Off The Charts Sean McLaughlin & Steve Strazza

From the Slopes to the Screens: Todd Gordon is hyper-focused.

Flying down a mountainside on two skis while negotiating tight turns and ever-changing microclimates would be a terrible time to lose focus.

Todd Gordon knows this. If he hadn’t quickly learned this skill in his journey to competitive ski racing, he would’ve likely landed himself onto a stretcher and an air-lift back to base.

There was no other choice.

But for Todd, he’d have it no other way. From a young age, when he found an interest in something – whether skiing or finance – he’d go all in. Nothing else mattered.

And when he discovered the world of trading, he knew what he wanted to do. “There was never a question,” he said.

In college, between classes, skiing, and happy hours, Todd would trade options from his dorm room. It wasn’t a matter of IF he would be a trader, it was a matter of where would he start.

And that answer came right after college when at the age of 22, Todd headed west and joined a proprietary trading group based in San Diego. And from there, he never looked back.

How did he handle those first twinges of pressure when early trades went awry? His background in high-pressure competitive skiing gave him the tools to stay focused on the things he could control, and keep his attention away from anything else that he couldn’t.

In this episode of Off the Charts, Todd gets into all this, plus the transition he has undergone from a high-paced intraday scalper to a money manager guiding investors toward long-term gains.

Caleb Franzen Can Figure It Out by Sean McLaughlin & Steve Strazza

As a Trader with zero to negative correlation to traditional assets, managing money on behalf of institutional investors is exactly where Jason Shapiro is supposed to be.

But if you were to ask him, he’d tell you he probably should’ve been a lawyer. And anyone else who comes to him asking about how to break into the world of full-time trading will likely get admonished with: “Go to Law School instead. Become a lawyer, then trade on the side with the money you make.”

Why would a highly successful trader say this?

Because Jason agrees with us that trading is easy, but BEING a trader is damn hard.

Jason is a contrarian trader. In its most basic form, this means Jason is seeking out opportunities where the crowd may have overextended itself in one direction. If everyone is on the same side of the trade, the reversal can be nasty when they all head for the exits at the same time. Being the trader on the right side of this reversal can be immensely profitable when Jason gets it right. But it’s very, very difficult.

Among the many things that make trading hard is that you are often doubting yourself. Especially if you aim to make money when almost everyone else is wrong.

“If the market made sense, it would be simple,” he says. “I could hand you a system that consistently makes money, and you’ll STILL mess it up.” It’s all psychology.

Jason gets charged up when people think they can easily learn to become successful traders. “Most amateur speculators are delusional.” He recoils when he hears people talking about the “freedom” that trading can provide. “Trading isn’t what people think it is. This isn’t the freedom you think it is.”

And very few can handle the reality of lumpy return streams, even if the “average” annual gain is a very impressive number. “It f-s with your head!”

In reality, Jason believes most retail people who engage in the markets are hobbyists. And there’s nothing wrong with that, “just know that’s what you’re doing!”

In this episode of Off The Charts, Jason shares some tactics he’s devised to keep him in the game for as long as he has been (hint: frugal living), why he’s no longer invited to dinner parties (hint: people cry), and he breaks down precisely why it never works out if one attempts to copy another trader (hint: math).

This episode of Off The Charts may become one of the most important episodes we ever publish. Please give it a watch (or a listen).

Jason Perz has grown comfortable with risk.

His whole life has manifested risk in every form. From being an adopted child who was teased at school for being "different," to riding BMX bikes and performing "shows" and dangerous stunts professionally, to living with and battling through drug and alcohol addiction, to trading on behalf on investors -- very little in Jason's life did not entail some forms of risk. And much of it was life threatening!

So, you can forgive him for being a little more nonchalant than most of us about the occasional measly 30% drawdowns in his individual positions.

From a very young age, Jason was different. He was adopted to a white family and inherited an "odd" Great Great Uncle who bootstrapped himself from a humble childhood with undiagnosed autism (it was the early 1900's) into a successful business man who took care of his extended family. This Great Uncle took an interest in a young Jason, taught him a lot of what he had learned in entrepreneurship, and sparked Jason's first interest in the markets.

But first, Jason had to make an escape from his own humble beginning and playground bullying. He found that first escape in the world of competitive BMX riding, which eventually resulted in a prolific career in which he was able to tour around the world performing for and wowing audiences everywhere he went. But sadly, the pay wasn't good. And it was a struggle. And eventually injuries piled up which led him down a dark path that began with prescription drugs and ended with him lost in the mire of a spiraling drug and alcohol addiction.

Jason said that when he was at the very depths of his addiction, he couldn't see a way out. "And the people around me couldn't see a way out."

How does one come back from that?

Tune in to find out how.

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.

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.