Jared Tendler's Blog, page 8
June 28, 2021
NEW! Leverage Your Intuition Free 31 Page eBook
I’m excited to announce the release of Leverage Your Intuition, a 31 page free eBook!
Intuition is a critical tool for traders. It allows you to cut through noise and self-doubt. But in order to leverage your intuition, you need to know when your intuition, or gut, is more likely to be right, or wrong. Trading with that knowledge is powerful and lucrative. It allows you to capitalize on opportunities other traders can’t see, or get out of moves that typically lead to bigger losses.
One of the challenges I faced while writing The Mental Game of Trading was accepting that I couldn’t fit everything into one book. While I couldn’t be happier with how the book turned out, intuition was a topic that I ultimately had to cut, but I didn’t want the material to end up on the cutting room floor.
With that in mind I wrote Leverage Your Intuition, as a companion piece to The Mental Game of Trading that I’m releasing it as a free eBook. The goal was to make intuition within trading more recognizable, so you can cultivate it and use it effectively.
In this free resource you’ll learn:
Spot real intuition vs. emotions just masquerading as intuitionThe origin of intuition within the mindStrategies and advice on how you can produce it more often and less spontaneouslyReady to leverage your intuition to bolster both your PnL and your confidence?
Click to Download your Copy Today
The post NEW! Leverage Your Intuition Free 31 Page eBook appeared first on Jared Tendler.
NEW! Leverage Your Intuition Free 31 Page eBook
I’m excited to announce the release of Leverage Your Intuition, a 31 page free eBook!
Intuition is a critical tool for traders. It allows you to cut through noise and self-doubt. But in order to leverage your intuition, you need to know when your intuition, or gut, is more likely to be right, or wrong. Trading with that knowledge is powerful and lucrative. It allows you to capitalize on opportunities other traders can’t see, or get out of moves that typically lead to bigger losses.
One of the challenges I faced while writing The Mental Game of Trading was accepting that I couldn’t fit everything into one book. While I couldn’t be happier with how the book turned out, intuition was a topic that I ultimately had to cut, but I didn’t want the material to end up on the cutting room floor.
With that in mind I wrote Leverage Your Intuition, as a companion piece to The Mental Game of Trading that I’m releasing it as a free eBook. The goal was to make intuition within trading more recognizable, so you can cultivate it and use it effectively.
In this free resource you’ll learn:
Spot real intuition vs. emotions just masquerading as intuitionThe origin of intuition within the mindStrategies and advice on how you can produce it more often and less spontaneouslyReady to leverage your intuition to bolster both your PnL and your confidence?
The post NEW! Leverage Your Intuition Free 31 Page eBook appeared first on Jared Tendler.
June 1, 2021
Looking for the Escape Hatch with Trading
Some of you hate your current jobs or financial circumstances, and see trading as an escape hatch to get out.
I am all for setting a big goal like trading full time and making a lot of money. I want your ambition to take you as far as it can and one of the great things about trading is that it provides opportunity to anyone with the dream and the willingness.
But a problem that I’ve seen with some of my clients, and was recently brought up on my first edition of Office Hours, is that looking at trading as an escape hatch actually adds a lot of pressure to trading, compromises your execution and ultimately damages your chances of success.
That is a hard pill to swallow. Here you are doing everything you can to change your life for the better and the mentality you have about that change is making it harder to achieve while the self-inflicted mistakes only add to the pressure.
It’s hard to see how you can turn things around, but sometimes a small change in perspective can make a big difference.
The Great Escape Hatch
A big part of what adds to the pressure is the sense of urgency. You hate your job, the fact that you have to answer to someone else, and that you can’t trade full-time yet. All the negativity that you have towards your current situation drives you towards an exit as fast as possible. But the intensity of those emotions cause breakdowns in decision-making and execution.
You size too big looking for a home run to give you a windfall of cash to buy your exit. You hold onto losers because realizing a loss is a step backwards, and you can’t allow that to happen. Worse, you know better, but you can’t stop yourself. The urgency is too intense. You have to get out now!
Can you relate to that feeling?
