Surprising Advice From Worlds No 1 Trading Psychologist Dr Steenbarger

TITLE: Surprising Advice From World’s #1 Trading Psychologist (Dr. Steenbarger) CHANNEL: SMB Capital DATE: 2026-04-08 ---TRANSCRIPT--- You are meant to do something great. I’ll give you an insight and this is something I talk about in the uh the book that we’ll be discussing. Your success as a trader, your future greatness as a trader will leverage something you have already been doing greatly in your life. Now think about this. There’s something in your life up to this point that you already have been doing greatly. What do you do greatly? How do you do it? Whatever those talents are, whatever those skills are, it could be in sports, it could be in business, it could be in relationships, whatever you have done greatly in your life to this point, that’s what you have to draw on to fuel the greatness in your trading. And yes, you know, you can learn about different trades and chart patterns and all that good stuff, but at the end of the day, how you trade has to be an expression of who you are. In trying to be like someone else, you can get away from being you. When I first started at SMB, as Mike was referring, I saw something great there. And as Mike points out, back then it was not nearly such a a large firm and didn’t have such a large following, but they had a vision for teamwork. They had a vision where each person could make everyone else better. And that was unique. I saw that that strength, that that uniqueness could fuel their success. And look, here we are. We have so many people teaming up as a tribute to that vision of SMB. So before I launch into the formal presentation, I want to issue you a challenge. and also make an offer. The challenge is you may have come here alone. You may have come here because you’re trading on your own and you’re looking for input. You’re looking for community. You’re looking for teamwork. You may have come here alone, but don’t leave here alone. Make a commitment that before you go home, you are going to connect with people here. You’re going to get their contact information. You’re going to follow up with each other. You’re going to share ideas. You’re going to review performance. You are going to create your own virtual team by linking with people here. So you become your own SMB. And my offer to Mike, Steve, and the rest at some point if there’s an interest in doing an online trading summit for all of us. I volunteer my involvement to be involved in an online summit coaching everybody. Thank you. Okay, let’s launch into the actual talk. I have to apologize. Uh what I’m holding here is water. I had actually requested vodka. So they they did not follow through on that request. So you’re going to have to listen to me stone cold sober, which uh is a frightening thought. Okay. So the topic is positive trading psychology. That’s the title of my new book. From personal strengths to trading strengths. So this is getting at that idea that your success at trading is going to leverage something that you’re already good at. Now this I believe is a gamecher. The idea of positive trading psychology is that we achieve success not by just getting rid of our negatives but by building our positives. When people want to reach out to me and as a a trading psychologist, a trading coach, what do they want to talk about? They want to talk about going on tilt and they want to talk about fear and greed. Okay. Yes, it is important to be able to master those. But we master those by being grounded in our training and being grounded in our strengths. Our talents, which are our inborn strengths, and our skills, our acquired strengths. One of the questions I sometimes ask because I teach at a medical school is consider the surgical students and residents. They’re learning surgery. They might be learning orthopedic surgery. They might be learning some other kind of surgery, but they are in the process of mastering the skills of surgical procedures. Now, I would argue that the riskreward of of doing surgery is greater than the riskreward of putting on a trade. Okay. Why in the let me guess in the near 40 years that I have taught at upstate medical university in Syracuse, New York, and worked directly with residents and medical students. Why has a surgical student and resident never gone on tilt? Can you imagine your surgeon like getting frustrated and going on tilt like I got to make another cut because I I I fear I’m missing out. What the hell It never happens. But but wait a minute. But surgery is higher riskreward than trading. So why does it never happen? This is very important and it’s very important to your collaboration with SMB because they are so grounded in training and the training is occurring not over a period of days and weeks but months and years. They are observing people doing things the right way. They’re getting feedback about doing things the right way and they’re doing it again and again and again and again with supervision until it becomes second nature. Many many many many of the problems we think about with respect to training psychology is simply be occur simply because we have not put in that training time. When you do it again and again and again, you see other people doing it again and again. It becomes part of you. It becomes second nature. And you don’t go on tilt. It becomes routine. And that’s what you want with your surgeon. If you’re lying on the table and your surgeon is going to be cutting, do you want them to have lots of positive emotion? Do you want them to have lots of negative emotion? You want them to be focused and that’s what positive psychology is all