Finding A Trader To Follow | Podcast Episode #438

0:07
Hey, I’m Ryan Mallory and this is my swing Trading the Stock Market podcast. I’m here to teach you how to trade in a complex, ever changing world of finance.

0:16
Learn what it means to trade profitably and consistently, managing risk, avoiding the pitfalls of trading, and most importantly, to let those winners run wild.

0:25
You can succeed at the stock market and I’m ready to show you how. Hey everybody, this is Ryan Mallory with shareplanner.com’s Swing Trading the Stock Market.

0:35
And today’s episode, we’re going to talk about traders to follow out there. Now, one of the reasons why you guys listen to this podcast because there’s a level of credibility that you’ve attributed to it. If you’re listening to this podcast for the first time, this is the first episode that you’re listening to me on. You’re wanting to see if there’s credibility to what I’m talking about here.

0:53
So for today’s episode, I wanted to talk about the swing traders to follow or the swing traders to subscribe to. Now this isn’t a self promotion thing at all. That’s not what I’m doing here. What I’m trying to do is help you guys out because whether you choose to follow me on Twitter or subscribe to a service or follow somebody else that’s more suitable to your liking, what I want you to do is be to be equipped to not fall for a lot of the scams that are out there.

1:18
So today’s e-mail comes from a guy who didn’t necessarily write me to have a podcast done off of it, but he’s emailing me about my services. And I I thought instead of just responding to him directly, which I’ll still do, I also wanted to make a podcast episode out of it. So obviously I’m definitely not using his real name. I’ll give him a fake Florida red nickname of Wilbur. Wilbur is pretty solid redneck name there.

1:46
There was actually a guy, I think he played for the Redskins named Wilbur Marshall. He was a pretty good defensive player too, but I think that was like 80s. I think I played with him on Tecmo Super Bowl with the original Nintendo system. So that goes back away.

1:59
So Wilbur writes. Hello, I discovered your site through an AI search on swing trading. Well that’s pretty cool. That’s a first. I didn’t know I would pop up on swing trading, but I guess I did. I’m interested in learning how to swing trade. As you know, there are hundreds of sites selling coaching lessons, etcetera for all the types of stocks and options these days online. I have no idea what realistic average annual returns for a swing trading might be for say A5 year period.

2:25
It seems the more credible sites are now sharing their results by sharing their actual statements. Are you doing this? And if so, how can I access them to see your track record? Thank you, Wilbur.

2:34
OK, good questions. I think it’s an honest question guys. Starting off, he’s trying to figure out who to follow, what to see out there and pop up on that Google AI search engine thing. And that’s pretty cool, but he doesn’t know anything about me. So this is a honest e-mail to probably right somebody and this is much you got to be careful about what you see out there on the Internet. I guess nowadays you got to be careful about what the AI stuff might be telling you too, especially from like if you’re asking a trading questions and so forth, because they can actually give you the wrong information as well.

3:04
Now, do I think he’s given the wrong information by saying that I’m a good swing trader? No, I think that was a good result there. But funny story about the AI stuff is that I got a bunch of nieces and nephews and one of them, he will Fact Check you in real time when you’re telling him a story or whatever, just to see if it’s possible that you might be exaggerating or not.

3:22
But when I was in college, I wrote the UCF Creed for the university and I forgot that I even did it. When my daughter was graduating from college not too long ago, they had all the kids stand up and read the UCF Creed. It was on the back of the program. And I’m looking at that. I’m like, isn’t that what I wrote back in like 2000?

3:44
I’m like, holy cow, that thing is still in existence. I don’t know what the exact date of it was, might have been like 2001 or 2002, but nonetheless, I wrote it. I forgot I did it. And so during the graduation, I was like turning the program over and I’m looking at the UCF credoms, like leaning over to my wife saying I wrote that, that right there. I wrote that.

