Lead-Lag Live
Welcome to the Lead-Lag Live podcast, where we bring you live unscripted conversations with thought leaders in the world of finance, economics, and investing. Hosted through X Spaces by Michael A. Gayed, CFA, Publisher of The Lead-Lag Report (@leadlagreport), each episode dives deep into the minds of industry experts to discuss current market trends, investment strategies, and the global economic landscape.
In this exciting series, you'll have the rare opportunity to join Michael A. Gayed as he connects with prominent thought leaders for captivating discussions in real-time. The Lead-Lag Live podcast aims to provide valuable insights, analysis, and actionable advice for investors and financial professionals alike.
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Lead-Lag Live
From Hollywood to Wall Street: Mastering the Day Trading Mindset with Vincent Bruzzese
Ever wondered what it takes to become a successful day trader, conquer the volatile market, and achieve financial independence? Tune in to our eye-opening conversation with Vincent Bruzzese, the real day trader himself, as he shares his unique journey from academia to Hollywood, and eventually, to the stock market. Discover how Vincent's experiences in the movie business and background in gambling ignited his passion for trading, and what he's learned along the way.
We also delve into the crucial role of mindset in trading. Learn how the thought process of traders differs from that of wealthy individuals, and why this can make or break your success in the market. Find out the importance of keeping a trading journal, paying attention to key statistics, and adapting your decisions based on the current market environment.
Lastly, we explore the tactics and strategies necessary to navigate today's unpredictable market environment. From employing different types of strategies to hedging long-term investments, we discuss it all – including the significance of having the right mindset in trading.
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The content in this program is for informational purposes only. You should not construe any information or other material as investment, financial, tax, or other advice. The views expressed by the participants are solely their own. A participant may have taken or recommended any investment position discussed, but may close such position or alter its recommendation at any time without notice. Nothing contained in this program constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments in any jurisdiction. Please consult your own investment or financial advisor for advice related to all investment decisions.
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Foodies unite…with HowUdish!
It’s social media with a secret sauce: FOOD! The world’s first network for food enthusiasts. HowUdish connects foodies across the world!
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The content in this program is for informational purposes only. You should not construe any information or other material as investment, financial, tax or other advice. The views expressed by the participants are solely their own. A participant may have taken or recommended any investment position discussed, but may close such position or alter its recommendation at any time without notice. Nothing contained in this program constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement or offer to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments in any jurisdiction. Please consult your own investment or financial advisor for advice related to all investment decisions. Don't forget to follow at LeadLagReport on Twitter to join these conversations live and check out the LeadLagReport at wwwleadlagreportcom. Use promo code podcast30 for two weeks free and 30% off to get access to award-winning research and anticipate stock market crashes, corrections and bear markets. And now onto our LeadLag Live discussion hosted by Michael Gaiad.
Speaker 2:My name is Michael Gaiad, publisher of the LeadLagReport. Joining me for the hour is Vincent Brzezi, the real day trader himself here on Twitter. Real day trading, vincent. Interesting to tell the audience and a lot of people follow you here on Twitter and on Reddit. But who are you today? Is that comfortable? What's your background, how did you get interested in markets and why focus on day trading?
Speaker 3:Hey, thanks for having me Really appreciate it. Hello everyone. So you know I didn't really take a traditional route here. I was in academia, you know, a long time ago I was a professor of sociology and statistics. It's not where I grew up like third-poor, you know, living in a car, homeless, as a kid, new York. It's freaking cold out there And I don't know how much that impacted me in terms of how I see money or deal with money or my mindset on money, but mindset certainly came into this.
Speaker 3:So I left academia, i got tired of the ivory tower and I went to the movie business. I had a knack for predicting opening week in box office. I wrote models to do it. I went to the movie business, i started a couple of companies. They did well. I joined some studios and I eventually started a studio myself.
Speaker 3:The last movie I released was called Unhinged with Russell Crowe. I don't know if anyone saw it in the theater or not, and right here I'm an executive producer on a fan-athlete movie coming out this weekend called Hypnotic. But I really haven't seen it, so I can't say whether it's good or not. Anyway, but you know. So I say that because I had a great job, like a dream job. I made movies, right, i made money, i made movies, and you don't get much better than that. But the idea of being just completely financially independent just drew me to the market And this was pre-pandemic, pre-the-whole Wall Street Bets thing, all that. And so I go in and I'm a fairly arrogant guy and I get my ass kicked, Just smacked around. I mean, my account got totals, so what did I do? I filled it back up again and thought all right, i got this, no problem. And of course, i got my ass handed to me promptly again. I don't like to lose. I'm a gambler by heart, i have a gambling background, and that certainly impacted me And I decided, ok.