Part of the bigger problem here is a false perception that if you had enough money and capital to be free of the other job, you would suddenly be able to trade your account perfectly. You might think money is the answer to becoming a successful trader, but that’s mythology.
It’s not what happens.
Money can’t buy skills or competency. Skill begets skill and skill begets execution.
You’re looking for trading to be like winning the lottery. Of course, that’s not an entirely fair comparison, but to some degree, when you make money without skill you’re at greater risk of being like 80% of lottery winners who lose what they won.
Why?
Because you lack the requisite skills to understand how to manage an account of that size – both technically/strategically and mentally.
Let’s imagine that in one magnificent trade you made enough money to quit your job and trade full-time. Just like that, you’re where you want to be.
What comes next? Dreams or fantasies aside, since you basically got lucky – you didn’t build an account through a sustained period of trial and error, systematically developing your skills and knowledge, and honing a mentality and degree of emotional stability – you’re at greater risk of losing it.
These are the clients that come to me after they’ve crashed. The poker player who won a big tournament for a million dollars and then 9 months later, with only $300k left, they come to me desperate to recover. Or the trading clients, who made a ton of money only to lose heaps, sometimes in a single trade they kept piling into, unable to cut their losses.
If you are going to trade full-time, you need to be good at it. You need to build true competency that can withstand the chaos of the markets and adapt when it changes. A big monetary increase in your account, whether from one massive trade or a short period where you make a ton, doesn’t come with an equivalent increase in skill. The only way to upgrade your skills is to work on them, and a shift in your mentality about your current situation could lead to substantial benefits.
What if instead you viewed your current situation as your own personal training camp? Your job provides the financial freedom to trade, and learn. It allows you to make mistakes, take losses and go through the ups and downs that you need to in order to develop the required skills. If you have a bad day or are too emotionally compromised to even trade at all, it’s not the end of the world.
While you still have the current job, there is less pressure on trading to provide income. Use that freedom like you’re an athlete training and preparing for a season, where errors are inevitable, and the opportunity for growth is high.
Because make no mistake, when you graduate to trading full-time, the pressure is going to be higher. When your livelihood depends on trading, the emotional intensity around mistakes and losses is scaled way up. You want to have already built a skill set capable of handling that kind of pressure, and the training camp approach is how you begin to form that foundation.
Try to look at the opportunities that are in front of you so you are better prepared when it’s time to make the leap. But for some of you, being ready to make the leap also means going back to review your trading and personal past.
If you are looking for the escape hatch, it’s also important to understand what it is about your current situation that bothers you so much.
Are there past failures that you’re looking to wipe clean? Would being a success in trading mean that you’re no longer a failure in life? Whether in trading or personally, past failures can make you feel like your past experience isn’t valuable. For others there’s a “the grass is always greener” mentality, and regrets of how they ended up in this bad situation to begin with. Unfortunately, once you get to greener pastures, eventually you’ll again start looking for grass that’s even greener.
If you are beating yourself up for why you are in your current job or situation, I encourage you to do the work to reconcile your past and re-contextualize your current circumstances. Explore your past failures and missteps, and come to terms with them before moving on. They are valuable when you learn from them and uncover the skills you developed in the process. All failures hold lessons to learn from.
The ultimate goal is to remove some of the emotional intensity to unstick yourself from past failures. Remember, emotional intensity is what’s behind the errors such as sizing up too quickly, reentering after you get stopped out, not taking profit because you are looking for the home run, etc. A home run trade will not heal the pain of the past. You have to deal with that pain directly.
The truth is, there is no such thing as an escape hatch, you’ll just take your unresolved problems with you. But there is such a thing as a solid plan to get you to the next step of where you want to be, and with the right perspective and strategy you can get there.
The post Looking for the Escape Hatch with Trading appeared first on Jared Tendler.
May 26, 2021
Now Accepting Bitcoin & Other Crypto for my Book on Trading
For the crypto traders and HODLers out there you can now get The Mental Game of Trading with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Dogecoin. Just go through the cart and checkout process as usual and select CoinPayments.net for payment, click “Place Order” and you’ll be taken to a page where you’ll input your billing info, select the coin to use for payment, and get the address to complete the transfer.
