Experience, Learning + Watchlists | Podcast Episode #104

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. 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 Swing Trading the Stock Market. And I got some exciting news. Hopefully, I can pull this off. I think I can. I’m gonna start doing about 2 podcasts a week. That’s my goal.

0:41
Uh, I wanna, I want to try to keep bringing you guys new and fresh content on a regular basis, getting so much good feedback. And if swing trading in the stock market has impacted you and impacted your life and trading, man, send me an email about it. I love reading those things. I love reading about it.

0:56
And if you have questions about the stock market, it’s a lot more fun for me to take a really good put together email about a struggle in the stock market or a question, and use that as material for a podcast. I’ve been really trying to do that.

1:12
I’m not trying to go down like a Dear Abbey route where I’m just telling you how to handle your life or anything like that. But in terms of the stock market, I like providing you with my experience, with my knowledge and what I’ve been able to learn over the years from the stock market. So keep sending those letters. I’m gonna do another one tonight here.

1:27
I think this one’s pretty interesting. And you know what’s funny is that he wasn’t really asking any specific question. He was just giving me his experience and I thought there was a lot to comment on, and I think he even made some really good points that I want to share as well because this comes from a pilot. And by the way, I’m never gonna give away your identity.

1:44
You know, I’m not one of those people that’s gonna throw you under the bus or anything. I tried, I really tried to make one of my people identity clouded in mystery, right? I mean, I tried to say it was a woman when it was actually a man and everything else, but I was really bad at that because I kept referring to the person as a he.

1:59
Now, I never gave away his name and nobody knows except for me and the person who wrote it, who it is, but it’s funny though, because I couldn’t go that far. I wasn’t that stealth of a person to be able to make it that secretive, but while I may not be able to keep your gender a secret, I will be able to keep your name a secret, your email, all that good stuff.

2:17
So any private information, like, you know, if you decide to give me exact specifics on a trade or something like that, I wouldn’t put that out there if it could embarrass you or anything like that. So in any case, yeah, keep sending those emails to me. I really like. I get them on a daily basis, which is great.

2:34
It’s one of the more entertaining parts of my day because I feel like I’m meeting new people too in the process, you know, in terms of just connecting with other traders and being able to share with you what I’ve learned in the stock market. And here’s the thing, I’m not like a perfect trader. Anybody that’s been in the trading block for any time, there’s plenty of people that’s been in there over the years from a guy who uses the handle desert rat to GP.

2:57
They all know that sometimes I scratch my head. I’m like, why did I do that? That was like very undisciplined to me, or not even so much undisciplined, but it’s like maybe I didn’t consider all sides of the trade. So I mean, there’s things that I’m learning from, I’m always learning from people in the chat room, and I think that these emails are good because it actually makes me ponder some of the questions you have because maybe I haven’t thought of that before.

3:16
So keep sending them to me, it’s great. I’m doing this podcast here. I’m getting ready to read the email and I’m enjoying a little bit of bourbon here as I’m doing it. So it’s a good time for me right now. Let’s see, I think I got Elijah Craig going here. I think that’s what, 94 proof.

3:32
Good strong taste. I could use a 2-inch ice cube. Ice cubes are everything. Now, some of the bourbons, I won’t even use an ice cube, but Elijah Craig, it’s a little bit harsh, so I’ll usually put it in there just to dilute it a little bit, but overall, it’s a good one. Usually I use that kind of stuff more for like making an old fashioned or something.

3:50
During COVID, I’ve become really good at making cocktails. My go-to drink is an old fashioned. So anyways, let’s go ahead and get started on this. I don’t think you guys tuned in to listen to me talk about cocktail beverages and mixology. So the email goes like this.

4:06
Ryan, first off, I am glad that I found your podcast and it has seriously helped. I was about 2 weeks into trading and I was pretty frustrated and had no idea what to do. And real quick, I’m not gonna read this whole thing right out of the gate and then dissect this time around because it’s a little bit more lengthy of an email.

