Ep 556: “The Goose”

In Episode 556 of The Traders Podcast, your hosts Rob Booker and the producer Jason Pyles discuss how success often comes from setting a goal to do the right things consistently (as opposed to just setting a goal to accomplish some great thing).

Rob also talks about having a specific trick or “scheme” that is your job that you do consistently. And we discuss the approach of sticking to what you’re best at and exploring it further by looking deeper inside rather than branching out and experimenting with new and unfamiliar methods.

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Links for this episode:

Subscribe to Rob’s YouTube channel here: https://youtube.com/robbooker

Rob on Twitter: @RobBooker

The Traders Podcast on Twitter: @TradersPodcast

TFL365.com

Trader Interviews.com

Jason’s movie podcasts:
Movie Podcast Weekly where we review new movies in theaters.

Horror Movie Podcast where we’re Dead Serious About Horror Movies.

Movie Podcast Network a group of eight film-related audio podcasts that cover various movie genres.

Full transcript of this episode:

Rob Booker: Welcome back, Mr. Pyles.

Jason Pyles: Thanks, Rob. It’s good to be back.

Rob Booker: When we left our dear listeners, we were talking about the fact that sometimes success comes from setting a goal to do the right things consistently instead of setting a goal to accomplish some big thing. Success in my life has been a mix of those two things and then just pure luck at times. I want to talk today about if someone were to choose the path of success by doing the right things … We’re, of course, specifically talking about trading in the end. But generally speaking, let’s just talk about success in general. If it’s about podcasting because you started podcasting before anybody else that I know … Well, we kind of started together before anybody else that I know.

Jason Pyles: Yes, we did.

Rob Booker: We’ve continued through the years. You only continue if you’re getting some measure of success. What are some of the things that a podcaster does that they have to do consistently well or at least they have to do it consistently in order to succeed?

Jason Pyles: I would say release episodes. You have to actually record the episodes and continue to release them. That’s one thing. I think for me it’s been … You have to have this interest in the topic itself. I genuinely love the topic. If you love it enough, usually you can continue talking about it. There have been podcasts, Rob, that I dropped pretty quickly that I realized I did not have a love like that one really stupid NBC survival show. What was that called? That was awful. Revolution or something like that.

Rob Booker: Yeah, right.

Jason Pyles: We went 10 episodes on that. We’re like, Yeah, that’s enough of this.

Rob Booker: Oh, gosh. All right. You have to release content on schedule. You have to have a purpose, meaning I think probably podcasting about everything is not as effective as podcasting about something.

Jason Pyles: Agreed.

Rob Booker: All right. Let’s apply that to traders. It can almost be as simple as that. Maybe it can be as simple as that. You need to sit down at the computer at the same time everyday or you need to run a robot that’s going to run all the time. Then you need to have a specific purpose, or a specific technique, or a specific trick, or a specific method. I like to call it a scheme these days. Whatever the trick is that you do, you’ve got to have that one thing. That’s it. That’s your job. You’ve got to sit down and do that job in the same way that you have to release content as a podcaster. You have to sit down at the computer and you have to get that work done.

Every month on the first Monday of the month at 11:30 p.m. my time, I sit down in a webinar with all of the members and I trade the Australian dollar when the Australian interest rate decision is released. It is potentially … I don’t know potentially. I mean it is. It is the best trading that I do all month long that I do. But it only happens once a month, Jason.

Jason Pyles: Interesting.

Rob Booker: I would guess that everybody listening, everyone that is a listener of the podcast, all seven of you, all of you, each of you has some kind of scheme or trick that you can do like that. However, that one scheme or trick doesn’t produce necessarily enough profit in order to accomplish your goal of trading for a living and so you seek other tricks, schemes, methods or strategies when in reality you’re already off course if you do that. It’s like saying to a podcaster, Well, I don’t have enough listeners from doing a podcast about scary movies, so now on the scary movie podcast we are also going to review children’s television shows with songs.

Jason Pyles: Yes. And that’s actually a real example. I’ve seen a horror podcast do that where they started reviewing Twilight stuff in order to attract the Twilight fans which to the horror community is a huge betrayal.

Rob Booker: Exactly what I was talking about. You got to stand for something. I’ve noticed, including this text message that I got the other day from our friend that was struggling and on the verge of quitting, this is exactly what I see happen is that I already know how to make this work but it’s not making me enough money so I’m going to add something to it. Instead of focusing on what is working and approaching that, someone will go off course and I mean when you find something that works like this Australian dollar strategy that I have and it’s … I’ve even described it on previous episodes of the podcast. You can go to robbooker.com and get on the email list if you want to learn more about all of this stuff.

