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Transcript of Adrian Reid’s Interview On The Eric Mueller Show podcast

Enlightened Stock Trading with Adrian Reid – E53 – The Eric Mueller Show (podcast) – Listen Notes

Eric Mueller:

Hey, everybody. I am your host, Eric Mueller, and welcome back to the Eric Mueller Show, the podcast where we explore what makes any successful person’s inner clock tick. Did you know that most investors lose money trading? What if you had a method to trade stocks profitably using just 20 to 30 minutes of your day? Adrian Reid is the founder of Enlightened Stock Trading, which focuses on educating and supporting traders on their journey to profitable systems trading. Adrian’s systematic trading workflow generates several $100,000 per year and only requires 30 minutes of his day to manage.

He trades both long and short across the US, Australian, and international stock market, as well as the cryptocurrency market. And his trading systems have consistently outperformed international share markets with dramatically reduced risk over the past 18 years. Adrian teaches traders from all over the world how to get profitable, confident, and consistent by trading systematically, as well as back-testing their own trading systems. He helps traders grow smooth returns by implementing a portfolio of trading systems to make money through different markets and different market conditions.

Today’s episode will motivate you to become a more successful investor through systematic trading. As you listen to Adrian’s success portfolio, think about which attributes you would consider adding to your own success portfolio. Let’s head on over to the interview.

All right, welcome back to the Eric Mueller Show, the podcast where we explore what makes any successful person’s inner clock tick. Joining me today all the way from Australia is Adrian Reid, founder of Enlightened Stock Trading. Adrian, welcome to the show.

Adrian Reid:

Eric, thanks so much for having me. Awesome, awesome to be here. I’m super excited about this.

Eric Mueller:

Man, I’m excited too. And I think before we even dive into the investing and systematic trading and really talk about where your expertise is, I want to know what makes up your success portfolio. So, if you’re new to the show listening right now, let me fill you in real quick on what this means. And this is perfect for a finance investing episode and trading. So, in an investment portfolio is the compilation of your investments that lay the foundation for financial goals. Well, here on the Eric Mueller Show, we want to discover how successful people like Adrian invest in themselves and build foundation for their success.

So, Adrian, start us off. What are some skills or traits, habits, mindsets, what have you that make up your success portfolio?

Adrian Reid:

Yeah, I really love this question, Eric, and I think it’s critical for everyone to do this analysis on themself and then also pick bits from people they like, people they want to model and use those. For me, there’s a couple of things. I love stocks and crypto and active trading, and I’m also a big learner, but I can’t just learn anything and I can’t just do anything. So, I think the first thing for me in the success portfolio, it’s really about passion and interest. I could get good at lots of things, but a lot of things I just have no interest in, and so I’m not going to do them well.

Look, I have loved stocks for a long time and I have loved crypto for a long time, and active trading, I’ve been actively trading now for just over two decades, and that just doesn’t happen. You don’t achieve mastery if you’re not passionate about the subject. Right? When I started on my investing journey, it was basically as I was just about entering the workforce, and I said to my dad, “Okay, having a job’s great and it’s good that I’m earning money, but I don’t want to do that forever.” And so, how do I retire?

And it’s like, I’m just entering the workforce. How do I retire? It’s like looking ahead. And the response was basically, “Well, you have to save money, not spend everything you earn and you’ve got to invest and make sure that you protect your capital and grow it over time and keep adding to your nest egg and grow.” And eventually, you get to a point where you have enough capital, producing enough income that you can retire. And so, I thought, “All right, good. What could I do?”

Well, I could do real estate. I could start a business. I could invest in stocks. Crypto didn’t exist back then. I could do all these things and I thought about real estate. It’s like, “Oh, really? I’m just not that interested.” I read a few books, it’s like, “Okay, cool. I get it. I can see it. I could do it,” but oh, yawn. I read a bunch of books about stocks. It’s like, “Whoa, this is amazing.” It’s like, “Oh, I love this,” and the charts and it just got me. And so, I think that passion is the first thing. If you’re going to be massively successful at anything, you’ve got to have passion for it. So, that’s that. That’s number one.

The second thing is having passionate, passionate about something is great, but unless you’re driven to master, it’s very hard to do well because pretty much anything we do in life is competitive. If you want to be a trader, it’s probably the toughest competition in the world. There’s thousands of people around the world or tens of thousands of people trying to make money in the markets and lots of different methods of doing it, and you’ve got to be good. And that’s true of most disciplines.

If you want to become the CEO of a multinational corporation, you’ve got to be good, not good, great, probably not even great, amazing. And the same in trading, and the same in crypto, and the same in property. So, you’ve got to be driven to master it, and that means continuous learning. Does that make sense? I still read books. I’ve been trading for 20 years. I still buy new books. I still look at old books that I missed, and I still talk to people and I try and learn from my students.