4:02
And then I leaned over to my kids on the other side, the two boys, and I said I wrote that and they didn’t, they didn’t believe me, like right. So then I Googled it and I was able to pull it up. I was shocked that there was actually an article on the website that talked about it. And then of course, when I was telling the story about that the other day, because I went to my niece’s wedding up in South Carolina, I was telling them the story about how I wrote that creed and, and how it just popped up the other day. And I didn’t even realize that they were still using that.

4:25
Well, my nephew is suspicious. He’s like, I don’t believe this guy. He’s exaggerating. And then he used the AI and it said Ryan Mallory wrote the UCF Creed. So I thought that was a kind of a funny story to share. It was kind of fun being validated by AI, but in this case, I guess I’m 2 for two because now AI is saying that I’m a recommended swing trader on on their platform.

4:50
So very cool stuff. But that’s the point of the story is, is that you can use this stuff to Fact Check or you can use it to get a definition for what something might mean. There’s a lot of cool applications for AI.

5:04
But, and I’ve talked about this in another episode, I’d be careful about asking, OK, what is a winning trade for me? Because there are limitations to swing trading. And I don’t think that it’s ever going to apply to the financial markets in the sense that it’s going to give you a winning trading system.

5:10
Because if it’s giving you a winning trading system, it’s probably going to give a million other people the same trading system or a variation of it. And then it’s just going to cancel each other out.

5:18
So be able to keep AI unique. And there’s a lot of services out there that are now using AI is like, oh, we have a great AI software. Again, I don’t think it’s bad for finding out facts. And even then it can, it can mess that up, as I’ve already mentioned. But to depend on it for your trading, I think it’s a huge error to do that because one, AI is very much in its infancy still.

5:48
They’re giving you that information. There’s probably a million other people that are asking for that same kind of stuff. And they’re going to be telling them the same thing or some kind of variation of it. For instance, when I’ve played around with it in the past, I would say, hey, give it a generic, you know, question like, hey, give me a winning trading system that doesn’t have more than a 5% drawdown and has a 2 to one reward risk ratio.

6:11
I talked about this in another episode. I just a recent one, like a couple episodes ago. So definitely check that out. But you would get something that says, oh, when the stock bounces off the 50 day moving average and you have an RSI that’s curving upward and a MACD that’s turning positive, that is the time that you want to get in. And when it’s curving downward and the RSI is coming off of over solo territories, then you want to get out.

6:36
OK. You know how many times it’s probably told a million other people that’s the exact strategy. So you you can’t depend on it for trade. So there’s services out there that are going to do that. And you should be highly, highly suspicious of it because then there’s really no ingenuity behind what they’re trying to do.

6:51
There’s no experience that they’re trying to sell you. They’re trying to essentially tell you that they’ve leveraged AI to be able to harness winning trades, and that’s simply not the technology’s not there and I don’t think it’ll ever be there because of it. They’re giving it for one, they’re giving it for a million people.

7:05
And if they’re charging you for it, that’s even Dumber because you can probably get AI, ChatGPT or whatever platform you’re using, probably give it to you for free. So one of the things that we can start off for is when you’re looking at a swing trader and who to follow some of the people to avoid because there’s a lot of charlatans, there’s a lot of scam artists out there.

7:27
I mean a ton of them. I mean, you don’t have to look further than any stock market video on YouTube and you got in the comment section 1,000,000 people that are bots talking about their success being attributed to some random crypto guru, right?

7:42
But what not to look for, one is guaranteed success or returns. The market is not a guarantee. Success is not guaranteed a winning trade record. I’ve seen some they’re like, oh, we win 95% of the time.

7:55
That’s bull. And if you’re selling naked calls, I guess technically you could have a pretty good record of being in the 90 percentile. As soon as you have one trade that goes against you, you’re going to be wiped out.

8:05
So guaranteed success and returns are absolutely a red flag. I can’t guarantee success every year. I can’t guarantee success every day, every week, every month. You just can’t do that.

