The Best Price Action Trader In The World! - Al Brooks | Trader Interview

i think through natural selection people are competitive and they're hunters right people who didn't hunt died off and their genes disappeared people were not competitive lost every battle their genes disappeared you know so i think through natural selection we're all competitive so al brooks welcome back how's it going today well thank you very much atn i appreciate you inviting me pleasure to you here this is their second interview we did one like a few years ago i think two years ago where you were talking about price action and your story a little bit and it's a pleasure to have you back here again to a second interview follow-up interview so this time i want to go more in depth i want to ask a question that i didn't ask the first time and kind of get some more information about what you do when and how people can understand who you are so first can you give people a quick introduction of who you are and what you do well i'm 67 years old and i went to medical school at the university of chicago and i was an eye surgeon for a number of years i taught at emory university in atlanta and then i was on the faculty at ucla and i practiced medicine ophthalmology eye surgery for about 10 years in los angeles and the entire time that i did it i felt like i was doing the wrong thing when i was in chicago i felt like i should be at the board of trade or the merck and be a i thought i should have been a trainer but we we grew up poor and my mother told me that al i want you to become an eye surgeon and the our culture back then french canadian immigrants i know your name is atn yeah but my family is french canadian immigrants from quebec was that if your parents tell you to do something there's no further thought you go ahead and you do it so i made sure that i was a good student that i got into a very good medical school and became an eye surgeon and as i said the entire time that i was in medical school and in my residency in chicago i felt like i was doing the wrong thing i was making my mother very happy but it was not right for me and after practicing for about 10 years i had enough money saved up so that i could begin to trade and i started trading before work every day and i started about the month before october of 87 and on the morning of the october of the crash i had a very big short position on in the s p futures and i had i had a full surgery schedule so i had to go to work and i closed off my position and had i not closed off my position i would have made over 400 000 over the next several hours and in today's dollars i would have been over a million dollars in the morning and that that was the day that convinced me that i could make money as a trader even though i did not make any money that day you know it convinced me that the potential was there and over the next couple of years well a few three years later i had a daughter and then 15 months later i had identical twin daughters so i had three daughters under the age of 15 months and i thought wow yeah i really want to stay home and raise the kids and that would allow me to be a trader and i started cutting down my surgery schedule my work schedule and increasing the number of days that i stayed at home and in 1990 i think of 1990 i became a full-time trader and since then that's that's what i've been doing i stopped medicine in 1990 and i've been a day trader ever since and i'm very happy yes it's been really cool it's been really very good that's very interesting story i think that's something that i think a lot of people face these days and want to do the same thing they want to jump from their job to trading i'm curious to know what was that moment where you want to switch from your job as a surgeon to trading what was that like this how did the decision happen exactly well the entire time i was like i was at the university of chicago for seven years and the entire time i was there i felt like i really should be downtown i felt like my heart was downtown as a date as a floor trader and i just couldn't do it i grew up you know my family had no money there were six of us and we had a two-bedroom house and i didn't get a i didn't take my first shower until i was in high school so you know that that was our life and here i was in medical school and it was a sure it was a guarantee that i would make a lot of money and i was afraid to give it up you know i grew up poor i hated being poor i wanted to make a lot of money and i was in a position to make a lot of money and it's just hard when you have something that's guaranteed to make you a lot of money and give it up for something that you have no guarantees and a lot i i hear from traders fairly regularly asking this the very question that you ask career transition how do they go from one career to another career one of my friends who's a trainer is a was a computer consultant for years and he used to write me email me all the time saying al i wanna i wanna switch i wanna switch and i kept telling don't don't be too fast you don't make the switch until you feel like you're making more money as a trader than what you're making in your other job and that you've been doing it for at least several months and so that you're consistently doing very well and at that point it makes sense to make the switch that's a good answer i really like that so i want to hear what has changed since we last spoke uh about three years ago you know i i don't think the market ever changes i think that when you look at a price chart you know you think it's reflection of you know