@BTheStory87 interviews Lance Breitstein, former back-to-back #1 trader at a tier one prop firm, in this MUST WATCH video. Below are the Show Notes of this interview- Wall Street’s Top Trader Invites Me to His Penthouse. We hope this video gives you numerous ideas to improve and grow as a trader.
Lance and “B The Trader” Interview Show Notes
Key Takeaways
- Lance got into trading by chance
- The more Lance learned about trading, the more the ethos spoke to him
- Trading can be this intellectual battleground with many ways to win
- There are different types of trading like sales trading, prop trading, and quant trading
- Lance knew Prop Trading was exactly what he was looking for
- Trillium was one of the longest lasting, most reputable, and most profitable Prop Trading firm when Lance graduated college
- Failure rate is high in this type of industry
- Lance made the choice to go work with one of the most profitable traders out in Princeton compared to moving to the “sex appeal” city lifestyle….and it paid dividends in the long run!
- Lance struggled big time when he first started off and was negative every single month in his first year of trading
- Lance believes of himself as a slow and reflective thinker
- Lance specialized in “meta-learning”
- Lance needed to figure out what was the best type of learning for him when it came to trading
- Reps, reps, and more reps
- Replicate the easy trades and things will start to click
- Adding value to the team aspect is a very important factor
- People underestimate the power of teamwork and adding value to the team
- Lance believes that some of the most edge comes from the shortest time frame
- When you work or review things at a speed higher than 1x, in real time trading, the speed and evaluation process becomes that much slower / easier to see and grasp
- The real learning and developing comes from the After-Hours process
- You want to FOCUS on the long term process compared to the short-term outcomes
- You can use a negative emotion to fuel a positive change
- You need the intrinsic motivational factors or emotions to keep pushing you towards the path of success / process
- People overemphasize psychology
- If you’re playing a negative reward mathematical system, you’ll basically have a 0% chance to succeed
- Lance realizes that he may have not had the best risk management at all, and actually realizes that it may have even been sub-par, but had so much edge that it outweighed the risk management factor
- If you don’t have a system with edge, nothing else matters because in the long-run, you will fail
- 99.9% of tickers on any given day are useless and just noise. You want to find stocks-in-play as quickly as you can.
- Ticker selection is super important versus generic price action on a day-to-day basis
- Our brain is trained to fool ourselves
Quotes
- “If I knew there were people winning, why can’t that be me?”
- “I knew I was going to outwork everyone.”
- “At least one of my advantages was my personal grit.”
- “Teaching is a very different skill set.”
- “People learn in different ways.”
- “For being an instructor, focus on the process and what works for them.”
- “Find someone who is a level or two above you and try to add value to their performance.”
- “You need to proactively give others value.”
- “Stocks are no different than real-life pattern recognition.”
- “The real improvement doesn’t come from the actual day it comes from the review process and practices.”
- “Emotions can be used maladaptively or adaptively.”
- “I want to be better. I am hungry for being better. I’m not okay with failure. I’m not okay with not being my best trader.”
- “I never want to feel what it’s like to fail.”
- “There are many ways to skin a cat but there is still the mathematical truth in situations.”
- “You need a system with edge.”
- “Can you have a system with edge and bad risk management, but still succeed? – Absolutely.”
- “Do you actually have a system with edge?”
- “Find the broken slot machine.”
Key 1-min Segments
- 7-min mark where Lance begins to talk about the failures and success of the market, along with the individual characteristics of one to make it in this industry
- 11:30-min mark where Lance begins to talk about his “highlight reel” process
- 25-min mark when the video begins to look and discuss his “trophy shelf”
- 33-min mark where Lance begins to talk about having a system with edge and risk management philosophy
If you want to learn from Lance, check out 8-Figure Trader’s Daily Trading Routine (Take notes!)
From all of us at SMB, train and trade well.
Mike Bellafiore is the Co-Founder of SMB Capital, a proprietary trading desk, and SMB Training, which provides trading education in stocks, options, and futures. Bella is the author of One Good Trade and The PlayBook. He welcomes your trading questions at [email protected].