Trading Psychology | Why Normal Doesn’t Make Money | Part 1

[Music] I'm not going to attempt to show you how to trade I'm going to attempt to show you how to think while you're trading and this will become very clear in a second by way of introduction my name is Tom who got and I come from a very unique vantage point in relation to you you see I started working in the city about 20 years ago and for the first decade of my career I sat and I watched you trade I must have watched a hundred million trades go over the tape in the ten years that I sat on a trading floor whilst I was managing and hedging positions depending on which direction you saw the market go up or down and it does provide you with a rather unique insight to watch 50,000 people trade over a decade you get a feel for how it is people are thinking when they are sat in front of their monitors at home or wherever they are in the world and you notice that people tend to make the same mistakes over and over and over and actually very few people are capable of making money consistently so as I left in February 2009 in the throes of the bear market I realized that actually trading had absolutely nothing to do with technical analysis fundamental analysis and there was it was it was difficult to begin with because no longer did you have a security blanket in the form of a monthly paycheck instead you were there man oh man oh in front of the screen the markets was your best friend or your worst enemy depending on the day and Here I am some 10 years later this year has been a good year I made a more than a million pounds year last year I managed to lose nearly 90,000 on Christmas Day would you believe that it's one of the reasons why I am so grateful that CMC market is stopping me from trading on a on a thin train day and sadly it's a bit of a challenge would you believe it to be at a Christmas lunch and dinner this is I think you call this Boxing Day yes see we Europeans we heathens we celebrate Christmas on the 24th while you wait a day or so and then you have your Boxing Day and there I was on Boxing Day in a celebratory moment whilst at the mean time I was I don't know if you recall what Dow Jones did on the Boxing Day last year it had its single biggest game ever it had fallen 500 points on Christmas Eve the move that I captured absolutely every single tick off and on Boxing Day I had been long but as the MA as the Dow had risen five six hundred points I thought it's probably about time to begin to short this I took my profit and I reverted short and the Dow rallied another 600 points to make it an 1100 point move day and me walking out of there going that was an expensive Christmas dinner fear is what stopping people from making money in the markets sure people are good at making money at times but the tendency is to make it lose it make it lose it I believe that the only reason why I am good at what I do is because of my relationship with fear I am what's called a high state trader some would call it an extremely high state trader at institutional size the average bet amongst CFD traders here in the United Kingdom is 7 pounds a point my position here equates to 750 pounds a point in attacks it means that if - goes 20 30 points against me I am faced with a loss which would equate to the average annual salary of a worker here in the UK thus you need to have a rather special relationship with losing and you need to have a rather special relationship with winning as well and what I hope to do over the next two hours is to change the way that you look at trading now I could have come in here and I could have thrown all sorts of techniques at you Bollinger Bands Keltner channels moving averages crossover stochastics MACD RSI oh god I've spent countless hours studying it as I'm sure you have as well but I am sure that you also realized that actually no matter how good a grasp you get on technical analysis they are still those days where you simply refuse to take your loss where despite your best intentions you simply cannot get yourself to do the right thing so you may quite rightly ask do I get scared when I trade and I trade the size that I do of course I get scared but the narrative here is not that I am a fearless trader I'm not even a fearless person I am scared of losing loved ones I'm scared of sending my children out in the traffic I am in no shape or form any different than any other caring parent is if you put me out of the balcony over here and I stare over into the gun do I get a flutter or nerve sure but with practice comes experience now I'm actually a firm believer that practice does not make perfect and I would like to elaborate on that point a little bit later on in the presentation I'm also scared of making a complete Twitter of myself today I'm scared that you don't get the message I'm scared that you think this is ridiculous I came to hear about how he navigates the stock indices and I promise you I'll give you my rather unique insight into how I trade stock indices so if you are that way inclined where you prefer to just stick to the technical analysis I assure you you're not gonna walk out of here empty-handed either but the truth is that my relationship with fear has come to the point where I have the sensitivities no that's not right descends it's I tried so hard sometimes foreigners can struggle it with these words I have desensitized myself to certain levels of stimulus that you face when for example a car comes at you full speed I'm sure that if it was somehow possible to produce a brain scan while I was trading during particularly stressful situations such as Boxing Day last year you will find that my amygdala doesn't light up like a Christmas tree you will probably not even be able to discern that I am losing 90,000 pounds because I have blocked it out I can't block out fear in in many other aspects of my life if he put me front of the television screen I watch Friday the 13th or I don't really watch much TV so I don't know what's scary these days but you know Freddy Krueger a kind of style I'm sure I'm gonna sit with a pillow like everyone else does well probably you won't sit with a pillow but I will because I don't I take I don't take be the horror movies very well but when I'm faced with horror situations while I'm trading I seem to have developed an immunity to fear which enables me to make the right decisions when they need to be made whether that's because I've trained or whether I was born with it I don't know but the fact of the matter is that my father was a vacuum cleaner repairman and mother was a nurse so I don't think that I've come from a heritage of risk takers so my argument is that if I can do this with a rather unique way of doing it then I believe you can as well but it boils down to that practice does not make perfect practice makes permanent and if you carry on practicing the wrong way you will merely establish a behavior pattern that doesn't serve you so what can I accomplish in two hours well look not that I in any shape or form will put myself in the League of these four gentlemen but it only took Steve Jobs 15 minutes to galvanize a departing class from Stanford University in 2015 to go out and connect the dots and not so much work from the point of view of the head but work with the heart and Martin Luther King it took him 17 minutes to create the fortitude for a generation and a segment of the American public that was suppressed hey one day it paved the way for him winning the Nobel Prize and I don't