about. Being grounded in your strengths and not just combating the negatives. Okay. So how do we make changes in our life? One of the big problems that we encounter when we try to make changes is that you know we write in a journal you know we review some charts but there’s no emotion behind what we’re doing. In the research review I did with my colleagues at uh Sunni Upstate, we looked at what works in terms of change processes in terms of therapy. And it turns out that emotional arousal is the biggest catalyst to change. When we feel something, we’re more likely to internalize it. I’ve written about the uh young man I worked with who had patterns of negative thinking. Just was always blaming himself, telling himself how worthless he was. He would never be a success. And I tried typical cognitive therapy techniques. Nothing was working with him. So I finally hit on an idea. I said to him, “How about if I take the role of your negative thinking? I’m going to say to you what you have been saying to yourself.” He thought that was a little weird, but I had him get up and I got up from my seat and I start circling him and saying to him everything that he was saying to himself, “You’re no good. You’re never going to be a success. You’re such a failure.” Well, I’m doing this again and again and again, and what do you think is his reaction? He starts clenching his fists. He gets red in the face. I’m thinking, “Oh, no. This is not the place for a bar fight.” And finally, he just is ready to explode. And I say to him, “What do you have to say?” and he lunges out toward me with his fist and he says, “Fuck you.” So, as I have here, that that’s how FU therapy was born. But what I taught him was that he had to take his negative thinking and imagine that someone else was saying these things to him. that’s so and preferably someone he doesn’t like. You know, think of someone who you really don’t like and they’re saying these things to you. You’re never going to be successful as a trader. You should just give it up. And the emotional arousal, the part of you kicks in where you can say f you to the negative thinking. And soon that becomes a pattern. You become able to challenge your most negative qualities by arousing that anger. Some other ideas in positive psychology. We do training reviews hopefully at the end of the day, you know, definitely end of the week, but we review what we did and how we did it. And we write in journals because that can cement charts and patterns in our mind. That can cement lessons in our mind. So, writing things down in a journal, reviewing the journal. One of the uh well-known hedge fund managers I worked with journaled his trading. But the way he did it was he talked into a recorder. His trading journal was spoken out loud in a recorder. And what do you think he did the next morning? He he listened to his journal. He listened to his recording. And what did that do? That was him talking to him and him coaching him. It was a very effective way of of him learning from his experience. But what happens when we journal is that out of our frustration, those negative emotions, we tend to write down everything we did wrong. I missed this point. I should have been larger here. I, you know, should have, should have, should have. and you keep writing that and you keep rehearsing that, you should have, you should have, you should have. What psychological impact is that going to have over time? If I’m raising my child and I’m constantly saying, you should have done this, you should have done that, you didn’t do that right, you didn’t do that right, how are they going to grow up? Not with self-confidence. So, our trading journals have to actively reverse engineer our successes. You have to journal what you do well. Your best trades, they may not be perfect, but when you had a good idea that worked out, when you sized it properly, when you took profits properly, how did you do that? What was going through your head? What kind of planning did you do? Again, again, again, you journal your best trades, your best trades, your best trades, and you’re telling yourself, “This is how I succeed. This is how I succeed.” You are learning not just from some guru, not just from some mentor. You are learning from yourself as your own mentor. Setting visions, not just goals. You have a goal that I want to make a certain amount of money in trading. I have a goal that I want to be profitable on a certain percentage of my trades. That’s great. It’s important to have goals, but what’s your vision? Goals will channel someone. They will direct them in terms of what they need to work on. And that’s great. But the vision is what inspires us. What in your trading is truly inspiring? The hedge fund managers I work with, many of them dedicate a percentage of their profits to a cause that they deeply believe in. and they’re inspired to trade well because these prophets are going to a good cause. It’s for a higher purpose. They’re disciplined because they’re doing something ultimately that they believe in. There are all different visions that we may have for our future, for our family, etc., etc. But you want to think through that big picture. Is your trading moving you just a bit closer to your own vision? And finally, repetition 90 and 90. What what the research in psychology tells us is that emotion will catalyze change. We can create change through emotional experience like my example of the FU therapy. But what cementss change, what makes change a lasting part of us is repetition. That’s what prevents what psychologists call relapse. When someone is really committed to ending their alcohol abuse, they