Stock Market Update

Welcome to this week’s Enlightened Trader Newsletter. To be honest the markets have been pretty boring this week, no major excitement, no meaningful moves, no changes in direction.

About as much excitement that happened was the Hang Seng had a small burst of strength which was enough to turn my Hong Kong long side stock system on. The system has been basically flat since it entered.

So when I sat down to write my newsletter this week my immediate question was “What am I going to write about???”

I looked through a bunch of charts and found a few interesting things to share, but then it struck me that I was forcing it … I then had a little 2-year-old tantrum in my mind and 2-year-old me huffed out of the room saying I don’t want to write anything 🤣😂🤣😂 (true story).

But what I realised in this little interplay with my thoughts and my inner child, was that I was forcing it, and that is something that can be devastating as a trader. Sometimes there is no trade to take, no signal, no system making money and nothing stroking your ego saying, “You’re doing great!”.

In our trading we need to remember that there are times when it is not interesting and there is nothing to do at all… and THAT’S OK!

We should never try to force it and take a trade when there isn’t one. That is one of the reasons I love systematic trading so much – we just have to wait for the signals and take them… do that consistently over time and manage our risk and over time we earn returns in line with the expectancy of our trading systems.

I frequently remind my students in The Trader Success System that cash is a legitimate position (if you are not getting any signals from your systems) and that patience is one of the most important attributes for successful traders.

So I am sitting patiently at my desk working on system ideas, or entertaining myself building my new Aquaponics Kit or walking on the beach with Stephanie enjoying the sun while I wait for the markets to make up their mind and do something interesting.

So I am not even going to share the chart of the indices this week because it basically looks the same as last week’s chart and not much has changed!

Earlier in the week I did get the signal to close out all of my US Short positions which gave a small profit for this latest round of signals, so that was nice.

The markets are a bit boring at the moment so we keep waiting patiently and just take the signals our systems give us… let’s move on…

Trading Tip of the Week

I had a little giggle to myself just now because I was thinking that I should probably use “Patience” as the focus for my tip of the week… until I looked at the last newsletter I wrote and realised that I spoke about patience last week as well.

That is the perfect illustration of the point! 

So instead of patience, the message I want to share is about Expectations.

I had a great conversation with my Trader Success System members this week about the link between frustration and anger and where they come from.

In most cases, frustration and anger are the result of your expectations not being met. After all, when you expect something to happen and it does not happen, that is pretty annoying right?!?

But the kicker is this – we create our own expectations. Sometimes we do this consciously, sometimes not, but our expectations come from us nonetheless…

That means if we are angry or frustrated or impatient it is usually because expectations we came up with on our own are not being met…

And THAT means that we create our own anger, frustration and impatience!

So if we want to have inner peace…

(I know, I know, you are probably thinking “Holy crap that is super woo-woo, I didn’t sign up for this” and you might feel the need to do a backtest or an optimization just to get away… but bear with me here, this is important…)

So if we want inner peace, the trick is to be honest with ourselves about what we expect SHOULD happen, and then just let those expectations go. If we are being truly honest with ourselves, we really probably don’t have any control over whatever is going on anyway, so expecting a certain thing to happen is just asking for upset!

Once we let our expectations go, we are much more able to appreciate what IS happening rather than getting annoyed at what IS NOT happening.

Tony Robbins says,

When you trade expectation for appreciation, your life will change.

And in my experience this is 100% true. Whatever will happen will happen and if we can stop fighting it with all of our irrational and preconceived ideas and instead just appreciate what we do get to experience, then life becomes a whole lot easier.

So what does this have to do with trading?

Everything!

How many times have you said things to yourself like this:

• The market ‘should’ be going up by now
• I ‘should’ have made more money than this
• I ‘should’ be able to make money in these conditions
• The FED ‘should’ stop raising rates
• The broker ‘should’ have given me a better fill
• My stop loss ‘should’ have been filled more quickly

If you are anything like me, the answer is A LOT!

I call this ‘shoulding all over myself’ and it is uber destructive. Imagine letting go of all the expectations and just appreciating what is actually happening right here, right now.

That is the way to get into the zone and trade like a champion… develop new systems that work well… create amazing relationships… build your account… achieve your goals.

So the answer to success is clearly not in having expectations and getting irritated when they are not met. The answer is to set some clear goals, do the actions that you think will give you the best progress towards those goals, and appreciate what happens every step of the way.

My best trading moments and clearest insights have been when I am truly present and not distracted by all my expectations about what should or should not be happening.

Student of the Week

My student of the week is Henjo.

Henjo was having a bit of a block moving forward with one aspect of his trading and was brave enough to admit he needed help with it so he booked a TraderMind Mastery Session with me to work through it.

During our fantastic one on one discussion, it became clear that he had several beliefs that were in conflict about this particular aspect of his trading and this resulted in him being blocked and unable to move through it.

Once we worked through it and understood where these beliefs came from and inspected them Henjo was able to see the conflict, appreciate what each of those beliefs was attempting to do for him and then choose which one to let go so that he could move forward with confidence and conviction.

It was a super fun session with lots of deep discussion and insights that ultimately ended in a fantastic outcome!

Like it or not our psychology can hold us back, so if you are feeling stuck and just can’t seem to make the progress you want then one of these sessions might be just what you need.

News from EST

Last week I announced that we have launched The Crypto Automation Engine for Kucoin (so now members of The Crypto Success System can trade our systems on full automation for both Binance and Kucoin).

But our fantastic developer has not stopped there and I already have the Beta version for the Kraken exchange!

This means automation on Kraken it will be available very soon.

The great thing about this is on the Kraken exchange you can hold your money in USD (Fiat) rather than USDT, so it avoids the risk of stablecoins being less than stable. It also means that we now have 3 exchanges that the automation runs on so we can diversify to reduce our counterparty risk and still be automated!

Opportunity:

I am looking to expand the Enlightened Stock Trading website with more quality and well-researched articles, so I am looking for some writers. I will provide detailed writing briefs, and guidance along the way and edit everything that is written so you don’t have to be a professional writer.

I am looking for a very particular group of people, so please make sure you meet the following criteria if you are interested:

• You are an active trader (everyone on my team must trade)
• You know how to backtest
• You are fluent in written English
• You LOVE trading and are keen to research, learn and share things about trading
• You keep to deadlines
• You are able to take feedback and are coachable

If that sounds like you and you would like to get involved, email me directly (e: [email protected]) to let me know and we will take it from there.

On the Home Front

Our son was away at camp this week, so our youngest got to be the only child for a week during the school holidays. We had dinner out with the three of us and watched 3 out of the 5 Pirates of the Caribbean movies together. I thought the movies are pretty fun, but just between you and me, Stephanie isn’t a fan 😆. It is always great getting to spend focused time with the kids – I really appreciated the chance!

Are you out there?

If you got this far reading my newsletter then I would love to know… sometimes I wonder how many people read my newsletters and whether they are helpful to you, so if you got to the end, please comment and just say “read it” to let me know.

That would be awesome!

If you have any trading questions please add those to the comments as I would love to help you out.

Trade Well

Adrian Reid

Founder, Enlightened Stock Trading