something taking place in computers some mysterious connection of servers all over the world that's not what it is it's simply mapping out human behavior and you know if you and i were alive 5 000 years ago and you saw a deer and i had a bunch of chickens with eggs and i wanted some deer meat i give you some eggs and so if the eggs are currency and the deer meat is the commodity and we could plot it out and if you took a whole bunch of people making that kind of botter the price charts would look very similar to price charge today for any stock for any commodity uh for futures market which is what i do most of my trading on it's just a reflection of natural human behavior rational human behavior and um and and that's not going to change it's genetic it's built in our genes and if you start to get thousands of people together behaving rationally or at least the people with big money will be will make rational decisions and you look at the charts it's simply a reflection of natural not just normal rational human behavior and the computers obviously are going to be rational you know they most of the training that takes place is done by computers at least in the united states and they obviously are behaving logically and so and so the patterns that we see right now are reflection of computer trading for the most part and you have to assume that it's all logical and yes sometimes it can result in big moves sometimes it can result in sideways moves but it's all a reflection of rational human behavior it's just it's just a mapping out of how transactions take place and it's not going to change over time unless we become a new species you know it's in our genes that's it's always going to be that way i've looked at charts from over 100 years ago and if i take the time and price off the charts they look the same as charts today and i look at charts even today i look at charts from all kinds of markets and if you take the time and price off the chart you cannot tell if you're trading gold if you're trading stocks if you're trading bonds you cannot tell so so i trade all markets in all time frames the same and then i think computers do that as well so there are people that say that every market has this like specificities of like some markets range morse markets trend more so you would be saying the opposite of that they all look the same right there there are certain characteristics especially in the smaller markets if you have a small market and it's traded by a small group of people um it can have some personal some some subtle differences also there are other things that are inherently different for example if you trade bond futures versus trading the e-mini versus trading on citibank the dollar value per tick is different but the amount of margin that you need is different um some things are going to be more volatile than other things if you're trading a utility stock as a day trader it could be very boring it's not going to move much if you're trading a cheap stock a stock that's trading at two dollars it's not going to move much on a percentage basis it'll move but in terms of absolute number of ticks up and down it's not going to move much but you know all that aside if you just look at the charts and get rid of price and time and i've looked at account probably more charts than anybody on the planet over the past 30 plus years i i honestly believe it's impossible to tell one chart from another very interesting very interesting so you're well known for price action and i think a lot of people these days are looking at trading prospection where do you think that interest representation comes from in traders we see these days i think i think through natural selection people are competitive and they're hunters right people who didn't hunt died off and their genes disappeared people were not competitive lost every battle their genes disappeared you know so i think through natural selection we're all competitive and we're also you know we're also we like to hunt and for example i like to i'm a fly fisherman and i like to go fly fishing and part of the fun of fly fishing is reading the water so there's price action in the water if you look at a stream and you don't think about it it just kind of looks just water running down the rocks but there really are a lot of subtle patterns that take place in this stream and if you if you can read the patterns you know where the fish are and trading is the same way that's one of the things you like about trading you know if you're not if you're if you have no experience looking at charts and you look at charts it just looks like a bunch of lines but if you have a lot of experience you know where you can make money you can see certain patterns that have a high percent high probability of doing something if you see a pad a pattern unfolding you have and you know how to trade you have a high probability of making money and also the reward can be quite a bit bigger than the risk it just takes time to look at the charts try to be objective and then you have to have the ability to place the trade and you have to have patience you know one of my favorite quotes you know patience is really important wait waiting for a pattern to unfold one of my favorite quotes is about patience is from warren buffett who i think for me he's i admire him more than probably any other traitor and he he talks about patience saying that you can't make a baby one getting nine women pregnant and treating us the same way you have to be patient that's good i like that you mentioned about being objective and i think that's something people