The volatility in the crypto markets can put a strain on your mental game. Invest in greater emotional stability and it’ll help you make better decisions.
Why Am I Accepting Bitcoin For My Trading Book?First of all, I’m a fan of BTC. So why not?
Over the years, I’ve become more aware of the cryptocurrency industry. Not only through the news and growing prices. But also through my clients, as many of them are cryptocurrency traders.
Naturally, they would ask me if they can pay with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. At first, I held it back because of payment infrastructure reasons. Luckily, as the crypto space is growing, so is the usability of it. Today, we have payment platforms like Coinpayments, that makes it easy for entrepreneurs like myself to be able to start accepting crypto as payments.
There’s not many books on Bitcoin that actually accept Bitcoin as a payment. So there you go, now you have at least one trading book that you can buy with your cryptocurrencies.
In retrospect, it’s inevitable.
Full Circle in CryptoSuccessful traders want to invest in their mental health to increase their bottom line.
Therefore I decided to accept cryptocurrency to purchase my book on trading. Spend your BTC, learn how to optimize your mental trading performance, to earn more BTC. A full circle in crypto.
Now before you spend your satoshi’s, join one of my office hours in which we discuss trading psychology. You can find the schedule here.
The post Now Accepting Bitcoin & Other Crypto for my Book on Trading appeared first on Jared Tendler.
Now Accepting Crypto
For the crypto traders and HODLers out there you can now get The Mental Game of Trading with Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Dogecoin. Just got through the cart and checkout process as usual and select CoinPayments.net for payment, click “Place Order” and you’ll be taken to page where you’ll input your billing info, select the coin to use for payment, and get the address to complete the transfer.
The volatility in the crypto markets can put a strain on your mental game. Invest in greater emotional stability and it’ll help you make better decisions.
The post Now Accepting Crypto appeared first on Jared Tendler.
May 14, 2021
Announcing Office Hours
I’m excited to announce that I’ve started a monthly “Office Hours” on YouTube where I’ll discuss different topics and answer your questions. I always enjoy this direct 1:1 opportunity to interact and answer questions. Should be fun and informative. Be sure to join me for the first edition on Wednesday May 26th at 4:30PM EST / 20:30 UTC. Add it to your calendar and if you want to post your questions ahead of time, go here.
The post Announcing Office Hours appeared first on Jared Tendler.
April 21, 2021
The Natural Transition From Poker to Trading
My pivot from poker to trading happened organically around 2013, a few years after Black Friday (the day the DOJ shut down PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker). I realised that my coaching business was comprised of 95% poker players and if a similar event happened again, I could be in trouble. The old, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, really applied to my situation.
From Poker Players to TradersAt the time, I had steadily been getting more interest from forex and cryptocurrency traders who had picked up the poker books and remarked how much it applied to them. “Just change the word poker to trading and you’ve got yourself a new book!” was something I’d often hear from them. One thing led to another, and I steadily built up a roster of clients from the trading scene. Added some speaking engagements for a few trading firms, and landed a long-time gig with one institutional firm. (NDA prevents me from disclosing any details.)
As I got deeper into trading, the parallels between poker and trading became more obvious, but also the differences.
Trading, as a game, is far less defined than poker and the game can change at any time. This makes trading exciting and provides a lot of opportunity to make it what you want. But it also makes the importance of a strong mental game even more important than in poker – fortunes can be made and lost in a flash. Just look at what happened to Bill Hwang.
Start to Improve Your Trading ResultsThe Mental Game of Trading has a distinct value from the other trading psychology books. Providing practical and actionable step to permanently solve the costly problems in your trading. Click here to download the first chapter, or for links on where you can pick up a copy.
And for you crypto traders, I specially added Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Dogecoin as payment methods to purchase the book.
The post The Natural Transition From Poker to Trading appeared first on Jared Tendler.
How I Got Into Trading
My pivot from poker to trading happened organically around 2013, a few years after Black Friday (the day the DOJ shut down PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker). I realized that my coaching business was comprised of 95% poker players and if a similar event happened again, I could be in trouble.