I’ve got hundreds of students in my Enlightened Stock Trading, and I’ll listen to what they’re doing. It’s like, “Okay, what did you do?” It’s like, “Oh, I’ve never tried that. Cool. Let me check that out.” This is the third thing, is curiosity. For me, curiosity is really, really critical because when you are confronted with a problem and you will be no matter what your discipline, the immediate response for most people is, “Ugh, another problem, ugh, another challenge. When am I going to get past all of these challenges?” And it’s important to realize that you will never get past all of the challenges in any discipline in life.

I mean, business, investing, relationships, fitness, health, whatever, there is always going to be challenges because if you are growing, you are always going to be hitting new boundaries, new things that you have to master. And in order to master those things, you’ve got to resolve the challenges. And so, when you hit a challenge, what do you do? Well, what not to do is go, “Ugh, another challenge. Ugh, so sick of this crap. Ugh.” That’s going to stop you from growing and stop you from mastering.

But if you go, “Huh, I’ve never seen that before. Hmm. I wonder how I get past this. Huh. I wonder how other people have solved this.” Curiosity. If you are passionate about something, you’re constantly seeking mastery, and every time you see a new challenge or problem, you get curious instead of getting frustrated. It’s very hard not to get great at something over time. Does that answer the question?

Eric Mueller:

Phenomenal answer to the question, Adrian. So, we’ve got passion, continuous learning, and curiosity. Three very actionable things and things that I’ve seen in other successful people that I’ve talked to on this podcast that have exemplified those traits and habits. And I think that it really is to your point of challenges and not being burdened with them. As you grow, you’re probably going to experience more and more challenges. So, as you level up so to speak, your problems are going to explode to another level. It’s going to be a different complexity of problems.

If you’re listening to the podcast right now and you want to level up and become a better X, you’re going to have problems that come up all the way from when you’re a novice to a master. So, Adrian, yeah, I think that really, really lays the framework while I think for people to take some actionable steps here. And taking it just a bit further, has your definition of success changed over time? Like when you were in the corporate world working full-time, you left that in 2012, so you’ve been doing this full-time for about a decade, a little over a decade, has your definition of success changed in that timeframe?

Adrian Reid:

Massively. Massively. I truly believe that everyone needs to define what I call your dream life. If you don’t know what your dream life is, like what do you really want life to look like in terms of your health, in terms of your wealth, in terms of your relationships. And wealth is business and investing and employment and all of those things. If you haven’t really defined what that looks like for you now, then you don’t know what you’re shooting for. When I was in my 20s, my dream life is completely different to what it is now because back then, I was like, “Okay, cool, I’m going to be a strategy consultant.”

I was actually really good at that. I studied chemical engineering in the university and I did really well. I came first in the course and got a university medal and blah, blah, and I got a great job in a strategy consulting firm, and I got in there. It’s like, “Whoa, this is so cool. I like solving these big business problems and working with CEOs and forming strategy. I want to be a partner in this consulting firm. That’d be amazing, that makes so much money. They talk to all these cool people.” And then, a couple of years into my journey, I was like, “Oh my god, I do not want the partner’s life.” Because I started to see the reality of what it was like.

It wasn’t just the glossy brochure. It was, “Wow, these guys are on an airplane every day to somewhere different. They’re on meetings from dawn till dusk and beyond, and they’ve got stress you wouldn’t believe, and they look 10 years older than they are,” and so on and so on. After a couple of years, I was like, “Whoa, that is no longer my definition of success.” And now, my definition of success, really what I’m setting my life up for is to be able to be time and locationally-free so I can do what I want, where I want, for as long as I want.

Now, that doesn’t mean I need to have millions of dollars a month of income. It just means I need to be flexible enough to be able to go travel, hang out over here, hang over there indefinitely, and support myself and my family. And right now, we have some constraints in life because my kids are in school and we’ve committed to our kids that we will not move until they’ve finished high school. And so, we’ve got a couple of years into one place.

So, that’s my definition of success now, for right now, doesn’t involve as much travel as my definition for five years from now, because five years from now, my kids will be out of school. I don’t have to be here every day. So, we will be in lots of different places then. So, you can see, depending on life stage, the definition of success and the dream life is very, very different. So, yeah, you need to think about what do I really want now and what elements can I put in place now and what does that look like over time in the future? And so, therefore, what do I need to start putting in place to prepare for that?

One of the things when I started trading, I started trading stocks. Day trading is a really big thing, if you look at how many people are trading or trying to learn to trade and the proportion of those that are trying to learn to day trade, which means buying and selling multiple times during the one day. Most people who come to trading think, “Oh, I’m going to be a day trader.” But I don’t want to do that because that’s not my ideal life. I don’t want to stare at the computer screen all day. That’s not the life I want.

