So a bunch of years back, I was kind of a complete dork around the financial market.
I was actually a securities lawyer.
But the truth was, my secret hidden truth was that I was less interested in the practice of law.
And I was just really fascinated by the psychology of markets.
What makes them tick?
What makes them go up, what makes them go down, what makes them freak out and move, what makes the people who make them tick make decisions that seemed to be at times totally rational, at times massively irrational.
And I became fascinated.
So I spent years researching and researching and researching to try and find systems, methodologies.
I would research and read about the most famous traders in history and how they developed their systems and their approaches and their methodologies.
And I would talk myself into any room where I could be in the presence of some of these great traders and learn from them.
I would read every book that I could.
I would buy from newsletters and stuff like that, all of the methodologies.
And what I was really trying to do was understand the psychology, but then find somebody who had developed sort of pragmatic, replicable methodology, a system that I knew worked, and then basically take that system and use it myself so that I could start to trade the markets using a proven methodology.
What I found was that it turned into a big disaster for me.
And here's why.
And here's what happened.
And here's a little bit of a cautionary note.
We tend to look for success, and there's a term in the success sort of genre called modeling.
We look to people who have come before us and who have succeeded massively at something that we want to succeed at.
And then we try and reverse engineer what they've done, what's their methodology, their approach, what's their thinking process?