8:20
Every year the market is different. Every year the market is invalidating trading systems out there because something happens that the trading system is never been able to back test for before. There’s new variables being introduced, like for instance, this year one of the the big popular themes has been zero DTE trading, zero days to expiration. That is created a whole other influence on the market.

8:44
The extent of buybacks that we’re seeing has created a huge influence over the last few years. So yes, there’s systems being invalidated all the time. And that’s one of the scary things about trading systems is that trading systems don’t really adjust to new variables being introduced into the market.

8:59
Retail traders used to be almost non existent in the stock market 20 years ago. Now with Commission free trading, they’re everywhere. So a person that’s guaranteeing success or a certain amount of returns, total garbage. That’s 99% chance that’s a scam.

9:17
Magic indicators. Magic. It’s good to have indicators. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have indicators. In fact, I sell an indicator on my websites called the Stock Market oscillator.

9:24
I like it. Is it a crystal ball? No, but it gives you direction. It gives you a feel for what the markets doing. If there’s divergences, if the market’s turning bullish, if it’s turning bearish, it’s good for that if it’s getting oversold, if it’s getting overbought.

9:37
But a magic indicator that says OK this thing is a Holy Grail to swing trading or investing in the stock market cannot go wrong with this magic indicator. You just need to download the indicator and you’re guaranteed success. Again, guaranteed success is a bad thing.

9:53
Magic indicator is really bad because the more people that use the indicator. That’s why I’m not a huge fan of RSI basing systems off of RSI and MACD because so many people use them.

10:02
It’s already kind of already watered down as it is. And that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for them, but I’m trying to back test off of those things can be really difficult.

10:11
Here’s another one for you guys. And I’m going to preface this because I know there’s some young folks that are listening to me. And I don’t mean to be offensive and telling you. In fact, a huge part of the people who listen are very young to this podcast.

10:24
But if a person looks like they’re still a teenager, probably not worth following. And the reason for that is so much about the stock market revolves around experience.

10:33
And so if you’ve only been trading, you’re 19 years old, good chance you’ve only been trading for four or five years. I can tell you I started trading when I was 11 years old, when I was 18. I was, I didn’t, I still really didn’t know what the heck I was doing.

10:46
I had experience, but I was still learning quite a bit. There’s someone that looks like they’re extremely young, not that they can’t have success in the stock market, but to depend on them to be able to provide you with that success in the market is a pretty wild expectation.

11:01
They haven’t seen enough. If you’ve only been trading since 2020, you’ve I’ve seen very, very little of what the stock market can do. I’m starting to get older.

11:11
I’m 44 years old. But when I look at some of the things that I’ve traded through the dot-com bubble, the great financial crisis, COVID, 2022, I have seen a lot of things. And so when we have events like we had just a couple weeks ago where the S&P 500 was gapping down 200 points, I wasn’t really worried.

11:30
You know, I’ve been there. I’ve done that before. I was actually short on the market, which was nice. And so I was, I knew when you get that 200 point gap down, go ahead and close out that position. That’s a, that’s a pretty nice gift.

11:40
And since then, the market’s just gone straight through the roof. But someone that looks like they’re still a teenager, you know, or if they are, obviously if they are a teenager, there’s a lack of experience there and you really need somebody that’s gone through the ringer.

11:51
Another is selling their lifestyle. And man, I remember back in the 2000s, people were surrounding themselves with lambos. And I guess the next two points are the same, selling their lifestyle or selling their wealth. I’ll combine these two.

12:03
They would be talking about their Lambos, they would have girls in bikinis and everything else. I am seeing the same exact thing, except they’re just trying to appeal it to a different generation.

12:14
You know, look at the the travelling that I do. I’m always trading and travelling, trading and travelling. But I only have to trade for like 10 minutes a day. And we’ll get to a point on that one in a second. But there’s plenty of people out there that are trying to sell you their lifestyle.

12:25
Let me tell you, trading is boring. For one, it’s a lot of time. I have to go to watch lists every weekend, every day, every morning. I go through probably 1000 charts a day.