But at one time I thought I did, so I tried it. It’s like, “Oh, this sucks. This is terrible.” So, I readjusted my view of what my dream life was going to be like, and I made a shift.

Eric Mueller:

And I think that speaks volumes to me as far as the definition molding and changing over time. And it can change quick from weeks to months, even days, you can have your definition change. And another piece to that is what keeps you driven towards chasing success. And really a question that was on my mind when I launched this show was, what keeps successful people driven? Because you hit a certain level of success. Let’s say you’ve leveled up to the level of mastery. What keeps you pushing to the next level? Is it family? Is it that he’s shared about time and location independence? What is it for you, Adrian?

Adrian Reid:

That’s a great question, and I think this is something a lot of people get wrong because a lot of people think about the goal. “Oh, if I could just have a million dollars, if I could just have 10 properties, if I could just have, whatever it is, a Ferrari.” But the trouble is you get to that goal and you go, “Huh, all right, well, that’s a bit of an anti-climax, isn’t it?” The problem is it’s not about the goal. It’s about the journey to get to the goal and who you become along that journey. “I want to grow, right? I like to grow, I like to learn new things. I like to get better.” That’s the journey. That’s the thing. It’s not like what you get, the goals, the boxes that you tick along the way that’s incidental.

What happens is we set goals and the goal is there to guide and facilitate our journey to become the person that can achieve that goal. And then, when you get there, the person you now are is not someone who’s like, “I got my goal. I’m good for the rest of my life.” The person you now are is someone who can set a goal and figure out who do I have to become, what do I have to learn? What skills do I need? Who do I need to meet with to go on that journey to achieve that goal?

And if you set the right goals, you have a lot of fun along that journey and that becomes your purpose to grow and to become a bigger person and to contribute more and to help other people along the way and show people a path. So, it’s not the thing you are aiming for, it’s the path you follow to get there.

Eric Mueller:

That’s extremely profound. Honestly, hearing you say that and thinking to myself, I mean, it does blow my mind hearing you say that because I’ve heard it said several times, and hopefully, those of you listening really take it to heart. And people say it somewhat differently each time, but the theme is the same, that the focus on the goal as the endpoint is really not the right way to go about it. It’s that journey of growth.

And I know I personally struggle with that and being able to think about the progress you’re making and think about once you get to that, once you get the Ferrari or the 12 rental properties or whatever, I don’t know, tying into a material thing is also a risky thing. So, I appreciate you sharing that, Adrian. I think that by having that growth and that learning tied to what you want to become and your purpose, your why, so to speak, I think that really should help people listening.

And so, moving, blending this into your level of expertise in the trading space, I would bet a lot of people listening want to become better traders, better investors, build a life of financial freedom. What have you seen as far as the why most crypto and stock traders lose money? Because I think over time, and we’re not talking necessarily year-to-date for 2022. Obviously, it’s been an atypical cycle as far as loss there in the short term, but in the long term, people still don’t do a very good job investing I would say.

Adrian Reid:

You’re right. People do it generally do a terrible job of investing. Interestingly, it relates very tightly to what we just talked about. People focus on the making of the money instead of the becoming a good trader. If someone comes to me and says, “Okay, I want to make $5000 a month, can I do it?” Well, maybe, if you become a good enough trader, if you become the person that allows yourself to put money into your account and leave it there and maybe even add money to your account and grow it. You’ve got to become something different to win. And this is way more psychological than I thought we were going to get, which is fantastic.

Eric Mueller:

I love it.

Adrian Reid:

Yeah, totally. When you focus on the money as a trader or an investor, let’s say I’m buying X, Y, Z stock. It’s like, “Okay, I need X, Y, Z stock to go up so I can make money.” But that’s a huge problem because you are now sitting there hoping and expecting and needing and stressed about whether or not X, Y, Z stock’s going to go up. But you have no control, once you bought the thing, you have no control about whether it goes up, sideways or down. The only thing you have control about is when you are going to exit. But if you are going, sitting there going, “Okay, go up, please go up, please go up. I need to make money. I’ve got to make money. I want to be right. I want to make money.

I want to be a good trader, so I’ve got to make money. So it needs to go up.” And it goes down. You’re screwed. You don’t have a plan for that because all you had in your mind was, “I want to make money,” but you got to divorce yourself from the desire to make money and think about becoming a good trader. What does a good trader do or have? Well, a good trader has a set of rules or a process that they follow over and over and over again that is profitable.

