The Truth About Preparing to Trade

prep-a-ra-tion (noun) The action or process of making ready for use or consideration. Something done to get ready for an event or undertaking.

Like so many other things in life, the level of attention paid to trading preparation is not what it should be. Most people are lazy, looking for short cuts, or they simply don’t understand or appreciate what it takes to compete, or they simply don’t care.

That’s pretty cynical. Most people do care, they just don’t know how to prepare. And worse yet, the idea of preparing properly gives people anxiety.

Experts will tell you it’s both physical and mental, but mostly mental. I can definitely agree with that, but that doesn’t help me…how do I concentrate on the mental, is there a process I need to learn, do I need to balance the mental with physical exercise and proper diet? Should I take supplements, or enhancement? I heard Kratom helps you focus, then I read that it can kill you.

Here’s what I think, what I’ve learned from my mentor. His name is Greg. Greg has made nearly $100 million in his trading career. We met online and became friends, even though we had 6,000 miles between us, he lives in Hawaii, I’m near Boston. But we hit it off, he liked some stuff I wrote about on the web, that sparked a conversation, which led to talking with him over Skype nearly every day for the next 6 years.

He became my mentor in all things trading, futures, options and automation. I even started a small hedge fund using his ideas…it worked great until super low volatility spread through the market in the aftermath of the crash in 2009.

He agreed to mentor me if I would help him develop automated systems that encapsulated his ideas with treasury spreads.

He wasn’t too patient with me, because I knew too much, which in Greg’s eye’s meant I had a lot of bad ideas and habits that needed to be exorcised before we could move forward. It took me 3 years to unlearn all the crap I had learned through traditional means. Greg set me on a new path that focused on developing new habits and a new mind set, and more importantly a way to constantly reevaluate where I was…a kind of continuous improvement process.

Once I reached a baseline, in other words I wiped my brain and started fresh, Greg taught me the secret to becoming a consistently profitable trader. And that’s what I’m going to teach you in this GTTU Master Course. I’m going to prepare you for war, to slay the markets with confidence, to be prepared for anything, and if you’re not, to be able to adapt quickly.

This secret starts with a very simple process, applied to a few fundamental areas, then it gets repeated to other areas, and then the scope widens…and we continue down this path for a long time, in fact there is no end to the path, our goal is to stay on the path, the right path, and keep on improving, getting better, seeing more clearly, being present, shedding attachments, until one day, maybe not a specific day, but some period where you realize that you can consistently turn a profit, that your now ready to scale and grow.

So, what does it mean to be prepared as a trader? It means you are on a quest to shed bad habits and replace them with good habits. Your number one goal is to eventually achieve consistent profitability. In the beginning, it’s more like getting to the point where you no longer lose money.

And during that time, the beginning months and years on this path, you’ll trade smaller than you ever believed possible, because you’re not yet worthy of trading big. You don’t have the skill, the knowledge, the emotional intelligence. All of these things are necessary so that you can execute your plans, your playbook, with confidence.

Before we get into the heavy lifting, which will be in The Mind section of the course, you can start by developing some good habits, and commit to tracking them. You’ll need to stick to your commitment of these habits, so recruit someone that can help you be accountable for sticking to it. Make it someone that you respect, someone that if you fail to commit to the habits, would take it as a personal insult, that you would entrust them and you betrayed that trust, they would see it as an egregious thing, and wouldn’t hesitate shaming you.

Attached is an excel spreadsheet. It’s a daily checklist of habits you must do to prepare for the trading day. You must check each item once you have addressed it, rate it if you must, then share the sheet with your helper so they can confirm and sign off.