From Side Hustle to Financial Freedom: A Deep Dive into Forex Trading with James Eaton

Speaker 2: 0:11

Welcome to Side Hustle City and thanks for joining us. Our goal is to help you connect to real people who found success turning their side hustle into a main hustle, and we hope you can too. I'm Adam Kaler. I'm joined by Kyle Stevy, my co-host. Let's get started, all right? Welcome back everybody to the Side Hustle City podcast. Kyle Stevy is in the house today, to my right. Yeah, what's up, kyle?

Speaker 3: 0:38

Nothing, nothing.

Speaker 2: 0:40

That's why you're here. If something's going on, Kyle's not here.

Speaker 3: 0:43

Yeah, it's just it's. I don't know, don't have kids.

Speaker 2: 0:46

Yeah, well, there, there you go Today, special guests, guys, we are going to talk about Forex today. We're going to talk maybe Dabble and Crypto a little bit, but mostly Forex trading with James Eaton. James, welcome to the show.

Speaker 4: 1:00

Thank you for letting me be here. I'm incredibly excited because if this conversation, if my being here, helps even just one person start their trading journey and start this process, then it's it's certainly a conversation and time will spend.

Speaker 2: 1:11

Well, I think it will, and obviously James is joining us from across the pond here. How's everything over there?

Speaker 4: 1:20

For September it's unusually hot. We're experiencing a bit of a heat wave at the moment, so it's slightly uncomfortable here, but it's good yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:29

Love it, love it. Well, this might be our first international guest.

Speaker 2: 1:32

No, no, no, no, we've had Australian folks We've had, yeah, oh, yeah, well, you weren't here. So yeah, I had an Australian guest, but yeah, actually I think he's the second British guy we've had on the show.

Speaker 3: 1:45

I thought the British guy was living. It was based out of the.

Speaker 2: 1:47

US, but it lived in the US but, yeah, originally. So, james, tell me, tell me how you got into into DeFi, how you got into trading. You know all this. You know how you get in the stock market in the first place.

Speaker 4: 2:01

Yeah, I mean, I've always been very money motivated. That's been the case since I've been about seven, eight years old and I was working as a personal trainer at the time and I can't say that I didn't like the role. I did love it. It was the perfect intersection of my skills and my competency and my passions as a person, but it just started to get a bit intense. I've been doing it for two and a half years at this point and ultimately, the 5am wakeups you know the packed out weekend schedules. It just started to become a little bit intense and the one thing that I wanted more of apart from more money, obviously was more freedom. I'd recently become obsessed with the idea of, you know, making money online. I didn't necessarily want passive income where you didn't work, but just being able to make money online. So a year prior to that, I'd set up an online fitness business, which has had very minimal success, and I was always on the lookout for opportunities where online income could be created and realised. So this was in the time of, like Gary V, when he was talking a lot about eBay selling and, yes, garage flips and all that sort of stuff, and I kind of toyed with the idea, but it just never really appealed to me. And then, ultimately, I think I'd seen like a YouTube ad about stock trading or stock investing and I thought you know what? I'm young, why not? Why not have a crack? And in comparison to some of the side hustles that I've had over the years, this was probably the most normal. So I decided to pursue it and then, of course, it led to over the next sort of six months, so a pretty intense obsession, and that then led to getting educated and creating the strategy.

Speaker 2: 3:43

I love it, man. Well, there's a lot of people out there that would be thrilled to do this all day and leave their job. This is actually one of those side hustles that you can play around in. Get your feet wet doesn't require a ton of your time. You can keep kind of keep your day job even and get your feet wet, See if you're good at it and then, if you're great at it, jump in. You know, leave that job. That may not be paying you what you want. You don't have the time freedom. I mean I see her on your website. Looks like you got a young daughter. I mean more time to spend with your kids, more time to spend it with your wife, your family. You know this is the opportunities that we talk about all the time on the podcast here. You know, if you're beholden to someone else, your life you're essentially an indentured servant and if, until you can find a way to break away from that and a lot of people find it hard because you know they're stuck with those golden handcuffs on, in a lot of cases, like Kyle Stevie over here, they're paying him. They're paying him great money. I don't think he's ever going to leave, even though he knows all these things he could be doing on the side, but he, you know, he's early in it One of his company, at the company he works for, so he's he's kicking butt, but he likes coming on here and listening to these things. And a lot of people are probably in the same same thing. But they think to themselves James, they go, well, that's, that's going to be too much time. I'm not going to be able to get away from work and do that. I'm not going to. You know, there's no way I'll be able to do that. What do you say to people like that?

Speaker 4: 5:05

I would say, you know, enjoy the nine to five, enjoy the fucking grind. You know, if you, if you ask someone that's got the inherent, not even ability but drive to say, do you know what I want? A better my life, I want to, and look, some people might be more than happy in their job or their business and that's okay, incredible, you know, stay there. But if you are someone that is desperate to get out of the business, to have more time with your family, to have more money and you're not then willing to put in the work, then enjoy your present circumstances Because ultimately, nothing is going to change. That's right. Nothing changes unless you do right Exactly. So you know, it is seldom that I speak to someone that tells me, you know, they're interested in learning how to trade or whatnot, and they're just like, but I don't think I'm going to do it. You know, most people do have that inherent drive and it's funny that you mentioned, like you know, children and having more time with their family, because that's probably the biggest motivator that I hear of when I speak to people and I speak to, you know, hundreds of people a month and people aren't interested in the Lamborghinis they don't want, you know, rolex watches. They don't want the luxury vacations, they want more free time with their kid. They want to leave their business. They want to, you know, be able to be there when their partner puts their child to bed. It's, that's the driver for people, and that's the shit that really matters, right, because nothing, you know, rolex isn't going to give you happiness, not in the long term, right, but obviously, spending more time with your children, having more time to spend with your family, that's what's going to make you step up and create change.

