The Pro's and Con's of Prop Firms

Are you hearing me at all? Yes, I can hear you now. All right, guys, welcome to the webinar. Now, not so much of a coaching session, but Kevin had a good point. I did throw it up there to see if you had something specific. It's a bit of a weird week we're in, so this is a good discussion. It's around, I was just gonna talk about prop firms, right? The pros and cons of prop firms and where it goes. Now, just on the general prop firms themselves, now, we set up, we started offering a prop solution and more of a proprietary trading like old school. Back in 2012, when we started doing all this stuff and then the backend system that we built with a company in the US ended up being the same one that everyone used globally, right? The guy that I did it with thought it'd be a good idea for him to keep it himself and went and sold it to the world. So that's why everyone has the same systems. It's actually the same system I built in 2012. We didn't roll it out. Well, he didn't roll it out till it was completed about 2017, but by then there was 1,000 or 2,000 prop firms in a matter of weeks. Now, coming back to the prop firm structure. Now, a traditional prop firm, right, what they do is they nurture, educate, nurture, train, give traders capital as they progress and go forward. That is completely different to what the prop firms are doing, okay? They are more the system here, and this is where it got so corrupt and we sort of pulled out of it somewhat was the system is all about getting more people on and everyone losing. Everyone loses, right? That's the whole system. So, but if you don't have any money, then if you're looking at different companies and FundedNext, I've done a video on these guys, it's all the same stuff as in it's all, there's no regulations, right? Put it this way. You trade with a broker with your own money, there's things that the broker has to do, right? It has to be fair play, you know, not manipulating prices and these things. When it comes to brokerage firms, I mean, prop firms, they can do whatever they want. And this is what actually happens. Like FundedNext, they've been going up against FTMO is the sort of biggest in the world. There's so many plans, I don't even know how you can keep up with what's going on. The structure of what they're doing, and this is quite common for all prop firms. It's all the scandalous activity that you may not see. I did see FundedNext, I mean, this stuff usually gets hidden or they pay it off. The guy here that I was looking at, he's been a professional trader for seven years, and there was a price spike in an instrument, which in a regulated market, you can go back to the broker and say, that was a false move, or that was a, it didn't really happen, so you need to give me my cash back, and they would. In this situation, he got taken out after all the work of going through things. I know in every sort of product, there's always gonna be people who whinge and bitch and moan about stuff, but the fact is, in the prop industry, it is commonplace, and it is for good reason that they whinge and bitch, because a lot of these companies are misleading people. The whole timeframes, there's the pop-up instant funding, all this sort of stuff as well. It is completely crazy. So what we've done, we've come back to, it's like an organic, the way things were meant to be. So I'm not one to sort of follow suit. So for traders who are gonna come through our sort of prop program, we've now set up an easy way to do this, because all you wanna know is, what are my trading limits? And this is what you guys are sort of doing with your evaluation accounts and trading accounts anyway. I know a lot of you trade your own cash. So you set your own boundaries. So we've got a system here where you can trade your own limits, or you can trade your own. If you want your profit target to only be 5%, well, your maximum loss limit is 3.75, and your daily loss limit, 1.25. That's actually pretty logical, and actually a pretty good way to get some funding, because prop firms, the pros is, you can get funded. The cons is, they can change the rules the same day that you get funded and take you out, right? There's no, and you've got no right of reply. That's the worst thing about it. Now, if you get a good firm, and I would consider myself that, then you can actually sort of choose your limits and work around that. If you want bigger limits, I'm like, yeah, absolutely, knock yourself out. But understand that you are gonna have a bigger profit target. So this puts things in your own hands. So if everything was all fair and equal, then you could actually just do what you wanted to do when you sign up, which is just give me an account. These are the limits. If I don't break them, then we're all good, right? That is good, because that's what the prop firms are supposed to be doing. What they do do is if you go into their sort of rules and limits and these sorts of things, it gets very problematic around what you can do and what you can't, how fast to scale up. The traders that actually come through our main programmes, which a lot of you guys are a part of, you understand the structure of your capital management. You understand now, you're getting more understanding around trade selection and how to be patient. That's all that trading is. The prop firm industry is all about the micro trader, instant funding, right? You're knocked out, get funded in a day, do this, blah, blah, blah. It's all where all the poor trading decisions are made, that's what they gamify, and that's why it's not a good idea, right? And I mean, I could