Tell me why this is

I've started doing technical analysis and swing trading. I seem to have a knack for it, and I've made enough trades to where I've proved to myself that my successes are not a statistical anomaly. What I'm doing is working so far.

Here's what I don't understand. I feel this will make me "successful". My definition of "success" may be lower than yours, but I'm excited about the future. If someone had come to me a few months ago and said:

"Hey man, I've figured out how to predict the market and make really good money...it doesn't work all the time, but it works most of the time". You can probably make at least 10% a month.

I would have said, "Holy crap man, let me take you to lunch! Let me invite you to dinner! Let me mow your lawn. Will you PLEEZ tell me what it is you're doing?

Right? You would do that, right?

Being the generous, good friend that I am, I have tried to share my system with my friends. And I'm not getting much of an enthusiastic reply. They don't want to get off dead center and try this, or even expend the mental energy to learn it. They won't even take the time to open trading accounts.

WTF???

I've read a lot of "get rich quick" stuff and sales stuff, and they always start off with the Mantra that you have to really want it. You have to be willing to go the distance. Robert Kiyosaki (sp?) even says that people will come up with all kinds of excuses not to learn or try. I'm hearing things like, "this isn't the time in my life for this" or "Come back to me when you're 'wealthy' and show me then".

Excuse me?

I probably will share my secrets after I've made my fortune (God willing), but honestly I'll be less inclined to do that because they don't want to get involved and help me refine the system, provide feedback, etc.

Understand that my friends are good people. Even moderately successful professionals.

What is it about people that makes them never venture out of their comfort zone? Even in the face of what I'd like to think is strong evidence (lets assume it is strong evidence). What gives? I truly want to understand it.

SM

 

The only thing to understand is: These are the people you hire not partner with.

 

If they’ll believe that trading is for them, they’ll ask you for help. If they don’t believe that it is beneficial to them, then you must be getting on their nerves and remind them of a used car yard salesman.

Why are you "shoving" good systems down someone’s throat in the first place? Out of genuine love? If you’re such a generous person, go and do some voluntary work for underprivileged people. Keep your system to yourself, and you’ll get to keep your friends.

 

I think it is often hard to believe that if something works "why doesn't everyone do this". The fact is, there are a lot of reasons. What works for you doesn't necessarily work for them. Maybe the person doesn't have any interest in trading. Maybe they are closed minded. Maybe they have a fear of failure. Maybe they feel handcuffed to their job. Who knows!

The fact is, if it works for you it is great. If a friend takes interest go from there, but don't worry about why they aren't interested. To each their own!

 

About 16 years I felt the same way you do when I first did discretionary swing trading and made some great profits (today I’m retired with fully automated swing trading). I was so proud. I touted it to others and got the strangest looks and responses. You would have thought I was right out of an alien movie from the response. Then I learned a few things about my self and people I never understood….

You are wired for swing trading - your buddies are not. Take a good hard look at how swing trading works. Two thirds of the people on this planet can not even mentally handle a stop loss order. And of the remaining one third about 90% could not handle 3 losses in row from swing trading. Of the 3% left 80% of them are investors who don’t have time for trading. So we are down to 1/4 % of your friends who may be interested in trading your system.

And most of those .25% would not like your tactics. They would rather develop their own. They have a different style of trading. They want to hold on for bigger profits and trade positions. So now your down to .004% of your buddies and it don’t look good for finding some one interested in your strategy.

Trading is hard to teach because we have so many different buttons to press that bring different types of responses from fear and greed. If you told your buddy “The system makes big bucks. But it does lose (draw down) about 25% of the account at times.” - that could cause them to hit the fear button. And draw the response “…are you crazy. I could not lose that much and sleep at night…” So now we wash out another group of your buddies. We are now down to .00002% of your buddies. And the saga continues...

The point is we are all drawn to what suits us to make money. Of those interested in swing trading many will wash out before they ever get to make the first buck. More will lose the account and quit. Many will lose multiple accounts and quit. And a very few will prevail.

 

I have no clue as to whether you genuinely want to help your friends or whether you're looking for approval from them. Either way, does it really matter? If your system is good, make lots of money. They'll definitely approve of the gift from you of a bottle of wine that costs more than $3

 

1) Your friends may be have misplaced attitudes about making money with money.
2) People tend to be more fearful, pessimistic and closed-minded during bear markets.
3) Instead of a 10% monthly return, they may prefer a pie-in-the-sky, lottery-style, mega-payoff, i.e. instant gratification versus consistent gratification.
4) Your friends may have responded differently to your idea if it were the Summer of 1999 or 2006.

 

I spent afternoons in a coffee shop when I lived in the Mojave Desert.. there was not much to do after the markets closed but that.. I had a good friend, we spent hours and hours talking about stuff... we had little projects that we worked on at the restaurant, little educational ventures into digital photography, camping gear, all sorts of good stuff... I was always discussing trading and how it was not all that difficult to make some good bucks and finally I realized that the guy was basically a Marxist. Impoverished as the guy was... he could not bring himself to make money from the markets...

Take an employment interest test sometime... do they have an actual trader category... they have "finance" but that's like accounting and shit that I hate, but I love trading... so maybe there is one in twenty that would like to be a trader, it would psychologically make them happy... then you could narrow that a lot by tossing out those without the drive, the attention span, the learning ability, the ability to act, goals... ability to think outside the box of their cubicle life, etc.. there aren't a lot of people left and of those, some might suffer misfortune and get wiped out early and never return to trading... I'd be willing to bet that most traders got thrown into it by chance, more than those that decided they wanted to become traders... I was forced into it, I had some goals, the cubicle life was not part of them, but it did not pay enough to get to the top of the goal list so I had to look for a way to make a lot of money, trading was it, especially autotrading because I already had the computer skills... I just asked Jesus to kick me through the goal posts of life and so far, not a bad thing at all...

 

Honestly, yes, out of genuine love and selfishness. I have a few friends who I talk investments with as the basis of our friendship. After years of talking about it...plotting...scheming, I've finally hit on something that works and I want them to benefit. My other selfish reason is that if this works like I think it will, I can retire very young. And there is a part of me that thinks that it would be great, but it would be better if I had a buddy or two in the same situation so we could do fun stuff.

SM

 

So I'm assuming you're successful at it. This is a serious question, but is it lonely? I mean, you're right...for the reasons you just outlined, it can be hard to find a person you know..."in person"...who does this, enjoys it, and someone you can bounce questions off of. I'm sure you can find fellas to talk to about photography, or sports, or what not, but the thing I'm running into is there is a serious lack of "real" people interested in this stuff...despite the fact that my circle of friends is pretty wide. I guess I'll just have to deal with it, but I hate just accepting something I don't like...goes against my core values.

SM