think I need to introduce another JFK no Winston Churchill at least not when I'm in the United Kingdom since the establishment of the rules by ESMA last year or was it the yep no it was last year in August September time last year we're all European Union brokers now had to curtail the amount of leverage that they gave to their clients we used to enjoy 200 to 1 now we only have 20 to 1 and another thing that then establish was that every single broker had to put up on their way upside how many of their clients were losing clients that was a little bit like the cigarette companies being forced to put warnings on their cigarette packages and and and and show draconian photographs or people in hospital beds with emphysema and lung cancer and anything in between yet it didn't stop people from smoking and it certainly hasn't stopped the interest for trading either but the fact of the matter is that asthma has done as a favor may not have done us a favor about margin although this many ways we can get around that if we really want margin you just think offshore and you'll get your two hundred to one if you want it no they've done us a favor because they've actually highlighted the true nature of trading you see if there's a hundred people in here and 75 of them are losing as it shows here on the CMC market website well this is no longer a technical analysis issue you're not a losing trader because you are deficient in MACD and you're not running your your you're losing positions because you don't understand stochastics or moving averages this is not a technical analysis problem this is a human problem and the sooner that you accept that this is a human problem the sooner you can actually do something about it I thought that it would be the end of the see of the industry when all the brokers had to put their this the winning stats and the losing stat up on the website but it hasn't because people know it people are aware of it but people think well this stat doesn't apply to me anymore than the warnings on the cigarette packages applied to me so when we're confronted with charts beed something the point here where I write here at that point you can buy by the market so to say I buy the market here well I'm buying it because we have a gap up and now we've traded sideways in what I consider to be an ABCD correction yeah I know my technical analysis the flip side is I could also say no actually I'm going to sell because if this was such a strong market it wouldn't have taken the bias an hour and we also know that 48% of all gaps gets filled within the first three hours of trading and 78.6% of all gaps in the Dow Jones index gets filled within 72 hours all free trading days but it's really not so interesting to know whether this is a winning trade or losing trade maybe I'm right maybe I am wrong it really does depend on how many traders out there agrees with me and they back up my trade as well by being a buyers when I'm buying or being sellers as I am selling so since I have no knowledge of the future whenever people ask me where do you think go is going where do you think so and so on going and saying do you know what come back to me next week my crystal ball is out for repair it's a facetious way of telling people to stop bugging me but where I think the market is going because I am NOT Nostradamus I have absolutely no idea and anyone who says they think they think that the market is going this way that way is because they have a vested interest or a bias towards a direction or another and that's quite fair if you're long Bitcoin of course you're going to say that the Bitcoin is gonna go up and you think it's going to go up you wouldn't say I think bitcoins going down and then your long Bitcoin so it's not that I am not forgiving towards people when they state that they think the market or is going to go up or down or Tesla is hit it this way or that way it's just that the opinion is biased from their own position so if my entries are purely random and I'm a professional trader and you may think oh as a professional trader you may have a hit rate around the 80% and 90% oh no I most certainly do not have a hit rate in the 80s or in the 90s in fact you could even argue that I would have a better hit rate if I simply flip the coin and then I applied money management so either way the sooner I accept that the nature of what I am doing is basically random the sooner I can begin to trade as trading should be done I hadn't seen that one coming and I certainly hadn't seen that one coming either but that's the nature of the game that we are playing now do I think that Joss is the Holy Grail I like charts I could devour 1012 hours every single day a bit more in the weekend if you allow me to you know if there's no lawn to bemoan or windows to be polished you know I am quite happy to sit in devouring endless reams of stock charts that I analyze purely to train my mind but I'm also fully aware of the way my mind works and my mind is not my best friend when it comes to highly profitable trading so I don't believe from one second that chart is a Holy Grail any more than I think fundamental analysis is the Holy Grail see the problem here is ladies and gentlemen that we have a brain which is at best chaotic and at worst just our worst enemy and one of the little intricacies of our brains is that it has a tendency to see things that aren't there this is a phenomenon that in Latin is called apophenia now if I was going to translate apophenia into a common language it would be something along the lines of pattern isset e so when you think about the nature for example of indicators take some common known indicators like Fibonacci let's say that we look at some of the ratios of Fibonacci I'm going a little bit off-track here a little bit without any notes not that I really stick to the notes anyway when a market makes a 61 percent retracement some would argue that this is the ideal time to either buy or sell short depending on the direction and if that fails then there's also the 78.6% retracement and he'll why not throw the eighty eight point six and 94.5% ratios so there's also there's always a ratio for the particular season however my argument is that if the market has already traded up to a 78 percent retracement surely if you sell short at seventy eight point six you're actually betting against the prevailing trend some would argue against me I'm not really so interested in what other people are thinking I am more interested in trying to explain to you that the majority of indicators a moment available to the majority of people yet considering that 75 to 80 percent maybe 90% of all people engaged in trading are losing maybe it's a time we have a real long hard look at what it is that we're actually doing when we are trading see the purpose of trading is for us to make money purpose is not to be right it's not to derive glorification through our efforts there is one single raw purpose to reading and it is to make as much money as possible and the way you do that is simply to begin to think differently and I stated earlier that if seventy five eighty ninety percent of all people are losing traders we also have to assume that those seventy eighty ninety percent are normal perfectly well functioning people within society who hold down jobs as well as everyone else does are intelligent well-spoken pay their taxes look after their children etc etc but they can't trade for shoot because they simply think like everyone else does [Music]

