How to Help Your Family Understand Your Trading

The general public, and in most cases our families included, don't understand this. Say what? You're gambling on the stock market, you're buying and selling. You know, that's just like going to the horses, right? It's pretty much the way most people view this. You know, putting money on the track or on the sports game. Like, how's any different? And it's all about frame of reference and experience and my family's experience at the time. Buy and hold good stocks forever, grow gradually, get some dividends. Not terrible advice, but for me, not great because I have a much shorter attention span than that. I'm much more technically oriented. I'm fascinated by the movements in the market. I'm interested to see how do people get in and out more actively and make money. So there was a disconnect between my family's experience and what I was interested in, which made it difficult to have that conversation. Added to that, the only person our family knew was a futures trader. But I think he was a worked for a fund and he was massively stressed out, always vacant, always absent. Like, wasn't there, you know, family functions. He was distant relative to us, but we had sort of confined family functions. And so that's been a hard thing to shake because that was the early kind of model of someone who trades for me and also the expectation of what it meant for my family. And so there was a lot of reconditioning, I guess, to get past that mental image of, oh, you know, trading doesn't have to be that way. When I started trading, I was spending four or five hours a night researching and looking at charts, and particularly when I was going through my technical analysis phase, I was looking at dozens and dozens of charts every night and checking indicators and lines and levels and trying to make decisions. And it was hard work, long work, and uncertain. But then again, when I got to this point and I realized systematic trend trading of stocks was what I wanted to do at the beginning anyway, and I flicked that switch, that all changed. All of that time, effort, energy just went out the window, became completely irrelevant. And it came down to opening my computer, opening the software, pressing the scan button or the test button or explore button, depending on the software you're using, to find the setups for the next day, writing them down, and then on the bus in the morning or that night, depending on where I was at, placing the orders with the broker, and that was it. So that's very hard to explain to someone who doesn't understand trading. It's like what you mean, all you're gonna do is press a button, get signals and place trades and you think you're gonna make money. Like what? There's some challenge we've got with our community because our community, our circle, typically doesn't understand trading, because all of the work is not in the pressing of the button and placing the order right. The work is what goes into that, to create the rules and validate them and build confidence in them so you can follow them come hell or high water in the market. And there's a lot in that. That's what. And this is one of those reasons that it's hard.

Sa.