Episode 4: Brian Lund Doesn't Have Time For Your BS
If there’s one thing Brian Lund learned about himself over the past 30 years in the markets, he must write. Without a doubt, without even thinking about it, he knows that to express himself and to complete his thoughts into productive trading, he needs to sit down and start writing. And this makes sense. We hear this a lot from our smart friends. Barry Ritholtz once wrote: “I write to find out what I’m thinking.”
In this conversation with Brian, we get into the importance of sleep hygiene and how it’s so important for us to be at our best. Not just in trading, but in living. We dig into challenges Brian has overcome along the way, including an ADHD diagnosis, and morphing from an always-on entrepreneur who constants has problems to solve to a trader who must sit on his hands and wait for things to happen. We also cover his hacks like therapy, meditation, and a CPAP machine to help him maintain his sharpness.
Like all of us, Brian has suffered from the market honing in on his biggest weaknesses. He’s got the battle scars to prove it. But learning from these mistakes and fighting the urge to revenge trade have been evolutions that took time. Brian discusses how many of the trading problems we experience are simply contrived. They aren’t real. We make them up in our heads. The market doesn’t care that we lost money in this stock the last time we traded it, and it doesn’t owe us any money on our next trade. Brian is a former night owl who now has a hot take on spousal sleeping arrangements. You don’t want to miss this! We hope you enjoy me and Steve Strazza’s wide-ranging chat with our friend Brian Lund.
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.
