It was the summer of 2017…<\/p>\n
I opened my eyes… And for a moment, I didn’t know where I was.<\/p>\n
As I slowly gathered my senses, I looked down and realized I was lying in a hospital bed.<\/p>\n
My last clear memory was of the U.S. dollar being in free-fall…<\/p>\n
I was sizing up a position to short the dollar against the Japanese yen. It was going to be a big trade, with the upside being hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential profits.<\/p>\n
All I had to do was push a few buttons, wait a few days, and collect my money.<\/p>\n
And I was 100% right on how the trade would have played out. Unfortunately, I never did end up placing my orders…<\/p>\n
Instead, paramedics found me barely conscious at my trading desk. As it turns out, I had suffered from a series of poor decisions that almost led to a heart attack.<\/p>\n
Over the span of the last 90 hours, I hadn’t slept at all. And the only things fueling my body were Red Bull, coffee, and a potent prescription stimulant to stay awake.<\/p>\n
The sheer exhaustion coupled with an overload of my central nervous system was enough for my brain to say… no more<\/em>.<\/p>\n Like a computer that was dangerously overheating, I needed a reset. But first, I had to admit I was a workaholic…<\/p>\n I was addicted to trading.<\/p>\n I was living my life around trading instead of trading around my life. It was a much-needed wake-up call to make some serious changes.<\/p>\n I decided to undergo what I call “radical simplification.” This is a philosophy that continues to underpin my approach to the markets today.<\/p>\n Simplifying my trading meant getting rid of anything that wasn’t directly helping me make money.<\/p>\n Instead of having six monitors, I kept two.<\/p>\n I used to be in about a dozen different chat rooms. I left all of them.<\/p>\n I was paying hundreds of dollars a month for various research services and data feeds. I unsubscribed.<\/p>\n In the end, I was left with a couple of monitors, a free economic calendar that let me know when the most important reports were released, my brokerage platforms, and my price charts.<\/p>\n And instead of day trading, I decided to focus on swing trading instead. I went from averaging several trades a day to just one or two trades a week.<\/p>\nHow “Radical Simplification” Changed My Trading Approach<\/h2>\n