use Funded Next as an example. You can get any prop firm up. There'll always be, as I said, there'll always be someone that will be somewhat disappointed with their experience, especially like, even if you fail, we've had traders before go, this is terrible. If you don't give me my money back, right, and they've blown the account up, usually in a day, they would come back and go, we're gonna like spray your name all over the internet and say how terrible you are. You're like, you know what? I was more like, you know what, knock yourself out, and I'll actually, you know what, just so they know who it is, I've got all your account details here, your name and address, and I'm gonna post those everywhere else as well, just so they know where you are. And I'm serious, I actually did that, and it stopped a lot of lunatics who were buying challenges, blowing the account up, and then thinking they could just get their money back by some idle threats. So that's one thing. The other part is the toxic part, which has become too commonplace, which is you do everything right, you pay your money, you get through nice trading, and their intention as soon as you get through is we need to get that guy out, right? We need to get him out. So that's when they start changing the rules, manipulating the prices, doing a whole range of things to get people out. Smaller accounts, well, they might be okay with keeping you going a bit, but generally speaking, they've got a different team that manages the funded side, and it's more about, okay, take him out, take him out, change the prices, whatever it is. I'm telling you, a lot of it is there and that you need to be aware of. And that's pretty much it, right? Because if you get a company that is with the right intentions, it can be a great tool for people without any cash, right? You can get in, use your knowledge and skills. Why should you be penalised just because you've got no capital? If you know how to trade, well, you show us, and then you are in the game, right? That's the sort of main aim of it. So just on that, I mean, there's a few other things we could talk about. You guys must have some questions around that or specific companies or anything. Yeah, Brad, from your side then, you providing the capital or the equity, are they normally a demo account to prove that they can trade? And then secondly, is it company money? Like if they open up a $5,000 or $50,000 account, you've got to qualify first, but you guys are putting that 50K up, and then normally that splits the 80, 20 or something close to that. But originally, they're all just demo accounts, aren't they? Linked to your back office, and that way you can assess whether or not they've got the skills to do it or if they're just gambling. Is that sort of how that works? Because you're putting- Yeah, it is. That's actually, that's a good one because it leads into something else as well. So always, I mean, if anyone was giving you real cash to trade, if they didn't know who you were and how you could trade, well, that's just idiotic and crazy. No one would do that. So if someone's saying they're doing that, then it's definitely, they're not doing it. They're all demo accounts. Now, since, I think it's FundedNext or whatever it was called, that got pulled up by the Fed or the CFTC in the US. Then there was a massive shutdown of prop firms in the US. What they found is there was a lot of US clients that had prop firms all over the world, and they hate the US, doesn't mind them losing money as long as they lose it in the US. So they went and shut them all down. And they used the regulations around US clients cannot trade CFDs. That's just a sort of regulation because it's a contract for difference. I mean, there's hardly any difference between that margin trading and what they do in the futures market over there. But they just made up this sort of thing. So that's sort of what happened. So it used to go to demo accounts and then you would put the traders into live accounts. It would be connected to an overall big account, big margin account, right, Stephen? So you wouldn't actually fund every account. You fund the drawdowns in every account. So otherwise, you end up with having to lock in 10 or 15 million bucks to try and run this. Instead, you can have sort of half a million bucks and actually run the risk exposure in all those accounts. Now- You cover the risk side of it. We cover the risk. You don't need to cover the whole collateral. Right, so is the whole collateral real money then? Or is it actually just, like I said, a hook to another demo account where you're accountable for that risk profile? No, no, no. So that's, yeah, this is where I'll get to. So that is connected to the accounts and that is real cash. Now, what we found as we started, you know, just sort of going back into it, going, you know what, we should be, but we do the funding programme anyway with a bunch of our clients. So we're like, well, why don't we sort of offer this again? We found when we went to the brokers that it's funny now, right? Because they all changed. I was looking at all the terminology and we had to sort of fall in line with this a bit. Because if you look through different companies, let me go to, say, FTMO, you'll find that the terminology now is about rewards, right? Because all of these massive, all the big companies now and everyone's falling in behind, because if you want US clients, you've got to, you can't offer them CFDs, right? But this is the catch. If you use demo accounts, they're not really trading live CFDs so they can actually use those. So what they did is, FTMO sort of