Expert: Tony Sycamore – Building disciplined investing habits | IG

Bryce: [00:00:17] Welcome to another episode of Equity Mates, a podcast that follows our journey of investing. And whether you're an absolute beginner or you're approaching Warren Buffett status. Our aim is to help break down your barriers from beginning to dividend. Now, if you're joining us for the very first time, a huge welcome and thank you for joining the Equity Mates community and congratulations on starting your Equity Mates journey and investing journey to different journeys. If you are still getting up to speed with the basics, you can check out our Get Started Investing podcast. But with that said, my name is Bryce and as always, I'm joined by my equity body Ren. How are you? 

Alec: [00:00:48] I'm very good, Bryce. I am very excited for this episode. We are on a journey here to become better investors and I think one of the key things that we've learnt over the years doing Equity Mates and we've heard from a number of experts is that the analysis of companies and investment opportunities is only half the battle when it comes to investing. Mastering your mind, getting on top of your behaviour and correcting for any cognitive biases you might have can often be just as important. That's why I'm really excited that we're doing this series all about the psychology of trading and investing. 

Bryce: [00:01:26] Yes, brought to you by IG. So a massive thank you for IG for supporting this series. As you said, Ren, our brains aren't really wired for trading, but IG believe they can be rewired by and they're helping us master our trading mind and taking control of our emotions, biases and psychological influences that come with everything that you just mentioned. They are focusing on trading psychology and have collected a wealth of information, including interviews with experts in the field, articles, podcasts and ebooks all brought together in a dedicated Master Your Mind Trading hub. And today, it is our pleasure to welcome a third expert to the Equity Mates studio to help us unpack the psychology of investing. It is a great pleasure to welcome Tony Sycamore. Tony, welcome.

Tony: [00:02:12] Thank you. 

Bryce: [00:02:13] So Tony is a market analyst at IG. Similar to the previous two episodes we've done. We're going to be unpacking how to manage our emotions, how to build good habits when it comes to trading and investing, how to identify who we are as a trader, and then finishing with the tools and resources that Tony uses to find information and a bit about on recovery and ice baths.

Alec: [00:02:34] Yes. So, Tony, a lot to cover today to kick it off. How do you trade?