kind of lack and it's something that's tough to develop so how did you yourself become objective in the market to kind of look at the chart and say that's how it is it's really it's really an interesting question that you're asking and once once you learn how to ride a bicycle it's hard to remember what it's like not how to ride a bicycle right and you know you speak english it's your second language and it's hard to imagine you know what it was like before you could speak english and i i what i do remember is for the first five years or so even for the first 10 years i would have tremendous stress training i would always felt like i was ripped up inside that i was fighting the market and the market was constantly beating me and it was just a miserable miserable feeling and at some point it just started to melt away and now you know i'm really at peace in the market you know every day i like it it's really enjoyable because i sit there and everything that's happening i look at it and say oh i see what the bulls are doing i understand what the bears are doing you know you know they're balanced here oh they're not balanced here you know i by being able to reap what the what the market is doing and what the forces are and who's winning um it just makes it it makes it first of all fun because i feel like i'm seeing stuff that a whole bunch of people are not seeing so it's fun to see it's fun to see something that nobody else is seeing or not many people are seeing and it's also fun to watch it unfold you know you see something happening and you know what the possible outcomes are and you know certain outcomes are more likely than others and you just see it start to unfold and it's just really satisfying it's fun nice man go ahead i'm sorry it's like doing anything well it's just it make you know if you you know if you play soccer and you play it well it's satisfying you know if you play tennis you play it well it's just satisfying i play tennis and i like going out there and i like trying to get better and better um and it's it's fun i i i like i like when i do things well i guess the question there is how do you make sure to keep going and do things when it's not fun when you don't get results in in trading well at this point in life um i can't remember the last time i felt that way yeah no but i do know 30 years ago i felt that way all the time you know you lose and then you do something stupid and you lose more you do something stupid you lose more and now if i have a bad trade i say to myself yeah in general um everything is going to be between 40 and 60 you know the best setups you win 60 the worst setups you you win 40 and that's pretty much true any time all day long at any instant all day long every trade that every trade that you do there's somebody taking the opposite side and it's always you should always assume it's an institution so if you're buying you have to assume that an institution is structuring a trade exactly opposite of your direction and mathematically it makes sense right so if you're buying an institution is selling to you and they're selling to you because they have determined that they can make money by doing it and at the same time you and other institutions are buying because you have figured out a way that you can make money doing it so you know i just in my mind i just i just assume that you know sometimes things are 50 50 sometimes things are 40 60 but they're never much worse than that and um you know a lot of times maybe 10 of the time the probability of the market doing something is 70 or 80 so about 10 5 to 10 percent of the time on any chart the market is quickly going up or quickly going down if you look at any chart you'll notice that there's one section of the chart where it's quickly it's almost vertical it's very brief the market and during those times the probability of making money if you trade in the right direction can be 70 or 80 percent but going back to what you're asking about um if i mess up i know the math and i'm comfortable with the math and it took a long time to get comfortable with math so i know that if i just keep doing what's right i'm going to win so i don't worry if i lose i'm or if i lose twice in a row you know i'm just confident that if i just keep doing what i'm doing and i don't get emotional and it's it's the math is on my side it's like a casino except that instead of me being the customer i'm the house and they they know that every now and then someone is going to win 10 000 in the slot machine and they don't care because they know that the the the way the game is structured the they have a the math favors them probability is going to favor them so they can they can win 51 52 53 of the time but if they do it often enough um over time they're going to grind out a consistent profit and that's the same with traders you know as long as you're doing structuring things correctly and you just keep executing properly you know you can do very well you know i talked about casinos how they're they win 51 52 53 of the time as a trader you only have to remember i said most of the time the markets are around 50 50. you can buy or sell at any moment and make money if you structure the trade correctly one of the keys is risk reward as a routine trying to take a profit that is two or three times your risk right so let's say you're risking um let's see let's say you enter a trade and you know where your stop has to be right let's say you buy and you and the market's starting to turn up you put your stock below that low and if you go for a profit target that is two to three times your