Matt Kenah is Building Positive Momentum Every Day
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.
But there was a growing discomfort within him that questioned what value he was bringing to the world. He thought there was more he could do.
So after three years in the Chicago trading pits, he left to pursue a higher calling in the Catholic Seminary. He studied to become a priest.
But on the eve of making a decision whether to embark on a voyage to Rome to further his education that would keep him abroad for at least two years, his mother was diagnosed with a serious bout of cancer.
There was no way Matt could leave the country with his mother about to face the biggest challenge of her life.
As Matt tells it: “God had other plans.”
And so at that point, he decided to pivot back to the Chicago trading pits and make a go at it in the markets.
It would be great if the story ended there with Matt finding tremendous success, but it wasn’t easy. In fact, Matt would suffer numerous financial losses along his path. One of which put him firmly back at square one, trading 1 and 2 lots, just to find and rediscover his rhythm and train himself in new habits and languages to succeed in a screen-based trading environment.
If you commonly find yourself in a trading rut (or worse), the wisdom Matt shares in this podcast will go a long way toward getting you back on the right track.
This is an episode you’ll likely bookmark and return to, as needed when times get tough.
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.
They are only losses if we don’t learn something from the experience.
When traders woke up on Monday, August 5th to the VIX at 65 and the Nasdaq index down 5% overnight, they didn’t need a cup of coffee to snap into high alert.
The easy first question to ask was: “What happened?”
If there’s one thing Anne-Marie Baiynd learned after making the transition from a business owner to a trader, it’s that she’s no longer in charge.
The market, unlike her employees, doesn’t do what she asks it to do.
She needed to learn to give up control. And it wasn’t easy.
In fact, it was so hard that she almost lost all of the hard-earned money she had salted away from years of successfully running her business. To say this would be stressful for a family and a marriage would be an understatement.
It wasn’t until Nik’s father suggested he get involved in High School Wrestling that he began to learn what drives him: Discipline, Regimen, and Humility.
For the first time in his life, wrestling gave Nik recognition. He liked it and knew the only way to maintain it was to go all-in.
From high school and into college at the University of Minnesota, wrestling taught Nik how to become the man who would soon enter the ring of Mixed Martial Arts and the UFC tour circuit.
When Michael Nauss first sat down at a trading desk, his computer had a keyboard and a screen. But no mouse.
And his screen displayed an order book. But no charts.
Thus began his career as a scalper working the order book, who paid no attention at all to trends or technical analysis. He was simply trying to find spots to buy ahead of large buyers and flip the position out for a quick couple of ticks. Do this a couple hundred times per trading session and perhaps he’d have a successful day.
When you are chasing a wave, you can’t be anywhere else. You have to be present.
Similarly, you can’t be anywhere else when you are chasing trends. You have to be present.
Ian has worked hard to create the right mental and physical environments to increase his odds of presence. The places he’s lived would surely inspire envy in anyone who cherishes beautiful natural surroundings and ocean breezes: San Francisco, Hawaii, and the underrated Gulf Coast of Florida.
Ian said it best when we said: “Find what brings you joy, then do it!”
Born with an entrepreneurial spirit and temperament, Michael grew up in a working-class community full of blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth people who worked honest days for an honest wage. And it rubbed off on him. How could it not?
In order not to be a financial burden on his family, he knew he needed to get out there and hustle. He shoveled snow, mowed lawns, caddied, and worked as a server and waiter. He worked 15 hours a week while in college so that he could earn a degree from Columbia University.
Flying down a mountainside on two skis while negotiating tight turns and ever-changing microclimates would be a terrible time to lose focus.
Todd Gordon knows this. If he hadn’t quickly learned this skill in his journey to competitive ski racing, he would’ve likely landed himself onto a stretcher and an air-lift back to base.
There was no other choice.
But for Todd, he’d have it no other way. From a young age, when he found an interest in something – whether skiing or finance – he’d go all in. Nothing else mattered.
Heading into the COVID-19 pandemic, Caleb Franzen was working a corporate banking job that felt like a dead end. “It felt like I was just being moved around from one boiling pot of water to the next.”
Additionally, he had traded during college and what worked in the market didn’t jive with what he had learned in college. “Never once did I use anything in my banking job that I learned in college.”