started doing it and then there was a whole bunch of them. If you go through the thing now, there's no profits. It's not called profits because the environment is completely demo. Every aspect of it is demo. So now, yeah, you can get a reward. That's what it is, right? And you're not making profits. They call it something else, right? It's not like, well, these guys have got actually profit target, which is a little bit odd because it's more like reward target is what everyone's using now. And so you can see down the bottom here, that there's sort of, I mean, these guys do a good job of marketing these things, but the average reward for this account, right? Reward. There's no profits. You're not getting a profit. You're gonna get rewarded. It's gonna be a cash amount, you would think. So that's where it sort of changed, Stephen. So globally, it became so toxic that we sort of stopped doing anything in that space because it was like, what the hell is going on here? So most of the companies funded next, all the big guys that sort of market themselves. And I did a, I mean, I don't know if you guys saw it. I put it on YouTube. I think it might've even got, they might've asked me to take it down because these guys would pay a lot of money there, is I did, because for some reason I was getting emails. So I must've logged in to one of their emails like a couple of years ago. And each month they send out a report, how many people we got and all this sort of stuff. So I actually sort of went, I started going, hang on a second. None of these numbers add up. So I went through from the time that they started sending out the emails, right through and they just joined the party. And what I'm saying by that is, how much they've paid out, 350 million. It's an absolute lie. I mean, as soon as we try and get some regulations around this, you'll find these numbers are, that would be probably like less than 500K that they've paid out. And it's more about, so these guys went from their emails, like monthly payouts, 40K, 50K, 42K, 37K, 50K. Then the next month, 3.5 million. So they worked out looking at what FTMO is doing and everyone else. So one of the cons of prop firm industry and trading, it's really about trust. It's really about the fact that, so this is a thing here, right? Simulated platform and earn rewards. That's what you're doing. So they are not regulated. That's the biggest con. Because basically, even if you're really good, and even if you do the right things, they can just say to you the next day, look, you've just made 50K, but you know what? We don't like you. So you're out and we're keeping the money. And that person's got no one to respond to. They can't go to a regulator and go, hey, this guy's doing this. They're like, that company's unregulated. So this is like, it's like the Wild West. That's why a lot of people these days are looking for a bit of trust, a bit of security, making sure they're around. There was hundreds of firms that went sideways. There was companies like SurgeTrader that probably took about 10 or 15 million out of the market and then just closed down with thousands and thousands of accounts online. So that's what it is. You've just got to understand, if you go to a company that's got a lot of, whether it's FTMO funded, they seem to have a lot of propaganda, like a lot of crazy stuff. These guys are, as you go through the testimonials, it's not all squeaky clean, put it that way. No, and you don't know what someone's going to say or write anyway. They could be working for the company or they could be someone who- Oh, well, that's the other thing. That is 100%. The other thing is a lot of, to me, a lot of the testimonials, they're not like checked. And a lot of the prop firms have teams slagging each other off, right? You can't hit all those sites and tell everyone how to- That happens in real business, bro. What's that? That happens in real business as well. Oh yeah, it does. And you know what? This is the problem of our time, social media and the internet. They hide behind fake names, fake bullshit testimonials. It's absolutely terrible. And these people should be in jail for slander, defecation, defecation. There should be some defecation on them, but- Do you know a company called SFX? SFX? Yeah. Not really. SFX, trading, is it? No, it's just SFX. As far as I know, it was one that popped up recently. Somebody was telling me about. Okay, okay. So this is the sort of stuff, actually. This is a good example of some of the crazy stuff you want to be aware of. 50% off, buy one, get one, plus 200% refund. That company is either going broke or is broke already because they're basically just, anyone, please sign up. So I don't know why that site isn't even loading, but that's where it- Can't see too much on these guys. Oh yeah, there's some little certificates down there. Yeah, so that's the sort of stuff. So for these companies, let me just tell you the model that they use. They are relying on volume. Traders coming in, get a big discount to reset. Even when we were sort of doing this back in the day, we worked out that most traders reset six times, so you can work out the structure of your pricing. This is before all the companies came online. So you've got, so you need volume, and you also need everyone to fail because that funds the whole thing, and that's how you make money. There's no making money here from traders making money is the problem. And that's what the, if it was regulated, there would be none of the bullshit claims here that you see all over the place about trying to help traders or do this and do that, and we're amazing. And