At the time, I had steadily been getting more interest from traders who had picked up the poker books and remarked how much it applied to them. “Just change the word poker to trading and you’ve got yourself a new book!” was something I’d often hear from them. One thing lead to another, and I steadily built up a roster of clients, did some speaking engagements for a few trading firms, and landed a long-time gig with one institutional firm. (NDA prevents me from disclosing any details.)
As I got deeper into trading, the parallels between poker and trading became more obvious, but also the differences. Trading, as a game, is far less defined than poker and the game can change at any time. This makes trading exciting and provides a lot of opportunity to make it what you want. But it also makes the importance of a strong mental game even more important than in poker – fortunes can be made and lost in a flash. Just look at what happened to Bill Hwang.
The Mental Game of Trading has a distinct value from the other trading psychology books. Providing practical and actionable step to permanently solve the costly problems in your trading. Click here to download the first chapter, or for links on where you can pick up a copy.
The post How I Got Into Trading appeared first on Jared Tendler.
April 19, 2021
Busting 4 Big Mental Game Myths for Traders
Today I want to bust the biggest mental game myths for you.
Writing The Mental Game of Trading took me roughly three years. During that time I dove deep into the trading world to better understand how traders think. Including the problems they face, and the situations they encounter.
Part of my deep dive included research with a wide variety of traders that involved surveys, webinars, 1:1 and group coaching sessions. One of the outcomes was I found there are several myths that predominate the industry. Which have significant impact on traders’ ability to develop the kind of mental and emotional stability needed to perform at their best.
Myth #1: Emotions Are the Problem
It’s a myth that emotions such as anger, greed, and fear are the problem causing your trading errors. Rather, these emotions are actually signals of a problem. When you label emotions as the problem, you are masking the real issue. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom feeds into this idea and advice mainly focuses on reducing, controlling, and releasing emotions. You’re fighting emotion, but in the wrong way. Instead, you need to treat emotions as a signa
l and get curious about what they’re trying to tell you. This is a critical change in perspective: emotions are not the problem; they are signals of underlying performance flaws.
When I talk about the underlying causes of emotions, I’m not talking personal stuff. This isn’t about Freud, and we’re not talking about your relationship with your mom. I’m talking about the underlying performance flaws that cause you to have misperceptions of yourself, your strategy, and the market.
Examples include:
confirmation biasillusion of controlbeing overly attached to unrealized gainsexpecting to make money on every tradehating varianceThese are just some of the performance flaws that I talk about in the book and that are the real cause of your greed, fear of losing, hatred of mistakes, and overconfidence, to name a few.
Expectations, Expectations…To give you a closer look at how these performance flaws cause problems, let’s look at an extremely common one: high expectations.
High expectations aren’t inherently bad. Many successful people have incredibly high expectations of themselves and the people around them. These expectations have been an important driver of their success. But high expectations can be like a double-edged sword, causing self-inflicted damage. You may get intensely angry when you fail to meet those expectations. Or you may get incredibly nervous, and resort to comfortable trades with very little risk.
For others, it’s a nasty cycle where anger turns into fear, which damages confidence, which further weakens the ability to perform, which makes it even harder to achieve your expectations, which leaves you angrier, more anxious, and more down about your prospects. As an fyi, high expectations and perfectionism are so common for high performing, highly motivated people, it’s probably the most applicable topic in The Mental Game of Trading, which includes dedicated material as well as a strategy for addressing it that has been reliably helping my clients.
Lastly, emotions are not a problem because they are an essential source of energy to fuel your performance. Even emotions typically seen as negative are not always bad. For example, anger can be a phenomenal source of energy. Michael Jordan used anger as motivation, most notably from being cut from his high school basketball team, to become one of the greatest basketball players of all time.
Myth #2: It’s All About Greed and Fear
This is a common one, exacerbated by the greed/fear index that is so often talked about. To reduce the emotion present in the market down to these two emotions is a myth for a couple of reasons.
First, there are other emotions disrupting your performance, and the decisions of millions of others, that differ from greed and fear. The big other three that I talk about are: anger, motivation, and confidence. To oversimplify it down to just two emotions is a shorthand that doesn’t help you understand the dynamics in the market or the dynamics of how you participate in the market.