Tony: [00:02:41] All right. Well, it's a very good question. My journey in markets started back in the mid nineties down on the futures floor of the Sydney Futures Exchange. I was with Macquarie Bank working in the three year bond pit and I was very cognisant of the difference between brokers and traders. So at that time I was working for a broker, Macquarie Bank, and I could see the locals or the traders there which were trading their own accounts and I always wanted to I guess, become a local or a trader and I could see that the days of the Sydney futures floor were numbered. Every exchange was moving towards electronic trading and I thought what I'd like to do is to see out some time on the floor, learn as much as I could with Macquarie Bank and then become a trader, but one of the first traders actually to trade via screens. So that was my process and I resigned from Macquarie Bank. I sold my shares for $6 at the time. So how much writing, which looks like a really ridiculous move, but at the time it sort of funded by next move. So I can, I can take that and move on. And I became a trader and essentially I was trading from the garage of my parent's house just trying to make some money. And after about six months time I thought, Look, this is just going to be fantastic. I'm going to be done with this in about five years. I'm going to be sitting on a beach or whatever it was, making really, really good money. But like a lot of people that come to markets for the very first time, that first period was followed by a period of losses or drawdowns. And I was smart enough to realise then that I didn't know quite as much as I thought I knew in those first six months. Perhaps, perhaps I'd got a little bit lucky in that journey, and I thought, I need to learn more about markets. So I joined a Melbourne based stockbroking firm called JBWere and I became a broker on their retail futures desk. And apart from obviously talking to investors about their trades in futures markets around the world, we were also trading a futures fund or a managed fund, if you like, for some of the clients there at JBWere. And I was assisting my manager the funded fabulously well and at about the time of 2003 when we saw some of these large floats coming through the door, the Telstra's etc., the CBA's Goldman Sachs decided they wanted to have a bigger footprint here in Australia. So they looked around, they thought about growing organically I guess, and then they decided that the best course of action was to actually take a stake in JBWere or merge with JBWere. JBWere obviously had a huge footprint in the Australian equity market and that was the. Process that they went through. So. Goldman Sachs JBWere became the organisation that I was involved with. Now, anyone that knows anything about Goldman Sachs, they know that they're one of the biggest trading firms in the world. They're very, very happy to take risk on their own account. They don't like any risk being taken on there in the name of private individuals. So they went through the business. And I guess after sort of going through the more important parts which they bought, such as the stockbroking arm, etc., they then came to the private client futures desk and they saw a couple of guys there that were making money for their clients, doing pretty well. And they said, Listen, we don't want to shut you guys down, but we're going to send you off to proprietary trading. And you couldn't have imagined the small that sort of graced our faces like it was a dream coming true. Suddenly we parachuted into the biggest trading bank in a trading room in Sydney amongst the best traders that you could possibly imagine. So I'd been at Goldman or JBWere for about three years prior to that, and then I spent the next six years trading Goldman Sachs J.B. Whizz money here in Sydney and that involved the GFC. We had a really good run during the GFC, but things changed after the GFC. There was things like the Volcker Rule, the Dodd-Frank rule, and basically what that did was the US government had given a lot of the US banks or all of the US banks, taxpayers money to stay afloat. And as part of that they said that you can't obviously go and trade taxpayers money in the market. So they closed down proprietary trading at all the big banks. So I'd, I guess, had a good run. I'd been there, as I mentioned, for about ten years in total. And I thought about my next step. And one of the things which happened after the GFC was proprietary trading was effectively outlawed across the world. Some of it was rebranded on balance sheets, facilitation desks, etc. But by and large, the job which I'd done up until my early thirties was effectively outlawed. So it was an interesting situation. I said out of the markets for about a year. It was a tough time after that, particularly in banking. After the GFC, a lot of the banks were still haemorrhaging and trying to sort out their next steps and I was trying to sort out my next steps as well. And what I landed on was to become where I'd made my money in. At Goldman, It was essentially in the foreign exchange market, along with some commodities and stock indices. So I thought it made sense for me to become a foreign exchange salesperson. And I did that at a bank called BNP Paribas, a large French bank. And what I found there was a fantastic organisation. French banks have amazing systems and amazing quote abilities. But where I'd gone from, being at a US bank in a US centric financial crisis, I soon found myself at a French bank in the European sovereign crisis around 2012-2013. So things were going really, really well until that point. But then some of our clients, similar to what we saw during the banking crisis last month, where there was rumours that potentially clients in other banks were pulling the lines of Credit Suisse First Boston. A similar thing was happening with the French banks and some of the clients here in Australia and abroad decided that they didn't want to trade with BNP Paribas because they just didn't know if BNP Paribas was still going to be in existence the day after they put the trade on. So things started to go a little bit pear shaped there at BNP Paribas, and it was a very sad day. Ended up leaving BNP Paribas to join Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Now Commonwealth Bank of Australia, if you remember back around that 2012, 2013, 2014, the Aussie banks were doing magnificently well. They sailed through the GFC. There was no problem with the European sovereign crisis, but I became a foreign exchange salesperson at CBA and one of the things that I was doing was was writing a technical report, which was something that I was doing at Goldman Sachs as part of the proprietary trading team. And I also I guess it picked up a lot of those skills back on the futures floor back there in the nineties. I was very interested in all the research which the brokers bought down, and so I guess I took sort of that to the next level and I started putting out a technical report for clients which was very well received and I got nominated for the Technical Analysis Awards in London back in 2016. So that was quite an honour. They flew me to London, but after that point of time, if you called the Royal Commission and things started to sweep the Australian banking landscape. So after going from a US bank to a French bank to an Australia bank, I'd found that I'd finally been caught up with, if you like. And I thought, Well, I've had enough of this. I'm going to go out and I'm going to start my own FX Advisory Firm, which is what I did for four years before becoming a market analyst here at IG and before that and another broker as well. So that's the long story version. But yeah, that's kind of how I'm here today. 

