FAQ: My Personal Returns

I’m fairly passionate about the topic of the Psychology of Trading. I’m a Psychiatrist and I’ve learned how to trade through the Institute of Trading and Portfolio Management (ITPM). I’m transparent about my affiliation with them and about my experiences with them. However, there’s the big burning question that’s probably on everyone’s mind: How much money do I personally make?

I’m hesitant to answer this question with a single number. The reason is because literally any single number would be misleading. Stating 10% a year might sound small but it is amazing if it only comes with 1% risk. Saying 100% a year sounds amazing until you learn that it requires you to only make 1 trade and you have a 50/50 chance of making it where the other 50% is losing all your money.

There are a lot of charlatans out there making BIG claims of the money they make. Even outright lies. They fund one account and do the opposite trade in another account. Then whatever account makes a lot of money, they show that to their audience and promise similar returns. 

On top of that, I’m not really promising that you will make big returns. I’m promising that if you engage my content, you will be able to prevent your psychology from holding you back. That’s an entirely different claim than making big returns.

I’m a Clinical Psychiatrist. I studied Accountancy in College with a BBA and passed the Certified Public Accountant examinations. I later went to an MD/JD program. I went to Law School and passed the New York State Bar Examination. As part of the MD/JD program, I later went to Medical School. I followed that up with a Psychiatry Residency Program and became a Board Certified Psychiatrist.

How did I get into trading? I trade because it’s fun! It’s fun to use everything I learned to make a call on how businesses do their thing. It’s even more fun when you make money off that. In my trading journey, I came across the Institute for Trading and Portfolio Management (ITPM). I learned from the ITPM because I wanted to learn from REAL PROFESSIONAL traders that make money consistently. 

I’m still and forever will be a student of the markets. I will likely work with ITPM for the rest of my life because the program is THAT good.

But I’m not trying to sell you on the program. I’m trying to answer the real question about the relationship between my returns and my credibility.

As I was going through the ITPM process, I learned a lot about myself, about the world. I learned a lot about the misconceptions I had about the world and I corrected them. I began to appreciate the true relationship between Reward and Risk. I began to understand the true engine of wealth generation: managing risk. This is true beyond just trading. Things started making sense and I realized that all the big money was in finance because that is where all the risk was. No matter how smart I am as a doctor, my skillset will eventually be outsourced to someone who charges less or even artificial intelligence. My big doctor salary days are numbered. 

There’s something natural in human psychology that makes it really hard to build wealth. Building wealth is very unnatural which is why rich people are so rare. Psychology is a large component of this phenomenon. It’s something I wanted to share with others. I believe my insight has value. If there’s a market that wants to pay me for my knowledge, it makes sense for me to put effort into building a infrastructure where I can engage this market. Thus, The Trading Toolbox platforms are my initial efforts into building this infrastructure.

I noticed an interesting relationship between psychology and returns. Most experienced traders will tell you that the market tells you what money you could make. You don’t dictate your returns. The volatility needs to be there in order for you to make money. However, the psychological component ensures that you execute your strategy according to plan. 

To put it plainly: Your psychology ensures that you are a consistently profitable trader. Your hard work and intelligence (which creates your process) dictates the opportunities you can exploit. You can’t have one without the other. 

I’m no Michael Burry. Professional traders are able to spot more opportunities due to their sophisticated industry knowledge about financial markets as well as other information based advantages. I have other advantages. I’m a Clinical Psychiatrist with a background in Law and Accounting. My value is not in helping people increase the size of their returns, but to prevent them from messing up their process with their own psychology. 

With my background in Accounting, Law, Medicine, and Psychiatry along with the work I’ve done through ITPM’s training, I’m a pro at the psychological part of trading. I’ve developed a good understanding on how to counterbalance your psychology so that you can make the best of your successful trading strategy. For now, it’ll be through free articles. But if there’s demand, I may expand to other content as well.

The main difference between me versus other trading psychology experts is that I recognize psychology is useless without a separate strong trading process. However, Most psychology programs claim to be the solution to all your trading woes. Some ignore or downplay the importance of the strength and quality of your process.

I’m different. I’m saying that your trading process is even MORE important than your psychology. It’s usually the main reason why trading isn’t working for you. But once you have a good process, your psychology is the only thing holding you back. That’s where I come in.

You don’t. You’ll never know if anyone’s advice is really good unless you try it out. That’s the nature of advice. Usually, advice from people who have achieved what you want to achieve is good. 

However, if they achieved it by sacrificing something you don’t want to sacrifice, then their advice won’t be so great. If they achieved it through luck but they believe it is skill, you’ll still get bad advice. Even worse, if they were born into success and then claim it was “skill” that’s pretty dumb. Worst of all is a situation where they outright lie about their success and convinced you they have skill! (And you believed them because they told you their INSANE GAINS, right?)

So how do you know? How do you know what I’m saying is true? Did people care about Warren Buffet’s philosophy when he was 20 years old? How about 15 years old? Were his words and wisdom any less valuable then compared to now? If he lost 10% in one particular month, would his advice suddenly be worthless? This is true for any and all traders. Ray Dalio is known to have an embarrassing loss that he had to reflect on. When he came back, he built one of the biggest most successful hedge funds in history. Was Michael Burry only right because he made money? What about when he was losing money in the beginning?

If you are a potential investor willing to fund me at least $1,000,000, I will share my stats with you with absolute transparency.

If you go through the ITPM program and join the ITPM discord, you may find me there. If I see that you’re not a troll, you’re doing the work, you’re honestly looking for help and my trading journey will help you, I will share my stats provided you promise to keep it confidential.

If you are not a potential investor nor an Institute Trader on ITPM’s Society discord and cannot see the value of my work without knowing my returns, that’s fine. You’ll have to glean my progress through the articles I write if you care enough.

You don’t go around showing off your tax return, or your salary. If you won the lottery, you may be inclined to keep it to yourself for fear that people will find out and start demanding things from you. There are a lot of social costs to sharing your financial information without a lot of gain.

When I was in college, I shared my grades with other people in my freshman year. I thought it was no big deal. However, there was something about my psychology where I felt more pressure because I shared my grades with others. It ended up making me perform worse than my full potential. When I stopped sharing my grades, my grades started skyrocketing because I was able to just focus on myself and my personal improvement. No one else needed to know my grades except graduate programs and employers.

I imagine my personal returns have a similar nature. I don’t mind sharing my personal progress if it helps me progress with my personal goals, or if it helps expand on a psychology of trading concept. I’m also willing to share it with close trader friends that are working hard on their journey. But I don’t need to unnecessarily add pressure to my current trading endeavors. When I imagine a world where I need to answer to everyone and anyone about my returns without appreciation of nuance of those numbers, I gives me the heebie jeebies. No thanks! Furthermore, this added pressure may be enough to derail the progress I’ve made with trading and any progress with The Trading Toolbox. In short, sharing my returns with everyone and anyone has a poor Reward to Risk profile for me.