4 Lessons From a Favourite Qullamaggie Rant
Plus: my experience of publishing stream notes for a year
Last week, I referenced a Qullamaggie rant. One that really hit me hard when I heard it live, and had a huge impact on my work ethic.
I linked to Kristjan’s tweet rather than the clip itself for two reasons:
Substack doesn’t like it when I link to age-restricted content (presumably because of the strong language).
You get to see Stockbee’s response, which simultaneously amuses and exasperates me — because it sounds so ridiculous, yet is spot on.
Fortunately, the full stream recording — from 9 July 2021 — isn’t restricted. The rant starts at 1:18:10:
Let’s go through four lessons from this rant. After that, we’ll talk about how they relate to my experience of publishing Qullamaggie stream notes for a year.
1. There’s no substitute for in-depth study
To quote Kristjan (1:20:44):
“There is no substitute for going in depth, and studying different traders and different methods. […]
“You have to go in depth. You can’t just spend 5 minutes and go ‘oh, okay, this is not for me’.
“[Going in depth] is how you learn. That’s how you get an understanding for the market — these different structures that occur over and over again in the markets.”
Kristjan’s often mentioned that he learned to do ‘deep dives’ from Stockbee (Pradeep Bonde).
However, before then, he’d already realised he had to change his early attitude that trading was going to be easy.
This business is fiercely competitive. Only the very best can find long-term success.
Kristjan realised that, to be successful, he had to get his act together and get serious about studying.
2. Just start somewhere
(This is my take on Kristjan’s phrase to ‘not wait for permission’.)
What did getting serious about studying mean to Kristjan?
Kristjan googled for every scrap of information he could find — about successful traders that came onto his radar, for example. He saves articles in an Evernote database (he’s shown us bits of it during some streams).
He read all the main trading books, including How to Make Money in Stocks by William O’Neil and Mark Minervini’s books.
Kristjan went through every single Minervini tweet, studying his setups, entries, etc. He also signed up to Minervini’s paid service, where he probably dug through another massive archive. (Marios Stamatoudis calls this ‘reverse engineering’.)
He dug through Dan Zanger’s tri-weekly newsletters (behind a paywall), going back to the late 1990s. Kristjan studied the setups in them, trying to understand Zanger’s methods, how he trades, what he trades, and so on.
Kristjan went through all of Stockbee’s free blog posts, then signed up to Pradeep’s paid site to dig through all his paywalled posts, too.
Most important of all, Kristjan collected thousands of examples of the setups he was studying, and saved them in his Evernote database. I’ve talked more about the details here.
This is the main point.
You don’t need to contact successful traders to get started, much less wait for their response (assuming you get one at all).
As I wrote last week, we’re very lucky to be living in a time when we’ve got ample information at our fingertips. As Minervini says: if anything, we have too much of it.
This tweet sums up the problem nicely:
So, to borrow Nike’s phrase: Just Do It.
If you don’t know where to start, the worst possible course of action you can take is to do nothing.
3. To be successful, you must do the things most people aren’t prepared to do
Let’s open with a couple of quotes from Kristjan (1:18:12 and 1:22:26):
“People write to me all the time — people who don’t want it enough. And I usually just ignore them, because I find these people annoying, even though they can be really nice.”
“You can just spot these people far away — the people who don’t want it enough. They think they want it, but they really don’t. They’re not willing to do what it takes.
“You want to be successful in this field, or any field? You got to do what most people are not willing to do.”
About free education
The amount of education available now is incredible — particularly considering how much of it is free.
However, the quality of that education, to a large extent, depends on your own efforts.
Take Kristjan’s streams as an example:
Do you actually watch them, or only listen?
Do you watch them only once, or multiple times?
Do you watch them while you’re doing something else, or do you fully focus on the stream?
Do you also take notes? If yes, are they just rough notes or suitable to teach someone else?
Do you only consider what you felt was important, or do you take the time to figure out why Kristjan thinks the way he does?
Just some things to consider. How serious are you about getting maximum value out of amazing free resources?
The good thing about free resources is that, well, they’re free.
The bad news is that the lack of a barrier to entry means that everyone can access the information.
With that in mind, what are you doing to get more out of those resources than most people? As Naval says:
You must be dedicated
If you want to be a profitable trader, by definition, you have to be in the top 5%.
So, are you studying hard enough to beat 95% of traders?
As Marios says: “Only the dedicated get rewarded in the long run.” Also:
Insight from non-traders
I feel like what Marios is saying in the above tweet matches up really well with a point Cal Newport makes in this podcast.
(You may know Cal Newport from Deep Work, Stockbee’s top book recommendation.)
In short, to really get good at something — and specifically at the right thing — you have to do the right kind of training. This almost always involves doing things that aren’t fun.
So, learn to get pleasure out of doing the hard things — the stuff other people won’t do. Athletes and other top performers know this:
You must alchemise the intense discomfort of certain training into fulfilment.
That means thinking things like: ‘I can’t understand this [concept/problem], but I’m going to bloody crack it.’ and ‘Other people are going to give up here — I’m not.’
Or to put it how Seth Godin would: think ‘get to’, not ‘have to’. You get to spend time studying the charts, and building those databases, and studying top traders, and so on. You don’t have to do it.
4. Talent is overrated
During his rant, Kristjan said (1:23:07):
“There’s no such thing as talent. Talent is developed.”
I don’t quite agree.
I do believe in talent, or ‘aptitude’, if you prefer. But I also believe talent is overrated.
Hard work always trumps talent. And curiosity beats competence.
And if you combine hard work with curiosity?
You become unstoppable.
My experience of publishing stream notes for a year
Coming back to stream notes, I know first-hand how much time and effort they take to write, even as a professional writer.
But it was worth every second:
I fully stand by the above tweet. Writing on Substack has been a phenomenal education.
But the Qullamaggie stream notes are special. To put them together, you must figure out:
Why Kristjan likes or doesn’t like a setup;
Why he bought or sold something; and
When he bought or sold it.
Plus, whenever I make a mistake, someone will point it out to me, giving me a chance to improve — quickly.
(Considering the thousands of views my stream notes get, I could be pretty sure that someone was going to notice any mistakes, and that I’d be able to correct them faster than I could have on my own, or even in a small study group.)
On top of that, people asked me all sorts of questions about my notes, or how Kristjan trades.
Some of those questions could’ve been answered by spending five minutes on Kristjan’s website.
But many others were intelligent, nuanced questions I needed to think about. That process further deepened my understanding of Kristjan’s methods and refined new notes.
In short, I think that publishing stream notes for a year — even a year with relatively few streams (2023) — was some of the best trading education I could’ve asked for.
And that they seemed to have helped many of you too made it an even better experience.
Happy Easter!
Have a lovely Easter, everyone, and enjoy your long weekends :)
I’m currently taking a few days off and spending time with family. I’ll catch up on comments, messages, etc. early next week.
More content like this
All my Qullamaggie notes are here. If you’re interested in stream notes only, use this link.
The Trading Resource Hub’s full archive is here.