We’ve all been there.

Think about the time you first got interested in trading. It was exciting thinking about all the potential money we could make.

But then we were quickly overwhelmed with the reality of all the things we didn’t know. Former aspiring traders never made it past this moment. The mountain they had to climb just looked too daunting.

When Jason Krutzky left the road after spending years touring with a rock band through North America and Europe, he decided he wanted to try his hand at full-time trading. “I was just throwing darts and hoping.”

He found inspiration and education on the internet, particularly through pumper discord chat rooms, and predictably he made all the mistakes that bedevil every new trader. It is hard enough learning how to trade, but also trying to wade through the cacophony of voices on the social interwebs to find those he could trust was equally time-consuming.

Sure, he was passionate about wanting to learn. But he also says he was delusional. I think we can all relate to that.

What Jason continues to learn about trading is, as he puts it, “trading is the practice of non-emotion.” This was a hard 180-degree turn for someone who spent his life as a musician pouring his heart and soul into finding and channeling his creative spirit. “Non-emotion” was a foreign concept to him.

But learning to gauge himself and put in hours and hours of screentime is how he finds his edge. “You have to be in it. You have to be living it, breathing it.” If you can’t put in the screen time, you’ll be a failure in no time.

An early adulthood spent on the road as a struggling, traveling musician prepared him to learn a skill such as trading.  How? He learned the confidence to ask for help.

Jason relates some stories of hanging around music clubs in Atlanta, meeting successful musicians, and having the confidence to go up, introduce himself, put a tape in their hands, and ask to be given a listen. When he dipped his toes in the trading world, he utilized this same skill to reach out to other experienced traders, forge relationships and friendships, and find lessons and mentorship this way.

We can all learn to be better at this. Jason shows us how it’s done.

Please enjoy this conversation with a Trader who’s still cutting his teeth in this business. I promise there are nuggets in here that we can all both relate to and learn from:

The audio version of this podcast can also be found on Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you stream your favorite podcasts!

Sean McLaughlin
Chief Options Strategist
All Star Charts, Technical Analysis Research

If there’s one thing Brian Lund learned about himself over the past 30 years in the markets, he must write. Without a doubt, without even thinking about it, he knows that to express himself and to complete his thoughts into productive trading, he needs to sit down and start writing.

And this makes sense. We hear this a lot from our smart friends.

Barry Ritholtz once wrote: “I write to find out what I’m thinking.”

In this conversation with Brian, we get into the importance of sleep hygiene and how it’s so important for us to be at our best. Not just in trading, but in living.

We dig into challenges Brian has overcome along the way, including an ADHD diagnosis, and morphing from an always-on entrepreneur who constants has problems to solve to a trader who must sit on his hands and wait for things to happen.

We also cover his hacks like therapy, meditation, and a CPAP machine to help him maintain his sharpness.

Like all of us, Brian has suffered from the market honing in on his biggest weaknesses. He’s got the battle scars to prove it. But learning from these mistakes and fighting the urge to revenge trade have been evolutions that took time. Brian discusses how many of the trading problems we experience are simply contrived. They aren’t real. We make them up in our heads. The market doesn’t care that we lost money in this stock the last time we traded it, and it doesn’t owe us any money on our next trade.

Brian is a former night owl who now has a hot take on spousal sleeping arrangements. You don’t want to miss this!

We hope you enjoy me and Steve Strazza’s wide-ranging chat with our friend Brian Lund. [Read more…]

In today’s Options Jam Session, I discussed the mixed signals that the broader indexes, semiconductors, and $VIX are sending.

If nothing else, the current market environment is offering up some small warning signals that perhaps we’re due for some “digestion.”

Regardless, the practice of raising stops following strength in our trades is a best practice I’ve engaged in more and more lately. And in environments like this, it could be the difference between being a net winner versus a net loser.

It’s a little tweak, but the importance of it cannot be overstated. I make a practice of reviewing and updating stops at least once per week in my swing trade portfolio. This subtle practice has definitely helped improve my results in 2024.

I discuss all this and more in today’s video. Enjoy!