risk even if you lose 60 of the time at worst you're going to be break even and at best you'll consistently make money so you know that prop that probability factor i said the probability of pretty much anything you do buy or sell at any time is between 40 and 60 percent if you work out the math as long as you go for a reward that's twice your risk mathematically you're going to make money so if you just consistently do that and don't get impatient and oh i've been losing i got a small profit i'm just going to take it no no you got to hold and you know because you need that that 40 of the time when you make two to three times your risk you need that to erase the occasion the losses so i think that simple math is one of the keys to making money you know patiently find a setup place you stop and hold for a reward that is two to three three times your risk and be confident that 40 of the time or more you're going to achieve your goal and you'll be a consistently profitable trader i sometimes talk about the walmart trade okay and what i mean by that is if you find yourself exiting trades too soon you know you're so desperate you've lost the last three or four trades and you're so desperate to make money one one thing you can do is take the walmart trade you see the setup you take the buy you put the stop in you place a profit taking limit order two to three times bigger than your risk and go to walmart and come back in a couple hours and and then you'll be surprised to find out that you're becoming a successful trader because you won't be micromanaging your trades you just let you know let your trades work and don't micromanage them trust the math that's a good lesson and there's been so many traders over the years that told me that if they had just followed their system all the time they would be better off than macro managing or tweaking trades all the time they want to tweak trades and they want to manage to try to get more profit but they're always most of the time better off not doing anything right you know most traders i would say 95 of traders are much better off going for reward at least twice their risk and that means just patiently sitting there and sometimes the trade will go a little your way a little against you a little for you know it'll take time but if you patiently just rely on your stop and have a profit taking limit order and if you're watching as long as the trade looks reasonably good you just sit there and just patiently wait that's that thing i was talking about about warren buffett and you can't make a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant you gotta be you gotta be patient as a scalper i scalp a lot i also swing trade a lot but as a scalper it's an entirely different game you can only scalp if well there's three variables risk reward and probability and as a scalper you're going for a reward right so if you're going for a small reward a lot of times most of the time the risk is greater than the reward that tells you that your risk reward ratio is terrible and how can you make money if you have a terrible risk reward ratio probability you have to be able to find high probability trades which most people cannot do so most people should not be scalpers but if you can't if you can find high probabilities trades you can do you can do very well as a scalper there are also tricks you can do as a scalper to increase your probability one is scaling in so if you buy it goes a little bit against you and your premise is still valid and emotionally you can handle it and your account size is big enough you can buy more and yes it's increasing your risk but it's also increasing the probability that you make money do you prefer one trading style over the order like do you prefer scalping to training a higher time frame i do both and for example um i like to hold option positions in stocks or in stock index uh stockton or etfs like the spyder spy and you know i'm currently holding several option positions and when i do that i'm swing training for the most part sometimes i'll rarely day trade options you know for example if the market is just totally crashing down but i think it's going to have a climactic reversal on a five-minute chart when that happens it only happens a few times a year a lot of times i'll buy calls i thinking that worst cases the calls will become zero but at least i know that i cannot lose too too much and if the market does what i think it will do and reverse up sharply i can make a lot of money so the risk reward is very good and the probability is very good but for the most part when i'm training options i'm using daily charts or weekly charts and i'm just looking for just looking for patterns so if the market is strongly breaking out to the upside i'll buy calls or a call spread if i think the market is in a bear trend and it's pulling back bouncing of my puts or put spread if i think it's about to reverse then um you know for example if there's a wedge bottom and it's at a support level i'll buy calls or call spread and so that is most of my swing training on the daily and weekly charts and the scalping is different or similar strategies and systems i use the same i use the same patterns what's different is you can only scalp if you can structure a high probability trade and that's why most people cannot scout they cannot structure high probability trades so they cannot they can't process the information fast enough to determine that a trade is high probability on the i trade the e-mini s p 500 stock index futures all day long and in the day session there are 81 bars every day and i on