My Dad Made Me Find Loopholes At 7 Years Old

My family is a bunch of business lawyers. They were very upset I wasn't the Harvey Specter of the group, although that would have been really cool.

While other kids were getting coloring books, my dad sat me down in front of contracts and made me find the loopholes. I'm not kidding. At seven years old.

I hated it. And it is the single most valuable thing anybody ever did for me, because it gave me the one thing this job actually requires.

It gave me the mindset of just staring and looking.

Not scanning. Not glancing at a chart for two seconds and deciding. Sitting there and looking at something until it starts telling you what it is. Finding the thing in the document that everybody else skipped over, because they were reading fast and I was reading slow.

That's it. That's the whole skill. I just happen to point it at charts now instead of contracts.

Here's why I'm telling you this, and I want you to actually hear me on it.

Everyone reading this has a talent that's better than mine at something. Not a maybe. You have something you're already good at, something you've been doing for years, and you don't think of it as having anything to do with the market.

Use that attitude and that approach in your trading. It will help you tremendously.

I've got a member, Big E. He was a truck driver. Think about what that job actually builds in somebody. You're measuring direction and distance and speed all day long. You look at a car three lanes over and you know — that's a bad driver, they're about to cut me off, something's about to happen.

That is a real skill. That's pattern recognition under pressure with money on the line, except the money is your life. You can use that in trading.

Maybe you're a nurse and you read people. Maybe you build things and you see when something's structurally wrong before anyone else does. Maybe you're a teacher and you can tell which kid is about to lie to you. Bring it. All of it transfers.

Now here's the other half, because the skill isn't enough on its own.

When a position isn't working, the question is not "man, I screwed up." The question is: why isn't it working?

I've gone short a little early. It happens. Hindsight has 2020 vision. But there's a difference between beating yourself up about a trade and understanding what actually happened in it, and only one of those makes you better next time.

When you know why a trade went the way it did, the emotion comes out of the equation. You're not punishing yourself. You're collecting information.

That's what turns whatever you're already good at into something that makes you money.

Rock On,

Voz

P.S. Speaking of loopholes, if you haven’t watched Everything Is Fraud yet, get on it! This link won’t be up for too much longer.