Prop Diaries EP7 – Reinventing Yourself
I haven’t written a blog in a while, so this will be a long overdue explanation of what’s been going on within the prop firm. A lot has changed; for example: I have another trader who seems to be doing rather well named Miller, who fully comprehends most of my trading system. He is a hyperscalper. Next, I have an assistant coach named Yuki, somebody who has no experience coaching traders. However, he’s coached people in video games before. Somebody who’s also not consistently profitable. However, the big elephant in the room we’re going to talk about is Chronik, the one trader whom I’ve been talking a lot about within this blog series.
As much as I would love a fairy tale story, a one-hit wonder, getting my first prop trader to be consistently profitable, that’s not the case. Chronik has come very close to blowing out his account. Now for the last two weeks he has been on a tactical pause where we’ve been training and having him do drills. Chronik’s issues are multiple reasons. I remember doing a live stream on my Fat Cats of Wall Street channel and a lot of traders wanted to give me input on what was going on with Chronik. However, it’s like buying a used car. Typically there’s not one problem. Maybe the tires need to be replaced because they’re really bad. It needs a tune-up, the spark plugs need to be replaced as they’re fouling. Maybe it hasn’t had an oil change in a really long time and there’s sludge building up in the engine. These are all individual problems with the car, however in order to get the car to perform as reliably as possible, all of these problems need to be addressed.
This is what’s going on with Chronik. It’s multiple issues. Childhood issues are definitely a big part of it. He consistently expressed how his father just let him smoke weed and not do homework. He dropped out of high school, and he just… could do whatever he pleased. A child who’s raised without discipline will have a hard time, as an adult, to get their own shit together. Now, I did have a little bit of discipline growing up myself. However, I can relate a lot to Chronik. We both have Attention Deficit Disorder, which I think is not a real thing. I think focus is a skill set that can be practiced. I also think that doing intermittent fasting can help substantially with focus. As the brain starts to run off of ketones, instead of things like carbs and sugar.
As I have Chronik do drills, it’s usually 30 minutes to an hour, depending. My assistant coach named Yuki, whom we’ll talk about at a different time, which I know is new news for you. As this specific blog episode is going to be primarily dedicated to Chronik. Yuki and I have spoken a lot about Chronik. We’ve actually been using ChatGPT and having it listen to our conversations and help us formulate plans to help him out. AI is becoming increasingly a more valuable tool within my trading and everyday life. It took me a while to finally see the light. Since Chronik is pretty close to blowing up an account, he’s not to trade it. Because if he blows it up, he’s out of the firm. Yuki and I have come to the conclusion that he really doesn’t have solid edge. I’ve traded with him side-by-side for months, and Yuki has come to a conclusion that Chronik leans on me way too much for pattern recognition.
Chronik needs to identify something I call slip ranges, and if slip ranges aren’t present, he has to identify something called trapping. These are going to be price action patterns, usually on a smaller time frame, roughly about 1 second to 10 seconds. He’s to drill consistently, and he needs to get an 80% win rate every day for a week before we allow him back on his account. Which, funny enough, is an account he pays for. However, Yuki has the Rithmic logins for the Prop Traders, so he can lock them out to the best of his abilities. So edge is definitely a big thing with Chronik.
The next big glaring issue is his focus. As I drill with him, I’m keeping track of how long he can focus for. Fatigue is a silent killer in trading that most, if not everybody, never speaks about. Fatigue is so bad that there is no outperforming it. Trading requires high amounts of sustained focus for many hours at a time. Personally, for me, going beyond two hours, I start to degrade rapidly. Chronik’s focus seems to be around that 25-minute mark. As we work with Chronik, we are figuring out where that focus is, so that way we can potentially create a solution around that. This is something I want to talk more about in the future. Fatigue. Often, traders think the longer they sit here, the more money they will make. However, that’s not the case. The longer they sit here, the sloppier they get. I see that pretty universal across many traders. In fact, I think creating a tag based off of how many minutes or how many hours you’re sitting in the market for could be a good tag in Tradecraft to track fatigue, now that I’m writing about it. For example, having the loop timer run every 30 minutes and then tagging with a 30-minute tag and then having an hour-long tag and then having an hour-and-a-half-long tag. I’d be very interested to see the performance around that.
The next glaring issue with Chronik is his lack of discipline. His father let him do anything as he was growing up. He’s in his mid-twenties currently, and it’s starting to haunt him as an adult. An undisciplined child will be affected as an adult. His father let him smoke weed, skip school, and just do as he please. And as an adult, he sort of just can’t do anything difficult. He has a quitter mentality. He quits everything and is okay with mediocrity.
