11/5/2025 - The most important thing to look for in teaming up with another successful trader in a pod is complementary strengths. You want to be similar in personality, but different in what you're good at. Ideally, someone you team up with is strong in areas where you are not, and you are strong in areas that they are not. That can take different forms. You might be strong trading one market, and they might specialize and experience success in a different market. You might be strong trading longer time frames, and they might find success in short-term trading. You might succeed trading stocks directionally; they might succeed trading options structures.
In such an arrangement, clicking in terms of personality makes it easy for each of you to learn from the other. They mentor you, and you mentor them. You share ideas, and you share learning lessons. Each of you expands your success.
Once you can create a two-person pod, then you might think about bringing on a third and fourth person who you both like and respect and who excels in areas of trading different from what the two of you do. That way, you continue the structure of learning from/with each other and expanding your trading. Reviewing market opportunity at the start of each day and reviewing performance at the end of each day creates many opportunities of "each one teach one".
Great things can happen when each person is a mentor and each person is a student and you challenge/inspire one another to grow. Trading psychology is not just about managing negative emotions and behaviors. When you create the right team, you cultivate the right mindset.
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11/4/2025 - Moving from individual, isolated trading to trading with one or more dedicated traders in a "pod" is an important path toward our growth as traders. At some point in a successful trader's development, adding size--doing more of the same thing--is not a formula for success. That would be like being a business that has one profitable product and just keeps making more and more of it.
Eventually successful traders get to the point where getting bigger means getting broader. By doing more and different things with an edge, the individual trader becomes a portfolio. The diversification of strategies and styles ensures that there can be success across different market environments.
When we trade with others in a pod, we learn from them and that sparks our ability to get bigger by getting broader. As the pod grows, we connect with more mentors--and we also mentor more peers. That expands our market mastery, and it also cements our learning.
A true measure of success is the ability to sustain profitability across different market conditions. That can only happen if our trading is as diverse and flexible as markets are. In teaching others and learning from them, collaboration makes everyone better.
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11/3/2025 - Once your trading is profitable, the single most important thing you can do is seek out other profitable traders, network with them, and share ideas and experiences. This is the first stage of teamwork. At every successful professional trading firm where I work, trading is conducted in teams. The sharing of ideas and mutual mentoring accelerates everyone's development and supports their trading. The trading events you attend and the traders you follow on social media are opportunities to reach out to other participants and network. It may take a while, but finding just one or two others willing to share ideas and experiences is a great start toward accelerated growth.
Ultimately, when you find those like-minded colleagues, you'll want to consider creating a formal trading pod, where you become a small group with its own processes and mutual learning. There is no reason learning and development have to be undertaken in isolation. Once you've been successful on your own, your growth has only just begun. The key is to team up with others who are similar enough in values and personality but different enough in markets and strategies traded that you can learn from one another.
The step from individual, isolated trader to pod member is often the most promising step in building a sustainable trading business. Learning with others accelerates everyone's development.
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11/2/2025 - Very often, there is an intermediate phase of development in which some of your trading is successful and some is not. This is not at all necessarily because of changes in our trading psychology. Rather, markets change in their direction, volatility, and correlation to other markets, ensuring that any given approach will work some of the time and not at other times.
If your trading has been profitable, but marked with losing periods, the best practice is to isolate those losing periods and see what might make them different than the winning periods. It's possible that the losing periods were periods of greater distraction in your personal life; it's also possible that the losing periods were choppier or more volatile than the winning periods. Reverse engineering periods of loss is the first step in figuring out how to adapt.
The other helpful exercise is to reverse engineer the greatest winning periods and see what you might have been doing differently and what markets were doing at that time. Often, this review will tell you when you're in your sweet spot, enabling you to grow your risk-taking. For example, my recent trading reviews showed that when I began by identifying markets that were stretched on a short-term basis and then identifying how their movement lined up with their behavior on the longer time frame, I was often successful in figuring out how the shorter and longer perspectives lined up. If I started with the big picture and (prematurely) developed a directional opinion, that was when I did my worst trading.
Learning from your successes fuels your positive psychology and provides the confidence to size up your trades. As I emphasized in my book, the goal is to turn your best practices into sustainable processes.
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* Are returns positive over a sufficient period to cover various market conditions? Does the trader earn significantly more than the risk-free returns of government bonds?
* Does the trader demonstrate good risk-adjusted returns (as measured by such indicators as Sharpe ratio)? Is the average/median size of winning trades greater than the average/median size of losers? Good risk-adjusted returns can be a great initial sign of a disciplined trading process.
* Does the trader demonstrate the ability to make money in different kinds of markets and in different kinds of ways? Such diversification tells us something about a trader's adaptability. It's great to make money in one kind of market, but rarely is that a sustainable business.
* Has the trader evolved in recent years? How have they grown? A trader who demonstrates ongoing improvement and growth is more likely to adapt to future market changes.
* Does the trader demonstrate a positive trading psychology, finding both joy and meaning in trading and rising to challenges through innovation and teamwork?
The above are useful criteria in assessing your progress and success as a trader. If you are firing on many of these cylinders, it is worth asking the solution-focused question: What have I been doing right? How have I been able to make progress as a trader? So often, future success comes from leveraging what we do best. More to come!