Speaker 3:First thing I got to find out is can this be done? Is it possible, is it at all possible, to trade for a living Right? And when I say trade, i mean day trade and swing trade. I'm talking about short-term trading, where your longest trade is maybe a week or two and your shortest trade is a few minutes. And I looked around and found, yes, you can.
Speaker 3:But what I started to see was just the whole space was littered with this human scum of from YouTube to these what I'll call well-meaning idiots on Reddit giving advice, people who have pretty much never been profitable a day in their life, telling everyone how to trade. And I realized that I'm watching what people who do this for a living do and then I'm watching what the advice that is being given out. there is this huge disconnect. So I decided, all right, i'm not putting another diamond until I absolutely learn everything I can learn. So I read up on it. I learned from options to spreads to different methods, different strategies. I opened up a paper account and decided I am not going to move forward until I hit goals that I set for myself. Can I be profitable only shorting? Can I be profitable under 25K? Can I? you know all different scenarios. Finally, i decided I was ready. I put $40,000 back into the account. At this point I was down like $175,000. And I haven't looked back since. That was around six years ago. I've had one red month since then.
Speaker 3:Every trade I make I post live. I entry, exit, position, size, all verifiable. You can see it show up in time and scales on your platform. Any platform can show it. My sizes are large enough. They certainly show up there Last quarter verifiable. And I have plenty of followers that keep me honest, because they're keeping track of every one of my trades. I made $2.15 million This quarter. I'm behind the pace. I'm up around $450K.
Speaker 3:But what I decided was one I don't like people, period. I don't leave my damn house. Really. I can't frigging stand people And not just in a oh I don't like people kind of way, like if I could hit a button and make like 95% go, i would fucking smash it. But what I really don't like is inequity. I hate unfairness, and when I see people who are simply trying to make a better life for themselves and that's what most people who trade are trying to do right, they're trying to make a better life for themselves, they're going out and they're thinking all right, i want to tell my asshole boss I'm done, i'm out, because no one gets wealthy from a paycheck.
Speaker 3:You get trapped in living paycheck to paycheck, and so they decide they're going to try it, they're going to open up an account And what happens? they get scammed, they get preyed upon. Take my course, pay me this money. I charge nothing. I don't need people's money. I don't want their money. I am not selling anything. I'm not selling anything and I watch these people in their fake lambos, rented lambos in these damn videos and scamming people.
Speaker 3:Then I go on Reddit and I watch these people like I said, who's never been profitable telling people how to trade? I'm like this is not tenable. This is a real career, this is a real occupation, but people don't see it that way. So I open up a community called Real Day Trading and the point of it is you can learn it should be called real trading really but you can learn how to do this for a living And I invited other professional traders in and it is a very strict community.
Speaker 3:It's a very tight knit community. It's not as cultish as some would have you believe, but it is very tight knit. Nothing can get posted there unless it's verified. You can't just throw your method or your idea against the wall. It has to be repeatable, consistently profitable Over time. I need to see it posted in real time position, size, entries, exit, exact position to be able to verify that yes, this works and the people who are members here deserve to know if something's posted, it's real and it works. And so I wrote a Wiki it's 300 and some odd pages that goes step by step to tell people this is what you have to do. It takes two years minimum of hard work to get there. That's my story. I'm sticking to it.
Speaker 2:Okay, so let's unpack some. It's okay. So it sounds like you've had a fairly successful career, obviously on the Hollywood side. Presumably you've made some good money over the years from that. Why not just do it in terms of the way probably other people in Hollywood do it who have good income in the way of just giving to some advisor?
Speaker 3:why is it that you feel that you need to have direct control over it and still do all the other things that you're doing One thing I really got sick of the people, the stereotype on Hollywood's real, and I just really got sick of dealing with the Hollywood type people. They're exactly as you imagine them to be Not all of them, but by and large I enjoyed making movies, i enjoyed that process, but I just I wanted a different challenge, and the market is certainly a huge challenge, right It's. Can you as a retail trader, do what institute? you know what 90% of retail traders can't seem to do? Can you be consistently profitable? so the challenge drew me. It was fun and, quite frankly, you can. You know the potential. You can make more money than I was making, even as a Hollywood executive. So, and I was making, as you said, i was making decent money. So you know, all that kind of drew me to it.