4:22
I’ll probably pick and choose what parts of the email I’ll use, but I’ll probably use most of it. But I’m just gonna go ahead and comment on it as we go through it. So he says about 2 weeks into trading was pretty frustrated. And what’s funny about that, I always say there’s a little bit of beginner’s luck because I think that’s what sucks a lot of people in.

4:39
I don’t know why that is, but a lot of times you get these beginners that go into trading and it’s like all of a sudden they can’t lose. And you’re like, what is this guy on, man? It’s like everything he does is right. It’s kind of like what you’re seeing with David Portnoy, right? You know, I mean, he’s just so blatantly like stocks only go up and he’s benefiting from it today.

4:57
I mean, I think I saw him at the end of the day on Twitter. It’s like, oh, I threw a half million on AMD and I threw a half a million on eBay because stocks only go up. Some dude told me about Shop. I didn’t even know they were reporting earnings. He told me to go all in. I’m throwing it all in. I mean, it’s the most undisciplined form of trading, but he’s kind of got the beginner’s luck going.

5:17
After hours though, his eBay trade is down what, almost 4% or close to it. But I think he made up for it with AMD like it’s soaring like over 10% after hours. So you know, the guy, I don’t, and Shop doesn’t report till tomorrow I believe. So anyways, it’s pretty interesting to see sometimes the beginner’s luck that goes along with trading, but then they get burned.

5:38
And so that’s what he’s getting ready to tell me about here. He says, I was pretty frustrated, had no idea what to do. My knowledge was pretty simple. You want to buy low and sell higher and not try to lose money. And that’s true. I mean, you don’t want to buy high and sell low, then you’re kind of screwed using that kind of format. But what you want to do is to buy low and sell high, right?

5:56
I mean, that makes sense. But it’s such a cliche though, it doesn’t explain how you actually do it, just that you should do it. So yeah, I mean, while that cliche works in theory, it’s not really applicable. I mean, it’s kind of like stating the obvious, right? Like, don’t get into a car and drive into a brick wall. That wouldn’t be good. It’s kind of obvious, right? But you need to know how to drive in order not to run into a brick wall.

6:13
But he’s right. I mean, he says not to lose money. That’s definitely one of the things you don’t want to do. And since this is a proof of concept to my wife, so I guess he’s trying to show her that he can actually do this. And that can definitely create some kind of strain if you start losing money and you’re trying to explain it to a significant other. He goes on to say, so I can actually invest more money.

6:34
I have been pretty what I thought was risk averse, but all I was doing was pulling out whenever I got nervous with no limits and acting on emotions. He’s making a good point there. I made a couple hundred bucks and then lost all the profits the next day two times in a row. And of course, I have been using Robinhood laughing now that I heard your podcast and reading through Robinhood traders on Facebook, which is funny and sad at the same time.

6:55
And now I have learned to avoid everything they say. Yes, I remember when I first started, it wasn’t a Facebook. Everybody was like posting crap on Yahoo Finance message boards and oh my gosh, it’s pretty much back then what Twitter is now in terms of just so much garbage out there, people pumping things, people using it for clickbait, all that kind of stuff.

7:15
I haven’t actually looked on Facebook. I think I’m on my own personal Facebook account. I think I’m a member of a couple of stock market groups and I think I have them all on ignore because they just, they all suck. Because it’s the same thing. It’s like basically a glorified Yahoo Finance message board. There’s just nothing good going on there.

7:30
But he’s right though in the sense that he’s avoiding listening to the traders that are using the Robinhood app on different social media platforms because those things, they give you a lot of bad advice. They really do. You don’t want to be part of that. But he also says here too, I made a couple hundred bucks and then lost all the profits the next day, two times in a row.

7:48
And that’s oftentimes something that really does get traders frustrated and upset. It’s like, man, I was up this much and now I lost it all. I should have taken profit. I should have done this. I should have done that. And they do it with the idea that they had hindsight to know that. You don’t. I mean, look, I take partial profits on my trades.

8:03
And why do I do that is because I don’t know if I’ll have another chance to get that again. So I got into AES at 15.20. The first day I was in it, it popped really high, sold a third of my position for like 3.3%. I mean, so it’s not like super high, but it was a good start to the trade. Market to me, I kind of feel like it’s in this little chop phase, uncertainty, doesn’t want to keep going higher, doesn’t want to actually finally give back a little bit.

