Over the past few days, I’ve shared key insights from my 25+ years of trading experience.
If you haven’t read the first two emails, you can get them HERE and HERE
How long does it take to master a profession? Professional athletes spend over a decade training to reach the top.
Doctors dedicate more than ten years to education and practice.
Lawyers need at least seven years of study, plus experience, to excel. Engineers also invest years honing their skills.
Now think about legends like LeBron James or Cristiano Ronaldo. They’ve spent their lives becoming the best in their fields. But would you trust them to perform heart surgery? Or hire a doctor to argue your case in court? Of course not—it’s absurd.
Yet, in trading—a field where the rewards can surpass those of medicine or sports—people often dive in with no preparation. They open a brokerage account, deposit some money, and start speculating after reading an article or watching a video.
Consider this: some of the richest people in the world—Warren Buffett, Paul Tudor Jones, Ken Griffin, and others—are traders. But unlike medicine or sports, where years of preparation are required, anyone can start trading with just a few dollars and minimal knowledge.
Choosing to become a trader means choosing to go pro.
But here’s the catch: unlike stepping onto an NBA court or into an operating room—where it’s obvious if you’re outmatched—many traders don’t realize they’re competing against some of the sharpest minds every second of every day.
Is it any wonder so many traders fail? In Europe, brokers are required by ESMA (the European Securities and Markets Authority) to disclose the percentage of clients who lose money—even in their advertisements. For example, here’s a list of the top 25 brokers as of January 29, 2025.
That’s a considerable amount of data showing that at least, over ½ of traders lose money and some brokers have over 80% of their customers losing money.
Since you are reading this email, we can consider ourselves as traders.
So let’s ask ourselves, what do the 20% of traders who make money do that the 80% who lose money don’t?
In this series I’ve referenced again and again the Market Wizards books by Jack Schwager. Seeing the insights from those traders first hand, and hearing their journeys from the beginning, you get the sense that they are just like us.
You see them going from a struggling piker to, well, a Market Wizard..
In the Market Wizards book, he interviews a psychologist of traders.
Dr Van Tharp.
As traders, we all go through a lot, psychologically. And reading the Market Wizards books, you realize how much they talk about the psychology of trading too.
I looked up Dr Van Tharp and how I could work with him.
He offered a program called The Super Trader. It was a year-long program that looked a lot like a graduate school program. It was held in high regard amongst the community, but like grad school, it was expensive.
It was $75,000 US Dollars.
I wrestled with the idea but I decided to read his book first, before making the decision.
The Super Trader book.
At this point in my trader journey it was everything I needed, and I never did the Super Trader course.
This book was the major unlock I needed to go from a struggling trader, searching to find my way, focusing on things that didn’t matter and skipping over the big levers, to full time trader, consistently achieving my trading goals.
I learned that trading was about identifying my trading goals, then building a system to meet those goals.
What I had thought was so important, a trading strategy, knowing when to get into a trade, was only slightly better than a coin toss.
Trading is a business, but most traders treat it as a lottery. And if I’m being honest with myself, I did too.
The first step was to manually backtest my system so that I had something to work with.
I created my business plan (my trading plan). A systematic, realistic approach to accomplishing my trading goals through position sizing.
This is the framework that I have adapted and made my own, to create my trading business.
Every three to six months I run through this updating the entire business.
- What do I believe about the market? What are my goals from trading? What type of system can I trade knowing what I believe about markets, that gets me to my trading goals?
- Using the business (trading) plan framework, find the answers or solutions to all the questions of the plan.
- Build the trading system.
- Build the position sizing/risk management model.
- Build the tracking system to ensure your system, your risk and your plan gets you too your goals
At the beginning of each day I read through my plan.
I track every single trade I take in real time, in a tracker.
At the end of each trading day, I review the trading day, update my tracker and take any notes that I might need to consider about my plan.
I don’t make abrupt changes to the plan because I had a bad day, or my system is experiencing a drawdown, I follow through.
This is how I turned pro.
I never knew how best to pass this stuff on, until November 2022 I ran the first cohort of the Trading Thunderdome.
Since then I have helped over 40 traders with their trading business with this framework.
The Trading Thunderdome is where I show you, and work with you, my systematic way for building trading systems, building your trading business so you can scale it up to whatever level you decide.