Speaker 3:But then when I saw just how messed up the space was, how, here you have this opportunity for people and it's just not. You know, when most people think of trading, they think of, you know, going in and scalping low float gappers, and that's not what it is, that's not how you trade for a living and it's such an opportunity and it's an opportunity you know. It surprised me how few. Well, it didn't surprise me, but how few women are in the space, where this is a place where the market doesn't give a shit, right? I mean, there's no pay gap here, but it's not a welcoming community to women who want to come in. So there were just so many. There was just so much potential for this space to really take people and break them out of that paycheck, the paycheck prison, and it wasn't being used. And so I saw the challenge and I jumped into it. How do you manage?
Speaker 2:time. I mean you're doing all of the work you're doing during the day. Presumably it's pretty high demanding. Trading itself is pretty demanding itself. How do you navigate sort of the aspects of where you put your effort and how much effort you put into this versus the Hollywood side?
Speaker 3:I'm out of the I mean I retired from Hollywood, so I do this full time and you know I'm sitting here every day from I hate the fact on the West Coast I get like 6.30 in the morning but I have, you know, six monitors. I have a Bloomberg terminal. To my left, i have my, so I trade through a larger account through a JPM which goes through the Bloomberg terminal here. I have another account that I trade through, a merit trade here in front of me on another monitor. I have, i mean, three different chap rooms and communities that I'm talking to people and trying to answer their questions and help them. I do live Twitter spaces to trade live so people can follow along. So I mean I devote 100% of my work time to this. So to me, this is my job right now. But you know I'm no longer. I get calls every now and then hey, can you read this script, can you look at this? But I'm not in any way employed by Hollywood anymore. Got you okay?
Speaker 2:I understood. Okay, so let's talk about just some of the things that you did to self-educate. You mentioned some of the options side, but what were some of the sources that you yourself went to in the beginning?
Speaker 3:You know I couldn't find any. You have the typical books, you have the McMillan book, you know you have a lot of these books that are very, very dry. And what I found was the basic education. You know, much like poker, much like chess it doesn't take long to learn the basics. Unfortunately, a lot of people jump in without knowing the basics. So I don't wanna underplay it And, as we all know, there's a difference between, you know, we all remember in college or high school where, if you, you know, memorizing is one thing but truly understanding is another, and a lot of people don't truly understand options, for example, and how they actually work and how market makers are working, the bid-ask spread and all of that.
Speaker 3:And that takes time. But what really hit me and to me out there, tom Hulgaard really kind of hits an L on the head Mindset is 90, 85, 90%, to put an arbitrary number on it, but a lot of trading, which is why you can, you know everyone can look at the same support and resistance levels, everybody can look at the same technicals and you have 90% losing money and 10% not. And you know traders, the mindset that traders have in life is quite literally the opposite mindset. You need to be a successful trader. And one thing I found which is interesting is wealthy people and I was surrounded by these people and I do well. But when I say wealthy, i'm talking about people who write the checks, and they have a different mindset that people who live paycheck to paycheck and grew up in an environment that was paycheck to paycheck don't have.
Speaker 3:When you grow up or live in a paycheck to paycheck environment, you have a mindset that thinks the moment something, for example, good happens right, you get a raise, or you know your fiance just you know said yes to you, or whatever something good in your life you immediately think when's the other shoe gonna drop, when bad shit gonna start happening to me? right, because that's what you're used to. You're used to the moment something good happens, something bad's gonna happen. And then, oddly enough, when things aren't going your way in life, your mindset becomes this will turn around, I'm due, right, it can't always be bad. Eventually something good's gonna happen to me.
Speaker 3:And so bring that mindset to trading. And what happens? The moment you're in profit? what do you do? I gotta take profit. Why? Because the market's gonna take it away. I don't wanna lose this profit. You never went broke.
Speaker 3:Making a profit right, yeah, yeah, you're friggin' to have, and you do So you immediately think that other shoe's gonna drop. I have to take profit. So when your thesis is proven right, you bail. And then, on the opposite end, when your trade's going against you, what do you think? It's gonna turn around, it's gonna get better, it's gonna reverse. And so when your thesis is proven wrong, you hold.