this is, see what I'm saying? It's a part of the issue is, yeah, I'd love a free 180 count. It's a simulated trading, and that's more to avoid regulations, to try and get more traders in globally. That's what that is. That's what the industry's become. It's like a pretend casino. You can certainly see why they would be doing it because it's no longer, they're talking about profits. They're just talking about play talk, and that's how they get around all the regulations, I would imagine. Yeah, that's exactly right, Kevin. It's all about managing, like the regulators, I mean, they've got the brokers under lock and key. I just don't know why they haven't stepped out and actually done that for the prop firms, actually make them get regulated. Most of them wouldn't have the qualifications to run a trading firm. So that would tidy things up. And then also, yeah, if you have people coming into this, the live accounts have to be real live accounts. Let's get that going, because that's where the model falls over because they're like, but what do you mean? We're gonna lose all our money. Our traders are terrible. So come back, Brad, to what you're offering here. Just talk us through that, please. Okay, so I was sort of looking at the whole thing, right? Like, and actually, you guys are a bit of a cross-section of traders. Each of you have different risk appetites, different characteristics, different locations, time zones, different ways to trade. It's all like, that's great. So having one programme where you're trying to funnel everyone into one thing, it's not one shoe fits all. That's what I was thinking. So I have got a one shoe fits all. It's a size seven and a half, and it's got a 10% profit target. That's our limits. Now, what we wanted to do was give you the power to think about how you trade. Like if you, say for instance, Kevin, like you're, say you're a very controlled trader, right? And you choose, say, a 50K account. I would be going, the better you are, the smaller the profit target. I would be going, because what that means is you're just actually looking for good trades. You get them, you win, and that's what you get, and you only need to make 5%. So you are potentially trading a small profile. What you've got, and this is what all the other prop firms are doing, it's 10% drawdowns, 15% profit targets, and trying to get them to overtrade and do those things. There's nothing towards helping the trader use their own knowledge about how good they are, and then allowing them to use that knowledge to get the funding. So what we're doing is putting it in your hands, right? If you are, if you don't know how to trade, and you come in and think, well, this is great, I'm just gonna go 1% loss limit, I need to make 1.3, I'll get through in like a heartbeat. Yeah, yeah, but you lose, one losing trade, you're out. Right, there's common sense here, right? And then there's, so what it is, we're gonna give people enough rope to hang themselves. Good traders will actually be able to use it better, because now you can actually go, you know what? 5% drawdown's enough, I've only gotta make 6.7%, I've got a decent daily loss limit, let's go, right? So that's what we're trying to do, Kevin, is actually give people a bit more control over their own destiny as far as the limits they get, right? And you'll find, if you choose your own limits, you probably respect these more than you would someone else's limits. So if we gave you that, you're like, yeah, okay, I'm just gonna trade and trade till I hit the loss limit. Where if you choose the limits, it actually means something to you, this is your trade plan, you know what I mean? This is how you get control of your trading, it's actually own the limits, right? Then just start trading according to that. I think we're gonna have a better outcome, we're gonna find better traders that appreciate the ability for them to set their own plans, take ownership of that, and then start trading. That's how it should be, and that's how we originally started it, not with setting your own limits, we actually sort of thought, well, geez, 5% is enough, I mean, who wants to lose more than 5%, not us? So 5% was it, and then it became, within five or six years, it became 10% and whatever it was. Let me just take you back to 2012, right? There was us, and there was a firm called Top Step Trader. You guys heard of those? Okay, they're a futures trading company in the US. They sort of kicked off their futures funding program back when we did, and we were sort of based in the US, okay? These guys, I put up on our site, Funding for Traders, or something simple, right? None of all this glitz and glamour these days, and they sued us for using, they said they'd trademarked the term funded trader, which was a load of codswallop. Anyway, it cost me 30,000 in some legal fees because they took us to court saying that we couldn't use the term funded trader because they had coined it and it was not generic, and the court said, okay, get out of it. You guys are idiots. Didn't mean I got my money back, but we used to lock horns with those guys for quite a while. They were doing a good job. Now they've just become more like a futures broker, which is, sort of like us, we're in this space, and say, prominent back 2012, 2015 to 17. Once it became toxic, you're like, you don't want to be a part of it. I don't want to be a part of this, the toxic nature of companies lying about their programmes, lying about what they're actually doing, okay? And a lot of that is there's no live accounts. That's the problem. What we're doing with you guys is giving you resources, tools, courses, and