Channel: Opto CMC

Views: 542,721

Rating: 4.9072905 out of 5

Keywords: stocks, stockmarket, trading, tradingpsychology, tradingstrategy, stockstrading, learn, education, events, psychology, stockcharts, shares, stock price, share price, opto knowledge, opto, opto opportunities, assets, asset management, investor, investing, investment, listen, business, finance, expert, #OptoTradingInterviews, opto investing, learn trading, learn investing, strategy, investment strategy, global markets, emerging markets, stock market, investment outlook, stock trading, trading psychology

Id: xoGOZD7-3gY

Length: 18min 38sec (1118 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Critterchops]

I watched this video he’s worked on the opposite side…. He’s an amateur with good points and good intentions…#1 stop worrying about what everyone else thinks….. I’ve made $117,000 in stocks since March of last year I work in a warehouse. Make $70,000 a year… started with $2,300 turned it into $117,000… when I seen Clov I knew … sometimes you have to do what you know and not rely on anyone’s approval… you try to explain…your wasting your time… a lot of people are not looking for life changing money they want money now…. And the stock market will eat them alive…as Steve Jobs said “think different”…. But we are trained to think a certain way…. Break yourself from everything and think freely….. I can say it but you will know when you actually do it then you will know you are actually free….

[u/socalgirl77]

PLEASE WATCH THIS VIDEO (3parts) 🍀✅

[u/Imnobdytdub]

Watching now…

[u/6SIG_TA]

Very insightful, thank you