go to AA and what is often quote unquote prescribed for them. 90 meetings in 90 days. Every single day you show up to a meeting. Every day you are talking about your drinking, you’re talking about your issues, you are connecting with people, you’re connecting with a higher power to be inspired to end your drinking. And after 90 meetings in 90 days, the rehab process becomes part of you. Through repetition, we internalize change. So, let’s say you’re working on changing just one aspect of your trading. Maybe it’s your sizing. Maybe it’s how you get out of trades. You know, the fund managers I work with, they often get out in stages. Take a third off here, a third off here, a third off here if they’re long. But, however you decide to change, whatever change you decide to make, you make a commitment. I’m going to do it for 90 days again, again, again, again. It’s in my journal every single day, 90 straight days. And lo and behold, the change becomes part of you. It’s not something you have to struggle with. It’s not something you have to quote unquote work on. It becomes a natural part of your trading process. Now, here are a number of adjectives that represent the via values and action categories of strengths. You know, there’s a DSM system for diagnosing emotional disorders like anxiety, depression, psychosis, and so forth. This is a diagnosis scheme, a diagnostic scheme for our strengths. So we have six big categories. Wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. And these are some of the qualities that go into those six categories. So the question becomes all right so we have you know one two three we have eight yeah let’s say we have 18 adjectives what are your top four that best describe you and then what are the next four that describe you. So you’re so you’re doing your top eight your top four that best describe you. Those are your signature strengths as they call them in the research. And then your next four which are sometimes called latent strengths. When I gave this test to a number of hedge fund managers at a well-known hedge fund, what do you think the number one strength came out as for the most successful traders? Courage was important. Yes. The ability to take risk, you know, shows up in some of the courage categories. Curiosity. Intellectual curiosity. The really, really good traders loved finding opportunity. They were curious. They would look at markets. They would look at patterns. They look short-term. They look long-term. But they loved discovery. They loved the process of creative learning. They weren’t just copying someone else. or someone’s idea. Also very high was the quality of temperance or self-control, self-regulation. The really good managers were very very curious but they were very level in their taking of risk, planning of risk, waiting for opportunities. So they had a high degree of self-control. There’s one category that’s not up here on the screen that in a subsequent study turned out to be very very important in identifying the most successful traders. And that quality and you can look uh Google it is entrepreneurialism. The really great traders are entrepreneurs. You’re building your own business and you’re excited about building your business. You have a vision for your business. And yes, you have your creativity and your love of learning, your curiosity that helps you build that business. Yes, you have that temperance, that self-control that helps you build upon it. But at the end of the day, it’s back to that idea of vision. you have the sense that you’re building something meaningful. And the people who combined those qualities, who combined those strengths, ended up being the most successful money managers. So, it wasn’t about, oh, they don’t go on tilt or they don’t trade out of fear and greed. It’s that their trading was an expression of their personality strengths. Who you are, what your personality strengths are will define how you will be successful in markets. Now, there’s some interesting research on our trading strengths. One of those is that if we overutilize a strength, it can become a weakness. It can become a vulnerability. So for example, I might be very independentminded and come up with my own ideas. But if I over rely upon that, I might not listen well to other people and I might not listen well to the market itself. Often growth occurs through our latent strengths, not those top four, but the next group of strengths by building upon those. So if one of my strengths is that I’m independent in my thinking, I might rely on a latent strength to build my capacity for relationships, to build teamwork so that I’m better at listening to people and sharing with people. We grow often by balancing our strengths, not just by doing more and more and more of what we’re already good at. What made SMB unique from the very beginning was the framework of teamwork. You notice that in medical school, the training of physicians, it’s always done in teams. Everyone well actually the saying is each one teach one that’s the motto of the medical school everyone learns everyone teaches everyone shares what they do. So every day is learning learning learning learning. In teamwork different people have different strengths and you can learn from what they’re good at. They have different styles of trading. You can learn from what they’re doing well. The biggest challenge to being an independent trader is isolation, not having that teamwork. And that’s why I’m challenging you to connect with people here. form your own virtual teams so that each one can teach one. And finally, the idea of talents and strengths. Learn from your greatest