Traders Mastermind

Sponsored by Pepperstone

Years ago, I found a strange edge in a head-to-head trading game: while everyone else rushed to trade, I waited. In this episode, I share what that taught me about patience, understanding the real objective, exploiting other traders’ mistakes, and why sometimes the best trade is no trade at all.

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We all want results now, something new, and an easier path, but these natural instincts can sabotage our trading. Here’s how to recognise and overcome them.

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Trading has too many moving parts. Entry, exit, stops, targets, scaling, hold or fold, how many trades, breakout or mean reversion. When you're in a drawdown, it all turns to noise.

So here's one drill to cut through it. Strip out the variables and answer a single question.

It won't fix everything. But it gets you off the back foot and gives you something to work with instead of just bleeding.

Have a listen and see if it's right for you.

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When you trade for yourself, you wear every hat... CEO, risk manager, senior trader, junior trader. Nobody's holding you accountable, and that's exactly the problem.

In this episode, Mark Holstead unpacks why most traders stay stuck in the same cycle: feel bad about a mistake, promise to do better, repeat. The missing piece? Real consequences.

Here's how to engineer them, using trade hesitation as the worked example. It won't fix everything, but if you've done all the right groundwork and still can't shift a bad habit, this is probably the piece you're missing.

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No big claim in this one. Just a thought on why staying open-minded might be one of the most underrated attributes a trader can have... and what being open-minded actually means in practice.

A clickbait short came through my feed the other day. Guy ranting about how a specific strategy was total nonsense, how "this is how the funds do it." Except a bit of digging turns up four or five firms running exactly the strategy he says doesn't work. Twelve-year track records. All public.

So this episode is about the alternative. You look at a strategy and you land on one of three things: you like it and you'll test it later, you take something from it, or it's not for you. And then it ends there. No energy spent telling everyone else it's rubbish.

I cover:

Why open-minded doesn't mean chasing shiny objects
Taking the process, not the strategy (a hedge fund's stress-testing approach I nicked)
Expressing the same trade idea a different way
Moon phase strategies and why I don't care if they work
Building your own playbook from borrowed parts

Most hedge funds don't beat the market. Most traders don't make money. That's just how it works. The best take the spoils.