12:35
It’s a lot of work. I’m not in a fancy Wall Street office. I’m in an office inside my house. I used to have an office in downtown area that I live in, but I moved it back during the COVID. And I like working out of home. It’s great.

12:47
Go downstairs, make myself a Sammy when I need one. Couldn’t ask for more. I like it here. But these folks that, you know, they’re trying to sell themselves working on a laptop with mahogany walls surrounding them in a beachside view behind them from their 100th floor penthouse in New York City.

13:03
I guess there isn’t any beaches in New York. But you get the point. Is there beaches in New York? I guess there’s got to be some kind of water up there.

13:09
I know it’s close to the beaches, but I don’t, I haven’t been to New York City. That show it shows you right there how, how knowledgeable I am about Wall Street and you know, the location of Wall Street and New York in general. I don’t go there that much.

13:22
So selling their wealth, selling their lifestyle, that’s definitely something to be concerned about. Now, what makes this even more funnier from a podcast standpoint is this is usually the part where I talk about swingtradingthestockmarket.com.

13:31
It feels a little bit more shameless here today doing that because I’m talking about the other services, but I’m going to do it anyways. And if you feel like I’m a person that checks the boxes off, I’ll say that if I’m a person that checks off the boxes, check out swingtradingthestockmarket.com.

13:44
It takes you to my SharePlanner website and supports this podcast as well. But in the process you’re going to get all my stock market research each and every day. Nothing guaranteed, nothing promised, just my research, and that’s going to include videos of my stock market updates, mega cap updates, also doing watch list reviews.

14:08
So every morning I send out a watch list of stocks that I’m looking to potentially buy or short, and then I later in the afternoon I do a watch list review on those. So definitely worth checking out there. Also my bullish and bearish master watch list that I send out at the beginning of each week. We’re, I’m going to be curating a lot of my trade setups from, so check that out swingtradingthestockmarket.com.

14:25
I’m still laughing about the fact that I’m throwing that in there right in the middle of this podcast. So what do you want?

14:29
What do you want from a service? What do you want from a trader that you’re wanting to follow?

14:34
One thing that you should be asking is what is the risk to this service? If they’re only selling you the potential reward, they’re showing you how shallow they are as a trader, they have no concept of risk management.

14:45
If they’re only saying, hey, you’re going to get rich if you follow this, it’s guaranteed success, guaranteed rewards. They’re pretending to sell you reward, but all you’re doing is buying a lot of uncontrollable risk.

15:00
Guaranteed. That’s a guarantee. If they’re just selling you rewards, definitely a guarantee. They’re selling you nothing but risk, and you’re going to be assuming all of it.

15:11
Careful with the crafty marketing too, guys. It’s getting better and better out there.

15:16
I mean, a lot of people spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on marketing. I market myself, but I tell you what I market myself through, and that is through knowledge.

15:25
I don’t buy Instagram ads. I don’t buy YouTube ads.

15:29
I mean, I’ve thought about it before, but I don’t. My marketing budget—0 right now. I don’t market myself.

15:36
I’ve been out there since 2007. So I survived a lot, a lot of movements in the stock market, that’s for sure.

15:41
But crafty, I don’t have any marketing really. I mean, my marketing is really the knowledge that I already provide for free.

15:48
And then if you want more than that, sure, you can sign up for something, but I’m not putting, you know, these fancy videos together.

15:54
And that’s another thing. A lot of people were talking about, oh, look, I’m showing you my returns. And that’s what this guy’s asking me to do is like, hey, I want to see your returns.

16:00
I want to see your statements. That’s fine. And you can ask for that, but I don’t put my returns out there. And there’s a reason for it.

16:06
For one, returns can be faked. People will show you their statements from Schwab or from whatever brokerage, Fidelity that they’re using. And those aren’t even the real ones.

16:16
A lot of people use paper trading accounts. Have you ever seen the ones that show you what their returns are? And it looks like a staircase. It’s like, oh, look at how much money I’ve been making in the stock market.

