lystn

Hey everyone, Kirk here again at Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, I’m going to explain why I’ve never run a live trading room and honestly, why I never plan on running a live trading room, though have been asked an umpteen million times. I literally get asked every single week. “Can we run a live trading room? I want to see you trade live? I want to be able to ask questions live.” I get the concept of it and I understand why people want to do it. I understand the allure and the attraction to it. But there’s a couple of main reasons why I’ll never run one and haven’t run one before in the past. Number one is I think that it’s insanely inefficient, meaning that it’s an inefficient use of my time and your time for us to sit in a room together and just watch each other or comment amongst each other. I think it ends up bringing up things that aren’t really relevant. That’s the biggest thing for me. We end up talking about stocks just to fill time. We end up talking about indicators to fill time. We might see “potential trades” that really aren’t trades there. But it's just a means to create activity and to create engagement and to fill up blank space. There is a guy… I try to look this morning as I’m recording this and I didn’t find it, so I apologize for this. If you do know, just let me know. Shoot me an email or shoot me a tweet or a Facebook message on this. But there’s a guy who outperformed all the other fund managers I think last year or two years ago on one of the university endowment funds and his strategy was to basically do nothing. I mean, he’s a long-term investor. I mean, look, it worked because the markets went up. But he talked about – He would go to his office just by himself. He had no employees. There was nobody with him, helping him run this thing and he basically outperformed everyone else. When he was interviewed, they basically said, “Well, why do you go there by yourself? Why don’t you have just someone else to talk to you, someone else to bounce ideas off of?” He said that it would basically fill up time. It would fill up space and they would end up maybe creating ideas out of thin air that shouldn't have been investable ideas. That’s what I think live trading rooms do. When you actually look at a live trading room… I’ve jumped on some just to watch what happens. They have those things where it’s like, “Watch how we run it.” I’m like, “Okay, I’ll see how you’ll run it.” People are talking about so many random different things and it’s all over the place. There’s no consistency, no framework and it’s just creating ideas out of thin air which I don’t think is really useful. The other main reason why I don't do it is because I don’t want to be tied to the computer every single day. Frankly, I love you, guys, but I don’t want to be tied to the computer every single day and I don’t think you do either. I think the people that we’re trying to attract at Option Alpha want to know or want to understand how to trade and still have a life and not be associated to the markets being open 9:00 to 4:00. I mean, that’s still a job if you have to be tied to the markets every single day all the time, running live room or trading live every single day, day trading, penny stock trading, swing trading. That gets really, really tiring and that burns you out. I don’t want to do that. I’ve got two small girls, I’ve got one new kid on the way, I’ve got a beautiful wife. I want to spend time with them and I don’t want trading to get in the way necessarily of me being able to do that. I want to be able to trade, run Option Alpha, do our real estate thing and still have plenty of time for my family and my life. Hopefully that helps out as always, just understanding why I don’t do it. I think it’s just really an inefficient use of time. I think it fills up space for most people and I think that that space creates some sort of comfort or familiarity with the markets, but you really don't need it. It's not something that’s absolutely emphatically needed to be successful which is why I don’t run one. As always, hopefully you guys enjoyed this. If you have any other questions about what things I don't do or what things I do, always let us know. Head on over to optionalpha.com/ask and click the big red button there, leave me a message. It’s always first come, first serve for these daily calls, so we are always looking for new questions and content to talk about, so don't be shy about asking your question or getting your question in. Until next time, happy trading!