achievements. The shortest journal format that I recommend is just review. What one thing did I do today that I did really well? It might have been a negative P&L day, but what one thing did I do well? And my goal, how am I going to make sure I do that tomorrow and maybe even build upon it tomorrow? And then number two, what one thing did I not do well today that I need to correct? And what’s my goal for tomorrow? How am I going to make that correction? One thing that I did well that I’m going to build upon, one thing I didn’t do well that I’m going to correct day after day after day after day. Think of the compounding learning that goes on. Now imagine like at the places where I work, you’re in a team of six people and every single person within that team of six people is marking what did I do well today? How am I going to build upon it? What did I not do well today? How am I going to correct it? And they’re talking out loud with each other. So you’re hearing what they did well. You’re hearing what they’re working on. So now the learning is not only compounding day after day it’s compounding six times every single day you are learning from them they are learning from you each one teach one that is the value of teamwork any performance activity and trading is a performance activity any tra performance activity think of being a professional musician think of being a professional athlete Who learns in isolation by themselves? I want to be a worldclass clarinet player. Okay, I’ll buy a clarinet and start practicing at home. What the f? Or I’m going to be a world-class basketball player, so I put up a hoop in my backyard and I’ll practice, practice, practice, and pretty soon the NBA will be calling me. Yeah, good luck. It never happens. You cannot learn worldclass performance with worldclass isolation. And so teamwork allows you to learn from your greatest achievements, your own, but also the greatest achievements of others. Just real quickly take a look at your life outside of trading. Trading is not always going to be successful. It’s not always going to be fun. Perma Plus represents the positive qualities of life that give us energy and help us function at our best. Martin Seligman did this research. Positive emotional experience, doing things that are fun, engagement with others, relationships, engagement in meaningful activities, accomplishments, things that we feel good about that we’re doing. And the plus is our physical well-being and our health. We’re doing things that give us energy. Forget about trading. Take a look at the rest of your life. How much positive emotion are you experiencing? How much engagement in meaningful things are you engaging in? What’s the quality of your relationships, the quality of your sleep, the quality of your physical well-being, your exercise? Many many many people when they start trading they’re so focused on trading and looking at markets and reviewing markets. It’s all good but they’re neglecting these perma categories. And so when trading doesn’t go well which happens to all of us what do they have to draw upon? They don’t have the energy from the other parts of their life. You need your life overall to be giving you the energy, the enthusiasm to to energize you to to drive you because when we are in a state of well-being, as it’s called, we actually work more productively. And according to the research of Barbara Frederickson, we see more of the world. We actually perceive more opportunity when we are in a positive mindset. So by working on the rest of our lives, we are actually energizing our generation of ideas and we energize our trading. Look at those cats. Those are three of my four cats. The one on the left is a rare cat from Thailand called a cow mani. The one in the middle is a chocolate point Siamese. And the other one’s a black tabby who we rescued. The question is, how diversified is your life? These little guys not only sleep together, they end up sleeping in our bed and they end up being a a part of our lives. They end up being companions and that gives a source of joy that gives a source of meaning and commitment separate from work, separate from trading. So you look at your calendar. How are you spending your time? How diversified is your life? What are you doing in terms of relationships, in terms of physical activity, in terms of fun activities? One of the uh money managers I work with had a saying, if it’s not in your calendar, it’s not part of your process. He would ask a trader about their trading process. Well, you know, in the morning I talk to people and I research ideas and then in the afternoon, show me your calendar. Of course, none of it’s in there. If it’s not in your calendar, you are not making it a commitment with your time. You want your calendar to diversify your life and to be a guide in giving your life balance. So let’s sum up trading process as an expression of our strengths. what we do well, what we’re good at. Perma trading. Our states determine what we process. What state of mind are we in when we’re trading and making decisions? The importance of cognitive strengths, creativity, focus, intuition, multitasking. the importance of interpersonal strengths, teamwork, learning from others, learning with others, and the importance of positive trading reviews, reviewing what you do at your best. Again, the idea here is that sometimes, not always, not often enough, sometimes we do things greatly. And we want to study ourselves when we make great decisions, when we take great actions. We want to study what makes us successful. When we trade the right way in how we generate ideas, translate ideas into trades, when