16:27
I can tell you what they’re doing. They’re putting the money that people are subscribing to them with and they’re putting that into their account to make it look like gains.

16:32
Because a lot of times your brokerage accounts will show when you’re looking at a chart of your historic gains will make those deposits look like their actual stock market returns. And they’re not.

16:43
But again, you can make those things up. It is not hard.

16:46
You figure out what the font they’re using, what the colors that they’re using, you know, wipe out, you wipe out the numbers and you can put new numbers that that fit your plan.

16:54
It is not hard to do. But I also don’t think it’s good just to go say, hey, I need to see your returns because I’m going to follow all your trades and I’m going to make my decision based off of what your returns are versus somebody else.

17:05
Probably the worst thing that you can do because it’s not about following a trader into every one of his trades and hoping to duplicate it.

17:12
I mean, think about what that is doing. I’m going to give you $1000 a year or whatever somebody’s charging. Probably it’s a month in some cases for some people, not me. I’m pretty dirt cheap.

17:27
But people are going to say, you know, give me $500 a month and you give it to them and your expectation is, is that I give you $500 and you turn it into $10,000.

17:35
There’s really not a system out there doing it. One of the reasons why I do what I do is I love talking about trading. I love talking about investing.

17:40
I love doing this podcast. And look, I’m a full time trader.

17:43
Full time trading doesn’t mean there’s necessarily a lot of excitement around trading all the time. It’s very boring at times.

17:49
And if it’s too exciting, you probably got a bad trading system.

17:52
But as for me, I’m pretty, pretty bored if I wasn’t doing anything but just trading for myself.

17:56
So it’s good for me to have a community. I’ve created a great community on SharePlanner and through Discord.

18:02
I like what I do. I’m passionate about it.

18:04
So in the end, what you should be looking for is not to have somebody catch a fish for you, but to learn how to fish because you can take anybody else’s system and it’s not going to work for you more than likely because that system has been tailored to work for that person.

18:17
And we all have different lifestyles. You’ve heard me talk about it a ton of times. But what you can learn from somebody that does know what they’re doing, that has the experience that’s not just trying to sell you a bag of goods that we know is just a pile of poo inside, is that you can learn to trade for yourself.

18:37
When I first started trading, I didn’t have a mentor. I didn’t have anybody that I could rely on. But now with the Internet and I feel like some of the things that I’ve been able to do, it’s able to expedite the learning.

18:48
I wish there was somebody that told me don’t hold stocks through earnings, don’t hold your swing trades through earnings. Somebody would have done that. I could have taken probably 2 years off of my learning.

18:56
I could have figured for the life of me what I was doing wrong. I didn’t even know to look for earnings.

19:02
I mean, I couldn’t even have told you how often a company reports earnings and I was just taking a beating from them. For all I knew, they were reporting earnings every day.

19:07
So you want to be able to grow as a trader, to be able to grow as a trader that can create a system and develop a strategy for themselves. I mean, think about it.

19:18
If you’re buying a service, it’s kind of like expecting somebody to tie your shoe for you because you don’t know how to tie a shoe.

19:23
This is an example. I’m not saying that people who buy services don’t know how to buy a shoe, but if you buy a service with the expectation that I’m just going to duplicate every one of his trades and it’s going to be great.

19:34
It’s the equivalent of like a kid asking his dad to tie his shoe for him every time it comes undone and he ties it.

19:40
What happens if the shoe comes united and there’s nobody to tie it? All of a sudden you can’t walk, can’t move, unless you’re worried about tripping up.

19:48
No, you want to learn how to tie that shoe so that when it does come united, you know how to tie it back together.

19:53
It’s kind of like with trades. You want to be able to learn from somebody, whether it’s from me or from anybody else.

19:58
You want it to be a person that’s going to show you how to tie that shoe when you need to tie that shoe.

20:02
Now, I put my trades out there. I put my trades out there.