And when they follow that process, they manage their risk by taking small trades and lots of them so that if something goes wrong, they don’t lose much. And they focus on following that process with discipline, with consistency, managing it at low risk. And once they’ve got that down, they grow to the next level by saying, “All right, that process, that strategy works. Let’s add another strategy that is diversified, that is different from the first one, and let’s get that one going. And then, let’s add another strategy and another strategy.”

So, when I’m trading, I’m trading multiple strategies across multiple markets, across multiple timeframes. I’m not reliant on one trading process to make me money. I have lots of them, which is a very different proposition to what most people do, which is, “Which stock should I buy?

Eric Mueller:

Boom, yeah.

Adrian Reid:

Which coin is going to move?” It’s like, no, wrong question. How do I become a profitable stock trader, how do I become a profitable crypto trade, is a way better question because it leads you down the path of finding the process that works. And when you’ve got a process that works, you’ve got something to follow over and over again. It’s repeatable. No one knows which one is going to go next. People will tell you what crypto token or coin is going to go to the moon, but they’re just guessing. They don’t know. They might hope. They might be trying to sell you something.

But if you have a process that systematically identifies the tokens, the coins that are really moving that are likely to keep going, and you buy them and you buy many of them in a diversified portfolio, then you have a process for when to get out so that you either capture your profits or cut your losses short, then you’ve got a fighting chance of success. Most people are focusing on, “I want to make money on this trade.”

You’ve got to elevate to, “What process should I follow? What system, what rules should I use?” And then, once you’ve got that right, you elevate to what portfolio of systems and rules and strategies should I use. We’ve got to go levels higher than what the masses do because the masses lose money.

Eric Mueller:

Interesting. Yeah. And I know looking on your website from what you do with Enlightened Trading is you teach people how to become that better trader. So, you teach them that process and how to find their system. So, systematic trading seems like a buzz term that I haven’t heard of really until I started researching what you do, Adrian, honestly. And it really got me thinking about how to develop my own strategy or system. And what you’ve said, you said it perfectly in one of the sections of your website that a good trading system is one that fits you.

And my question is how can we find the system that’s best suited for us? Obviously, you have some incredible resources that I’ll tag in the show notes for someone to become a client of yours, to learn from you and be a student. But even beyond that, what are some tips or strategies you can offer for finding a system that works for you?

Adrian Reid:

Yeah. Good question. Good question. Look, I can have the best system in the world, the best set of trading rules in the world. They could be massively profitable, but if they make you uncomfortable, if they stress you out, if they cause you to lose sleep, it will be very hard for you to follow. So, what I talk about is three things. The strategy you use has to match your personality. It’s got to deliver your objectives or fit your objectives, and it’s got to suit your lifestyle. So, personality, objectives, lifestyle, let’s cover each of these in turn. Personality first.

Eric Mueller:

Sure.

Adrian Reid:

If you are a really patient, considered person and you like to make a move and then let it play out and you’re not hyperactive. You’re a bit more considered and patient over time, you are going to want a very different strategy to someone who is a bit more hyperactive. You can tell when someone is a bit more short term, a bit more energetic and needs more action. Those two people are going to need a different trading strategy to keep their interest, to keep their emotions and stress levels down. Let’s say you are the hyperactive person, the person who really likes a lot of action, and I’m the really patient, considered person. And I give you my strategy, you’ll going to be like, “Okay, what’s next? What’s next?”

My response is, “Nothing, just chill. Just wait for a couple of months and we’ll see this move play out.” And you’re like, “What? No, I’m bored. What else can I do?” And you’re going to go off and ruin it. So, it’s got to match the personality. Objectives. Think about what you want to put into it in terms of time, how much time do you want to spend on your trading? You don’t want to spend eight hours a day all day staring at the screen, making your decisions and watching the market. Or do you want to spend 20 minutes as a side hustle and get on with your life?

And you can make money both ways, but you’ve got to be clear on that. I never wanted to stare at the screen all day looking at charts go up and down. I just want a method that makes me money, good returns, and I want to implement it and I want to do my stuff, do whatever else. But not everyone is like that, right? So, you’ve got to be clear on what do you actually want. You also need to be clear on your objectives for risk and return. Let’s say I have a really great profitable strategy and it makes 50% return per year, which by the way is phenomenal. But in order to generate that 50% return per year, you have to put up with fluctuations in your account of 30% or 40%.

It has dips because nothing is a straight line in trading and investing. And you get to a 30% dip in your account and you start freaking out like, “Whoa, I’m losing all my money. The strategy is broken, it’s not working. My wife’s having go at me for losing all my money and I’m not going to be able to retire.” That strategy doesn’t suit your objectives. So, you got to be clear on your objectives for risk and return and how much fluctuation you’re willing to put up with.

