What the Hell Have I Been Doing & 2025 Lookahead
Happy New Year to everyone!
I’m now officially finished my year of adventure. Although it was an amazing experience, I am certainly enjoying being back in my childhood home of Brisbane after living away for the last 15 years, and then exploring around the world with the family the last 12 months, while having a lot of fun trading along the way. No more midnight alarms, early morning flights, typhoons, floods, food poisoning, or timezone changes. I’m grateful for working sanitations, and have been excited to be able to get back into some kind of social (beer belly incoming) and work routine.
The bones of a home office are starting to come together (in particular enjoying my new Desky electric desk and Mac mini), and with a bit of a woman’s touch on the decor, I reckon I’ll be in business.
It’s now been one year since I began this Substack, and I’m honoured to have almost 500 of you now subscribed. Thanks for your support and patience while I took a break from posting my ramblings over the past couple of months as I settle back into normal routine.
I’m sure all my recent subscribers are currently wondering, “What the hell does this guy do?” And heading to the “Unsubscribe” button right now.
Well, while I’ve been slack on the “SYWBDT” pieces, I have been quite busy on the TGM Ai-Insights side of things; pumping out the TGM Substacks twice a day, traveling around Australia to meet many of you face-to-face over lunch or a drink, and grinding hard (work-wise, not the app) on upgrading and refining our statistical data on a daily basis (particularly the ‘Major Event’ market edges for which we now have a comprehensive playbook for each of the large AUS/S&P releases).
So What’s Next
To avoid any confusion when I created the Substack, I used the same handle from my Twitter profile on Substack (asxcfdtrader). I’ve now realised that there’s a real need for me to clearly identify and seperate the three overarching goals I had when I began this Substack (you may notice that I’ve now changed my Substack handle to ‘sywbdt’ reflect this).
Firstly; an effort to improve the financial outcomes for beginners and ‘Retail Traders’ (I’m thinking of all of my Gen Z / Millenial cousins who currently learn absolute rubbish from finfluencers on Tik Tok)
Secondly; using the historical market dataset I built to provide statistical market insights to Sophisticated Traders, Portfolio Managers, CIO's, CEO's & CRO's, and
Thirdly; to help those traders who are seriously committed to throwing away the 9-5 and making the jump to trading for a living.
They are clearly not the same audience, so this has led to me crystallizing three distinct Brands / Verticals ;
1. So You Want to Be a Day Trader?
There are no expensive courses to sell here. So why am I allocating my time to this?
Firstly because it’s going to be fun, and Secondly; I’m constantly amazed when I chat to the ‘next generation’ such as my kids / nephews / cousins as to who, and where they are getting their Crypto / Trading / Get Rich Quick advice from. They ALL want to trade some type of ‘exotic’ instrument, and in my opinion, given the right tools they’re much more likely to succeed and benefit from Day Trading indexes where history repeats, than other forms of these schemes. I’ve always believed that kids lack basic financial education, so I guess given my niche, this is where I want to ‘give back’ to those testing the waters with these instruments. My goal here is to draw on 20+years of Index & CFD trading experience and ‘wisdom’ to provide some basic foundations.
We all know the stats…most Retail Traders lose money. That’s because the risks when trading with 100/250/500:1 leverage are real (see my previous article here), however the rewards can also be great. From my experience it’s definitely not unrealistic that with the right tools and the right mindset, you can achieve significant returns trading indices.
Whether it’s CFD’s, Crypto, Poker Machines, Horse Racing, or investing in an unknown nickel miner in the Congo (shoutout to my cousin), we humans cannot seem to refrain from activities which promise us high risk / high rewards. The analogy I frequently use is that no matter how risky it is to jump in a Ferrari and drive at 200km / hour, if offered, a portion of people are going to give it a try. My goal with the SYWBDT content over time, is to act as a ‘seat belt’ so that when people crash, it’s not fatal.
I’m only going to be able to do this stuff if I have some fun doing it. I’ve been mucking around recording videos with some subscribers on a ‘$2k Challenge’, which I’d like to do more of this year. I’ll continue to write some musings on Substack, as well as the Elite Trader Insights section, and also start posting some more basic visual content / recorded content from our morning sessions on Instagram, here.
2. TGM Ai-Insights
After my wife and I sold our business in 2020 I spent the next two years, doing three things only: 1) Going to the beach, 2) Playing golf, and 3) Building an excel file with >1 million cells of historical data across the three big indices; AUS200, UK100, and SPX500.
I created TGM Ai-Insights on the back of this, with the goal being to distribute unique statistical market insights tailored to Wholesale / Sophisticated Investors, Portfolio Managers, CIO's, CEO's & CRO's to improve their / their clients trading decisions.
This business has gone from strength to strength. We’ve now built a seriously amazing community of investors in TGM, from CEO’s to Underground Miners, from Air Traffic Controllers to Accountants. We’ve also partnered up with Trade Nation, providing input to hopefully make their upcoming platform the ‘bees neez’ for Traders, and in exchange they’ve offered to support my work by offering to cover the first month of a TGM Subscription for new signups, and up to a $2,500 signup bonus (SI’s only). I’ve also created some ‘Trade Copier’ strategies with the goal to capitalise on these insights over the longer term, although I’m also having a lot of fun and making a bit of money copying other expert traders on that platform as well.
Every day is a new learning, but it’s incredible the depth of insights you can draw from historical data, particularly in relation to the AUS200 (hint: history repeats over, and over, and over), and this process is becoming even more streamlined now with the help of the AI tools available.
Clearly I need massive amounts of beauty sleep, so I’m also super proud of how we’ve been able to pull out very tradable insights into the UK & S&P markets through the perspective of our timezone, which I believe is quite unique, and helps me sleep soundly while still being able to trade the major international markets.
If you want to upgrade, you can do so here;
3. The Quant Cartel
This is by far the thing I’m most excited about in 2025, and is an “expensive” offering by design, ensuring that 99.9% of people won’t apply (Experienced / High Turnover traders with Trade Nation are upgraded automatically).
The structure is inspired by the ‘Turtle Trading’ concept. Combining real time education with daily live trading sessions, executing leveraged positions based on high probability scenarios. AI has been an absolute game changer for this in terms of updating trade probabilities in real time based on immediate price action, and the results so far have blown even me away.
I’m also really looking forward to hearing from some amazing guest speakers as part of these sessions, in order to enhance the experience for the group and learn from traders from all walks of life.
Contact me via Substack or X if you would like more detail.
Hope to have some of you along for the ride. As always open to any suggestions on how I can add value to your trading.
As my kids would say, 2025 gunna bit lit! 🔥
Cheers
Marto