The Internet Doesn't Need Another Trading Newsletter

The last few months have without doubt been some of the most enjoyable and exciting of the last 20 years of my life.

“Learning” to code (ie vibe coding/ no-fucking-idea coding) about 8 hours a day with my best mates (Codex & Claude) on Mosaic, and at the same time doing what I really love, in my own time - trading market indexes, safely. Pretty sweet.

Now that I’m basically finished building out Mosaic and have more time on my hands, I thought about starting to write regularly again; to continue to share some of the lessons from 20+yrs of trading extremely highly leveraged CFD’s professionally. Enabling me to effectively retire in my 30’s as part of the exclusive ~5% of traders that apparently succeed.

Then I realised what I do with 95% of emails I receive into my inbox.

DELETE
DELETE
DELETE

With the advent of Substack and other platforms, any ‘successful’ trader of 2+ years experience seems to have a newsletter or a course. And with the emergence of Ai, this trend has accelerated. It’s all a bit cringe to me, but that’s where we’re at.

It’s generic Ai slop as far as the eye can see, and I truly feel for new/aspiring traders…. it’s very hard to differentiate people who actually know what they’re talking about, vs those that sound like they know what they’re talking about, thanks to Ai. Time is precious, and you can lose a lot of time going down rabbit holes with people that have no idea what they’re doing.

I trade live with others multiple times per week, and consistently invite other ‘successful’ traders from X/Substack to jump on so we can have a chat and share some practical knowledge in a real trading environment.

The vast majority of the time….it’s crickets. Very easy to preach about trading wrapped up in theories and hindsight, but it’s much harder to DO and teach in reality with real money, and you get found out quickly. It’s not good for your marketing.

The same with many of the new trading tools and platforms I see on X. Some of the trading tools that have emerged since, say, Opus 4.7 was released have been super impressive. But pay attention to many of the guys behind these, and someone who’s been around a while can quickly tell that they have no idea of the most basic foundations of trading, or what people actually need to be good traders. They are tech bro’s LARPing as traders….but again, they are easy to fall for, and most new traders do.

So where does that leave us?

While I don’t particularly want to add to the noise, I know that I have experiences and learnings from longevity which is rare in this game, and these are useful to a very specific group of people. Namely;

Traders who aren’t chasing excitement.

Traders who want a calmer, more repeatable way to approach the markets.

People who are attracted to the freedom trading can offer, but have realised that freedom doesn’t have to come from bigger positions, more time in front of screens, or chasing more indicators.

As most will tell you, the freedom from being a trader is absolutely priceless. The only two people I have had to answer to since I was in my mid-twenties has been my wife, and the ATO. Outside of those two, there is not one thing I can think of in the past 20 years that I’ve done which I haven’t wanted to do, in that moment.

But this freedom ultimately comes from having confidence in your process. This is by a country mile, the #1 area I see traders let themselves down in. Majority of the time, they don’t trust the process, so they’re constantly second guessing themselves, and subsequently, their trade. This is where I find the data-driven, probabilistic trading style I use to be of immeasurable value.

The strange thing is that most people who want to be ‘traders’ assume that trading leveraged products would be too stressful, so they plod along with buying & selling BHP or trying their hand at a few millions shares of some tinpot company in the Congo.

In my experience, the opposite can be true.

The better and more repeatable your framework, the less stress you tend to carry.

I turn over multi-billion dollar notional positions every year and I’m the least stressed I’ve ever been in my life.

Better context leads to better decisions.

Better decisions lead to fewer impulsive decisions.

And fewer impulsive decisions generally lead to a much calmer trading experience.

That’s probably what interests me most these days.

Not how to make trading more exciting…how to help make trading more sustainable for others.

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t believe that high leverage has to equal gambling.

It is entirely possible to make a comfortable income trading futures / CFD’s, relatively safely, with the right framework.

So for those that are interested in this type of trading, I’ll be putting some time aside to write some ‘What I’ve Learned’ type thoughts which could deliver some real leverage for traders, along with some data-driven trade ideas on here moving forward, and try to avoid being just another trading newsletter.

And for those that aren’t, PLEASE do yourself a favour and click:

DELETE.

Cheers
Marto