Episode 3: Brian Shannon Is Still Breaking The Rules
If there is one thing that stands out from any conversation with Brian Shannon about the trading process, it is this: For discretionary traders, there are no rules. Instead, there are “guidelines.” And because Brian is human, he occasionally breaks his guidelines and suffers the same consequences as anyone else. Everyone gets what they deserve. Even a trader of 30+ years like Brian Shannon. If a trader buys the dip or sells the rip without a plan to control her risk then she, too, will get what she deserves. Eventually. The market is always on the hunt for our weaknesses.
This is one of the things I love about my friend Brian. He doesn’t tolerate nonsense. He tells it like it is. Tough love. It’s what a trader needs. And he’s adamant about tuning out the noise and focusing on his strengths. For instance, he no longer pays any attention to financial TV. “It makes me emotional. TV is just theatrics. If it doesn’t help me make money, I completely ignore it.” He knows what he’s good at, says no to everything else, and makes the best use of his time by focusing his energies on profitable pursuits. Shouldn’t we all live and trade like that? He’s had to learn the hard way that things like global macro, or Fed policy, or foreign affairs just confuse him. And certainly don’t add any alpha to his trades. Instead, he focuses on a “bottoms-up” approach to stock trading where each individual setup is measured on its own merits. Each potential trade speaks for itself.
After more than 30 years in this business, Brian’s engagement with it has varied between addiction, obsession, and passion. But one thing he knows to be true is much of what we need to do in order to be successful cannot be learned in a book. It has to be experienced. He has observed that too many inexperienced traders want to simply copy successful traders instead of learning the “why” behind any trade. This is the type of thing that experience teaches you. One important thing Brian has learned is that most times when he takes on 20+ swing trade positions and his account is fully leveraged, that would usually be a signal that the stock market is ripe for a meaningful pullback. Do you think he learned that in a textbook? Or did he learn it the hard way via experience? I think you know the answer. Please enjoy this wonderful episode of Off The Charts with our friend Brian Shannon.
We talk to a lot of traders. Not just on this podcast, but across everything we do. And one thing that is common to most of them is some level of stress which must be routinely navigated. And it’s often a real struggle. Many of them are emotionally damaged and scarred by it.
In fact, many of our conversations get into discussions about how to best navigate ourselves out of these negative spirals.
“I don’t need to kill it right now. I need to make sure I’m around for the next cycle that is favorable to my trading style.”
According to Anthony Crudele, most traders struggle because they are too short-sighted. He believes most successful traders think longer term—not about time frames but about how each trade, day, or week fits into the bigger picture of what the trader is looking to accomplish.
From an early age, David Hale had hustle in his DNA. At just 10 years old, he was sneaking into casinos to play slot machines. By 11, he was betting on horse races. And before long, he was hunting for arbitrage opportunities in baseball card values. Inspired by his bargain-hunting mother, David developed a “value-player” mindset that would eventually spark a deep fascination with trading the markets.
It’s hard to believe Denise Shull is a product of parents and grandparents who believed in “buy and hold” and wouldn’t even know how to sell a share of stock if asked to.
Today, Denise is well known as a Performance Coach to big Wall Street traders, specializing in modern psychoanalysis.
“I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes
There’s a profound simplicity that can only be reached by working through complexity. It means that deep understanding is often simple, but achieving it requires grappling with and overcoming complexity.
Jason Leavitt believes this wholeheartedly. And this was his path.
When he first got involved in trading, everything seemed simple: buy low, sell high, make money.
Reinventing your career after 20 years is no small feat. Now, imagine trying to do that by becoming an active trader. That’s exactly what Andrew Moss is doing—but he isn’t going in blind.
Andrew’s fascination with the markets began as a teenager when his father introduced him to point-and-figure charts. From there, he pursued a career in brokerage and wealth management at a major Wall Street firm, gaining deep insight into the industry.
“We all have to follow our own path,” Andrew reflects.
Matt Kenah is Building Positive Momentum Every Day.
If we only learn one thing from Matt Kenah, I hope it would be this: “The only goal we should have every day is to live to fight another one.”
Matt has lived this ethos and he has been repeatedly put to the test. And passed.
Starting out on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange trading floor as a runner just out of high school, Matt quickly rose the ranks to Arb Clerk and was earning great money as a young man in his early twenties.
To say Andrew Menaker took an unusual path to Wall Street would be a severe understatement.
While negotiating with an armed bank robber to de-escalate the situation and ensure the safety of customers and bank employees, he had to let Wells Fargo know he wouldn’t be making it to his first interview that day and, therefore, would have to pass on an opportunity to work with the firm.
Among the many things that stood out during our conversation with David Lundgren, it was this quote: “I want to find a way to listen, and learn, and get a little bit better every day.”
This is a mindset that every trader, every human, can benefit from.
In his early days, David described himself as a “systematic researcher.” This process of discovery held sway for him, and when striking out on his own, he employed the same systematic philosophy to portfolio management and trend-following trading.
For Wall Street veteran Jared Dillian, getting away from Wall Street might have been the best thing he ever did for himself.
Now living in South Carolina, he can’t be further removed from the lifestyle of your typical Wall Streeter. And he’d have it no other way, as he’s convinced Wall Street took at least 10 years off of his life expectancy.
As Jared says, his stress levels are now “basically zero.”
Milton Marmanides does the hard work that traders don’t have the time to do. He sifts through the firehose of headlines, news releases, data points, and social media to cut through the noise and deliver only the market-moving information active traders need to make smarter decisions.
And in his nearly 25 years in the business, first as a trader, and now as a market data provider, he’s seen a lot.