Jason, being successful means diving deeper into that. It means, all right, I’ve got one strategy for when the economic news is released and how I deal with it. What about a strategy diving in deeper to the behavior of the Australian dollar on the day that that news is released? That led to an additional strategy for the Australian dollar. Now, I had two strategies because I dove in deeper into what I was already doing. What if I doubled, or tripled, or quadrupled down on that, and I added a trade to one of the trades that I was already taking? What if I quintupled down on that strategy by … I know this sounds absolutely bananas. What if I just dove deeper into reading about the economics of Australia? What if I did those things? Instead of looking for the answers outside, I went inside. Instead of going horizontal or laterally looking for additional stuff to focus on to be a jack of all trades, what if I went deeper into what was already working and I tried to benefit more from that? Ideally, I would just be happy with what was working.

Jason Pyles: Right. That reminds me of two things. It’s killing the goose that lays the golden eggs because then you see … You’re not getting any more golden eggs. You have a dead goose. It also reminds me if you have like an Olympic diver who’s practiced the same dive like a billion times and then the diver gets up and said, You know what? I’m going to try to change this up a little right here. Then they jump off and do something weird. Just saying. That’s what popped into my head as you describe this.

Rob Booker: Right. My niece is a diver. I’m sure she’s got three or four dives. I’ve seen her compete. She has three or four dives, Rachel does, in her repertoire. She’s probably got her one … I don’t know this for sure. I’m going to send her this episode and ask her if she’ll answer. She probably got one go-to dive that she knows she’s really, really good at and that’s her go-to dive, and she knows she can’t lose that one. Why would she still practice that one even after she’s won competitions based on that? She’s not done with it. I see this happen with traders all the time. Well, that works, Rob. But what else do you got for me? I ain’t got nothing else for you.

Jason Pyles: Well, they want something that works more, that produces even more results. That’s what they’re looking for.

Rob Booker: Yeah, yeah. That’s true. Here’s a great example. It’s not a great example. It’s a terrible example but I have to say it. As I’m re-watching The Wire … My wife has never seen The Wire on HBO. It’s every White person’s favorite show about Black people.

Jason Pyles: Yes, I know. It’s awesome.

Rob Booker: I don’t know if that’s true or not. I just thought I’d say that. But, even President Obama said it was the best television ever made. Anyway, let’s get back to the point. In that show, Bubbles, he lives on the street and Bubbles tries to get on his feet and get off of drugs and he starts Bubbles Depo. Do you remember this? He has a shopping cart.

Jason Pyles: Yeah, totally.

Rob Booker: On the front of it, it says Bubbles and then Depo with no T at the end. It’s just Depo. He starts by selling T-shirts, just T-shirts. And, then he realizes that these people that live on the street, they don’t want to go to the store, whatever. They’re out selling drugs on the corner, whatever, and he needs to have candy, or bus passes, or other stuff for them. He went deeper into his one concept. He didn’t then start, I don’t know, a hotdog cart or he calls them pimp steaks. He didn’t start a pimp steak cart. He went deeper into what he was already doing. Maybe that’s a challenge that we could ask our listeners is what can you do to go deeper into what you already are doing instead of seeking additional answers or profit outside of what you’re already good at? It’s possible of course that someone doesn’t know what they’re already good at. That’s possible.

You could listen to 500 episodes of The Trader’s Podcast and inside of those episodes, there would be at least, I don’t know, at least 10 different ways that you could focus. I heard from someone, Jason, just yesterday or the day before who just finished listening to all of the episodes of The Trader’s Podcast. I said, Oh, there’s a treat in store for you.

Jason Pyles: Wow, that’s amazing. I want to thank that person for listening.

Rob Booker: There’s a lot of people out there now that have just listened to every single episode. I think we can turn on the feature so that all of the previous episodes will appear inside of iTunes. We can turn that feature on so that if you want to get the old episodes on iTunes, you could do that. But, Jason, I don’t know if you knew this, of course you did, every single episode of The Trader’s Podcast is available in one location.

Jason Pyles: It sure is. That’s right, Rob. Traderspodcast.com, right?

Rob Booker: That’s exactly right. How can someone contact the show?

Jason Pyles: Well, Rob here, my friend Rob is kind enough to give out his own personal cellphone number and, yes, it is his actual cellphone. You can text him at 304-281-8332 or just-

Rob Booker: And, we appreciate you subscribing and downloading these episodes. We’re now at 1,773,360 downloads and we’d like you to be download number 361.

Jason Pyles: That’s right.

Rob Booker: Oh, my gosh. All right. Jason, let’s plug some movie podcasts here. Let’s make this happen.

Jason Pyles: That’s right. In the time that I’ve been away, I’ve actually started a Movie Podcast Network, if you can believe that.

Rob Booker: Can you believe it?

Jason Pyles: Yeah. I think it’s a eight different shows about movies. We have some about Westerns, sci-fi, stuff like that. Check us out. Our little hub site is MoviePodcast.Network.

Rob Booker: Nice. All right, everybody. Until next time. I’m Rob Booker and that’s the producer. Thanks for listening and subscribing to The Traders Podcast.