training, so when it comes time for you to trade, and you get there, you're making money, we know, I can go to sleep at night knowing that you guys have got control of your risk. That's the business, right? We have some limits in place to sort of stop you if in case you had a brain explosion, or a market had an explosion, and things go haywire. So that's where we are. How does this relate to, Brad, the role in that bigger account that I've got, have we? Yeah, yeah. Oh, no, so what we've got is the bigger accounts at this stage go with our general limits, the general programme. But it's good you mentioned that, because I'm actually sort of thinking, well, if we, so the limits you choose, right, to go through your evaluation, these are the limits you trade once you get funded, okay? So it's not like you pass a 5% drawdown, and then you get a 10% as a giddy up. What I am thinking of doing is just sort of processing it in my own sort of time is thinking, well, if this is good, if this is the way forward, well, then it would make sense to give traders in our bigger evaluation accounts the same sort of flexibility. Now, what we generally wanna see is, like the idea of having a 10% target at the moment is I wanna see a really good cross-section of trades. I wanna see a good cross-section of trade plans, how you handle different trading activity, all those sorts of things. That's what the target is for me. What, but then I am seriously thinking about changing it to this structure to give you a bit of flexibility. The only thing, like I just don't want people getting into an account. Say you go for like 3%, you've only gotta make 4%, which is all fine. What I don't want you to do is get funded and then have a run of bad trades, and you hit a 1% or 3% loss limit, and you're out. It's like a fair bit of work. Can you say you're out? Is that out for a certain time, or? Well, that account is out, right? This is the hard part, because if you prove that you've actually hit the loss limits, generally speaking, it means you've either been over-trading, you haven't controlled yourself, you haven't like, and this is where the systems like the four consecutive loss rule, I'll be looking at that going. You've had like 12 losing trades in a row, and you never once thought about reducing your trade sales. That's crazy. So if you hit the drawdown limits, am I gonna fund you again straight away? Absolutely not. You shouldn't anyway. No, that's right. You're doing a disfavor to the individual straight up. Well, that's right, and if it was like that, Kevin, you'd be like, oh, well, I'll just go mad, I'll hit the loss limit, and if there's just a simple buyback in, well, then you do it again. What we've done always since day one was if you hit that loss limit, you gotta sign up again and prove it again, because clearly the first time was a fluke. If you've blown it up, because traders who are in the bigger accounts, we are intervening much quicker than that, and when I say intervening, I'll be sort of talking to you or to whoever it is. If you've had a couple of losing trades, I'll be telling you, like the trade conditions are ----. What are you doing? You're actually costing yourself money, because this is your money now. Once you get in there and you're up cash, it's your money, right? When you start losing our cash, I'm even more focused, right? So I'm not waiting for you just to go, yeah, like the prop firms, they go, come on, one more losing trade, and yes, you've hit the loss limit, you're out, see you later. No, no, it's more like you're down 1%, I'm already in there saying, listen, your trade setup was good, let's talk through it, what happened? And then you're like, I don't know, I just, it was Friday, I was bored, and I thought, well, I've got money here, I'll just put a trade on. Well, that's stupid. You just, you might as well just toss a coin, you should have rung me up, tossed a coin, and I'll bet you the money, because there's a 50% chance you lose, and that's what happens. So the traders who are in this, in the proper programs, get the assistance, so you should never hit the maximum loss limit. That's the difference. So, we can do- So you're saying just, go on, keep going. Oh, no, I was just gonna say, we can do that. So say, for instance, you chose this as your plan for the million dollar account, you'd almost have to be micromanaged on, okay, what this means is, you need to, like, and this is the same way we teach it, right? What you would be doing is, I've got a 3% loss limit. Okay, so why don't you just risk only half percent, or 0.25, build up like a 10 grand buffer, boom, you've got a big account with, on a really good structure, and now you've built a capital base that you can build upon, that is smart. It's not the bit that I've been looking at, it's like, you know, everybody tends to think a bubba account, but you gotta work really hard to build that. Where you have a larger account, you can, whole lot less need for up in the ante, you know what I mean, like, taking risk. Does that make sense? So you don't need to take, so you take minimal risk, like next to none. Because you don't need it, because you're gonna make a lot of money just on a very low risk. So that's what I've seen. That was the whole aim of those accounts, right? Because that's the gap. You can actually trade very modestly, and I keep saying it to traders, you only need one good trade a week. You know, when you've got a big account. I worked it out the other day, that trade would have made me 20K. That's right. This week already, if all those were fair dinkum that I took and pulled it