- [Tom] So then I was looking around for what careers made loads of money and I had the retail traders perspective of people in the city trading for a living and making millions of pounds and so maybe arrogant maybe a bit of a challenge although I like giving myself challenges, but I said what makes them better than me and gave myself the challenge to see whether or not I could learn and to become profitable. I quickly looked around the internet, did some due diligence, some research, and realized there was a massive proportion of the retail trading space that's purely there to part you from your cash and with no interest of actually turning you into a profitable trader.

- [Brandon] One of the biggest problems with especially with retail traders is unrealistic expectations and what I mean by that is like it's really hard and it's not there fault most of the time because like you go online and you see these chimps on Instagram who are posting you know they've made a screenshot of what probably is one of their thousand demo accounts that they just made fifteen hundred dollars trading whatever because when you're mobile you can't see the difference on an MT4 the difference between a live and a demo account when they show you a screenshot. And so people see this stuff and they think and then they obviously have something to sell you as well and people see this stuff and they think, "oh well I can do this too" and rightly so to them. If one person can make 15 hundred dollars on a trade then you should be able to do it too if you have the information that they have, but the problem is is that I think everybody doesn't give enough credit to put the time in like doing the work and actually putting in that time cause it's kinda like mountain climbing. You've got if you put two guys together and one person been climbing for 25 years and who's climbed really big peaks and all that kind of jazz and then some person who just went out and just bought a bunch of fancy equipment and it's their first time and they think they're gonna get to the top of Mount Everest or something like that. Like it's pretty unrealistic to that person that new person whose got flashy equipment is gonna be able to do it without killing themselves. And so same is true with trading. The unrealistic expectation is just that on one point you can't blame people because that's what they're sold and that's what they're told, but then the other thing they bring that in there and it's just like you're not gonna make it a thousand percent in your first month regardless of what the Instagrammers or the other people selling you information online tell you. It's just time to reel it back in like I always tell people if you can make between like say two to five percent per month and you do it that's in a scalable way. Like none of this scalping stuff where you take two or three pips, but like 30, 40, 50, 60 pip profits that kind of stuff, that's scalable. Like there are investors that would love to give you a ton of money if you can show them a track record that says you make an average of four percent per month with a drawn down of three percent whenever you have bad losing streaks. You can literally leverage that up like there are people I know one guy who he trades I think he's got about 100 million under management and he started off with a five thousand dollar account, but he just traded that five thousand bucks like it was gold like it was actually really valuable to him and just made two, three, four percent on that and now he's making he's raking in the kinda cash that people are told they can rake in, but what they're not being told is that it took 'em eight years to get there.

- [] I would say what helped me the most in trading and in my personal life or in my professional life as well is I was always a perfectionist and that doesn't help at all. So once I recognized that I have to stop being a perfectionist everything took off. It was really amazing it's like just I'm pretty sure most of you have tried a diet before or tried to be very consistent with one thing. And you started out, you are highly motivated, and then you stop one day, you fail one day. Everyone fails, right? No one is a machine, I mean it just doesn't happen, everyone fails. And then you just destroyed a perfect diet, for example, you dieted for 20 days you one day you go on a binge and you eat 500 marshmallows and then you feel like you failed, you destroyed your perfect diet and you stop. And that's exactly where you should keep going because everyone fails and real success is made the day after you fucked up, right? So no one is perfect, and don't be a perfectionist, just keep going, steady, steady, steady step-by-step and don't worry too much about the little drawdowns, ups and downs and so on.

- And then one year my father-in-law said to come down to Hong Kong, I've got this great way of making money and we started trading in Hong Kong Tail Market and it wasn't hard. It looked to me, it was trading a very night top range and I thought if I can sell the top and buy at the bottom, you know, easy money, right? Um and I did that for about, I was supposed to stay for about four weeks and ended up staying about six or eight something like that and at the end of that period I made enough money to be able to buy my wife a fur coat and I had a little bit extra for myself so I thought, this is it, you know, I love this, time's my own, I'm gonna get to trade, talk to my wife I said I'm gonna sell the legal practice and she said yeah. We're all in agreement and just before I left the last ten days, last week before I left Hong Kong gold broke out and the ten or fifteen percent I'd kept for myself I blew the account, but I'd known that you know, I just said I'm not gonna worry about that. Sold the legal practice and 12 months later I'd blown all the money for the legal practice. So that's how I got started.

- Okay, okay.

- If you ask me how my wife's gonna kill me, she hates me telling this, but if I have to put the success, call it to blame, if I blame anybody for my success it's my baby because for seven or eight years. First successful year was 1987. Sold the legal practice in about 79, 80? So that period, that seven or eight year period the only reason I kept afloat cause I lost about 750 thousand Australian dollars. You're talking a couple a million nowadays in today's currency you know that was 19. She was the one that supported us you know and I basically got to really understand what trading was all about, the probability and so on. When I did a course with Pete Steidlmayer in Chicago and she was the one that funded that and she was living on 25 bucks a week so tell you, you asked my how I turned it around. Firstly, you need the support of your wife especially someone like Chrissy and then I think I came to realize and that's what Pete taught me that it's not about patterns, it's not about it's about the psychology of buyers and sellers and yes profile is something that will identify that for you, at least it did for me, but it's always about the psychology of buyers and sellers. You've gotta get in there and say, "What is this chart telling me about whether the buyers have exhausted themselves or the sellers exhausted themselves or we're trading a value area where you know this fair price for both parties and I think that to me was the key. My understanding of the market came from that idea. So I really do believe depend, it doesn't matter whether your personality is better off as a discretionary cradle like I am, or someone who is mechanically inclined, I think you should start with a very simple mechanical system and make sure it's got an age obviously some sort of age, but just learn that trading involves execution of a methodology irrespective of what's happening emotionally for you. You know you handle your emotions, but you have to execute that plan. Once you get that under your belt then you go on to other things. You can become a discretionary trader because by then you've understood okay, I find a way, a set of rules that will work for me, I'm going to follow them and we go from there and he saw my trading results and he said, "right, I think you could be successful in this area" and he got me interested so we managed to raise IPO, we call it an IPO for 20 mil that's how we started.