Alec: [00:09:47] Let's get to the emotional side of it, the psychological side of it, because trading your own money, trading massive banks money, helping your clients trade their money would have been filled with emotion, you know, in big wins, big losses. So when you think about the emotional side of investing, what are some of the big emotions that come to mind? 

Tony: [00:10:10] Yeah, look, one. The thing I will say firstly is trading other people's money is a lot easier than trading your own money if for obvious reasons you're a lot more attached to your own money, even though the money which a bank may give you is considerably more than you could ever hope to possess in your own possession. So that's the first thing I like to point out. But we talk about emotions in trading, and at one point of time all traders are going to go through those emotions hope, fear, euphoria, the ego of being on top of a market, the greed and anger. If a trade has gone wrong, you know, they're all emotions which traders will experience at some point of time during their career. Now, what I tried to do, and I guess what I learnt being able to be in that environment there at Goldman was that a lot of successful traders and this is how I guess I think about it as well, you want to take as much of that emotion out of trading as you possibly can. Now, successful traders and investors, they're different in terms of the way they tried to private traders, They're not making huge bets. They're basically very, very disciplined. They're taking very high probability set ups with a good chance of success with a very controlled or limited downside. And and they do that by going into a trade with a plan. You know, they know where their entry is. They know where their stop losses and they know what their target is. So eventually, essentially they've got a plan, which means that they can control the outcome of the trade rather than being controlled by the emotions which drive any trader. And quite simply, that has enabled it to become more of a routine in terms of how you trade. You trade every trade the same. There's no trade that is special. There's no trade which is different. And then it becomes, I guess you become desensitised a little bit to the emotions which can lead to those terrible trades. I might be averaging into a trade, it might be putting on a trade at the high or the low, all those types of things. If you can follow a plan and have some rigidity around your process, it certainly helps removing those emotional rollercoasters. 

Alec: [00:12:03] So you mentioned a few of the, I guess, aspects of a plan that you have in place, your target price that you'd get out at the stop loss, the amount that you're willing to lose, and that rules of thumb that you have for those kind of things. Like you say, my stop loss should always be like 20% below my entry price. Or is it dependent on the individual trade?

Tony: [00:12:23] Very rigid, in terms of we would generally and I'll go back to the times of Goldman's and also with some of the hedge fund clients that I've dealt with. So it's very, very different, again, as I mentioned to the private trader world, whereas the private trader world, you've got a small amount of capital you've sometimes tempted to put on bigger trades because it doesn't seem as much, you know, $1,000 might be 10% of your capital, but, you know, $1,000 is sometimes neither here nor there. But when you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of capital under management, you've got to be very, very disciplined. And at a big hedge fund, using this as a guide rather than a hard and fast rule, if you lose somewhere between 5% of the capital and 7%, you're getting a very strict talking to. So. So it's that tight. If you lose more than 7% of the firm's capital. Now we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially billion dollars. That's a lot of money for a partner or a firm to lose. You're out the door, so that means you've got to be a lot more rigid about your risk management process. So generally what we would do is we would try and start small at the beginning of each year. We might be risking half a percent of our notional capital. And then as we build up that capital base, we're playing with the banks money. Essentially we might be risking one or 2% potentially looking to leverage that view or that trade through optionality as well. So it's a very, very disciplined process. But because of the umbrella that you're under in terms of a trading manager or a manager of traders is a is looking at each trader as a trade themselves. So they don't want to see one trader out of a team of 20 lose 20, 30, $40 Million and undo the work of all the other people in there. So it is very much will a more rigid and more disciplined approach. Now if I put money in a trading account and all those $10,000, I'm really annoyed at myself. But it doesn't mean that I can't go put another $10,000 in my trading account tomorrow and start again. That doesn't happen with your big hedge funds, with your big proprietary trading firms. They just you blow up. You're pretty much well, you don't get a second chance. 

Bryce: [00:14:21] Wow. So you can't chase your losses.