Trade ’em Well,

Sean McLaughlin
Chief Options Strategist
All Star Charts, Technical Analysis Research

Stop me if you’ve heard this already: We had a good time in beautiful Sonoma, California last week at our Portfolio Accelerator event.

But what you might have yet to hear is this: We have incredibly smart, driven, and open-minded clients and friends. And this includes you.

As wonderful as it always is for me to be able to get together in person with my All Star Charts team – which is normally spread out across the globe – it is even better to be able to interact with clients who use our research and execute on our ideas every day.

Sure, it’s great when our clients are complimentary of our efforts. Who doesn’t love a pat on the back? But it is even more rewarding when they get an opportunity to ask us questions about WHY we are thinking or doing the things we’re thinking or doing.

Our clients were in the room with us as our analyst team fleshed out trading ideas. But they didn’t just listen – they were part of the brainstorm. They had input. And they had great ideas of their own – many even better than ours!

When we get a bit of back and forth with our clients, it challenges my assumptions. It reveals potential blind spots. And when I field these questions, the act of explaining and educating my processes is also incredibly beneficial to me as well. It opens my mind to ways I can do or explain something better.

It has often been said that you don’t fully understand something until you can clearly communicate it to someone else.

For three days in Sonoma in both formal and informal settings, I got to interact with some of you as well as some of our special guests in a way that left me better educated, open to new ideas, rejuvenated both mentally and spiritually, and motivated to tackle the back half of 2024.

I can’t put a price on that. We’re all richer for having been there.

And for those of you who are here, reading this newsletter, my commitment to you is to make us all richer for being here!

From me and my team: Let’s go!

Trade ’em Well,

Sean McLaughlin
Chief Options Strategist
All Star Charts, Technical Analysis Research

If there is one thing that stands out from any conversation with Brian Shannon about the trading process, it is this:

For discretionary traders, there are no rules. Instead, there are “guidelines.”

And because Brian is human, he occasionally breaks his guidelines and suffers the same consequences as anyone else. Everyone gets what they deserve. Even a trader of 30+ years like Brian Shannon.

If a trader buys the dip or sells the rip without a plan to control her risk then she, too, will get what she deserves. Eventually. The market is always on the hunt for our weaknesses.

This is one of the things I love about my friend Brian. He doesn’t tolerate nonsense. He tells it like it is. Tough love. It’s what a trader needs.

And he’s adamant about tuning out the noise and focusing on his strengths. For instance, he no longer pays any attention to financial TV. “It makes me emotional. TV is just theatrics. If it doesn’t help me make money, I completely ignore it.” He knows what he’s good at, says no to everything else, and makes the best use of his time by focusing his energies on profitable pursuits.

Shouldn’t we all live and trade like that? [Read more…]

Nobody is having more fun than Kenny Glick.

He’s found the perfect outlet for combining his myriad passions of risk-taking, education, and entertainment to the benefit of anyone who gets caught in his orbit.

Kenny’s unorthodox path to Wall Street is proof.

In the early 1990s, Kenny was plying his craft as a fledgling standup comedian when he was spotted by a stockbroker who was impressed with his ability to “sling bullshit” onstage. The stockbroker offered him a job on the spot at his firm.

Turns out, the “firm” was a stereotypical Boiler Room that soured Kenny’s opinions of the interworking of investing, which was the early drive to turn him into a self-proclaimed “permabear.”

When one of the senior brokers at the firm told Kenny his nickname was “Mushroom” because he’s kept in the dark and fed shit, he realized he needed to find something better to do.

That something better came while attending a Pearl Jam concert where he met another gentleman who introduced Kenny to the world of day trading NASDAQ stocks. His life would never be the same again.

In our chat, we get into the painful rollercoaster from then until now and why Kenny firmly believes “the market has taught me EVERYthing.”

Please enjoy mine and Steve Strazza’s wide-ranging chat with The Warlock, The Mensch of Mentions, The Edutainer, our friend and soon-to-be yours, Kenny Glick:

The audio version of this podcast can also be found on Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you stream your favorite podcasts!

Trade ’em Well,

Sean McLaughlin
Chief Options Strategist
All Star Charts, Technical Analysis Research