Speaker 3:And that really sums up the huge mindset disconnect. And it takes a long time to break that mindset and it takes a whole process to do it. But if I had to boil it down, that is what in my learning process. That was the aha moment of oh okay, this is the problem. We're all taking profit too quickly and we're holding on to losers too long. It's oversimplified there, but that's the issue that needs to be fixed. And on top of that, people have no clue how to read a macroeconomic environment. This market's a ticking time bomb right now. I mean people are out there with these bullish. I mean, seriously, have you seen the credit default swap numbers? Have you seen how much money is being poured into TLT right now and into gold? Does that not tell people something? But people don't have an education on the macroeconomic environment And with tools like chat, gpt and others, there's no excuse to not learn that stuff as a trader.
Speaker 2:I want to go for a question. There's a lot that I agree with you on as far as just sort of the broader risks which we'll tease out. But if you're there, go ahead.
Speaker 3:Great question. So, first, it is essential to me, in my opinion, that you have a trading journal. There are many out there. I use TraderSync. I like TraderSync, but they're a trader view. There are plenty out there that work And the reason for that is I can look back at my last thousand trades whatever number trade and see the statistics there and I could see my win rate on certain setups.
Speaker 3:And when it comes down to it, as a professional trader, you have to treat it like a business And as a business you have to say, ok, this is how much money I need to take out of my account as profit every month And this is going to leave the base in. And to do that, there's only four numbers that really matter. What is your win rate? What is your average number of trades a day? What is the amount of money you're making when you have a winning trade? What's the average amount you're losing when you have a losing trade? So your profit factor And you can look at those four numbers and adjust it to see all right, this is what I need to hit my target. But when you have a trade that's winning and you look back and you can rely and you have the confidence because of those statistics saying all right, i know this works X percent of the time. That can give you the confidence to stay in a trade. It's also a matter of making sure you're taking trades that are taking the market into account.
Speaker 3:The market has to come first. What is the market doing? Is your trade in the direction of the market? What does the daily chart look like if you bullish on a trade? Is your daily chart through all the moving averages? Does it have a bullish profile? Is it through all the trend lines? Is the market in your direction? Does it have And to me, every trade has to have relative strength against the market if I'm belong, or relative weakness against the market If I'm short.
Speaker 3:And I don't mean that RSI bullshit measure, which is just the worst crap measure in the history of crap measures, and anyone who says, oh, i use it, it works, yeah, let me see how much you actually make the month. Zero RSI is crap. I'm talking about when the market is going up. That stock is going up proportionally more than the market. If it's going down, that stock should be flat or even going up a little. It has strength independent of spy. When I say in the market. I mean spy here, because spy has a gravitational pull and it's going to pull 75 to 80 percent of the stocks, even the ones not in it along with it, biotech stocks and your low float stocks aside.
Speaker 3:And what we're really trying to do as retail traders is isolate the institutional buying and selling Everything else is noise because we want to follow that. That's the trend we want to follow. Traders tend to counter trend trade and when it's at the top, they want to short. At the bottom, they want to go long, and they'll keep doing it until they're broke. It doesn't work. You want to follow the trend, this whole damn the man and screw the hedges. And great, they're the ones making money. And so you want to follow them. And the only way to do that is to isolate what they're doing. And to do that you've got to figure out that stock has strength against the market. That gives you more confidence if the trade's going in your favor, that if the market goes against you, this stock is not going. You're going to have time. There's a buffer there, and then it just comes down to the mindset of you know.
Speaker 3:I mean, look, imagine you made a bet on a baseball game and your team is up three nothing And you, the person you bet against, says would you like to get out now? Would you like to double the bet? Would you like to keep it as is? Most people would double the bet at that point. But in trading, when it's going your way and you're up now three nothing, you think, oh, i'll get out of it, i'll get out of that bet. You would never get out of that bet if you were up three nothing in that game in the fifth inning, you would, you would press it, you would, you would increase the money you have in that bet because your odds of winning now are like 80%. But in trading, because we remember all the times it's burned into our brains, all the times we were up and it reversed on us, and we conveniently forget all the times it didn't.
Speaker 3:Well, that's where the fear comes from. So I carry them up with something called the walkaway analysis And it's quite simple. You look at all the times where you exited. Then, just on a chart, you could do an Excel, anything. What was the price five minutes after you exited? What was it an hour after? What was at the end of the day? What was it at the end of the next day You will find your profit will have exponentially increased. Had you stayed in those winning trades And you, by looking at that and just looking at the raw numbers right in your face, going my God, if, on average, i stayed in my trades two hours longer, i would have made 40% more. That is hard to deny And when you see that time and time again, it helps you stay in. It helps gives you the confidence you need to not only stay in but increase your position.