Tony: [00:14:24] You can't revenge trade as much. I mean, it just means that you're digging yourself a bigger hole, and that means you have to be more disciplined in terms of how you deal with drawdown. So every trader has a losing trade. I mean, I know that people would love to believe that every trading that you put on is going to be a winner, but it just isn't that way. You know, taking losses, having losing trades is part of trading because the unexpected happens. And this is where a stop loss is extremely important. You are protecting yourself when the market doesn't do what is expected. And this is, I think, another rule where we see the difference between the professional trader and more than you b type of trader. They're happy to put a trade on. They're not going to put a stop loss on if the trade goes against them. They're going to hope that it comes back. But having hope in a trade is probably one of the most dangerous situations you can actually be in. 

Bryce: [00:15:10] We mentioned discipline there, and that's a good segway to talk about habits like you've had plenty of experience around the globe, trading with some of the best traders in the world. What are some of the habits that you've built yourself over time and what are some of the habits that you've seen? Some of the equally some of the best traders around the world sort of employ that has led to success? 

Tony: [00:15:31] Yeah, some of the best traders in the world. I mean, you could sort of, you know, some of the guys I've worked with, I think as I mentioned, their sharpe ratios, etc., they're up there with the world's best. So, you know, they want. 

Bryce: [00:15:41] what is sharp ratio. 

Tony: [00:15:42] Sharpe ratio basically measures you performance. So if you put a dollar into a trade, what are you going to get out of a trade? So essentially a good sharpe ratio is anything well above 1.5. But these guys had chops of three and five, so every dollar they are risking are pulling out. $3 or $5 is extremely impressive. Yeah. Yeah. So you know how their process varied from mine. I wouldn't put myself in that league, but what I did know was I had to be aware that I needed to resist the temptation to revenge trade or to dig myself a bigger hole. Now, Goldman's quite funny because the start of their trading you was always December the first, which when you think about it, markets generally go through a very quiet period between mid-December and mid-January. So all of a sudden we're looking at a mountain we had to climb at the beginning of each year and doing it at the worst possible time. Yeah, there's quite a few times there when we're in the second week of December and we might be down a couple of percent, we're sort of thinking, Wow, we've got another three or 4% before we actually have sales and these markets are particularly good. So you have to be aware of when I guess it's like driving to Queensland or going on a long road trip. You've got to understand when the driving is good and when the driving is bad. So there's times, you know, right here, right now we're in Easter holidays. So the volume, the volume in the liquidity markets is a little bit less over Christmas. The liquidity in the volume is a little bit less. You need to adjust your driving for those particular circumstances. Now, if we're in a normal type of environment and the untoward or the unexpected happens and you start giving back money, what I would generally do is I would give myself a yellow card and then a red card. So what that meant was that if I gave myself a red card and I'd had three or four losing days in a row, I would effectively close out all my positions and I would take some time off. I'd go for a walk, I'd go to the beach, do some stuff which actually just short circuited that process. And what I found is instead of that losing process or that drawdown becoming more extended a more deeper maybe into eight days or ten days, I was starting again with a fresh set of eyes after resetting. And I think that whether you're talking about sports, you're talking about trading, that ability to stop and a reset is really, really important. 

Alec: [00:17:50] It's pretty nice day today. I might give myself a red card and let Bryce finish this on. I guess when we talk about habits, there's one side, which is what we've just spoken about, which is like the habits that you have when you're actually trading. And then I guess there's also habits about how you become the best trader you could be. Like, you know what you do in terms of the information that you're rating or like how you structure your trading day and stuff like that. Are there any habits that you set with anybody in terms of their like personal lives to get the best out of themselves? 

Bryce: [00:18:25] Heaps of Red Bull. 

