Dear Trader,
Little known fact: I was in two TV commercials when I was a kid. They were for a local radio station (Q101) for the morning show called ‘Murphy in the Morning.’
You can check one of them out at this link.
I got paid $350 for each spot. My parents would give me $20 (a fortune for me) and they would put the rest in a savings account I could not touch until I was 18.
They had me dressed as a cub scout, and my job was to say I was listening to the show for the contest money, not the host.
My second shoot is the one that is extra funny, because I didn't just get to see Murphy at the shoot, they had his whole team, the news girl, his co-host ‘Danger Dan’, the sports guy… everyone involved In the shoot with me though were the two guys that were really famous:
Celozzi and Ettlison, are famous for their commercials where they would hold up giant wads of fake money and then say “Celozzi and Ettilson Chevrolet… where you always save more money!”
If you are from Chicago, you know who all of these people are, but if you live in another city, I am sure you know both of these types of commercials from the 80s and 90s. At one point my parents bought a car from their dealership. When they went to sign the paperwork, there was a poster of the scene I was in hanging on their wall.
My mom said: THAT'S MY KID!
They remembered me so they sent my mom home with every single piece of swag they had at the dealership. I mean they even sent me a snowglobe.
One thing I remember clearly that day is how excited I was to be on the shoot. I had met Murphy once before on the 1st commercial and I thought he was SO cool.
So obviously, me being happy and clueless, I peppered him with questions:
Who’s your favorite Bear?
Do you like the Cubs or White Sox
What kind of car do you drive… and on I went.
It got to a point where he was likely getting a little annoyed by 10 year old me… but he didn't want to be a jerk… so he came up with a plan.
He looked down the hotel carpet that they were filming on and noticed it had tiny dots in rows and columns that stretched the entire hallway.
So he looks at me and says “Listen kid, I'll give you 5 bucks if you count all the dots on the carpet.”
Now recall, I was a 10 year old and this was 1989, 5 bucks was a TON of money!
So I started counting.
About a half an hour in, Danger Dan walks up to me and says ‘What are you doing?’ I told him. He then looks at the carpet and says “Do you know how to multiply?”… “Just count one row down the hall and one row across and multiply them…then you will have your answer.”
I did exactly what he said, and Murphy even gave me 10 bucks instead of 5! What a guy.
Why am I telling you this story? There is a difference between knowledge and the ability to use it. On that day I learned a real world lesson, using multiplication to make my life easier.
It's easy to know something, it is much harder to use it in the real world. Clearly the same holds true for trading. There are a lot of people that know the theory, it is different in application and many cannot ‘count the dots.’
That is what I love so much about the macro gauntlet that our head of Macro Trading Tim Colby built. It doesn't just tell me that 3 X 3 is 9, it gives our users all the information they need to actually use it.
I want you to learn more about what he has built over the past 7 months and I am pretty sure you are going to want to apply it to your own trading.
Your Only Option
Mark Sebastian