Speaker 2:So let's talk about that actually a little bit. that point about increasing the position, vincent, i mean, arguably, if you want to get really outsized returns, you've got to take some kind of increased weighting or high conviction type of bet, right? So as you yourself are trading around positions in your portfolio, do you have certain limits? When you talk about pressing, how hard do you press on a particular position?
Speaker 3:It depends on how much it's going in my favor. But, for example, right now I have 10,000 shares of Amazon going well in my favor. I may add another 5,000 if it hits 113, because I have a market that's going down and I have a stock that's going up against the market, which means I have institutions pouring money into that stock. I want to follow that trend, so I want to increase my position in it, even though I'm in profit right now, whereas you know, ctd has been an absolute pain in the ass And so once that gets to break even, i will probably get out because I don't like the price action on it, even though it had good earnings. So it depends on the price action and it depends on the stock. But if the stock's going in my favor, i will press, press, press, increase position until I'm fully in belief that I will max out every dime of my buying power on any given day.
Speaker 2:But what percentage? I mean you talk about the numbers, but what percentage of a portfolio typically? I mean, presumably you've got some limits as far as you don't want to be 50% of your holdings.
Speaker 3:For better or worse. I generally don't. I tend to diversify, you know. So I try to make sure I don't have more than one position or two positions in the same sector or industry. If I have, you know, one semi, i'm not going to have, you know, if I have a NVIDIA, i'm not going to be also long AMD, for example, but I will at times, you know, put in up to 50% on one trade if it is going my way. But I rarely look at the total percent of buying power I'm putting in on a single trade. There have been trades where I've came close. I think I had a Lulu trade where I had around 75% of my buying power into that trade And I have around $24 million in buying power because you get, you know, four times, five times, four times on day trading buying power. So there are times where I've had a significant amount into a single trade if I am very bullish or bearish on it, and I mean I'm bearish on the market right now. Here's what I mean. We're in a very unique position And, as I said, you have, you know, credit default swaps going up.
Speaker 3:I mean you have a lot of people who are paying more and more money to insure against a financial collapse. You have a disconnect, an absolute disconnect that I've never seen before, where you have a market pricing in up to three rate cuts this year by a Fed that has said, point blank I'm not cutting damn rates. I mean, you know, call Powell what you will, but the guy doesn't strike me as someone who's not you know, he's a fan of Volcker. The last thing Powell wants to do is cut rates, and if you're pricing in three rate cuts against the Fed that has no intention of cutting rates, something has to give there. That is a huge market disconnect. On top of that, you obviously have the debt. You know the whole debt problem going on with the debt limit. You have the banks and the financial issue on a potential credit squeeze And you have the fact that we're through a CPI, through major earnings, through economic numbers, and we have not yet broken out above 4.15. So all that tells me is we're currently range bound because there are several oh my God economic apocalypse potential triggers on the horizon And investors are just not quite ready to dump their money in equities.
Speaker 3:I agree. And look, you know, a zero interest rate policy looks great until it isn't, and it's just another version of trickle down, right, it's just another version of here's free money, but not for you. Here's free money for large companies that are going to take that money, that and borrow it against no interest and use it right And the idea oh, it'll create jobs. It'll create this. Well, we have one of the lowest unemployment rates in history right now, with a higher interest rate. If they drop that interest rate back down and loosen the policy before we get inflation to 2%, i believe it'll be disastrous. But so I don't think Powell, whose hero is Volcker, would do that or is going to do that.
Speaker 3:But if you look at these, you know you go to the CME website, cme group, and the probabilities they have. You have priced in right now 100% probability that rates are gonna be cut and a 80% probability that the rates at December will be 450 or below. That is insane. There's nothing to verify that. There's nothing to say that's going to occur. But the market has that priced in and even with that priced in, we're still unable to break above. And with money being poured into TLT right now. I just saw a huge thing. Jpm informed me a huge amount of money got poured into the December. Out of the money. A TLT falls money going into gold. When billionaires tend to stop putting the money into equity and start putting it into oh shit, money safety, that's usually a sign for me that at least on long-term holdings, one should at the very least hedge themselves. Get some vicks, get some spy puts, do something to hedge your long-term investments in this environment.
