Look, there are two seats at every trade you’ve ever made.
One guesses, hopes, and pays up. There’s a name for that one. It’s the mark. The bottom of the food chain, where everybody above you takes a cut.
You’ve been sitting in that seat your whole life. So have I, for years. And it’s not because you’re bad at this.
You did your homework. You picked what looked right. You were sure this time, and it went against you anyway.
It was never you. It was the seat.
I went live earlier today and spent the whole session on the other seat. The winning one.
The seat Citadel sits in, the one Jane Street and Virtu sit in, the firms on the other side of almost every order you’ve ever placed. They don’t pick stocks.
Those people don’t guess which way the market’s headed. Most days they’re not even trying to. They sit in the middle, take the other side, and collect. Up, down, flat, doesn’t matter to them.
I know that seat because I came from it. Market-making background, 13th employee at ThinkorSwim, ran trading education over at TD Ameritrade.
For 25 years I had a front-row view of exactly how these firms make their money, and for most of those years one question kept nagging me. Could a regular person sit in that seat? Not a fund. Not a pro with a monster account. Just a normal trader, a few days a year, when fear gets expensive and pays the most.
I finally cracked it. And on the replay I show you the whole thing, the real trades, the real dates, the actual brokerage statements pulled up live on my screen.
Including one I had on during the exact stretch in April when the rest of the market was puking its guts out.
I’m not going to hand you the mechanics here. It lands a whole lot better watching me walk you through it. Just go get in the seat.
To your success,
Don Kaufman
P.S. I put my track record on screen today and then said something you almost never hear a trader admit out loud. That it can’t stay perfect. That one of these is eventually going to lose, and when it does, I’ll show you the exact day. Watch the part where I explain why that’s the whole point, not the flaw.
