Weaponize your mind to get peak performance as a Trader! - Trading Psychology lessons
hello traders this is blake maher with trader summit and with me today i have mr mark randall co-founder of alpha mind how are you mark hey very well from london blake good to see you it's good to see you and i am on the other side of the pond and then a stretch of land in between so uh so good to have you here today um you know i wanted to introduce you really to the trader summit community uh because your specialty is something that i feel as a trader personally is something that every trader needs um you work with traders in in more of a psychology standpoint uh point of view do you want to tell us a little bit about what you do at alpha mine sure we work on the on the mindset and sort of behavior aspects of trading and developing self you know the the power of the uh of the person is is is a significant force that's very that's very much untapped um people often ask me can you make me a better trader and i start off by saying like first i need to make a make you a better a better you i i need you to try to guess regulate yourself and the ecosystem around you so we we work upon that self we work upon that ecosystem and our eco system can be a corporate system that surrounds it it can be a corporate culture sure it can be a ship culture it can be executive culture it can be a it can be the ecosystem around us all the trades that you're doing and kind of understanding some of that uh based upon some of our own experiences so we we kind of look at the whole and develop it from some things that we know that people just don't pay attention to you know the sort of the the idea of weaponizing the mind is often the way we we've placed it particularly in this world where you know performance and peak performance is is pretty key and we're looking to develop and arm this weapon that you can create from this ecosystem through yourself into the market very very often because we're not managing cell phone because we're not managing ecosystem what we're putting out as a weapon that turns mid-flight and actually point straight back at us and all we're doing is we're going in defensive mode you know trying to protect ourselves from this own thing that we've created and so when we drag that into a complex markets environment you know how aware are we going to be of the market right we're going to fall over rapidly and fail and guess dwell on failing well in that state you will so alpha mind is is tuned in to all of those rose elements about what can we tweak what can we shift now what can we do about you and i think you know the concept of hydration much discussed in the military not discussed in trading but you're up there is 80 water and if you start getting dehydrated at the top of your head the thing that's losing water the quickest is whatever's on top so hydration is important oxygen is important all those elements we're looking at and going into systems or speaking with traders whatever they are or even sales guys and brokers you know which are quasi traders if you've come from that market you know what i mean and just said how can we make you better how can we optimize you how can we really really tune you into peak performance that's interesting you know even just with a few minutes of listening to i feel better about myself already as a trader so let me ask you this as a trader you know looking at you and and by the way you your your partner is stephen goldstein who i've met over the course of last year in the trader summit community we've uh we've had him as a as a guest speaker in the past at one of our one of our panel events um but why should uh why should i as a trader seek help from you mr mark randle can you tell us a little bit about your background sure i was a day one trader on the london international financial futures exchange so openout quite trader um i that was in the early 1980s and i thrived and survived you know stupid markets through the 80s through the 90s cultural change leadership change product change flow acceleration where factor suddenly opened up the markets to the whole world we went from doing this amount to that amount of everything yeah and having to get your head around that i i'd um i was lucky that in the 80s this is how luck looks strange when you look back at it but it was luck um i was getting sort of you know the panic attacks and blackouts because of the pressure um couldn't go on an underground train without feeling as though someone was strangling me because i was carrying that stress into all sorts of environments i also suffered from a back condition called ankylosing spondylitis which is arthritis of the spine and so that was giving me all these reasons to suddenly you know find life a bit difficult and uh i actually was speaking to my mother and she said look your grandmother was really interested in healing go and find something on healing i thought really so i you know went to something called the library and found a research piece on healing and it pointed me into this direction of this you know if you look at it today as kind of quasi-mindfulness but it was like exercises for the brain and just these these ways of using the breath and visualizations to just kind of sort yourself out and i committed to this and that's really important so i committed to this process of change and stuck with it within weeks calmer more positive you know i was dealing with complex things i'd normally walk away from more engaging in terms of relationship building better business i guess i found a secret weapon and so i developed that through the years i was running the um the broken desk of uh of greenwich natwest when greenwich were quite literally masters of the universe they were they turned up on us on on the scene and we suddenly thought okay this is how you do it right they were like stealing people from goldman's rather than the other way around so that that's what was going on there so we had to kind of grow up and but you know my attitude my mental capability kind of helped me take on that role um anyway so right away through the naughties and into the teens um i was in futures and i was developing complex things with the commodity world and you know in the background you know you have a trading instinct because if you're a broker there's an awful lot of trades that end up being your trade