off, it would be something like 40 odd K there. It's like, **** me. All right, well, let's just relax back here and just take it easy. That's right. So this is the thing, Kevin. I say to people, like, you only need one good trade a week. The bigger and better you get, you'll be thinking, I only need one good trade this month. That is- That's the way I'm looking at it now. That is actually how professionals do it, right? The bigger the account, like, we knew guys that were doing four trades a year, right? And they were making ---- loads. It's very hard to control yourself, but if you wait for the perfect setup, you pull in 20, you're like, you know what? That's me. I'm sort of done for the month, but you know what? I'm gonna keep an eye on the market. There could be some good opportunities. And that's the frame of mind. Well, that just turned up yesterday. The whole example that you've been giving us, it's like, there's nothing here this week at all. And then all of a sudden, for some reason, there it was. So, you don't know, but if you're there, you're watching the market. If you're not there, well, you're not there. But, you know, and then working out your mechanism to get in and all that sort of thing, I've got to do a lot of work on that yet. But I'll get in manually on stuff, because I can't with those that are working. I understand you can't be there all the time, but anyway. So what would you recommend I do here? Just simply start here and go through this. How do we get started? Or we'll just talk to you one-to-one. Oh, you mean with the funding program or just on the evaluation? Well, we talked about the evaluation thing the other day, of hooking all that up. Yep. And just gonna get started on that. I didn't get it. Still can't work out how to get the damn thing on that other, you know, dual account thing, but I'll keep working at it and I'll get there. So, I'll get that hooked up and get trading. On that, what you've given us. And then get your journaling and everything all sorted out and going. So that's all tracking, you know what I mean? That's my goal for the next month, you know? Yeah, good one. That's good. And that's really good. I'm just so excited to find, you know, all of a sudden, for some reason, you know, these trendline things are just like, holy ----, you've got to get out to a month before you see them. You whoop out to a month and you go, oh, god, now I'm starting to see it all. Anyway, beside the point. This is good. We do get a good steady, this is how it sort of worked in the past, is like with the bigger accounts, it's like a work in progress. And then we get guys who have either joined up with the funding program, get an account that they can use. It's like, that's where they do their trade, like some trading. The other one is like their real good stuff. You can get a little bit caught up in which account is which, but anyway, that's the thing, right? We want to work with you guys to get you focused, get you making money. That's the whole aim of it. And even if you don't have a funded account and you're using your own account, like most guys do, really think hard about these limits that you choose. Because once you choose them, like if you've done a little bit of homework on it, you're like, that's me, this is my plan, right? And it's really, and if you are trading your own cash, well then you're really only looking at these two things, the daily loss limit and the maximum loss limit. It's good to have profit goals that keeps you moving forward. Monthly goals would be good. Get that and then you're in, right? And funny enough, if you start doing that, that's when you come back to a prop program, you go, I actually know what I'm doing. And I'm actually in control and I feel confident. What they are caught up usually in is someone else's rule, someone else's plan. That's the problem. That's where this is a bit of a game changer. But yeah, that's good. It was good discussion, right? Because- That's enlightened us a little bit more. I'm still not 110% all over it, but I was particularly interested in all these bloody prop, why do they call them prop anyway? Because that was the name, proprietary trading, right? Proprietary trading in a trading team, all the banks have them, right? You've got the main trading team that manages all the flow on the main trading floor. There'll be a team of traders over this other side. Proprietary trading is basically trading anything, but you're not part of a flow or anything. You're just individual trade selection is what it is. With your maximum alpha traders that have come through your program, how long on average does it take them to get to that maximum alpha where they're very competent and they're being consistently profitable? How long is that? I know it's different for everyone, but on average, how long would you say that? Well, it really does depend on the conditions, but we've seen traders get through in like, you know, two or three months and then others six months. It can be a bit of a working, that's why some of them would choose, I'll just get a small account and use that to generate some cash. And then whilst they're actually, because they're sort of weird, right? You can get a different mindset for the big account than you would for the smaller account. We actually had a lot of traders who opened up accounts on other firms because they would get embarrassed about what they were doing with their trading because they would trade reckless on the other account, but try and trade properly on this one. It's like, no, no, you got to do the same thing on wherever you are, right? The whole thing is