Tony: [00:18:29] Look. Trading to become good at trading is the same discipline, that same dedication that is required to become a doctor or scientist or whatever your chosen profession is. And this is where it gets interesting because you see people coming new to the markets and going all in first up, and they haven't paid their dues. It's like me walking into a doctor's surgery and expecting to perform eye surgery or heart surgery. I just haven't got the training. So you need to make sure that you can actually, I guess, move into trading in a disciplined and orderly approach. But in terms of how I start my day every day with IG, I put out a trader's view of what's happening in stock indices, what's happening in the rights market, what's happening in FX markets, commodity markets, Bitcoin and and that means that a huge part of what I do is think before I start to write a note means I'm doing a lot of research now that could come from a Bloomberg article. It could come from a bank's piece of research which lands on my desk. It could come from having a coffee and sitting in front of CNBC TV at 5:30 in the morning. But before I do anything, I'm learning about what happened in the markets overnight. And then I'm starting to process what might happen during our day in Asia. So it's really, really important to keep that process consistent. You can't go into a market not knowing what's happened to then expect to know what might happen. So getting the background, you know, when we think about the last few years in markets, analysts, traders, we've needed to learn about what the R or the effective transmission rate of various strains of COVID have been. We've needed to understand what a property developer explosion in China means. A ship stuck in the Suez Canal, for example. What does that mean for supply chains, delivery times for chips, all that sort of thing. And the only way you can. Do that is by keeping up with the news, whether it's reading or whether it's sitting down with a coffee and watching CNBC or Bloomberg or ABC News or CBS News, whatever it is, you've got to try and keep abreast of what's happening in markets. So the good thing about that is it sounds like hard work, but if you love markets and you enjoy markets and you've got enthusiasm for markets, whatever you're learning about should be enjoyable. And the one thing I will say about markets is it never gets boring. There's always something new, whether we're talking about a US financial crisis, we're talking about Covid, we're talking about supply chain disruptions. Rampant inflation are very tight labour markets. So many things happening which we've got to come abreast of, and it means that you're continually learning and I think that's a really big challenge as well. 

Alec: [00:20:57] yeah, investing is this great pursuit and this might sound a bit glib, but it's this great pursuit where you can monetise your curiosity or monetise the interest, like whatever you're interested in, whatever rabbit hole you're going down, there's probably a trade or an investment that you could put on on the back of it. Like in any industry, in any sector, in any company, like in whatever you're interested in.

Tony: [00:21:19] And you become a specialist. I mean it depends how far you want to go down that rabbit hole as well. And there is an extent that you probably should say, Well, I've gone far enough down this rabbit hole, but you know, this that element of curiosity, what's down there is this in equity markets, trade is an FX trade. Is it a REITs trade? Is it a commodities trade? I mean, a lot of these asset classes are all linked by and large, whether it's a risk on or a risk of tight movement. But yeah, that's absolutely right. You've got to be able to get out there and learn and explore what's going on.

Bryce: [00:21:45] I'm interested to move to understanding the trading day and how your experience, I guess, has led you to figure out who you are as an investor. You've made it sort of clear that, you know, from day one you're interested in the research and analysis and the macro and then sort of combining that with technical analysis. Have you ever taken a trade and said, this is me for the next 20 years. 

Tony: [00:22:09] A type of trade. You mean you? Well, I mean.

Bryce: [00:22:11] Like rent and I invest for like the long term and I kind of get the impression that, you know, your experience through Goldman is like day to day. So how do you have your time? 

Alec: [00:22:21] Your time horizon is a 20 year compound. 

Tony: [00:22:26] No, it it's not. But I guess I've tried to now I still trade whether it be on a day to day or a week to week basis. I still dabble. I mean, it's funny because you go from trading a big slab of money at a bank to trading your own money. It's like going from Premier League two to third division. So some of that excitement wears off a little bit, but you've got to keep involved and sometimes there's opportunities. You know, there's Tesla trading down at $120 at the turn of this year was to me looked like a great trade and it turned out to be a good trade in terms of my investing process. Well, absolutely. I'm looking for stuff which I think might work for for longer term process for my super account and that type of stuff. So it's really gelling how that all comes together. But I don't really go into a trade saying this is a 20 year trade. I might because of my background, I'm probably thinking not so much 20 minutes, but if I'm in a trade for six months, it feels like a long time to make. 

Bryce: [00:23:19] Yeah, okay. What's your favourite chart pattern? 