for whatever reason yeah so you need to be supermarket aware and of course portfolio aware because a trader is focused on that but as a broker you were kind of looking at all these ideas and opportunities and packaging up for uh for trader to understand and then how to risk manage and to to look at in terms of profitability all that sort of thing and um i i then got to position mine fitness into the um rbs natwest global business and i guess went bananas it guess when bonkers and i was busier delivering mind fitness and mental capability programs than i was doing in futures which sounds interesting so that's how you made the transition wow and so the transition kind of happened from a legacy dna piece that kind of at this moment that got brought to the surface in me and then as soon as the business saw that i had this capability it kind of i mean futures get i mean i was bored of the bank conversations it was like and my line manager had just like nothing to do with what i was doing because i was doing stuff that that was helping people flourish and survive and you started to understand that you know traders ops guys i.t guys and then it extended beyond the business as i became a consultant you started to understand that it wasn't really about the job as a some people had some horrific things going on in the background and it was all about having a toolkit to deal with that and bringing about you know the proper work-life balance and all that way of really optimizing your ecosystem you know to drive you going forward um and so i became someone really involved in in building up people's ecosystems so they could perform better in whatever they were doing so i didn't really start with the fact that i was going to make you a better trader i was going to start the fact on and make you a better you first that's you know it's so interesting mark i i feel that that your aspect of the business is probably one of the most i i don't want to say it's the most overlooked but it's really it is quite overlooked and quite often um traders think that they think about process and they think about you know what can i do better to to get it to yield a better result from um you know whether it's an execution standpoint or it's the way i'm i'm viewing the markets but a lot of times it's really just deep inside and and and fighting some of those inner demons and and so with that being said um you know being a trader and working with trading psychologists over the years you know how many years have you been working with people would you say since you made that transition that happened to you to today how how many years has that been well well that's been about six but actually if you look back through my career i was doing stuff within the business that was essentially what i'm doing now yeah okay because actually people were coming to me and saying you know can you help me with this and when you look back when you have these kind of skills and that sort of attraction yeah people tend to come to people that they think are wise for whatever reason sure and and you know with your with your now with your knowledge and many years of doing this you have a very good sample size of of traders that you've worked with so what would you say you know i it's i want to phrase this correctly and and maybe you can you can help me along the way with traders that you've worked with and what would you say is the most common uh i don't want to say like worst trait of a traitor but what is the most common trait that you've come across that you can say well you know across the spectrum i deal with this the most what would that be well if you look at the people that stood out as being bad traders irritable right looking as though they were stressed all the time yeah yeah impatient really bad to be with you know that's interesting very loud very boastful of things that often they were trying to make bigger than they actually were to say they always made money when actually you kind of knew that they weren't holy cow are they all on social media because i think i see them all on twitter i'm just kidding joking about that right just looked through an awful lot of them sure that that was a con another thing was that they had very poor education based around markets so they kind of maybe just got into the role and guest did a job job job job job job as it was just a nine to five job sure and i didn't embrace the fact that they needed to learn they needed to read they needed to to learn technique about themself uh learn the market about the product um even the appropriate foundation of things like technical analysis you go around trading them look at some of the technical technical analysis of analysis people are doing on screens even to this day you will conclude that 95 of people that are trading now for professional businesses have not got a clue what they're doing it's a great point great point i haven't got a clue what they're doing yeah so you start to get and so that defines bad so that to me that's bad and you see bad very very often and you see people the almost the lastminute.com you know payroll's coming up and it's like okay i need to put a buy stop in there just in case it takes off with a take profit up here i want to put a sale stop in at the same time and i cannot and i'm like putting this stuff in and take profit on the sale stop and they wait for payroll to come out and bang that's their trade that's their trade of the week um i saw the worst trade ever was when someone put that in it was so big it was so stupidly busy that the buy stop got triggered on the way up at market in a fast market that got filled above the sale price above the ask right right and and within i'd know seconds the market had collapsed triggered the sales stop and the sales stop got triggered half a below to take profit by level and you explain that to someone that had a 10 billion euro fund oh my goodness wow in a thousand contracts per per trade and and you think you know that so you have you i mean you're working with an institutional size trader that really shouldn't be uh dealing in those sizes i mean just let's let's let's be honest here but that's that's pretty wild mark and you know and you know i look around absolutely but being in the being in the business as long as i've been and um i haven't i haven't i've never traded for a bank um so you know i've