about a mind shift. I've just noted in my experience so far, it's amazing. The whole mind is such an amazing bit of a, not a bit of an article, it's just an amazing thing. For ages, it used to be one week was great in my head and the next week was shed ice, and you know, but for some reason it shifts and then I come back to my wife and I say, you know, you wouldn't believe what I've learnt this week, you know, how much, well, I've never seen that before, but now I see that. But that's to me is like, that's just how your brain works, but you got to fight that negativity away. It's not about being gung-ho, it's about what little one piece have I learnt? I always used to say when I was running my team of people, I said, if you learnt one new thing, now learning doesn't mean you just look at it and you ******* piss off. It's like, I understand how all that little tiny bit fits. And if you do that for a year, you got 365 ******* things you know that you didn't know before. And that means you can use them. So that's what I've been doing in my trading experience so far. And you know, it's the shift. So you shift up and then you'll go backwards. And you know, in your head. Yeah, you're right. You got to keep going and shift it up again. To me, it's all about getting your head right. Because really the mechanism is pretty simple really, isn't it? The mechanism like you're telling us, it's even more simple when I'm following you along, Brad. It's just, you know, you've taken all that bloody candle bullshit away and it's just like, well, you're following a trend. Trend line, you know, and that's it. So anyway, that's just my two bobs worth. That's good. That's really good. And that's the whole ethos behind what I've always said. Trade with the market, not against it. Stephen, you were going to say something? Yeah, I was. So with your maximum alpha traders, do they, when you said they take their own trades, do the majority of them take your trades with your signals and your, you know? It's a bit of a mix. I think probably more independent. Use those as a bit of a cross check. See if like, it's like a good validation. Is my analysis the same as what's going on? No, a lot of it's probably more independent. You'll find that like exactly like Kevin's learning path, right? It's expanding. So by the time you get there, you're super confident. You're like, yeah, okay, I like what that says, but you know what? I'm actually, the decision is more yours as opposed to relying on outside sources as such. And they're good as a cross check. Talk about, you would have to say that at the moment or the last few months with the market conditions and the geopolitical thing. I know there's always going to be something in the background happening, no matter what it is. But are these really, would you call these really difficult times to try and get the flow? Tricky. This is really testing patience, right? Because it's like, you've got to be patient to wait for the opportunity. But the idiotic sort of behaviour that we're seeing is that's frustrating on top of being disciplined. So that's what I'm getting a bit more, I'm getting a little bit more shitty, a bit ratty about that. I'm like, can you, like, it's stupid. Like, it's just crazy. We just want the flow back, don't we? We want the flow back. And I said that in an update just before this came on. I don't know if you guys saw it. I was like, you're looking for little things, right? Trump is looking for an excuse to get out. The fiscal debt, right, of the government in the US could be away. And he's come out with this. Ending, so he wants to reduce, slash, the scope of the federal government. Ending costly forever wars. He's going to use the cost of the, oh, you know what, it's costing us too much, we're out. Like a business, you know what I mean? He got suckered in by Israel into this. Netanyahu, they have walked, have you not, we've not even seen them since, right? They're like, good, US is in there. Now they can wear all the brunt of this ----. But this could be a good thing, is what I'm coming back to. Would he still be in the war purely because that then would potentially raise interest rates because of inflation and the oil problem? Would that be a- Nah, well, it's the oil. Oil would come down, inflation would ease there. It's more about this, right? They owe so much cash, 40 trill. And it'd be like, you know what, that's what we need to do. So any excuse, and he could use that as the excuse. And then, you know why I think this is like a really important thing to see? It's because it's not his fault. Oh, it's costing us too much. Not my fault. He does not want to be blamed for anything. No, he's got his midterms coming up. That's why he wants to be popular, but I don't think that's happening at the moment. Can I just say something about all this? You know, I've been in business for ******* years, all my life. Never been, never worked for any other asshole all my life. In everything that happens is, I used to have sales guys coming to me, oh, you know, this war ---- and everything else used to affect our day-to-day sales. Stuff, elections, all this stuff used to affect our day-to-day sales. And I used to say to them over and over again, while that ---- going on, everybody else is in the bullshit, stay out of the bullshit. And the opportunity is to boot while you stay out of that crazy thinking. And we had sales, mate, the best sales we ever had was when the bullshit was on. Because I used to tumble the guys' heads, stay out of the bullshit. What opportunity is this creating for you? Do you know what I mean? Change your story to get