Tony: [00:23:21] So when I started down, the futures for Macquarie Bank had a very good technical analyst by the name of Frank Bongiorno, and he was an Elliott Wave guy. And Elliott wave analysis is basically it's quite a unique type of technical analysis and it's got its own niche, if you like. But to me it just breaks down whether a market is imposing higher or trending or in a correction stage. And as we know, markets tend to stay sideways or correct for about 70% of the time. And then there's that 30% period of time where they're explosive and trending. So to me, it makes a lot of sense to actually be able to firstly define whether markets in a trend or in a range. And obviously I'd prefer to catch the trend part of it because that's where the gratification comes a lot quicker. But the other part of it as well is it does provide a framework around risk reward. So in terms of a favourite type of pattern, for me, it's, you know, I see an explosive move higher, I see a nice corrective pullback and I think, well, this is only going to lead to one thing. It's going to lead to higher highs. I'm looking to get on board that. Or for example, there might be around a bottom that we saw in Bitcoin over the past 3 to 4 months. It might be around the bottom like we might see in natural gas at the moment. So these sorts of things mean the momentum's potentially waiting and the potentially waves set for reversal. So I think you can probably see some of the biggest trades when, hey, look, this, this momentum or this trend has now become, you know, mature and is set for a reversal. And to me, that could be a good trade as well. 

Bryce: [00:24:47] We don't talk a lot about technical analysis at Equity Mates. So it's great to have you in the studio. And I've done a couple of interviews recently around this. One of the experts said that for us, sort of layman retail investors, the 50 day moving average is the first thing that we should look at. The second one said it's the 200 day moving average. Where do you fall? 

Tony: [00:25:05] Well, I'm going to fall off the latter. So I think it again it's a horses for courses type situation depends on the time frames you trading and something that works for me might not work for someone else. But in my experience, dealing with some of the big hedge funds, particularly the systematic ones, they do watch that 200 day moving average. They probably are not quite so interested in what's happening in the shorter time frames. And I can give you an example. The ASX 200, if you recall the very first trading session of this year, the ASX 200 got absolutely pulverised fell down below 7000 and that was largely due to a stop loss going off as the ASX 200 broke below the 200 day moving average. So moving average that time was around 7010. Now the low in the ASX 200 was 6905, that very first day of the new year. And then we ended up rallying all the way up to 7567. So it was about it, you know, that was the spit out low, if you like, and it felt very much more like a false break low. We spoke about knowing the conditions of the market. Well, the very first trading day of the new year, the third or the 4th of January, people are still on holidays and liquidity is absolutely terrible. So if you've got a big order, you've got to be very, very careful when those sorts of conditions are in place. 

Alec: [00:26:14] Well, if people are interested in learning more about the technical side of investing and trading, the IG website you're writing a lot on there. 

Tony: [00:26:23] Yeah, about 7 to 8 articles a week go up there and they're across various asset classes, stock indices, currencies. And what we're trying to do there is to get a bit of an idea on, you know, what's driving markets, the macro drivers. And then I'll put some charts in there which I think are of interest as well a couple of times as well. I'm not sure. I'm assuming the Equity Mates have a strong interest in the ASX 200. I put out an afternoon report as well in terms of who have been the shakers and movers in the session on the ASX 200 and also I put in a bit of a technical overview as well. So that gives you a bit of colour of whether you want some fundamentals and some macro background or whether you want technical analysis. It gives you a blend of both there as. 

Alec: [00:27:03] Nice, well You can go onto the IG website and read that analysis. You can also go to the IG website and read the content in the Master Your Trading Mind Hub, heaps of content to make you a better investor. But Tony, we want to get to recovery because this is something that I introduced to us when we were first talking about, you know, the different aspects of the Master Trading Mind Hub. And I'll be honest, it's something I haven't thought about a lot when it comes to investing in my very short lived, very average sporting career. We obviously spoke about recovery, but you don't think about it when it comes to investing. So what does recovery mean to you as an investor or a trader? 

