on a $15 bill I yeah so what he works hard he goes don't ever lose track of money right don't don't lose perspective of money but it's kind of hard very very hard when you're you know there was a bunch of guys in their 20s driving around in Porsches Mercedes Ferraris single you know um in
the in both cities both New York and Chicago you know uh you know they used said women used to look at at uh you know I got a married a doctor a lawyer I like the F very nice respectable professional all of a sudden they saw these young kids driving around in Porsches in their 20s everybody wanted to marry a commodity Traer we had our choice you know we had our our uh our pick of the litter I guess in terms of your advice to Traders as we've discussed we've already given so much I know
there's going to be so much taken away from this episode already but what would be your direct advice to traders of this generation right we've already summarized that majority of people regardless of how much the markets have evolved and how much they are told um you know these are the mistakes or these are the things that need to be done but there's still the same mistake seems to be being made so what would you say to the audience in terms of like how can they focus on progressing as a Trader and start to make steps
forward yeah so I mean you got to have your process you got to have discipline you got to stick to it but you have to trade markets that are going to give you the opportunity right like like I said when when Reagan was in the markets were you know very mundane and slow and and sort of you know didn't have much market movement so um if you're a day trader you need that so you need to understand if you're going to be a retail day trader you have to trade markets that are volatile and give
you the opportunity to make money both on the down and the up if you don't do that you'll get yourself in a trade you'll get stopped out of the trade and then the market just sits there and there you are sitting with a loser so you gotta you got to be able to look at things that are giving you opportunity right if you can't find um something that's you know volatile enough to give you opportunities both on the up and the down it's going to be very very difficult you're going to be a position Trader
then you're just literally going to you know I'm going to buy the the S&P 500 and I'm you know put a stop in and I'll just stay long or I'm gonna buy this stock or whatever um when stock Trader is completely different animal when it comes to Futures Trading but you you gotta you gota play in a game that's gonna give you the opportunity to make the most amount of money I love that well Louis I really appreciate your time today sharing everything with us um you know it's a like I said true honor to
be with you and to have you on the podcast as well and hopefully maybe fingers crossed we can have you again for a part two in the future yeah but everyone at home drop a comment of your biggest takeaway from this episode obviously there'll be links for Lewis in the description below and yeah drop a comment like there'll be other episodes on screen so make sure you check them out and until next time take care
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