clients to loosen up their money. That's all you're doing here. Whether it's bad time today or good time tomorrow, let's face it, 98% of everything that happens in the world is all emotional, emotional driven, trading particularly, you know? So to me, I've just cut everything off. And in the last several weeks, it's just everything gone, just me. And I'm just watching them damn charts. And I am surprised at how much opportunity I have missed. I am surprised. And how do we do that? Well, we can just go back on the charts and you look at all these trend lines that you've been telling us about. My God, father, there's been a trades after trades. And I think we can get caught up in. Yeah, you can. I understand what you're saying, Brad. You know it only too damn well what pushes what and everything else. We're learning that and I'm so excited to learn it, to be honest with you, because I'm thinking to myself, you know, I only listened to another trader yesterday and he said, oh, stay away from all that news. And I'm going, no, no, bring me that damn news. What is that news gonna do to my trade? How different is that? This guy was running a mile, this is a successful trader, running a mile from news. Literally, don't go near. And I'm going, but that's what we're doing. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty commonplace. People who were sort of in the business of so-called helping traders or coaching or something, where no one understood the fundamentals. So they just said, you gotta stay away from that stuff. You gotta stay away, stay away. And you're like, hang on a second. Yeah. Anyway, it's just interesting watching news push markets. I can't wait to learn more. Yeah, good one. I don't know how much more to learn. I mean, you keep saying the same thing every week. So I'm thinking, well, it's the fundamental basics and like you say, the trial, we're just same ----, same ----, same ----. You just gotta get really good at it, identifying it. And that's what I'm talking about learning. I'm learning about the Aussie. How does the Aussie, like I was stunned yesterday. The New Zealand and the Aussie were doing crazy, good stuff. And you go, well, how does that work? And I know we've had this conversation before, but it seems to be something because I've seen it many times. How come those two go off? They should be going together. Yeah, that's right. It just seems to be a cycle happens or something in that regards. I don't know. Sorry, sorry, Kev. Can I just come back to your website? You've said the other day that you've nearly done it. You're nearly happy with where it's at. Are there any other major adjustments or? No, no, no, no, good. No, no, if anything, I wanna actually make it more encouraging to traders to be trading. I'm gonna. Okay, that gets me to the next point. I did log on the other day and I went to market. So we get 3000 bonus points to start with. And then after each sort of interaction that costs us points, which is fair enough. What, how do we upgrade the points or reset them? Is it just like a monopoly or? Yeah, yeah. It's down the bottom here. There's a top up. So. Okay, so. So what's your idea of that? Just for us to be mindful of what? Well, if you're asking like 10 questions a day, I mean, that's more, you got at least 10 questions a day you could be asking. Like generally, like the main thing to be asking is around your general trading performance on which account you're on. So that is, it's like to guide you around the market. And you could go in and ask for how's your risk management. You can look at different accounts and the outcome would be different. So you can either pull your accounts or have them separate. Like just ask, like it's just asking questions about, like today, I'm trading today. I'm about to trade the Aussie. Is that a good idea? And that's what you could be asking. And I'll say, Stephen, just hold off on the Aussie because today, it'll probably stay up here, but maybe down here. It goes, you suck on Aussie, right? So please take it easy, reduce your trade size or don't trade at all. That's the sort of stuff. It's just like a tap on the back. Like instead of asking me, you could be asking Marcus. Okay, that's great. That's awesome. You've done a great job with that website, right? It's awesome. Awesome, awesome, guys. Well, that's a pretty good sesh. Let's just see what the next couple of days. Just coming, just to end that, we used to find, like if you went into a day, like we used to go to work, obviously, every day of the week for 20 years, and you're in the dealing room and you're like, there's nothing happening today. They were the days where something like nice would happen, like Kevin was saying about the Kiwi. So don't go into each day with fresh mind, right? Like I don't get too caught up in the news. I just know what the Don's doing, and I'm like, this is crazy. I've been watching financial market news for 36 years. I'm like, get out of the markets, you bastard. But each day's a new day, and that's all you need to be, like just, this is a game. It's about you controlling your time. I like a treasure hunt, really. Treasure hunt, I like just thinking about it as a treasure hunt. Yeah. You gotta put a bit of money into it. Yeah, and then play some good money in the treasure hunt. That's what I'm looking forward to. Yeah, well, that's what I wanna do, actually, to get some good rewards, actually, legitimate rewards, so you guys get rewarded for actually being good. That's actually what I'm looking at. Exactly. All right, guys, well, goodbye. Thank you. Appreciate it. Cheers, guys. Catch you later. Thank you.