Speaker 2:But also I'd go back to that freezing of pressing. You wanna be careful pressing too hard on the short side, because you and I both know that the speed with which markets move on the outside tends to be very different than the upside. So if you press too hard on the short side you might be doing it too late.
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, and that's why a lot of my plays are very short-term. To me, this is a short-term trader's market. It's even very difficult to swing. I've talked to a number of what I consider to be very successful professional traders that make their living doing this. They've been doing it. Some of them have been doing it since before the crash in 2000, let's wait before my time and they've all said, one by one this is the hardest market they've ever traded, bar none. It is unpredictable. It is. You know.
Speaker 3:Bear markets, by definition, rely less on technicals, and technicals are a trader's bread and butter, right. Without them you don't have anything. But bear markets are driven by external news more than people. Markets are by far. And when you get these external news drops, that come in. Whether it's a Fed speaker that day coming and spouting off, or it's a new news about the invasion of the Ukraine or anything like that, the market reacts. And at that point in time it doesn't give a shit about your support and resistance levels, it'll blow right through them. So it becomes very difficult to swing positions in that environment.
Speaker 2:So what do you do in this period? I mean, presumably you don't have to, you don't necessarily have to trade every single moment of every single day, right? I mean, I'm gonna make these assumptions that you sit out some periods. But what do you do in this kind of environment where things are risky, but the risk is also that things could surprise you on the upside too?
Speaker 3:You know I take very short-term trades one you know so. For example, today I grabbed 10,000 shares of you at $32.09. I sold it at $32.59. That's, you know, $5,000 when I shorted NVIDIA earlier this morning and now I just increased my NVIDIA short by buying in the money puts. I will close those by the end of the day and take that profit.
Speaker 3:So I am really doing a very quick turnaround on these to maximize the take advantage of the volatility that I'm seeing but also not leave myself open to the immense amount of risk that some of these overnights will have. With that said, i am taking some risk. I'm doing some earning plays. You know I shorted Disney well, because I'm very familiar with it before earnings last night. I went long on TTD before earnings last night. So I am doing some of those more risky plays because what I found was my monthly return was going down by about 15, 20% a month since the bear market started. So I had to find alternative sources of revenue, other than the method I was using, to make up for that downfall. And some of those alternative methods was finding an edge in doing some earnings trades.
Speaker 2:So about your worst trade, and with a caveat that worst is not necessarily a function of performance, but something that maybe you would not repeat in terms of the way that you looked at that trade or the setup.
Speaker 3:Yeah God, it was one recently, about six months ago. So I short snow, right, and it looked bearish at the time And snow starts going up. I think I shorted it was at like around 120, somewhere around there, and it starts going up and it started out with 5,000 shares short. So then I averaged down first bad mistake right At around 130, now I have an average around 125 and 10,000 shares. It goes up again. I averaged down again. I held that stupid stock all the way up to around 170, taking a 40-some odd dollar loss on that trade, because for some stubborn reason I could not accept the fact that snow was not going to drop And I felt the market was going to drop. I felt snow was going to drop, it was overpriced and it just kept going up. And of course, what happened? that literally the day after I bailed on that trade and took I think it was like close to a $750,000 loss on it, the damn thing starts tanking And within five days it was pretty much back down to my entry. That wasn't fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, and that's gonna happen. And well, I think it's the other part, too, about going back to name the space around scams and sort of the space in general. You rarely hear about people's losses, right? The scammers are not scamming based on the integrity of showing that they lose money.
Speaker 3:They're doing it based on the bullshit that they're winning every single day, 100%, and that's why I tell people, like one of the benefits, not selling anything. They see all of my trades good, bad and ugly. They see my losses. They see plenty of times I'll get out of a trade, take the loss and then watch it turn around. It just happened on Boeing, which is that stock is the spawn of Satan. Somehow It's like some weird black magic shit is going on with Boeing that you just can't friggin' trade the stock like they just watched me get my ass kicked on that.