And then, finally, lifestyle is like, “Okay, do you have a day job?” If you’ve got a day job, when can you do your trading? Because it’s a process. It’s got to be done over and over again. It’s not like a random ad hoc thing you do. If you want to make money, you want to be consistent. And so, if you have a full-time job, you cannot be a day trader, full stop, the end. You cannot, because you will ruin it. You’ll make bad decisions, you’ll be caught into a meeting at exactly the wrong time. You’ll miss your stops.

Or if you try and do day trading at night, heaven forbid, you’re going to be exhausted because you’ve got your day job during the day. You’re trying to day-trade for four hours at night. You get three hours sleep, you wake up and try and do it again next day. You are either going to lose money, make mistakes, have a heart attack, or all of them. Yeah? So, it’s got to fit your personality, objectives, and lifestyle. And if you think about those, you can narrow it down a lot. And then, once you narrow it down, you can then get great at that thing instead of being average at everything.

So, let me bring this to life. I started trading when I was working a full-time job. There was a strategy consulting role. It was insanely busy. I was traveling every single week to different cities. Some weeks I was in three different cities, on three different projects in one week. And I did not have much time. So, my objective was build my wealth in the minimum amount of time each day while still being active in the market. Because I was fascinated and interested by it, and make sure I’ve got a strategy that I can do outside of market hours before I go to work or after I get home from work so that it doesn’t matter if I work late, I can still get it done and I can still make money.

I settled on trend following. Trend following is a strategy where basically you find stocks or cryptos that are going up, clearly going up, not just a little, little tick up, clearly moving up. If you sit back and look at a one-year chart, it’s going up and you buy them and hold them until they are clearly not going up anymore and they start going down. So, basically, you’re trying to take a big chunk out of a major trend. And the reason I settled on that is because I could code those rules into my software.

I could update my software data, run the rules in 10 or 20 minutes a day. I could place the trades when the market was closed, and that’s all I would have to do, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it until the next day. And it made a ton of money and it fit my lifestyle and it was easy.

Eric Mueller:

Yeah, that’s a great example because I think a lot of people listening are in that certainly some type of work, whether it’s part-time, full-time, you need to have income coming in to be able to fund your bills and your expenses and fund your life basically. It’s really getting me thinking about individually, how do I check those three boxes, starting with personality? And those of you listening, think of the same way and rewind this if you need to and listen back to that because I think it just goes to the core of finding out, like we talked about earlier, more on the success psychology piece is really what’s your why, what’s your reason? What is your purpose for where are you going?

And that is something to be completely transparent that I struggle with, and I’m sure a lot of you do as well. You may not have a clear path as far as where you’re going in a certain goal, whether that be in your career or your personal life. But sitting and spending time with that I think is probably going to be very beneficial, especially when we’re talking about trading and dealing with money and if you’re really trying to build something. So, yeah, Adrian, that’s very thought-provoking, honestly.

I think it really gets me thinking about one thing we can talk about, a plug for you too for your company. A lot of people probably are a little bit skeptical about some trading gurus. They see things, whether it’s on Instagram, social media, all these. Who knows what they’re doing, whether they’re bots or Ponzi schemes, what have you, and crypto, there’s a lot of fraudulent things going on, but you sum it up perfectly in your website that there’s something that clearly makes you different. And I would like you to just share that with the audience about what makes you different and not one of these trading gurus to be skeptical about.

Adrian Reid:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. And thank you for the vote of confidence. Look, you’ve got to look at what it is the person, the guru is pushing on you or selling or offering. Are they offering something that will make you better in that field, or are they offering you a quick fix, a little injection of some drug? Think about trading. Most people ask, “What coins should I buy? What stock should I buy? What should I do now?” And those are short-term one-off questions. And if you ask those and you go to some guru to get them answered, you become dependent on that guru. They are telling you what action you should take and you are disempowered.

My goal is to build empowered, self-confident, in-control profitable traders. So, I help people answer a completely different question. I have no interest in telling someone what coin to buy or what stock to buy because they are bad questions. Better questions are how can I set myself up for a lifetime of profitable trading that I can do independently without relying on some guru to tell me what to do every day? And the way you do that is you learn what works, what strategies work in the market, and you learn how to test and validate those strategies for yourself so you’re not just putting blind faith in someone else.

And you learn how to implement those strategies consistently and identify and remove mistakes from your process. What we’re talking about is becoming a trader, a professional trader, and you can do it as a side hustle. That’s totally fine. I did for many years. But if you’re going to make money in the market, you’ve got to be professional about it. You can’t just be like, “Oh, what should I buy next? What’s mooning now? Coin is going to give me my Lambo.” That’s bullshit.