Tony: [00:27:46] Yeah, and I think you can think about in a sport or a trading sense as well, you've got to have a good recovery if you want to get out there and perform at 100%. And for me I would get into a run where I knew that I was in sync with the markets and that the run of trades could be X amount of trades long before you had a losing trade. But when that process of losing trade started to come around, that to me was where I needed to be a little bit more mindful of what I did next. And as I mentioned earlier in the interview, the main thing that I would do there was just to step away, to freshen up, to go and get some fresh air. The screens are very, very magnetic, as you probably know. You're drawn to the screens. You're sitting there in front of them. It could be 20 of the 24 hours a day and you're batteries run out. And that's where I guess in terms of trading and investing, there's a different type of of not so much it's a mentality, but it's also a you know the longer term trades are much and that's where I'm trying to take my trading style now to more longer term types of trades, because sitting up trading 18 to 20 hours a day, you don't end up, you know, in a good state. You know, by the time I left Goldman's, my hands were shaking. It was pretty intense. 

Alec: [00:28:55] What do you reckon the longest you've ever been in front of a screen trading? Like what? What do you reckon the longest period is? 

Tony: [00:29:02] I mean, I probably needed more sleep than others, but for me it was a lot of the times we'd walk into the trading room. We probably started out desks at 630 in the morning, put some trades on based on what the US equity market was doing, and then we'd manage those trades during the day. But ideally we were looking to take a lot of the trades off into the London session or into the New York sessions. So that meant that a lot of times were sitting there pretty much, well, it wasn't always uninterrupted. I'm not going, you know, there was times to go out, get a bite to eat or go to the gym and we'd have stop losses on and it might be a quite day like it is in the markets today. So it gave you that opportunity to be out. But it meant that we were watching the markets, whether it be walking through the streets of Sydney or in front of the desk pretty much, well, 20 hours a day. Then what we do is if we hadn't got out of those trades before we went to bed, we'd put stop losses on. So that might mean that a broker would call us and say, Hey, look, you know, this is what's happened, what do you want to do? And there was also times where we needed to be out for the US data. You know, it might be an employment data, it might be CPI, it might be an FOMC 4 o'clock in the morning. So for me, probably the most I would go would be 18 to 20 hours. But there was guys which would cause, you know, when the hunting was good, I'd be hunting for, for days on end.

Bryce: [00:30:25] Well, Tony, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. We have reached the end of our discussion. But as I said, we don't really often speak about technical analysis and just listening to your story and the intensity of what you're doing versus how Ren and I sort of treat investing with the get the core portfolio and just let it do its work. It's yeah, it's, it's just fascinating to see the differences for really what we're both trying to achieve is making money in markets. It's just That's right. Just different ways to do it. Yeah yeah.

Alec: [00:30:55] Yeah yeah. When we're long term investors because it's going to be decades before we realise we were wrong. 

Bryce: [00:31:02] You find out in minutes. But yeah, so, so a massive thank you and a massive shout out to IG for supporting this series. I think we've been able to provide insight into a different way of thinking about markets and insight into the psychology of trading and through the master your trading mind hub on ig.com. There are plenty of resources to get you up to speed, including interviews with experts in the field, articles, podcasts, ebooks, all brought together in that master your mind trading hub. Tony's obviously putting content up there as well on a weekly basis to get you across. So head to ig.com. Obviously trading involves risks to your capital issued by IG Australia, AFL-CIO 515106. Now, Tony, there is one more question that we have. We run at the Expert of the Year competition and by being on this show you are automatically in the competition voted for by our community. At the end of the year they let us know who they think was the best expert that, you know, brought new ideas and inspiration to them. And to help them understand a little bit about you, where would you put the beautiful glass trophy if you want it? 

Tony: [00:32:14] Look, I think there's only one place for a beautiful glass trophy and that's on the mantelpiece. So it would take pride of place up there. And I hope the listeners have enjoyed the interview today and found it useful. 

Bryce: [00:32:24] Love it. I'm sure they have. Thank you so much, Tony. 

Tony: [00:32:26] Thank you. 

Alec: [00:32:27] Thanks, Tony.