an average day probably see 40 or 50 reasonable scalps so pretty much on every other bar um there is i don't take all those trades when i was your age i took a lot of trades but no no no now where i am i don't take that many i probably take 10 to 20 trades a day but there there is an incredible amount of opportunity on every chart if you know how to read the charts you know and it's just it's it's it's really it's amazing it's amazing how how much the market is telling us but you have to know how to read the charts yeah and that's a question that i get a lot from different people is how do you like what what's the best way to learn price action these days is it through books or you might have an opinion different than this now i i put a whole bunch i as you know i have videos um that have a whole bunch of information about how to read price action charts i think the simplest thing to do if a person is starting out is to pick a pattern and and then only look for trays based on that pattern a good start is a wedge and there are two ways to use a wedge pattern one is as a reversal for example if a stock is selling off and is forming a wedge bottom over the past two or three months for example on the euro versus the dollar forex market on the daily chart over the past month it formed a wedge bottom so it was high probability plus in a good bicycle bar and we ended up rallying for for a few weeks back in october so that that's a good starting place you know just look for wedges and be open to the possibility that they come in many different shapes and sizes and they do if you look at a chart a one minute chart there are wedges if you look at a one second chart for every bar in the chart is just one second you will see wedges they're too fat they happen too fast for you to trade them but they're there they're on all time frames uh bond market a monthly chart of the u.s treasury bond market has been forming a massive nested wedge top a big wedge top and within it there are smaller wedge tops over the past several years and there and the result will be interest rates will be going up for the next 20 years the bond market wedge talk the rally has gone on for 30 years and this wedge top even though it might take a few years for the bond market to finally start to turn down i don't think there's um much more money to be made buying bonds i think interest rates are going to be going up that's that's what the chart the monthly chart is saying so i would pick a pattern wait for a reasonable buy signal bar if you're looking to buy a wedge volume and i would not be too quick to buy if you see a bunch of bear bars and then one little bull bar that's not the time to buy you want to see several bull bars and big bull bars and big bull bars closing on their highs you want to see consistent buying and strong line traders buying into the close of the bar and that's true for any time frame five minute chart a weekly short monthly chart so wedge reversals are good starting place and then another choice is wedge flags so for example if the market has rallied strongly and then it starts to go against you starts to sell off and the rally was so strong you think the market will probably test back up to the high again a lot of times you'll see a wedge sell-off it'll look like a bear trend but it'll only correct about half of the rally and it will not fall as steeply as the rally rose and you look for a wedge reversal so it's the same kind of wedge that you would get at a bottom but because it's a pullback and a bold trend i would call it a wedge full flag that's another pattern that i think if a traitor is starting out those would be the two patterns that i would look for wedge reversals trench ending and then on pullbacks and pullbacks that look like wedges then eventually how would you recommend people to go into different patterns should they kind of research them themselves or maybe take your course and learn about them and then apply them or how should they add to their strategies well i would you know as i said you know my videos have a whole bunch of stuff on how to trade and if you run out of ideas you have to come up with some of the source like my videos or my books or somebody else's videos or somebody else's books but you need some other source a good starting place though is as i said just looking at charts and getting a feel for them one of the nice things there are two good things out there right now for traders starting out one is forex markets because you can trade very small positions and if you're not scalping you know you're not going for 10 pips if you're going for 100 pips or two or 300 pips looking for a trade to unfold over the course of several weeks then the bid ask spread is not it's not an issue so even if you get a wide bid spread three pips four pips it's really not a problem if you're trying to make 150 pips and you can take a very small position i know you can argue al if i only trade 10 000 units i can't make much money that's right you cannot make much money but you cannot lose much money and when you're starting out you're going to lose and forex markets allow you to get experience trading but not lose much money and then on the other side stock index futures they started trading micro emitting contracts which are one tenth the side of an emit size of an immunity contract and that's a really good thing for people who want to trade stocks or stock index futures instead of forex markets again same thing you can say alpha um if the market moves two points i make ten dollars and after commissions i make you know nine dollars i can't