we size positions correctly, when we update our riskreward and we’re flexible in our trading, we take some off, we move our stops, when we diversify our trading so that we’re balanced in our risk- takingaking. Our trading contributes to our psychology. Everyone thinks with trading psychology that our psychology shapes our trading, good trading creates good psychology. When we trade the right way, we’re focused. We’re in control. We’re doing things for the right reason. That builds our confidence. We want to trade in a way that builds us up. And a concluding quote. When I was in college, it’s my sophomore year. I ended up working with a group connected with the novelist philosopher Rand. It was a great experience. And Einrance’s quote was to love money and to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you. To make money is an expression of the best power within you. And it’s your pass key to trade your efforts for the efforts of others. That’s what teamwork is all about. right here. We have a community in this room. By connecting with each other, you can connect with the efforts of the best of all of you. Each person can make everyone else better. And if there is a desire to hold an online trading summit going forward, I would be honored to participate and help everyone learn from the strengths of everyone else. Thank you very much. You spoke about diversification in your life and that’s something that I’m kind of trying to figure out right now. I’m trying to balance how serious um it do you find it helpful for individuals to have other serious pursuits at the same time that they’re um developing as a trader as kind of a way to mentally disconnect and reset um and and kind of provide a step back from being so close to trading every day? or do you find that people do best by focusing really only on one serious thing um at a time? It’s a great question. I have often said that the path to success in trading is having something or some things in your life that are more important to you than P&L. If trading is everything and P&L is everything, then you are going to ride the ups and downs of markets and you won’t be in control of your own emotions. If I have things in my life more important than P&L, whether it be the cats, whether it be family, whether it be my interest in teaching, my interest in writing. So now all of a sudden I’m diversified just like a good money manager. I have risk in lots of different places. And if trading doesn’t go well, yeah, I mean that’s a problem. I have to learn from it. But it doesn’t throw me. I take the trading seriously. I take the risk-taking seriously, but I’m able to do it in a balanced way because I have balance in life. So, I would argue for that diversification. Dr. Steve Barger, question while you’re here. So Shark is going to be in the next Market Wizards book and you have worked with him since the very beginning. I’m super curious and I think the audience would be super curious. You’ve worked with some of the best traders in the world. Did you notice something about Shark as he was coming up the curve or having success that uh would be a lesson for those of us in this room? No, I didn’t. You know, and I tried arguing with Jack Schwagger and he still put him in the book. What can I tell you? No, just kidding. Obviously, you know, um I’ll tell you, Mike, the one thing I first noticed about Shark, and it it’s in the area of talents. He had many open screens and was looking at many things and processing many things at one time. A couple of the best SMB traders I’ve worked with and and Mike, you tell me if I’m wrong here, were were in a previous life, they were gamers. And they learned to look at many things quickly and respond quickly. They built that set of skills. They had that talent and they built that set of skills. Shark was looking at more things. Even when he was in his early stage of development, he was looking at more things than I could process because he was so accustomed to doing that in the gaming. And I’m convinced that that was one of the foundations of his success. That was very helpful. I’ve had some pretty traumatic losses, whether over the course of a morning or two days, and I worry that I’ll never get over that, that there’s never going to be enough positive reinforcement, that that’s always lurking in the background creating fear and anxiety. How can a person process that and and move on from that to get back to a clean slate? Yeah. Uh, you know, I I mentioned the 90 and 90 and AA. Sometimes to make changes, you need that emotional arousal of hitting bottom. And you go through a loss that is so great, that’s so painful that you end up saying to yourself, I can’t do this again. I have to change. Not I want to change. I have to change. And it’s hitting that bottom and having that conviction. And you may start out small and that would be good. And you now have the motivation to set up your rules and do things the right way. If you read the market wizards uh entry in the first book um Paul Tudtor Jones, he lost when he was young, he lost three quarters of his money and totally hit bottom and became a totally different trader as a result. His whole focus became risk management, opportunity management too. That’s how we get past it. My question is, if you’re having a level of genesis of identity and your level of belief with money, how do you overcome that factor? Now, could you uh word that? I was having trouble hearing what you said. your your level of your limited belief with money. You’re hit you’ve hit a pivot point where you’re making money, but you’ve hit a level where you want and desire to make more money, but