i've done a lot of facets in this business and i've traded a lot of different instruments um most at that but you know it's it's amazing after so many years you know you'd still see a lot of people that control large amounts of money that do make quite often um those types of mistakes but let me ask you this then you know and we're going to end it on on a on a positive note so with with your sample size and all the all the traders and you know people you've worked with over the years what do you say what would you say is the most common easy fix where people can start like like i i've got all sorts of problems you know you open up my book and you're like wow holy cow you do this you do that but what where would i start what would be the most common place for me as a trader to start working on well good journaling is is important i think a lot of people focus on that yeah but but if you put something in the journal that's a negative that was a bad bad moment write it in like size two font or something so when you look back so when you look back in time it doesn't like hit you in the face of the negative right um because from a mindfulness point of view it's all about triggers and tripwires and you don't want to be inadvertently tripwiring yourself into a negative thought process about a disaster and you you're bringing yourself back in time to that disaster so you can't let go and you're reliving that disaster you want to try to avoid that so that's number one tip second tip is you know the ability to step away but step away physically and get out in the garden and get some fresh air and find a place that is where you just sit and you guess just tune into the environment nothing breathing or anything just sense the smells and see what you can see see how many colored greens you can see and just tune into your senses of wherever you are outside of you sitting in front of a trading screen and fit that into your day even if it's like 20 seconds but little little pauses little and often will keep this fresh it'll keep it market ready um i mean in trading that's what you want to keep your market ready and it will keep your awareness aware and attentive because all this stuff gets in your way if you don't manage it so keeping yourself aware staying aware looking for opportunity being making yourself awake to the moment you know that's a very critical point i mean all this is about waking up it's not about falling asleep it's about waking up to the moment that is the market that is the only way you'll be able to manage and see any opportunity well mark you know there's a lot to unpack here and and i and i have to say that you know spending this this short period of time with you has been very beneficial to me what i'd like to do the next time we meet up we're going to unpack my mind a little bit and maybe we can work on some issues that might be so common or more common to some of the other traders out there and i think you might actually have fun with this and i might cringe a little bit how about that i would say that some of the one of the best traders or the best trader i ever knew gets to leave on something else for for the audience okay was he wasn't a trader he looked at the market philosophically and that he looked at the market as a vibration rather than a bunch of bunch of lines right yeah he made more money than anybody i've ever known and for seven years never took a loss wow that's every trade he booked made money i know i know what he was doing but there are rare cases of people out there the genius that have thought it through that spent the time i sent him two years of point and figure charts when he was trying to work out what to do that's how much work he did to work out the way he was going to trade and he was not a trader he had no screen in front of him and he made more money than i've ever known anybody in the markets make and actually of some of the people i've met on the retail side there are some traders out there that are retail traders that are better than most professionals and you know what without going too far into it i'm actually taking notes right now i think i know why but people are gonna have to wait for our next meeting and uh mark i i i truly appreciate our time here or your time with us here at trader summit so how do people um find out more about you and what you do sure so alphahyphenmind.net is a brand new glorious website um which shows the work of stephen i showed you how to contact us it shows you where our twitter feeds are on alphamind101 and now for mind102 we're all over linkedin we have a linkedin channel called alphamind as well that people can join and that's got about 20 000 members or something um so we've got a lot of thought leadership going on but you know plug in on linkedin tune in on twitter i think steve has just got this automatic feeder thing for tweets so he's got loads more tweets than myself but you know every now and then i say i say something sensible but they're composite so so they're they're they're our ways of of looking at us and finding out a bit more about us and of course anyone that feels as though that that they they need some some further professional guidance um then of course they can find about more about our services there great mark you know thank you so much for spending your time with us today and like i said i i look forward to our next uh meeting and um and guys and gals you can find out more about mark randle what he does with his with his partner steven uh down below in the link below you can get directly to their site as well and make sure you're checking back at uh at tradersummit.net because we actually post some other podcasts here on our site so mark thank you so much for spending your time with us today yeah great great you mentioned the podcast yeah we got a great podcast as well i love the podcast i actually i i actually just one of the things that i do when i walk an hour at night is i listen to your podcast so thank you the top five trading psychology podcast so uh we're we're we're we're more more um more viewed than cnbc and people like that and by the way i'm gonna i think i'm gonna be on there in the next couple weeks it's ours is getting released thank you mark have a have a great one and and thanks for spending your time with us welcome well farewell from london take care all right take care
2021-10-13 01:44