The goal? Build a long term successful trading business.
We spend the next 6 weeks walking through this process building your trading business, together.
Who is this for?
I am looking to work with traders who have experience, who’ve been in the game for a while.
I’m looking to work with traders who’ve had success but are struggling with consistency.
I’m looking to work with traders who are sufficiently capitalized and want to take their trading to the next level.
I’m looking to work with traders who know that there are holes in their trading, that despite getting it right sometimes, they are missing consistency.
I’m looking to work with professionals.
Who this isn’t for.
To be clear, this isn’t for everyone…
If you’ve never traded before, this isn’t for you, yet.
If you cannot pay for this without going into debt, this isn’t for you, yet.
If you question whether you’ll be able to pay rent next month because you’re spending next month’s rent, this isn’t for you, yet.
The Thunderdome isn’t a place that you can just plop down your credit card and become an insta-successful trader.
But if you are looking for that next level, looking to tighten it up, looking to take your trading to a level that you know you can achieve then try the Thunderdome.
How We Break It Down
Week 1
You can’t get somewhere unless you know where you want to go. We need something to reverse engineer.
We need to know what constraints we have (time, compliance, budget) so that we can figure out how to work with them or make a plan to remove them.
And most importantly we’ll be building (backtesting), your systems.
You’ll have access to everything before we begin (and forever):
- Pollinate Trading Systems:
- Curvy ($997)
- Swing Beast ($997)
- Equity Earning ($997) System
- The Systems Mastery Course ($1,997)
- Lifetime member Trading Lab ($9,994)
Week 2
This part will change your trading, but it’s really about changing your life.
Mindset. Having the right mindset, knowing how to deconstruct problems, organize the chaos, deal with issues, and play the game you want to play.
Creating your six month plan. From the work we did in week 1, we’ll reverse engineer long term plans into shorter plans, and build a system to track them.
Week 3
Risk Management: planning for the unknown, preparing for mistakes and building a framework for adapting and recovering or adjusting.
Tracking and monitoring. Breaking down our big goals to smaller goals and habits, we build a dashboard (the Trade Operating System) to monitor progress, identify what’s working, what isn’t and know the health of our trading business (and ourselves) all in one location.
Week 4
Financial Plan. Putting all of our plans, goals, habits together into a live operating P&L to run our trading business from. This is where it all clicks!
Trading Plan. Taking our system, our goals, our mindset, our constraints, our risk management, our monitoring and our financial plan and putting it all together into our business plan aka Trading Plan. (Don’t worry, it won’t be 52 pages, single space #6 font document that you have to update every few hours).
Week 5
Dialing the process down into a systematized approach to go from trading idea, validation, planning, implementation and follow through.
As your business grows, as you grow, as the markets change, this system will be the framework. When you are analyzing bringing in new systems, swapping old systems, or analyzing opportunities.
Week 6
One on One session with me to discuss your trading business in depth, your plan, make adjustments and follow through in the future.
Week 7 and beyond…
You’ll have lifetime access to the Collective and a private slack channel for Thunderdome members forever. It’s a great way to colab with other traders who have gone through the process.
You’ll get early access to any updates or NEW systems before anyone else gets them.
We’ll have follow up Thunderdome sessions that you’ll have access to as well as access to any new Thunderdome cohorts that go through.
Once you’re in, you’re in!
What is included?
The Thunderdome is both a live cohort and a self paced intensive professional trader program.
It is designed to be two sessions per week but you can go as fast (or slow) as you like.
You’ll have access to everything forever.
In addition, you’ll receive…
- Systems Mastery Course ($1,997)
- Curvy Trading System ($997)
- https://macro-ops.com/swing-beast-momentum-strategy-sales/ ($997)
- https://macro-ops.com/curvy-day-trading-strategy-sales/($997)
- https://macro-ops.com/curvy-day-trading-strategy-sales/($9,994) Only Thunderdome members receive lifetime access to the Lab
And on top of that you get access to all the other Thunderdomes cohorts again, and access to previous cohorts whenever you need it!
All together that’s $14,982 in trading systems, courses and the Collective, in addition to the Thunderdome program that we run multiple times per year.
We’re starting the next cohort in the next week, if you are serious about turning pro, this is the way.
You get everything here for $6,997.