When trading gets difficult, he tends to shut down and just wants to quit. Chronik had mentioned to Yuki and I multiple times how he thinks his childhood is causing issues. And the funny thing is, if you really put in a lot of time working with a trader such as I am, some form of issues outside of trading that’s related to how you were raised impacts your trading. I’ve seen that a handful of times with other traders. Luckily for me, I have tools to address these issues. This is why I think my prop firm has more edge than other prop firms as far as raising a consistently profitable trader goes.
The Magic of Hypnosis for Trading Edge
I have the ability to work magic through hypnosis and other psychological techniques to radically shift traders. I’ve been experimenting with traders for some time now, and I’ve been seeing some interesting results. I feel very confident in my abilities to do this. In fact, I’ve done these things for myself in order to become successful. One thing I did with Chronik was something called quantum timeline therapy. It’s an NLP technique, or neuro-linguistic programming. He basically gets put into a meditative, sort of hypnotic state, although it is not true hypnosis, and then I have him visualize the timeline of his life and recalling the earliest events of specific emotions, such as anger. Often when I do this with other people, it’s usually within their childhood. Sometimes it can be generational, where they feel it’s coming from a parent. We worked on anger, sadness, and fear, recalling these events. It was such a deeply emotional event for him after our session, which is good, because oftentimes when people make drastic changes in their life, it’s usually from deep trauma or hitting absolute rock bottom. You do not need necessarily to experience extremely horrible things to make changes. The reason changes happen when you experience horrible things like that is because your emotional button is getting pushed on, and your emotions are extraordinarily amplified.
For example, a couple of months ago, my girlfriend wasn’t paying attention as she was running late to work and ran a red light. She assumed it was going to turn green because she knows this light, and she doesn’t remember it being any color as she was in her head. She got T-boned by a Toyota Prius. Luckily, she was okay. She was banged up pretty bad, and so were the people in the other vehicle. She did not need to go to the hospital, neither did the other drivers. However, that shook her up so much, and the reason being is in that moment, she had an intense emotional release beyond what we normally experience on the day-to-day. And because of that intense emotional release, she will pay attention to these lights, and she has.
As far as Chronik’s Quantum Timeline Therapy, we did manage to hit a deep emotional response. Now I won’t be able to pull off a big enough emotional response like a car accident, but I can typically draw upon a very amplified emotional response. Now as the trading progressed with him, we were still having other issues. He had a lot of contentment issues, and as far as I can see, we’ve potentially fixed them at this point. This is something I will have to check in later.
Chronik, however, does claim that things have been substantially better since then. But again, there are other issues, such as his quitter mentality, that need to be addressed. This is something we were still struggling with. And I could tell within this quitter mentality, he really didn’t want it, but I wasn’t sure how bad he didn’t want to be a quitter. So I used another NLP technique, which I can’t remember the technical name of. However, the way it works is he stands in one corner of the room and basically yells at the quitter version of himself, visualizing it, talking to his quitter version as if it’s a real human standing on the other side of the room. And I just let him unload. Because oftentimes we as humans have these thoughts about ourselves, but we never truly address them. And this was his chance to address it. Then what I have him do after that is he stands in the shoes of that quitter version. And then he talks to the version of himself that wants to be successful. And what was interesting is the quitter version told successful Chronik that basically there’s no excuse for what he does. But to remember that the quitter version is still a part of him. Finally, I have Chronik third-party. What this means is he stands in a different area of the room and pretends to be somebody who doesn’t know these two people, quitter version and successful version of Chronik. And then he explains what he’s seeing.
After this, I gave him some time to take a break, and then we reconvened shortly. Next, I employed a technique called parts integration. What he does is he sits in a chair and he visualizes the successful version of himself in one of his hands. He chose the right hand, and then he visualizes the quitter version in the other hand. He explains to me what they look like. The successful version being in good shape, having a clean-cut haircut, a nice well-kept beard, bright colors, a watch, a tucked-in shirt. The quitter version having a dark hoodie with dark colors and just not wanting to be seen.
What I do is I have him explain what these two versions of himself want. Obviously, the successful version wants success, and the quitter version wants to just be left alone and not to be talked to. However, the conflicting parts within everybody always want the same thing, and with this technique, it’s my job to uncover what that commonality is. For example, the quitter version wanted to be left alone, so I would say, for what purpose? Chronik would say, for peace. And I would ask him, and how would that make you feel? I could tell with the quitter version he was fighting it, because negative words would continuously pop up. What I’m trying to do is probe for positive words, common positive words between the successful part and the negative part.
Finally, he brought these parts together. Coach Yuki and I repeated, “loving yourself, happy, a life worth living,” drawing upon deep emotions. Chronik was breathing heavily, clearly moved.
A few hours later, I called Chronik and asked, “How do you feel?” He said, “I’ve been smiling for two hours straight. I feel like I was reunited with a friend. I’ve never been this happy in my entire life.” This was a good sign for me, because I hit an extreme emotion.
As I check in with Chronik, I will update you guys in the blog. Stay tuned to hear how this Chronik saga unfolds.