Speaker 3:I'm a very big believer in if anyone out there is showing you 100% win rate or 95%, but you just shut the hell. No, this is not how it works And I have a standing challenge out there to any of those furus or scammers Come trade me head to head And 100 trades. If you can out-trade me, i have what? 10,000 followers on Twitter, around 40,000 on Reddit. I will 100% recommend whatever your damn service is to everyone And they know if I recommend something, it's good So. But if I beat you and out-trade you, you have to refund every single person who's paid you money to for you to scam them. As of yet, i haven't had a single taker. Wonder why.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about what would make you more optimistic. So I'm with you on the trade. Listen, i've been very vocal myself. I think you know, with my intermarket analysis approach that correction started third week of April. I say that based on breadth. I say that based on a lot of other intermarket dynamics. Utilities have not yet given sort of a real strong, confirming signal of defensiveness. That also doesn't be leading indicator of tail risk. Treasuries are getting there. They're certainly acting more like that flight to safety type of dynamics. But what would cause you to get optimistic and take a real curfew and bullish bet? Is it as simple as market crap out, or does something else need to happen?
Speaker 3:You know it would have to be a combination of obviously, first and foremost, i would need a technical confirmation there, right, i would need some technical confirmation that spy, for example, is over 420 and staying there. So that is first and foremost. I would need to see the market be able to do that. But on top of that I would have to see some macro economic resolution. A continued decline in inflation without a indicators that we're going to be in for anything but a mild recession. Right now I do not have faith that it would be a mild recession, and nor do I have faith that will be at 2% anytime soon. But that could change, right? I mean, unemployment has been very stubborn and staying, even though the numbers this morning notwithstanding, staying very tight.
Speaker 3:So it would have to be a combination of technical and macro support that says we're in a bull market and not just a bunch of those you know pain in the ass talking heads out there that love to change their message every other day about we're in a bull market, we're in a bear market. You know one piece of advice that I've been able to don't listen, don't listen to them, don't listen to the talking heads, don't listen. You know I use trade exchange because I have a flow of news that comes and headlines, but turn CNBC off. Their job is not to tell you what's actually happening. So technical confirmation and macroeconomic confirmation would get me confident And then I would start. You know, i would start buying long-term leaps in, leap calls in you know, certain stocks that I feel are strong companies. I'd sell calls against those leaps. I would start selling puts. I don't sell puts on a stock unless I want to own the stock, so I would start doing that more often. That would change my trading mindset if we started to get into that more optimistic space.
Speaker 2:Talk about sources of information for you. So if we're talking to me from traditional media and I share a lot of that sentiment is it just you're looking at charts? are you doing other kind of research, looking at other places for ideas? How do you go about your own due diligence?
Speaker 3:One. I have the benefit of having an entire desk at JP Morgan that I work with to trade with that have access to a great deal of information And I'm able to get I'm able to ask them those questions I'm able to ask them. You know, before, for example, tesla reported has there been any change in the expectation on the gross margin for Tesla over the last month, even though they're cutting the price of the cars? Have you seen on your client side any indication that that's been changed? Or and I'll get those answers right So I get good information there And my policy is is whatever information I get from there, i share.
Speaker 3:I do not believe I should be the only person. I should not have access to that information if everyone doesn't have access to that information. As you can see, this unfairness thing is very important to me, so if they tell me, I tell everyone else. They also offer things like exotic options and the The advanced. We can do a whole show on the advantages that people who have money have over those that don't. It's just sickening. I do not take advantage of anything that can't be done by a retail trader.
Speaker 3:I use trade exchange and I look at the headlines and you know, part of it is experience, part of it is looking at. There's a difference between a recycled headline or a headline that's meaningful, a headline that's company Pacific or a headline that's I'm gonna see a hundred headlines about the talks on this, the debt limit, going on. They're meaningless headlines. All of them are meaningless until we actually see, and get close, that there's some resolution there. And that's only gonna happen when the CEOs of major corporations start calling these politicians and telling them okay enough, you need to stop fucking around and raise the limit, then you'll see some action. Until then, those headlines all they're gonna do is trigger the algos and move the market a bit. But other than that, you know, i take them all with a grain of salt.
Speaker 2:What's what?
Speaker 3:do you say is your?
Speaker 2:biggest piece of advice for you traders. You mentioned you've been doing this, i think you said, for you know it started kind of heavily six years ago. You learned along the way What kind of things should people think about when they're at the earlier part of their journey.
Speaker 3:Stop expecting success. You're going to lose. You're going to lose for probably for two years. You can mitigate that loss by you know. I recommend very strongly First you spend, however, usually you can run six months paper trading which I get there's no emotional connection to But do it until you have a 75% win rate and a profit factor of two for three consecutive months, three months.
