The Treasure Hunterwizard who thinks that putting pressure on themselves to make
money is a good thing. You have got to get as far away from that as
possible.
Q: Yet how do you pragmatically resolve the need to have spend-
ing cash with the psychological necessity of not worrying about that
in order to be successful?
A: All I can say is the following. I don’t put any unnecessary
pressure on myself to make money. You have to meet your daily
expenses, you have to meet your medical bills, you have to meet
your insurance, you have meet your basic life expenses, put food
on the table. If you are going to go into trading and you can’t do
that, then don’t go into it. Don’t live on a shoestring. Meeting your
basic life expenses is one margin call that you have to meet and
don’t think otherwise because you can’t live in a cocoon. I wish
it were different, that you could isolate yourself in cocoon, not
have medical expenses, not have basic life expenses or insurance
and trade until you became profitable, but the world isn’t like
that.
Q: If you were to give advice to a starting trader, how many
months of daily basic bare bones expenses would you recommend
he have, aside from his trading capital, in order for him to give it a
fair shot?
A: I never looked at it that way. When I went into trading in
the ring for myself, I knew that this was now a time where I could
end up with no paycheck. I started coming up with contingency
plans—if I wasn’t making money in the ring or if I lost my$25,000
capital, what would I be doing? It was stuff like friends lined up
who were loading UPS trucks at night making$8anhourandI
had them put me on a list there, where in a month or so, I’ll be
doing these trucks and I’ll be back making a living again. So I had
fallback provisions where, if trading didn’t work out, I was going