In addition, greed is not actually a problem in the way people think it is. I’m not talking about it from a societal perspective. If you look at greed purely from a performance standpoint, wanting more is not a problem by itself. You would never suggest an elite athlete is greedy for wanting to win a lot of games. Tom Brady isn’t greedy because he wants to win an 8th Super Bowl.
In the same way, suggesting you’re greedy because you want to make more money (the actual point of trading!) defies logic. Greed is just excessive ambition that causes you to violate your strategy or system and make bad decisions that will end up costing you. That’s the real reason greed is a problem – because it costs you money. It’s no different than the athlete who doesn’t listen to the coach and tries to do too much in a game and ends up costing their team a victory.
It also can’t be all about greed and fear because there are a lot of anger and confidence issues that cause problems to arise. Remove the halo around greed and fear and start opening your mind to how these other issues are problematic, and you will be that much further towards solving your problems.
If you feel Greed or Fear are part of your current issues, have a look at one of my weekly office hours about this subject.
Myth #3: I Just Need to Be More Disciplined!This one links back to misunderstanding emotions. Sure, discipline problems exist. I included a whole chapter on Discipline in The Mental Game of Trading because it’s so common. But what many traders miss is that for many of you, emotion forces you to enter too early, jump into a position that is taking off, exit early to lock up profit, to move your stop.
On the surface all of these mistakes seem like you lacked discipline. But when you peel back the layers, you realize it’s FOMO that forced you to jump in, hatred of losing forced you to move your stop, and a lack of confidence caused you to lock up profit. Yes, discipline problems are real, but first you have to rule out that emotions (which are themselves driven by underlying flaws) aren’t the real cause of your errors.
Bonus Myth: Simulated Market is Equal to the Live MarketOK, this thing is starting to get too long, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to include it because newer traders really need to get their heads out of their asses on this one and it’s incredibly common, not just in trading but in other environments too.
You cannot, I repeat, cannot, equate what happens in the simulator, to what happens in the live market. Even though the conditions are the same. Burn this into your brain: YOU are different. That’s why it’s not the same. All your goals, work, effort, time, energy that you put into developing your skills, and your actual money – it’s all on the line. And that makes it intense and emotional. All of that combines to change the nature of the live market and makes it more difficult for you to execute.
Simulated markets and live markets are not the same and never will be. DO NOT MAKE THIS MISTAKE. Otherwise, you set yourself up for more emotional volatility than necessary when you really need to slow down and invest the time it takes to make the transition.
The post Busting 4 Big Mental Game Myths for Traders appeared first on Jared Tendler.
Busting 4 Big Mental Game Myths
Writing The Mental Game of Trading took me roughly three years and during that time I dove deep into the trading world to better understand how traders think, the problems they face, and the situations they encounter.
Part of my deep dive included research with a wide variety of traders that involved surveys, webinars, 1:1 and group coaching sessions. One of the outcomes was I found there are several myths that predominate the industry and significantly impact traders’ ability to develop the kind of mental and emotional stability needed to perform at their best.
Today I want to bust those myths for you.
Myth #1: Emotions Are the ProblemIt’s a myth that emotions such as anger, greed, and fear are the problem causing your trading errors. Rather, these emotions are actually signals of a problem. When you label emotions as the problem, you are masking the real issue. Unfortunately, conventional wisdom feeds into this idea and advice mainly focuses on reducing, controlling, and releasing emotions. You’re fighting emotion, but in the wrong way. Instead, you need to treat emotions as a signal and get curious about what they’re trying to tell you. This is a critical change in perspective: emotions are not the problem; they are signals of underlying performance flaws.
When I talk about the underlying causes of emotions, I’m not talking personal stuff. This isn’t about Freud, and we’re not talking about your relationship with your mom. I’m talking about the underlying performance flaws that cause you to have misperceptions of yourself, your strategy, and the market. Examples include confirmation bias, illusion of control, being overly attached to unrealized gains, expecting to make money on every trade, and hating variance. These are just some of the performance flaws that I talk about in the book and that are the real cause of your greed, fear of losing, hatred of mistakes, and overconfidence, to name a few.