Become a trader. Learn what that means to become a trader. And when someone tells you, “Buy this, sell that, buy this, sell that,” you are not a trader. You’re a monkey doing what you’re told. And you’re at their mercy, and most of them are idiots who are not even profitable themselves and they’re just taking advantage of you and stealing some of your money in the form of fees. What I want to do is build confident, independent, profitable, in-control traders. And so, the way I do it is I teach why a systematic approach or a rules-based approach to the market works.

I demonstrate it with actual rules and systems that do work. And so, I give my students a portfolio of systems, but that’s not enough because I can say, “Hey, use these systems, they’re great.” And you’re like, “Okay, I think I trust you, Adrian, so I’ll use them,” but you’re still not sure, right? There’s another level. The next level is I teach how to test and validate those rules for yourself because, look, I’ve been doing it for a long time, I can tell you what works, but until you have the confidence in them, you won’t truly become that trader, right?

And you also won’t truly be able to sit through the dips and the volatility that comes with being in the market because you’ll lose confidence. But if I empower you with the understanding with the rules that work and with the knowledge of how to test and validate those rules for yourself, then you can start answering your own questions. Then you become not at the mercy of some guru telling you what to do because, let’s say I give you a set of rules and they work and you go, “Hey, Adrian, I’m thinking that I’ve got these stocks and they’re all up. I reckon I should take profits. I’m up 50% on this stock and I’m up 60% on this stock.

Maybe I should take profits when I’m up 50% on each stock. What do you think?” I’m like, “Well, my response is why don’t you test it and see, because I don’t want you to be dependent on me.” So, what I’ve done is in the program with my students, I’ve empowered them with the knowledge of how to test those things. And you take those rules and you add your extra rule to it in the trading software and you test it over 20 or 30 years of history in stocks or over five or six years of history in crypto. And you say, “Okay, does that work? Does that make it more profitable?”

You got to be empowered to answer your own question so you’re not at the whim of some guru. That’s what I want for my traders. I want them to be empowered. Because if I fall off the face of the earth, I want them to be profitable. I don’t want them to go, “Oh crap, Adrian’s gone. What do I do now?”

Eric Mueller:

Yeah, no, wonderfully stated. I wanted you to say it because I knew you’d do it way better than I could as far as summarizing it. But the trader success system, the traditional non-crypto program that you offer, I just loved how that said that you wanted to create that independent person who knows how to do this, who isn’t reliant on which stock do I buy. So, I thought that was a really cool differentiator for me. So, those of you listening, if you’re interested in this, I think it’s definitely worth a look and check it out and see, evaluate some of the testimonials on there.

But I really do think that systematically, it sounds like that’s the way to go. And if I want to get serious about my investing, I know that that’s what I need to do is start developing systems and following rules because I’ve won and I’ve lost. And I’m sure you can attest to this too, Adrian, when you were learning back in the day and whatnot. Have you found that your students, are there any pitfalls that they struggle with early on, I mean, is there any computer coding issues in terms of running these programs?

I guess have you found on the spectrum, maybe your most successful and your most difficult student to teach? Is it a personality thing? Is it an age thing? Is there anything that you can think, so for someone who’s listening to think, “Hey, am I a candidate for this?” We can maybe set their mind at ease that you’ve seen at all, so to speak.

Adrian Reid:

Absolutely. Yeah, look, there really are some common traits and it comes back to what I said right at the beginning to your first question of what is your success portfolio, right? Because the students that do well are not necessarily the ones that already know how to code that have already got lots of experience in trading or already have a systematic mindset or those people can often do well. The biggest driver of success is the fascination with the markets, the curiosity to understand what is going wrong and not working right now, and the willingness to ask questions to be guided by someone who knows.

And it’s not questions like which stock should I buy? It’s, “How do I do this? Or, I didn’t understand that, can you explain it a bit deeper? Or I’ve tried to connect the software to the data source, but I’m getting this error. Why is that? And how do I resolve that?” As opposed to just throwing your hands in the air and going, “Ugh.” The people who just let the frustration come through inevitably struggle. And this is true in trading. It’s true in business, it’s true in your job. It’s true in your relationship. It’s like, whatever.

But if you get curious and ask questions, back to my original premise about my success portfolio and my success formula, then you do well. Now, that’s a personality driver. If you think about the type of person in terms of the skills that you need or you need to be able to learn to be a great systematic trader, you need to be able to think methodically, like if this, then that. Because it’s all just logical rules. If this and this and this happens, I’m going to buy. If this or this happens, I’m going to sell. It just calms the whole thing down. So, you need to be able to think in a structured, sequential way.

If you can do some basic math and analytics, it really helps. Because for someone who is completely qualitative, it’s quite tough to learn. You don’t have to be like university-level math, but 10th-grade math and being comfortable helps. And you also need to not be scared of computers. I’ve had some people that go, “Okay, well, I really want to learn to trade, but I just hate computers.” It’s like, “Okay, dude, I can’t help you. Because I’m going to have to teach you how to turn on windows. I’m going to have to teach you how to install software. I’m going to teach you how to use Excel.” It’s all of this stuff which is not trading. So, you need some basic computer literacy and confidence that will really help.