20:04
Every time I make a trade, I show people the parameters. And people just follow those trades, but I feel like they’re missing out on so much more that is to offer.

20:10
And that is the knowledge and the experience that you gain through trying to develop your skills as a trader.

20:18
I mean, what if I die tomorrow?

20:22
I mean, I hope I’m not going to die. I mean, I’m OK if that was when the Lord wanted to take me.

20:29
I mean, I don’t, again, I don’t want to die. But if Lord takes me, I know where I’m going.

20:34
I’m going to heaven. I’m not worried, but if I was to die and the only thing that I was good for was a stock pick,

20:42
you know, you’re kind of going to be left wanting. There’s like, OK, what do I do now?

20:46
So our goal should really be to gain knowledge, to gain experience, to be able to use other traders as resources.

20:53
There’s times on Twitter where I’ll see somebody post a really good chart. I’m like, man, that is an excellent trade setup and I’ll use it for myself.

20:59
Not all the time, but sometimes I do because I’m like, man, that is an incredible chart. I think that one’s ready.

21:05
How did I not see that in my own scan?

21:09
So that’s where you’re gaining knowledge. That’s where you’re able to utilize and leverage the resources and a few other things.

21:16
Don’t get caught up in these red light green lights. Those were really popular in early 2000s. I still see them around sometimes, except they’re a little bit more sophisticated these days.

21:22
You know, it’s like, oh, when the stock turns, when this little green dot pops up on the charts get long, when it pops red get out, you know, that kind of stuff.

21:30
It’s don’t do that. OK.

21:32
The other thing there’s, there’s a thousand other people that are getting in and the person that’s selling it to is probably taking the opposite side of the trade to be able to take advantage of short term price movements as a result.

21:39
The other thing is the exaggerated learning curves.

21:43
Oh, you can learn within the next 5 minutes. No, ask a doctor how long it takes him, how to become a doctor.

21:49
It’s very similar for swing traders. It takes a long time.

21:52
It is a lot of time, a lot of experience that you have to gain and a lot of knowledge base that you have to build.

21:59
And production quality. Man, these people are fancy on their TikToks and YouTube.

22:08
Let me tell you, if I was putting that kind of time into my YouTube videos, guys, I would not be a trader.

22:10
Every day I’m trading and I’m not making videos when the market’s open. And it’s very hard to even make videos after the market’s closed because there’s so much other stuff that I got to prepare to do for the day ahead.

22:17
But when you see these fancy productions, guys, they’re not traders.

22:23
I’d be shocked if they’ve ever bought a stock before.

22:25
If their presence is all about TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, they’re not a trader.

22:30
So wrapping this up, there’s a lot to think about.

22:37
The easy route is just to look for somebody who’s going to give you a top pick.

22:40
I’m here to tell you that it goes way beyond that because in the end, you want to be building up your understanding of the stock market to build your system and your strategy and your style and for it to fit around your lifestyle.

22:46
You enjoyed this podcast. I would encourage you to leave me a 5 star review on whatever platform you’re listening to me on.

22:49
Check out swingtradingthestockmarket.com and send me your questions ryan@shareplanner.com.

22:57
I’d love to hear from you guys and to let me know what are your stories? What are your challenges?

23:04
I want to hear your stories. I want to make a podcast episode for you based on your questions and on your circumstances.

23:10
So thank you and God bless.

23:16
Thanks for listening to my podcast, Swing Trading the Stock Market. I’d like to encourage you to join me in the SharePlanner Trading Block where I navigate the stock market each day with traders from around the world.

23:24
With your membership, you will get a seven day trial and access to my trading room including alerts via text, e-mail and WhatsApp.

23:30
So go ahead, sign up by going to shareplanner.com/trading Block. That’s www.shareplanner.com/trading-block and follow me on SharePlanner’s Twitter, Instagram and Facebook where I provide unique market and trading information every day.

23:41
You have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me at ryan@shareplanner.com.

23:51
All the best to you and I look forward to trading with you soon.