To give you a closer look at how these performance flaws cause problems, let’s look at an extremely common one: high expectations. High expectations aren’t inherently bad. Many successful people have incredibly high expectations of themselves and the people around them, and these expectations have been an important driver of their success. But high expectations can be like a double-edged sword, causing self-inflicted damage. You may get intensely angry when you fail to meet those expectations, or you may get incredibly nervous, and resort to comfortable trades with very little risk.
For others, it’s a nasty cycle where anger turns into fear, which damages confidence, which further weakens the ability to perform, which makes it even harder to achieve your expectations, which leaves you angrier, more anxious, and more down about your prospects. As an fyi, high expectations and perfectionism are so common for high performing, highly motivated people, it’s probably the most applicable topic in The Mental Game of Trading, which includes dedicated material as well as a strategy for addressing it that has been reliably helping my clients.
Lastly, emotions are not a problem because they are an essential source of energy to fuel your performance. Even emotions typically seen as negative are not always bad. For example, anger can be a phenomenal source of energy. Michael Jordan used anger as motivation, most notably from being cut from his high school basketball team, to become one of the greatest basketball players of all time.
Myth #2: It’s All About Greed and FearThis is a common one, exacerbated by the greed/fear index that is so often talked about. To reduce the emotion present in the market down to these two emotions is a myth for a couple of reasons.
First, there are other emotions disrupting your performance, and the decisions of millions of others, that differ from greed and fear. The big other three that I talk about are: anger, motivation, and confidence. To oversimplify it down to just two emotions is a shorthand that doesn’t help you understand the dynamics in the market or the dynamics of how you participate in the market.
In addition, greed is not actually a problem in the way people think it is. I’m not talking about it from a societal perspective. If you look at greed purely from a performance standpoint, wanting more is not a problem by itself. You would never suggest an elite athlete is greedy for wanting to win a lot of games. Tom Brady isn’t greedy because he wants to win an 8th Super Bowl.
In the same way, suggesting you’re greedy because you want to make more money (the actual point of trading!) defies logic. Greed is just excessive ambition that causes you to violate your strategy or system and make bad decisions that will end up costing you. That’s the real reason greed is a problem – because it costs you money. It’s no different than the athlete who doesn’t listen to the coach and tries to do too much in a game and ends up costing their team a victory.
It also can’t be all about greed and fear because there are a lot of anger and confidence issues that cause problems to arise. Remove the halo around greed and fear and start opening your mind to how these other issues are problematic, and you will be that much further towards solving your problems.
Myth #3: I Just Need to Be More Disciplined!This one links back to misunderstanding emotions. Sure, discipline problems exist. I included a whole chapter on Discipline in The Mental Game of Trading because it’s so common. But what many traders miss is that for many of you, emotion forces you to enter too early, jump into a position that is taking off, exit early to lock up profit, to move your stop.
On the surface all of these mistakes seem like you lacked discipline. But when you peel back the layers, you realize it’s FOMO that forced you to jump in, hatred of losing forced you to move your stop, and a lack of confidence caused you to lock up profit. Yes, discipline problems are real, but first you have to rule out that emotions (which are themselves driven by underlying flaws) aren’t the real cause of your errors.
Bonus Myth: Simulated Market is Equal to the Live MarketOK, this thing is starting to get too long, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to include it because newer traders really need to get their heads out of their asses on this one and it’s incredibly common, not just in trading but in other environments too.
You cannot, I repeat, cannot, equate what happens in the simulator, to what happens in the live market. Even though the conditions are the same. Burn this into your brain: YOU are different. That’s why it’s not the same. All your goals, work, effort, time, energy that you put into developing your skills, and your actual money – it’s all on the line. And that makes it intense and emotional. All of that combines to change the nature of the live market and makes it more difficult for you to execute.
Simulated markets and live markets are not the same and never will be. DO NOT MAKE THIS MISTAKE. Otherwise, you set yourself up for more emotional volatility than necessary when you really need to slow down and invest the time it takes to make the transition.
The post Busting 4 Big Mental Game Myths appeared first on Jared Tendler.