make a living doing that that's absolutely correct you cannot but what you can do is get experience and then instead of trading one micro immunity contract or trade two five or ten once you start trading ten then you trade a regular immunity contract and then two three or four of those and if you're consistently good and you're trying two for four regular mini tracks um you can do pretty well if you make four points a day which is a modest amount with a regular e-mini contract that's 200 if you're trading four of those contracts then um that's eight hundred dollars a day and all of a sudden you're making a hundred sixty hundred eighty thousand dollars a year which is you know that's pretty good money if you get to ten or twenty contracts it becomes um you know serious money i think it's all about going through this incrementally and step by step not rushing like from the start and going all in with trading you got to go step by step absolutely yeah i would that's what i'm saying i would i would start with one pattern wedges are good and when i say wedges there there are so many types of wedges and most people don't even they're looking at charts they're they're wedges all over the place and unless you know what to look for you don't see them it's like fly fishing you know there are trout all over the place and unless you know where to look you know you're not going to catch them so you have to be very flexible about how you define a wedge and you have to be very good at spotting them especially as they're unfolding so you can be ready to enter a trade but i think wedges are wedges with wedge reversals in which flags both flags beer flags that's probably probably my single favorite pattern but as i said there is an incredible variety of wedges and the more the more variations you know the more opportunities you'll have and i'll put a link below for your course people check it out if they want to follow your videos on your course because they have a lot of resources a lot of different patterns to learn so that that's really good it's awesome it's my it's the brooks training course website so brooks training course dot com and there's a lot of free stuff there as well to give people an idea what i do awesome did you have any mentor in the past that had a really big effect or impact on your trading performance or trading in general that is an interesting wording to your question and yeah the answer is yes back in 1987 um the world was filled with liars and thieves and there's there are still liars and thieves out there but there are not as many and i hired a guy who um advertised a lot i flew him out to my house and i paid him three thousand dollars to be with me i think for two days i paid for his hotel i paid for his airfare so it probably cost me five thousand dollars and when he was there he was supposed to teach me how to trade and it became clear that he was not a traitor and i started asking him well you know i started asking a lot of questions about this training and he said oh no i no longer trade i taught people how to trade for me and they trade my accounts for me and i i'm absolutely convinced the guy was just an absolute fraud he had very good looking material back then it was not the internet it was um you know magazine stuff and and conferences and very good stuff but it was a total fraud and what i learned was everybody wants a god to protect them a prophet you know you know please you know help me you know help me you know take care of me make money for me but trading it's eat what you eat what you kill right if you can't go out there and hunt you're not gonna you're gonna you're gonna starve you know relying on someone to tell you to buy this or sell that on television every now and then they'll put some expert on saying oh this is a good buyer that's a good sell that's total nonsense buying and selling that's the easy part i said before you can buy or sell anything at any time and make money if you structure the trade for actually correctly manage it correctly so some clown on television telling you oh gold's a good buy right now it's don't do it because he's not telling you how long to hold it he's not telling you when to get out he's not telling you how much profit you should be going for he's not telling he's not telling you any of that you have to be able to do that all entirely by yourself so um what i learned was i at the time when i hired this guy that totally cost me five thousand dollars i realized that i was basically hoping to get someone to hold my hand and you know protect me protect me from the dangers of losing money and what i that was five thousand dollars well spent because i realized that i have to do it on my own i got to figure it out on my own and that's true for everybody they have to learn how to do it on their own entirely on their own and so now i'm in my little office and i just sit here quietly all day i talk in my chat room all day which i enjoy doing but you know i don't i don't engage in conversations with anyone and i just sit here quietly watching the patterns unfold and i just enjoy watching them you know some people like listening to music i like listening to the market tell me what it's about to do and then just peacefully sit here i also spent a bunch of money back in 87 maybe 87 88 somewhere around there to spend a week with a very well-known trader working with him for a week and what he was doing i did not like he was doing a style of training that i did not like using he wasn't using traditional charting he's using market profile and um to me it didn't make sense if what he was