And you need to not be scared of making mistakes because you’re going to get things wrong. You’re going to have to ask questions because no one becomes a master overnight. But what’s interesting is I talked to my students at the beginning and they’re like, “Oh, my God, it’s a bit overwhelming. There’s so much to learn and there’s so much content.” And my courses have a lot of content because I want to build traders. If I just said, “Buy this stock, sell that stock, buy this token, buy this coin,” I wouldn’t need very much content. I wouldn’t have had to put anywhere near as much work into the courses as I have.

And frankly, I’d probably even make more money because people want the quick fix. “Tell me what to do,” is the helpless, “I just want the easy way,” that mentality. But that doesn’t work long-term and it’s not what drives me. I want people to become better, to be traders, not to just take my advice. It’s not about me, it’s about them. I want them to be successful in their own right. And so, I have the content to guide them through.

And what I find with my students is they get in the program and they look and I say, “Okay, first do this, then do this, then do this.” And I guide them through it. And some of them are going, “Oh, yeah, but I want that stuff. I want the advanced stuff.” So, they go straight there and then they get completely confused and overwhelmed, just ask 50,000 questions. I’m like, “Well, did you do the first step that I told you to do?” It’s like, “Oh, no, no, no, because I already know the basics. I just want to do the advanced stuff.”

Okay, let’s just calm it down, come back to the beginning, follow my process. Because I’ve done it with hundreds of people and it works. And it will get your mindset to the right place that you can become the trader that you need to be. So, people who will follow a process and learn from someone and be guided from someone who is already there where they want to be will also do really well.

Eric Mueller:

Yeah. Taking the emotions out of it, I think was a big takeaway that I thought of when I was reading about systematic trading, was if you have those rules, if then type thought process, thinking in that method way, basically like you’re sharing, that removes the emotions. So, you don’t get scared. You don’t panic sell. You don’t think that the sky is falling and you have to get out. So, that was a big takeaway for me in that regard.

And, Adrian, in closing, leave us with a final call to action. If we have someone who’s listening and wants to get into trading and investing, let’s take a complete novice example. Someone that’s really not done a whole lot of this. They have a 401k, maybe they’ve bought and sold individual stocks, but they are pretty much a novice. What would your call to action be for that person?

Adrian Reid:

Well, the steps I would go through is I would first decide, “Do I want to become a trader? Do I want to learn this?” Because if you don’t have that desire, if you don’t have that fascination with the markets, I’m going to say it’s going to be a long hard journey. But if you look at the markets and you look at charts of different stock prices or different cryptos and you go, “Wow, that’s really interesting, I really want to learn that,” then you should keep going. But if you look at it and go, “Ugh, I’m not really interested, but I should,” don’t do it. So, just be honest with yourself right upfront. It’ll just save you a whole lot of pain.

So, if you are the person that does want to learn it, that is fascinated by it, then what you want to do is find a guide who will empower you with knowledge and understanding and rules and systems that work and teach you how to evaluate those rules and systems. Like what I do. If you like me, great. If you don’t like my personality and demeanor and my Australian accent, that’s okay, I won’t be offended. But whatever you do, don’t go to someone that will just give you stock tips or crypto tips, say, “Buy this, sell this, buy this, sell that.”

I’ve done whole blog posts and videos about why it’s a terrible model. Basically, they’re probably not even profitable themselves, and it’s going to be very hard for you to be profitable, just taking tips from someone else, almost impossible. So, seek to actually learn and commit to that learning journey and realize there’s a lot to learn. The biggest mistake is people come to the markets and go, “Oh, in 30 seconds on my phone, I can open a brokerage account. I can get my Robinhood in the blink of an eye. I’m a trader.” It’s like, “No, you’re not. You’re an idiot who’s going to lose money.” So, don’t be fooled by the fact that it’s easy to get into.

There is a learning journey you’ve got to go on, and it’s exciting as hell because it is one of the best ways to make money, once you’ve learned. But don’t come into the markets thinking,” Okay, cool, I’ve got my Robinhood, and can I make $5000 a month and quit my job with my $5000 account?” No, you can’t. You will not. You’ll lose it all. And you’ll have to get back to your job and you’ll have to apologize to your boss for calling him a douche.

And the analogy I give is, if you want to become a brain surgeon, it’s like, “Oh, medical school’s really expensive. Maybe I’ll just practice brain surgery a bit and I’ll get some people to pay me for doing brain surgery so that I can pay for my medical school so I can learn to be a brain surgeon.” Dumbest idea ever. Because you’re going to kill hundreds of people trying to become a brain surgeon.