8:27
So I took 3.3% off. That was the best thing I could have done. Yeah, I didn’t book the whole trade at 3.3%, but I got to grab hold of some of those profits there, so I’m not coming away empty-handed. About a week later, I’m sitting at 15.20 still, exactly where I got in at. So that was one of the things that really helps me in my trading because then I’m not looking back like, man, I should have sold it on the first day that I had it.

8:47
No, I did sell a little bit of it, but I also gave myself a little bit more room to run. And that’s really such a great strategy in today’s day and age for so many new traders, and it’s a hard concept to embrace at first because you want to get right in at the bottom and get completely out at the top. And until you recognize the fact that you’re never going to do that, you’re never gonna be able to consistently profit in the market.

9:08
So AES maybe it goes down 1% tomorrow or 2%. But let’s say I get out for a 1% loss. I still on that final two-thirds of a position, I still came out on top on that trade. You see where I’m going? That 3.3% gave me an opportunity to be able to book some gains to make the trade to where I don’t have as much risk going on anymore while still having the ability to profit down the road should it continue to rally.

9:33
And the reason why that works so good is because we’re in a commission-free environment. I think it’ll probably stay that way forever. I mean, I don’t see them going back on it. So yeah, I mean, it’s a great strategy because you’re not going to be penalized for taking profits. Like if you were trading only like $100 on a trade, and it goes up 3%, right?

9:50
OK, you only made $3 on the trade, but you’re only trading with $100 too. Now, if you were in a brokerage that charged you a commission for every trade you made and you just made $3 on the trade, but you’re paying $7 in commissions, OK, that kind of stinks. You’re going to be losing money on the trade, so there’s no reason for you to take partial profits at that point, right?

10:05
Because you’re not really booking profits, you’re just booking a loss once you factor in the commission. But now it’s commissionless, right? So you don’t have a reason, even if you’re only trading $100 on a trade, to not take some partial profits because even if you’re only trading $100, and I know there’s some people out there that are, and that’s OK, don’t frown upon it.

10:27
You now, because there’s no more commissions, have the ability to manage profit. Whether you’re trading with $100 or $100,000. If you’re trading with a small dollar amount, don’t get caught up in how much am I trading. Get caught up in the fact of whether you’re making good decisions with the money that you are trading.

10:46
So he says, anyways, I was on the search for info that didn’t start with get rich fast because I’m a firm believer anytime someone says get rich fast, it probably isn’t going to work well. And that’s very true. There’s a lot of people that will say, hey, this guy will get you rich in 3 days, man, you give him $10,000, he’ll turn it into $20,000.

11:03
I can tell you I can’t do that. I can’t do it for myself. I can’t do it for you. I can’t do it for anybody. I don’t know anybody that can, honestly. Best traders out there can’t do that. You get the blowhards that’ll tell you that they can, but they can’t. And if they do, they can’t do it consistently. They just did it by luck. Oh, but Ryan, you might be jealous of the guy.

11:19
No, I’m not jealous of the guy. I’m just telling you, I’ve been doing this since I was 11 years old. There’s nobody out there that can consistently double your money every 56 days or whatever, you know, that people act like. Even like some of the comments on there, I get these trolls that like to pump their crap in my comment section.

11:34
Not all of them, most 99% of them are good comments, but you get that small group that’s like, oh, because of this guy here, I was able to take every week $15,000 and turn it into $25,000. I just had to send him the $15,000. Now you’re probably never gonna see that $15,000 again. You got prop firms out there that literally and you’re going to be shocked if you’re new to trading.

11:54
There’s prop firms that will try to get you to trade. They’ll give you this infinite leverage and everything. You send them like $3,000 and they’ll give you like 10x leverage so that you’re trading with like $30,000 and you’re not even trading the stock market. It’s a simulator. Yeah, it’ll mirror the current price action, but when you tell it to go buy a stock, you’re not actually buying a stock.