doing he was hiding a lot of information about not using standard bar charts or candlestick charts so i was with him for a week and i felt like again it was not it was not of any benefit to me so i think hiring people is not a good idea and as far as mentors go you know my favorite mentor is warren buffett and i already told you one of his comments he's made several he's made they've said several um i think really important things that have helped me one is you only have to do a few things right in life as long as you don't do too many things wrong right and then be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful he's a value trader he likes to buy things that are cheap so he likes to buy very good quality companies that are on sale so if the market is collapsing he's looking to buy apple he's looking to buy amazon or he's looking to buy jp morgan wells another comment but i thought one thing he said that i always thought it was interesting is he said i always knew i was going to be rich i never doubted it even for a second so he said be confident and i think i think that's really true i always knew that i was going to be rich um i didn't know how i'd get there but i always knew i was going to do pretty well right i think that's it's a it's a big advantage if you believe in yourself and part of believing in yourself is going back to what we're saying you have to do it yourself you have to do you have to make the decisions yourself you have to learn how to trade yourself and at some point you have to get you have to trust what you're doing you have to be comfortable and you have to trust the math you have to trust your ability to spot patterns your ability to place the trades your ability to decide that the trade is going bad and get out before you stop gets hit one other important point is charlie munger i don't know if you know charlie mugger he's warren buffett's partner and on one of his quotes that i get to kick out one of my daughters works for his law firm by the way in san francisco longer tolls i would rather hire someone with an iq of 130 who thinks his iq is 120 than someone with an iq of 150 who thinks it's 170. um because he says he likes he likes to be with people who find it easier to see when they're wrong so i think that's a good point one other point is an obvious one it takes 20 years to build a good reputation and five minutes to ruin it so i think it's important always to be honest and uh and to be a good person so in terms of mentors you know for me my mentor is warren buffett you know he's he has said a lot of things over the years that resonate with me they they ring true and they're consistent with how i want to live my life another thing is always hard to associate with people who are smarter than you and better than you you know there's a saying that i used to tell my kids you can't soar like an eagle if you're hanging out with turkeys you know find a good people and spend time i find this interesting i feel like for me it's been the same or similar with mentors where you get some really good mentors and some really not too good mentors that are not that good and that you don't really relate to so it's kind of a a win sometimes and lose sometimes with mentors at least for me and for you apparently so i'm kind of uh curious about that kind of interesting to to here yeah yeah and even if even if you find someone who's very really successful and you think they're honest with them if you to do what they're doing it has to suit your personality yeah and i think that's very very important you know as you know i scalp a lot i do swing trade and i do trade on the daily and weekly charts but i'm a scalper and most of my trades are scalps because if you're a scalper you take lots of little traits but in addition to the swing trades but most of what i'm doing every day is i'm scalping you know buying and selling buying and selling right and if someone is not comfortable with that they would they would be very unhappy listening to me talk about trading during the day because it has to be compatible with your personality i said that when i started our training 30 years ago so many days i would just feel so upset and sometimes i would feel upset for days afterwards after i do something really stupid um and lost a lot of money i would feel bad for days afterwards and you cannot drive looking in the rearview mirror you have to be constantly looking forward and you you have to you can't be thinking about the last trade you got to be thinking about the next trade and if you if you develop that ability which you have to do eventually you find out that trading becomes fun you have to trade to make money but it also has to be fun and i could make a lot more money trading much more aggressively greatly increasing my position size but i'd be stressed out and i'd be miserable and that you can't do that you know if you're going to be doing this as a career you have to you have to like what you're doing and you have to be happy so it's more than just making money you have to be making money and you have to be happy and therefore you have to do something that is compatible with your personality so it's really you know you have to be at peace with what you're doing you have to enjoy what you're doing because life is long you're a young guy and you know you get you got to be you got to love what you do it's a good point what does the in your life look like with the training included well everybody gets routines and i get a california time i get about five o'clock and i write a morning blog and um it's really one of the things that