you’ve hit a threshold where you can’t seem to go to a stratospheric level. How would you increase a limited belief with the money that you’re making and you’re seeing others make more money? How would you increase that in your psychosis? What would you do to increase the level of expanding opportunity and desire? What would you do fundamentally to make that happen? Yeah, it’s a good question. Um, with the people I work with, they uh to expand their earnings, they expand their trading. They double down and find new and different opportunities that they can participate in. In other words, they get bigger in their profitability. They get bigger by getting broader, learning new setups, learning new opportunities. and dedicating money to different things that all contribute to their growth. It’s interesting that the people I work with, they think about their profitability not in dollar terms, but in percentage terms. So, I’m trying to make X percent per month, let’s say. But they grow their account. They grow their risk-taking. So x percent this month is very different in dollar terms than the same percent a year from now. And that helps us be more level in thinking about risk-taking. But the idea of I should be making more and making more and doing more and doing more, you can do that by finding more and more opportunities and profiting from those. Uh you mentioned you know uh our success will leverage something we are already good at uh something that we have done past in our past lives. Is there a framework like okay maybe I know what I’m good at but how do I get to applying that for trading? Yes. So you uh yeah it’s a good question. You want to reverse engineer your success. So what was I good at before I was trading? I was a psychologist. I would meet with people and I was good as a psychologist. Well, why was I good as a psychologist? Part of it was that I was good at listening to people, hearing what they had to say. I could feel what they were going through. And that helped guide me to direct them to make improvements in their lives. But my real talent and my real skill was in being an empathic listener. Well, sure enough, I get to trading. And what am I good at? When I trade well, I sit there and I sit there and I sit there and I listen and I listen and I listen to the market and I feel what different participants are doing in the market and at some point it all makes sense and then I have an idea for a trade. The same skills and talents that helped me as a psychologist help me in my trading. And when I get away from those, when I get some big idea in my head and I think AR’s going to do this and this and I put on risk prematurely and I’m not feeling anything, I’m in my ego. That’s when I do my worst trading. When you’re at that rock bottom and you’re journaling and you’re thinking of one thing that you’re doing really well on today, one thing you’re doing uh not so well on today, how do you not let the one thing that you’re doing not so well on like kind of drown out what you’re doing good at so you can continue the growth from rock bottom versus kind of like staying on rock bottom? Yeah, you you may have done something really really bad uh in today’s trading and uh you know what you did well might not be as dramatic. But that’s all the more reason to focus on what you did do well even in managing the losses from what you didn’t do well. But also in terms of the research that you did, the ideas that you generated, you want to identify during the day what did you do that followed your process, followed your rules. Maybe you lost a good amount of money, but you sized the position reasonably. Well, how did you do that? What led you to size it this way? And how can you make sure that you repeat that so you’re sized well in the future? It’s important and this gets back to something we talked about yesterday in one of the meetings. It’s important to get to the point where everything is information. Everything is there to teach you. You make money, there’s something to be learned from that. you lose money. There’s something to be learned from that. Everything is learning. That’s why we have to keep our losses contained because we are going to go through a learning curve and we are going to make mistakes and we are going to lose. But when we do that, everything is information. Everything is there to teach us. We can embrace our losses and say, “This is here to teach me and the things I did well. This is here to teach me. I’m going to get better and better and better and better and then all of a sudden losing is not such a negative. Losing is not such a threat. In my industry, we find that personality assessments are very helpful. Um, some specific stuff we do is ask our agents, you know, who am I? Who do I like to work with? What type of client do I like to work with? So applying that to this, have you thought about developing some type of psych valuation or personality assessment that tells a person that you know you’d be better off going into this direction, stocks, you know, options or, you know, how to evaluate what to go after? Yeah, that’s a really good question. And I would say that there are personality differences between people who are very talented, very good short-term traders and people who are better longer term traders and investors. And the talents that are involved in short-term trading involve pattern recognition, rapid thinking, rapid processing like we were talking about with Shark. Once you get to the people at hedge funds where they’re putting on positions for weeks and months and they’re looking at many different ideas as part of a portfolio, then analysis