12:11
There’s literally prop firms out there. A lot of them have been busted up and everything, especially offshore prop firms. I would not touch an offshore prop firm. They’re like the devil. The best way to make money in the stock market is first using the money that you have, not trying to leverage yourself, not trying to go into margin and trying to get more money than what you’re capable of producing and not trying to take these big bets and getting rich fast.

12:31
This guy that sends me the email, he gets it. And so I’m gonna give this guy a name. I’m not gonna try to make it too complicated. I’m gonna give him the name Skeeter. Is that all right? I’m gonna call him Skeeter. So Skeeter gets it, man. Skeeter says, hey, you don’t get rich fast. They also said I started listening to your podcast from the beginning and boom, found the guidance I needed.

12:50
Yes, you did, Skeeter. Obviously not everything, but now I am oriented in the right direction. I still have 75 more episodes to go, and yes, your mind’s gonna be blown with those 75 episodes. There’s a lot of good content on the podcast, and now I think this is like my 104th episode.

13:06
I’m gonna keep going, guys. I’m gonna make this the best market podcast there is. A lot of people don’t even know about SharePlanner. A lot of people don’t even know about me being out there. I don’t run marketing schemes. I don’t run any kind of ads out there. Everything that I have done, including this podcast, I just created the podcast.

13:24
I created the podcast. I put good content out there, and the people found it. That’s all I did, man. But yes, go through those 75 episodes and if you’re new to this podcast and you’re listening to me the first time, go back through those podcasts because you want to know what I try to do more than anything.

13:40
Yeah, there’s a couple of them out there that are not like that. I really try to make these evergreen episodes. That means that I’m not trying to create something that’s about the stock market today. I’m talking about episodes that will be relevant now and 10 years down the road, and if they were around 10 years ago, they would have been relevant then.

13:56
Email goes on to say, I am not in this to get rich. OK. He said that once and then he says, would be nice but not expecting it. Yeah, I would like to go ahead and buy, I don’t know, AES, right? We talked about that. I want that thing to go to a million dollars tomorrow. That’d be awesome. But yeah, like what you said, Skeeter, I’m not expecting it either.

14:14
I am actually an Air Force pilot. This is what I kind of thought was interesting. I’m actually an Air Force pilot who has to take calculated risks all the time, but just like this, I wasn’t immediately good at flying. I had to learn the basics, the rules, the vocabulary, and the advanced stuff eventually.

14:30
Literally, the first thing they talk about is what makes you go fast, slow, up and down. And I feel like that what you did with risk management laid down my foundation, and it makes me feel like that I have control of my losses. Wow, that was awesome, OK? And we may not even get too much further into this podcast because I think his illustration about being a pilot in the Air Force.

14:53
First of all, thank you for your service. That is awesome that you’ve given so much of your life to protecting this country, man. God bless you. Second of all, being a pilot is hard, man. And if you’re in the Air Force, you’re flying some crazy stuff, I’m sure. One of my biggest regrets in life was right after 9/11, I didn’t go into the military.

15:13
One of my life’s biggest regrets. I really wish I would have done that. I stayed in college. I felt like that was my generation’s calling was to go in. I had some friends that did it. I didn’t do it. And there were some personal reasons too. I had lost a brother to cancer about a year earlier, so that was definitely weighing in on my mom.

15:32
And I think she couldn’t bear the thought of a son going off to war and fighting. And so that. I didn’t do it, but I’m not gonna get all caught up in that kind of stuff, because you’re still tuning in to listen to me talk about stocks. But again, to Skeeter, thank you for fighting for our country and protecting our freedoms.

15:52
But what he does here is make a great illustration about how he didn’t just jump in the airplane and start flying this thing and become an expert fighter pilot. No, he probably started off learning how to fly Cessnas maybe. He probably learned how to do like a dust cropper or something, but they weren’t putting him into, hey, you want to learn how to fly, let’s go ahead and throw you into an F-16.

16:15
No, they weren’t doing that. So he had to learn, he had to learn the language, the vocabulary, and in the same way, like with trading, you don’t just get in there and buy a stock and say, OK, it’s going to a million dollars. I’m gonna be rich as can be. No, you gotta learn through the losses, through the experiences.