Speaker 3:When you're finished with that, then go and trade only one share, one share, no more than one share, i don't care how much FOMO. You get one share And then you do that until you have three consecutive months of a win rate of 75% and a profit factor of 2.0. Once you did and hit those benchmarks, only then should you put your money in and start trading and trade with a method that you now know. Over the period that you spent doing the paper trading and the one share and you should have been journaling all that that you now have a consistent, repeatable, profitable method. That's almost muscle memory with an edge. But more than that, that time spent and it takes about two years to learn it and then hit those milestones is resetting your mindset. It's resetting your ability to stay patient, to stay in winning trades, to get out of trades when you need to get out of them. It is setting your mindset back to zero and building it back up to what it needs to be And only then put your money in, coming in and thinking you're gonna just open up an account, take your money, start buying calls out of the money, call lotto ticket bullshit, and you're gonna make money.
Speaker 3:You're not. You might have one or just like you might go to a casino and win one or two times. You're going to lose in the end. It's not gonna work. If you wanna make money doing this, it's gonna take time, dedication, effort.
Speaker 3:I've gone through graduate school, i've gone through being. I mean, this is that level of time and effort and study, because think about the time you put in to get a shitty job, to climb the ladder, to get a shitty cubicle, to answer to a pain in the ass boss that's probably some asswiped nephew or niece or whatever that doesn't know shit. And you worked your ass off long hours just to get that VP title and that 150,000 a year salary And you worked eight, nine years to do that. Well, how much is it worth to you to be able to roll out a bed? And if you have an internet connection to be able to have complete and total financial independence and freedom. Do you think that comes by just opening up an account and going I got this? No, it takes time. So my number one piece of advice stop expecting you know better and that you're going to make money. You're not going to make money until you learn how to do this and treat it like the job that it is.
Speaker 2:They're bringing a few minutes here. Vince, i'm gonna assume that there are some parts of your prior life on the Hollywood side that you miss. What are those parts, if any? I mean, i get the cynicism and I can understand, without obviously being in it, where that comes from, but there must have been some good things in your career that you look back on and kind of miss a bit.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, i mean absolutely. I miss the creative process of it. I miss, you know, talking with a writer going over a script. I miss seeing the end result on the screen, watching audiences laugh at a comedy, jump at a horror movie that I know I helped make, you know. So I miss seeing the fruits of your labor. I guess you could say in trading, the fruits of your labor is money. That's your. You know, it's kind of like, almost like a video game, it's a score. Oh, i had a high score today, great. But you know, making movies, you get the movie in the end And that is that's fun, it's as fun as it sounds. You're making a film. So I miss that. I miss being part of that process. I miss the challenge of. You know.
Speaker 3:The reason I go by the name Harry Selden is when I was a kid I got obsessed with the foundation series from Isaac Asimov. My youngest son's middle name is Isaac And in that series the lead character comes up with a method to predict human behavior. And that's what I specialized in statistical modeling to predict human behavior, based on that obsession. And I missed the idea of coming up with models and ways to predict consumer behavior and to market to them and come up with marketing campaigns as well. I headed up marketing at a studio And that was fun to come up with the trailers. And then how do you micro-target people? And the methods that we use to micro-target, if I tell you, i mean you can imagine they're very, they can be get down to creepy level, but they're very effective. And yeah, i missed that. I missed the creativity of that process.
Speaker 2:How do people find you eventually and track some of the work that you do and thought you have?
Speaker 3:Three different ways. One, i am a member of the one option community. I don't work there or anything. I help run the chat room, but the one option community is, to me, the best trading community out there if you want to ever join a trading community. So I'm always there In the real day trading subreddit and you can contact me there or on Twitter at real day trading. So those three places I try to answer everybody And as long as they show that, hey, they've read the material, they've put in some work. If you have questions and need help, i'm here. But those three places I'm very accessible And I'm also.
Speaker 3:I believe there is a real day trading discord that they have put together And I'm in that discord room. So I used to hate discord, but they put this discord together And it's actually much better than the chat function on Reddit. So I can put the link to that on my Twitter page. But I'm selling you nothing. I have nothing to sell. I don't have a course. I don't have. I'm not shilling anything. So if you just need to contact me, i'll just give you the ways on my Twitter page.
Speaker 2:Thank you for joining And hopefully I will see you all tomorrow. Thank you, guys, I appreciate it.
