Assessing a Great Year of Trading and Teaching
A new year is upon us and with all the festivities out of the way it's a good time to reflect and make goals for the months ahead. I typically do a year-end assessment around this point where I take a look at my own trading business along with the training I conduct at Samurai Trading Academy to determine what I did well, what can be improved, and what new ideas I should implement to ensure another great year personally and professionally.
In many ways this was actually kind of a "quiet" year for me in terms of utilizing the mobility being a day trader. Prior years have seen me travelling extensively and living in countries like Thailand, Japan, and Belgium or spending months in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico but this year I was far more settled and enjoyed a bit more stability remaining in one city most of the time with only occasional trips. Not much really changed when it came to trading and teaching however as I continued to push forward in the same way I have for years.
Reflections on the STA Training Program and Blog
First off I can say that I'm very happy with the progress that's been made at STA this year as I've worked with some amazing students and seen some exceptional results including having some fresh faces make the transition into full-time trading. There's few things that feel as rewarding to me as seeing students progress by leaps and bounds and achieve their goals. It makes all the hours and effort well spent and seeing that progression is why I plan to continue teaching for many, many more years.
That said, there's a lot more that I could be doing outside of the small group of students I select for the STA Training Program and a big part of that is making more trading content available to non-students through the STA website and trading blog. While there's not really a substitute for the kind of training environment where I'm working with a handful of students 1-on-1 over a number of months to guide them to consistent profitability, I still think there's a lot of insight and experience I can offer that self-directed traders or other professionals may find useful for enhancing performance.
Over the past year I've added only small amounts of public content because I was perfectly happy with the status of the STA group and the students I had and wasn't really looking to grow the site's reach. My interest in teaching people how to trade has never been to churn through as many students as possible or to use marketing hype to convince people to do this if they are otherwise unsure about pursuing trading. This mentality meant that as the site became increasingly popular and I was more easily finding the kind of determined and focused students that I was looking for that I was having to reject the large majority of inquiries and I was actively trying to keep my inbox from overflowing.
I realize that a lot of this goes against what's normal in this industry as many are more than happy to grow as much as possible and take on as many students as possible. I'm a bit different though because I'm a trader first and foremost rather than just a mentor. It's vital to me that I have time to focus on my own business because actively trading is my passion and I didn't want the teaching and training program to eclipse that. So I scaled down a bit on the teaching side of things, found a good balance that led to exceptional results personally and for students, and continued to push forward mostly in a behind-the-scenes way by interacting more directly with our training group.
But all of that has me thinking, why can't I still do more for aspiring full-time traders who are searching far and wide on the web for solid information to guide them? Training people directly while engaging in a great deal of back-and-forth feedback is time-consuming but there's bound to be some high quality stuff that I can put out there without nearly the same kind of demands.
There's a lot of great stuff on the STA blog already like the day trading recap posts which discuss a lot of my trading thought-process in detail, some Student Updates which give a clear look on the importance of consistency in trading, and numerous day trading articles on a variety of subjects as well. Still, there's a lot of topics that remain uncovered and that most aspiring traders rarely encounter in their pursuit of trading knowledge.
The Future of our Day Trading Blog
So what I'm looking to do in the months ahead is to not only bring back some of the content that led to so many positive email and comment responses (such as the Recaps of my own trading along with the strategy and thought-process involved) but to improve the depth of some articles and videos as well. I want to dig a bit deeper into why some traders succeed, why some fail, and what makes systems and methods of trading profitable over the long term. My hope is to provide more detail on some of the foundational knowledge and psychological tools that will help any determined learner to push towards their trading goals and achieve the kind of freedom and flexibility that being a trader provides.
As part of this push I encourage any of you to get in touch with me using the Contact form if you have any trading questions you want answered or topics you'd like to see covered. I answer all this stuff personally (rather than use PR people who know nothing about trading - the usual approach) and truly enjoy the interaction with those who share the same passion for trading that I do so I'm excited to hear your thoughts and forge ahead with the kind of content you want to see. It's going to be a lot of work but I'm excited to get going and to work with all of you in the months ahead!
- Strike While The Iron is Hot - March 1, 2021
- The Path to Becoming a Full Time Trader - February 22, 2021
- Looking to 2021 and Beyond - January 20, 2021
Thank you so much for doing what you do, Cody! Looking forward to the near year and continuing our trading sessions and learning everything I can!