My Home Stretch

May is coming to an end soon. I had back to back losing days this week since the Memorial Day weekend. Not quite pleased with myself, to be honest. I did ramp up the share sizes a bit, but I'm upset that I let my losers slip a bit this week. Jane ran my stats and so far my up eff is .0673 vs down eff of -.0664.

I'm feeling tired, exhausted, burned out even. Now that the Series 55 exam is over I have this urge to just pack up and travel in whatever direction without a destination in mind and just to see where I end up. Seattle, San Fran, Vegas, and NYC, they all sound good to me right now. I've been trading, in my opinion, near perfect according to the goals I had this month... but with the variable cost, it's hardly anything. The coaches and senior traders met today after the close. I hope they really do away with the stupid infrastructure costs.

I would love to have the opportunity to just sit down with top management to see how in the world they came up with this payout structure. Sure, there are people that supered without a problem under this new structure, but they all did it fairly quickly from my impression. Let's just say that these guys have a knack for trading and are better than me. (Yes, I can accept that other people are better than me at something... for now) I would want to know when did this new payout structure go into place, how many traders have came on board since then, the time it took them to super in a few different statistical measure, and how many traders have left.

My guess, and my hope in order for serious changes to take place is that the # of traders super quickly is about the same but it's taking a hell of a lot longer for the majority of traders. Some might get discouraged and quit before they make it, even if they've shown progress. Because everybody has a pain threshold. For some it's two months, for some it's longer. In other cases, people just flat out go elsewhere to seek higher payout.

I'm sure the new trade at cost plan was well intentioned. As you trade more of course the lower the commission the better, but I feel to get the benefit of this plan is to ramp up your share sizes quickly and not everybody is comfortable with that. The end result is that you'll end up with people taking on more risk than they're comfortable with or should. If you're progressing at a slower rate than your variable costs, what it essentially becomes is much like credit card debt. Your interest is so high that your income can't catch up unless something changes drastically.

I just think that it makes more sense from a management perspective to recruit and attract new talent. Hey, I've been running our family business with my dad and I've recruited with Southwestern before. I know what the other side of the table is thinking. If the intention of the company is to turn an average Joe into HP traders, I doubt 80% of them will even get to that point. Part of my belief also is that once you get to that super yahtzee point, some people start taking off or take off even more. It's like a validation, a vote of confidence. Ask any executives, anyone in HR, business books, or the Internet and they will tell you a high turnover is not a desirable thing. The cost and effort that goes into recruiting and training can work against you very quickly and lost productivity is immeasurable. Maybe what we should be doing is being more selective about the candidates, instead of just feeding people through the machine like some of the coaches are doing and hoping to get a few above normal catches.

It's been frustrating and lately... it's just plain stresses me out. Losing sleep. Draining mental and emotional energy. I'm not going to blame the system because I was the one that signed the agreement but I have a high self-awareness and I'll tell you that I've been guilty of over trading on days when I should be sitting on my hands b/c I'm trying to make up for the deficit when there's not much opportunities present in the market. It's also very easy to have a self-bias tendency. If you ask a roomful of people if they will have a successful marriage or if they perceive themselves to be an above average driver, the majority of them will raise their hands, even though statistically half of the marriages fail in this country and realistically only half can be above average technically. I'm sure lots of people when they join they have the mentality of "oh well, that's no problem. Look at this guy, he made 10 G's today. Yeah, I can do this or at least I will get to that point." Reality is, this is a tough gig. And the game is different now.

The Russell Reconstitution is coming up and I've been reading about it. Sounds pretty exciting and I'm hoping to do well. I'm getting all my tools ready to see if I can catch any good moves. I haven't really been posting anything interesting unfortunately... my mind is simply occupied elsewhere.