i write an evening blog i write a weekend blog one of the things that fascinates me about it is that i can sit down there and just write a thousand words uh pretty quickly you know in an hour just typing furiously and because i see so much so it's fun to it's fun to have it organized in my mind and to put it on on the computer and i know at some point i'm not going to be able to think that quickly and to think about that many things at one time but you know it's like a bird flying you know it just feels good to be able to do it you know i can run i like to run i like to play tennis i like to move through space and there are things in life that i i'm able to do and as long as i'm able to do them i want to do them it makes me feel alive so for me um part of what i want to do is i'm trying to put out a body of work out there that will help people going forward so i want to have a sense of a legacy and there's still parts of it that i i'm hoping to do before i finally finish but for me that that's my goal i want to feel like i want to feel i want to feel relevant i want to feel like i'm i'm using my time well and then i'm trying to try to help other people in addition to paying the bills you know but i want to feel like that i'm doing something useful so i get up in the morning i write my blog and then i talk all day during my chat room and it's fun to spot patterns and point them out to the people listening to me and i hope that they can see them as well i hope they can learn to start seeing them more and more on their own and i'm in my office from five o'clock california time the market closes at 1 15 and then i spend about an hour you know doing some more writing i go to the gym or i play tennis i do something every day and then my wife gets back from work and we go to dinner and whatever go to a movie watch a television show we travel a lot take a lot of weekend trips um but my kids i wish they would call more if they're watching this video call dad more that is one of the interesting things you know my i have three daughters and two stepsons and um my kids have graduated from berkeley ucla usc harvard stanford and yale so they all went to really really good schools but the downside of it is they have these high-powered jobs that make them work crazy hours and they don't see dad very much which um which i i'm i'm happy that they're doing really well but yeah i really would like to see them more or hear from them more i view what i do trying to teach is kind of um a substitute for that so you know i taught my kids a lot i spent a lot of time with them teaching them how to read how to think how to write and you know they ended up using it and having very successful careers and now i'm trying to do that same kind of thing with um with my websites trying to help people become as successful as they possibly can be and i loved it with my kids and uh i like it now it was a lot more fun with my kids but it's still it's still pretty good fun right now it's awesome great uh routine great day for sure so on that note what can people find you they'll connect with your recharge after this interview the easiest way is to just go to brookstradingcoursebutton.com so my name brooks b-r-o-o-k-s trading course dot com and that that's my uh primary website i have another website for the chat room but if you go to that brookstradingcourse.com website you'll find everything that you need to know you find sample videos sample charts a lot of articles on trading you'll find connections to the chat room into the course if you want to buy the course but that that's that's a good starting point awesome i will make sure to link all of this in the show note and in the video description for this interview and i have one last question do you have like a piece of advice for people that you want to kind of just leave people with after this interviews finish like what would they have to apply or are you doing the coming month to be successful in trading well for me i think the most important thing is what i said you have to be doing it for both you have to be happy you have you have to get to a place where you're very peaceful training you have to find a style training that's compatible with your personality and you have to be peaceful and you have to be happy and one of the keys to that is you have to be training the i don't care size you have to be training small enough so that you really don't care too much about losing if you have a lot of money small can be still pretty big but if you're a person starting out with a five thousand dollar account i would trade either forex markets or the micro e-mini contracts for many months until you become consistently good as a trainer so trade small trade very very small so that you're not getting stressed out and thinking about money you want to focus on what the market is telling you not on the money thank you so much alex been such a pleasure to be here again and we'll catch you guys pretty soon okay i appreciate it thank you you

Channel: Etienne Crete - Desire To TRADE

Views: 218,983

Keywords: desire to trade, forex trader traveling, forex, forex trader, swing trader, forex trading, al brooks, best price action trader in the world, best price action traders, best price action trading books pdf, best price action trading books, best price action trading strategy, al brooks interview, al brooks best price action, al brooks price action trading, al brooks price action trading course, price action, price action trading

Id: KBXnfay-BQE

Length: 50min 22sec (3022 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 24 2019