Think about the trading equivalent. “Okay, cool, I’m going to become a trader, but I don’t want to learn from Adrian, or I don’t want to actually pay for a course to really learn this because I don’t have the money yet, so I’ll just trade for a bit and I’ll make some money trading to pay for the trading course.” Again, dumbest idea ever because you are going to pay for your trading education one way or another, let me tell you. There’s two ways to do it.

There’s the fast and smart way, which is to find someone who is doing it successfully, who you can model and who will teach you the core skills, not just give you a stock tip or a crypto tip. Teach you the core skills, and learn from them and follow that path. Or you can go into the market and you can try and figure it out for yourself. And when you do that, you’re going to have losses and some wins and some more losses and lots more losses, and you’re going to blow up your account a couple of times and it’s going to take years.

So, there’s the fast way where you invest upfront and you get guidance from a mentor, and there’s the slow way where you take years and you blow up a lot of accounts and you miss that opportunity for compounding. And the challenge is people don’t think 10 years ahead. So, if you spent a little bit of money now in the grand scheme of things and learnt, in three months time, you’re a profitable, self-empowered trader, you can start compounding, growing your account.

Or if you don’t spend money upfront and you don’t commit to the learning and you just figure it out in the markets, then three years later, you finally figure it out, the light bulb goes off. And at that point, three years later, you can start compounding and growing your account. Now in 10 years time, which of those two people is going to be better off? The person who’s had 10 years of compounding, not the person who’s only had seven years of compounding. And that future impact, that impact on your future wealth is astronomically big.

So, you’ve got to learn and you’ve got to learn fast from someone who will empower you to have a lifetime of profitable trading so that in 10 years time, you are much wealthier than you would be if you took the slow route.

Eric Mueller:

And you get what you pay for, Adrian, right? You got to think too with the free stock tips or what’s the next crypto coin that’s going to moon. You’re likely not paying for any of that information. You’re probably seeing it on Twitter or somewhere. You get what you pay for. If you invest the money upfront to learn those skills, I think that’s the huge takeaway here is learning the skills necessary to do that. And, Adrian Reid, founder of Enlightened Stock Trading, thank you so much for being a guest. If someone wants to reach out and learn more from you, what’s the best way to contact you?

Adrian Reid:

Yeah, great. Thanks for asking. I’ve actually put together a bunch of resources that I think will help. I wanted to give some resources for free to your listeners so that they can really get a leg up and start moving in the right direction. So, if they go to enlightenedstocktrading.com/ericmueller, same as your podcast, it’s all one word. Then you can download what I’ve called the Crypto Acceleration Bundle, because a lot of people are interested in crypto right now so I thought I’d focus on that. And what it does, what you get is a combination of three things. There’s 20 Killer Trading Mistakes that crypto traders make.

And if you can just avoid those 20 mistakes, you’ll be better than 80% of people. And then, I’ve got a free course in there on how to think like a Millionaire Trader, like a successful trader. And that will open your eyes to say, “Oh, okay, that’s the path I’m going to follow.” And so, you can decide if that’s for you. And then, there’s articles that talk about the critical ingredients for success. So, go to enlightenedstocktrading.com/ericmueller and grab that, the Crypto Acceleration Bundle.

And I think the bigger thing though is regardless of whether it’s me or someone else that you learn from or books is commit to learning. If you’re a book learner, then go to my website, enlightenedstocktrading.com and look at the books there, or message me from the site and I’ll give you a list of books. I learned by reading 200 books on trading. And that was good for me. I could do that. It took some time. But if you like to do that, then good. Commit to the learning, read the books. If you want to do a course, then commit to that and do the course and ask lots of questions.

You can find me at the website. You can look at Enlightened Stock Trading on Facebook or on Instagram or on LinkedIn, and you’ll find me. Just message me and let me know what you need and I’ll do the best I can to help.

Eric Mueller:

Perfect. Yeah. And goes back to your success portfolio with your passion, continuous learning, and curiosity. I love that. I think that’s phenomenal. Adrian Reid, thank you, man, for being on. I will tag everything in the show notes. Those of you listening as well, go to ericrmueller.com/ericmuellershow. There, you’ll click to Listen Now. You’ll be able to access this episode with the show notes in which Adrian’s link that he just provided will be on there. So, just scroll down to the bottom of that. You’ll be able to access those wonderful resources. And, Adrian, thanks again, man, really appreciate it and we’ll look forward to catching up with you soon.

Adrian Reid:

Super fun. Great conversation. I can’t wait to share it with my listeners as well.

Eric Mueller:

Absolutely, man. Thanks.