16:32
Like you could read a textbook on how to fly. You can play flight simulator games on the Xbox. But until you actually get into that plane and start flying, you don’t know what it’s like to actually fly an airplane on your own. And then the same thing with trading, it’s like you can do the paper trading accounts, you can read about it in the textbooks, you know what a head and shoulders pattern is, all this good stuff.

16:52
But until you are actually trading with your own money, experiencing the losses, experiencing wins, you really don’t know what it’s like to trade. So you gotta get into it. You got to take some of your lumps. What my podcast is here for and what the SharePlanner trading block is here for and all these educational courses that I sell on SharePlanner is for.

17:11
That was kind of a slick plug, right? What it’s there for is to help you learn quicker to understand things better so that you don’t take unnecessary hardships when you go into the stock market. I want this guy to prove to his wife, hey, he can be a good trader, man. I really hope all the best for him.

17:27
I think that he’s got a good start to himself here. He was talking about how he was down 0.5%. He was kind of critical on himself just like when he was flying and he didn’t do something right. That’s good, man. Be critical. Try to figure out what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong. Journal these things if you need to.

17:44
He says he’s making mistakes and learning more each day, and but he’s loving and planning, executing all of it. Another one thing, and I’ll close with this, he talks about how he’s trying to figure out how to cut down on prep time. You know, I worked in corporate America when I first started SharePlanner. True story.

17:59
And one of the hard things was like I was up till like 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock in the morning, kind of still am all the time. Nonetheless, one of the hard things was just trying to figure out how to do my research fast and everything else. There’s really not. I mean, you gotta develop your watchlist. You got to develop an eye for what you like to trade for knowing what you want to trade.

18:17
So when you start going through watchlists, like for me, I have a must watch list, right? Those are the stocks like your FANG stocks, Baba, Baidu, Square, Visa, Mastercard, a lot of the trades that I’ve traded in the past, a lot of the stocks that I like to trade, a lot of the stocks that I know that provide a lot of volume, liquidity that drives market action a lot of times, those are the ones that I always want to be looking at if there’s a trade setup there, right?

18:43
I also have some scans where I’ll go through like the biggest volume movers each day and see, OK, is there any opportunities there, the ones that have been showing a lot of interest from the street each day. Those are ones that I like to follow as well. But it’s hard work, but you don’t have to update necessarily your watchlists every day.

19:02
You don’t have to necessarily update your scans every day or go through them every day. You can have your list, your watchlist that you’re going through, and each day you go through your watchlist and you’re saying, OK, I got 50 or 60 stocks. I mean, if you have 50 or 60 stocks in your watchlists, and they represent a good amount of the different sectors out there.

19:18
You’ll find opportunities. So, any case, that’s gonna do it for today. I didn’t get through his whole email, but I got through the gist of his email. I hope I answered all his concerns and if you have any questions, send me an email. I want to hear about what you have to say, and I’ll try to choose one of the emails that I get throughout the course of the week and try to make a podcast episode out of that.

19:36
Also, like I said earlier, I’m trying to go to 2 episodes per week. I really like doing the podcast. One of the best things that I’ve ever done with SharePlanner was start this podcast. When I started off, I had no idea what I was doing. Now I got like all the soundproof wall foam and I was trying to make sure the echo, and I’m still not done with it yet.

19:53
I gotta still keep adding more foam. I think I’ve bought over like 600 square feet of foam for the floor, the ceiling, everything, it’s kind of nuts. There’s not much echo, but I still think there’s a little bit of echo, so I’m still trying to get some of that out of this podcast, but in any case, it’s still a work in progress just like we all are as traders.

20:12
Thank you guys. Send me that email, ryan@shareplanner.com, and God bless. 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.

20:29
With your membership, you will get a 7 day trial and access to my trading room, including alerts via text, email, and WhatsApp. So go ahead, sign up by going to shareplanner.com/tradingblock. 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.

20:51
If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at ryan@shareplanner.com. All the best to you and I look forward to trading with you soon.