Failing to plan leads to negative compounding

And, and what do I mean? Spiritual meaning the emotional, psychological and what that does to you, is if you don't have a pre-trade checklist and you don't know about power law, um, and you're not really sure about your model, and you just say, "Well, I'm gonna figure out tomorrow.

I'm gonna wait for the opening bell." You know, so by definition you're gonna miss everything, right? 'Cause that's what that means.

You have no preparation.

You're not doing any scans.

You don't know what to anticipate.

You're always gonna be looking like, "Well, Kramer likes this or this prop trader likes this, and so that's my research.

That's how I'm gonna come across my names." I don't know a single person in the thirty-seven years I've been doing this, I don't know a single person that's made a living.

They might have gotten lucky in the short run, but I don't know anybody who's had any type of long-term sustained success by trying to pick winners based on somebody else's work.

It's true when you're an artist, and I've done this myself, that you get books of, you know, Keith Haring and Basquiat and Picasso or Salvador Dali, and you copy 'cause you're learning the marks.

You're kind of seeing how the colors blend.

You're looking about light.

What's the point of view? You know, and you kind of learn their gestural marks that way.

But then you move on and you kind of as, as you do that, you're still evolving your own particular style, you know, Cy Twombly, whoever your favorites might be.

Um, but when you, when you let yourself off the hook like that, you're also saying, like what's the relative strength of you actually caring about, you know, your model? And it's very painful to miss winning trades.

It's painful psychologically and the opportunity cost on your P&L is absolutely real, right? So when you, when you think about not having that level of preparation, whether it's from the night before, the day, the day of, and you don't have all those things calculated and what's your why or what are the catalysts that matter to you, right? Price can be a catalyst, right? And/or some other news feature and there are people who scan, you know, briefing.com or whatever some of these other, uh, entities are.

I even know high frequency trading firms have, have programs that scan headlines and enter trades based on whether they think that headline could be bullish or bearish for a particular name and they use that to add or remove risk.

So when you're a speculative, you know, day trader, chart reader, that's kind of what you're trying to do just using your human brain.

So by definition you're gonna be a day late and a dollar short even if you're trading on one-minute bars 'cause the computers are gonna work so much more fast than you could ever possibly work even if you have hotkeys programmed.

Doesn't mean you can't have some success, but you're playing in a game that's dominated by co-location of servers and extreme speed and, and low latency.

So don't fall victim to missing out trades because of your lack of preparedness.