becomes more important and that creative idea generation that becomes more important. And so there are personality tests that can get at those things and give you some idea if you would be more successful scalping or if you’d be more successful as an active investor, let’s say. So Dr. Sebar is the very best trading psychologist in the world. So all of you who have asked questions, we will be sending you a very large bill for the Oh, I now I had I had already negotiated that the bill was going to SMB. Sorry, Mike. Malcolm Little from Sydney. The question I have relates to specialization and generalization. And you were saying earlier that generalizing uh you expand on your strengths. Yeah. And move get broader. I had the opposite experience. I wonder if you can help me and interpret it, but early on I had a 1030 Wednesday trade that just worked. I traded the energy industry association data release and it works brilliantly when oil is not in play but when oil’s in play it’s a disaster and I but the second thing that that to advance that thinking I specialized in this trade and then when I thought let’s expand let’s add another play I went backwards and then eventually I would add a second play and what I’m ultimately getting at is there are sites you everyone’s the guy everyone will have heard this there’s the perfect apple trade there are people who just trade the cues that’s all they do can you comment on specializing verse generalizing yes yes yes um it is an important question and you’re absolutely right there are people who are more specialized than others even within the specialized people, there may be different ways that they trade the cues or different patterns that they look for in the cues. Uh, some shorter term, some longer term, that type of thing. Um, but they specialize they even when they’re specialized, they’re expanding their specialization. I’ll give you an example from my own trading. So, uh, as I’ve written before, one of the indicators that I use, uh, quite regularly, like Linda Rashki, is the NYSE tick, TICK. It’s the number of stocks at any moment in time trading on an uptick versus a down tick. And so, it’s updated many times a minute. And I can see when lots of stocks are trading on up ticks, which means that there’s broad buying. Lots of stocks are trading on down ticks, there’s broad selling, the tick isn’t moving very much, so there’s very balanced activity. And I’ve learned to trade patterns in the NYSC tick. So when we are selling and selling and selling and down ticking down ticking down ticking and price is holding up, I know that the sellers can’t push the market lower and that we’re going to get a rally when they cover. And that becomes a very specialized pattern that I trade. But there’s not only an NYSE tick, there’s a tick measure for the S&P 500. There’s a tick measure for the Nasdaq. There’s a tick measure for the Russell 2000. So now I can take that same skill and apply it to multiple markets. So I can broaden out even when I’m specialized. That’s the idea. Uh my question is regarding journaling. So you said uh we should do at least one thing which we did good in the day or trade or one thing which uh we can improve on. But my challenge is here when I had this I had a list of things I want to write down in the things I have not done well and I had really hard time putting the things and thinking about what I did good and when I think you know uh leaving the things where I haven’t done good I kind of feel you know I am not being honest with myself uh how to overcome this you know uh extra focus on improving yourself you have not done good uh and you know think about more in strength orienting things. Yes. So the idea is to prioritize there might be 10 different things you didn’t do well but if you are focusing or or paying attention to 10 different things you’re never going to work on any one thing intensively. So the idea is to prioritize. And the idea of one thing you did well, it’s to cement your best practices. And there may be more things that you didn’t do well than you did well. That makes it even more important to cement what you did do well. Think about raising a child. Do any of you have children? I have five of them. five children, four cats, seven grandkids, raising a child, if I just focus on what they do wrong. When they’re young, they do more things wrong than right. Many times if I keep repeating to them what they did wrong and I don’t build on what they do right, I’m actually doing them harm. They’ll never develop into a self-confident human being. So when they do something right, even when it’s a relatively small thing, I want to show appreciation for that. I want to support that. I want to build upon that. what you just did for your brother, that was really good. Can we do that at the dinner table? Just little things, but it’s showing appreciation. It’s showing support. And that’s what over time builds confidence. And that’s why it’s so important, especially when we’re not doing well, to be able to focus on those things that we do succeed at. Thank you, Dr. Steam Barker. So, thank you. One one last comment. The uh questioner did mention the blog traderfeed. It’s t r a d rer feed d traderfeed.blogspot.com. And just about every day I’m putting out ideas and sharing things I’m learning from working with traders and um and then responding to people’s comments uh particularly on X. Um so I invite you to check out the blog and see if there might be some good things there for you and happy to interact in that forum forum as well. But thank you Mike, thank you SMB and thank all of you for the opportunity to share some ideas.