Speaker 2: 6:32

That's right. That's right and I mean and you're you know, I've heard recently I kind of follow what's going on in Europe. I follow, you know, what's obviously going on in the United States. What I like about what you do is eventually you learn and you can see things before other people see things. Because when you trade forex and you're in the markets, you're looking at a lot of things. You're looking at what, in our case, the Federal Reserve's doing. What are they doing to combat it? Your interest rates Are they going to raise? What's going to happen to the stock market? What's going on with oil prices? We start with what? Forex is. Yeah, we can talk about it, but what I want to say is you can see things happen before other people do. If you've got a nine to five job, sometimes you get sideswiped by things that happen in the economy. You don't see those things coming and the next thing you know you lose your job. That's what I'd be afraid of if I was just a nine to five or not. I wasn't paying attention to what's going on in the world.

Speaker 4: 7:32

Yeah, and I mean the sort of notion of kind of like predicting things before they happen. There's a certain truth in as much that you can, through the study of technical analysis, make informed, probabilistic decisions about the likely direction of a market, but it doesn't mean you've obviously got a crystal ball when you can forecast where interest rates are going or what the property market's going to do, or anything like that. As a technical trader, we can study supply and demand through a chart, which is, of course, just a graphical representation of price, and that can help inform our decisions about short-term price fluctuations. Even then, though, you will only be operating with a small edge, which is only profitable over a sample set of trades. You can't ever go into any trade, regardless of how confident you are in the setup, with a 100% certainty that you're going to correctly forecast the movement.

Speaker 3: 8:21

Do you play poker?

Speaker 4: 8:23

No, okay.

Speaker 3: 8:24

No.

Speaker 4: 8:24

I've never got into it.

Speaker 3: 8:25

So a lot of this predictive analysis, like you do, they have to do it in their head at the table, but they call it game theory and it's basically like you take your position at the table, you take what cards if you're playing, hold them. I'm sure it's the other poker games too. I only play, hold them, but you take your cards, you run an analysis in your head or what your probabilities are of winning that hand based on your like table position. What everybody could possibly have at that point, based off of what the flop is, where your, what your pockets are, sounds like technical trading is somewhat similar in that regard. For someone who's not familiar with trading, but they may be familiar with poker. I don't know what the audience is, but, like I just see, it just feels the same way where you're looking at the signals that you that are out there and then you are basing it off of a mixture of experience, probabilities and information that you have that others may not. Is that correct?

Speaker 4: 9:22

Absolutely, and probabilities is, you know, plays a huge role in trading because, regardless of the strategy that you're deploying, regardless of you know, whatever information you're looking at to make a trading decision, you're only, as I said, going to have a slight or, you know, mediocre sort of statistical edge in your favor. You might be running a strategy with a 65% strike rate. It still means that 35% of your trades are going to be losses. But, of course, as a trader, that's where risk management comes in and ensuring that, when you know we do go into a trade, every trade has got a very fixed, controlled amount of risk in it. And, of course, one of the biggest advantages that we have as a trader is that we don't have to be in a position when the most powerful trades is no trade at all. So if the market conditions aren't favorable, just like in poker, you can, of course, fold and not decide to play the hand. You can decide not to trade. If the market conditions aren't aren't right or conducive to your strategy, don't take a position, sit on your hands, wait for a good quality set up to come along.

Speaker 2: 10:19

So what to explain for X, like I wanted to say before, like I just kind of jumped into it, but explain your specific. I mean you run a, you have a training program called the trading lab and everybody that trades kind of has their own thing, that they do their own strategy, their own thesis, their own edge, that they've get Explain kind of how you approach it and what it is.

Speaker 4: 10:46

So what is forex or what is the strategy that I, what is?

Speaker 2: 10:49

forex, and then what is the strategy?

Speaker 4: 10:52

Okay, I mean I'll start off with the absolute basics, in case someone is literally completely is new to this before. Forex literally stands for foreign exchange and it's just the conversion of one currency into another, and it's the world's largest global financial market. It's regularly trading about $5, $6 trillion a day which, to put into perspective, if you combine the world's stock market it trade stock markets it has a combined trading value of about 200 billion right, which is still infinitesimal compared to the volume that's traded on the forex market. And most people have engaged with this market already. If you've ever converted currency for for you know, for a holiday, if you've ever gone to another country and you've converted money, then you've engaged in this market. All we're doing as traders is actually intentionally looking to profit from the price fluctuations that these markets make. Unlike the stock market, which a lot of people will initially think of when they think of trading or investing, it's open 24 hours a day. So, regardless of where you are in the world, regardless of your time zone, regardless of your lifestyle and your commitments, it's quite easy to kind of make it fit around your schedule and your lifestyle Because, as I said, 24 hour markets, you know, you can kind of kind of hop on and trade whenever it suits you.

Speaker 2: 12:05

That's right. That's right. So how do you approach it? What did so? You just jumped in and you had to start learning on your own. You wanted to do this to make a living. Obviously, you did that. So how did you find success? I'm sure you had your ups and downs, but how did you find success and what kind of strategy do you use that you teach other people?

Speaker 4: 12:23

Well, the strategy that I now teach in the trading lab was created after 18 months of intense, obsessive strategy development. The first six months that I discovered trading, it really was just a side gig. It was just something that I was playing and tinkering around with. When I decided to actually get serious, though, and realize the potential and the scalability of this, that's when I got serious, and I started reading literally every book, joined every course, joined every community, just immersed myself in this world of knowledge about trading. The problem is, though, I'd done that for about six months, and I didn't actually have any quantifiable process, any syntax, if you like for actually going on to a chart, analyzing it and then actually placing a trade. I could talk your ear off all day about exponential moving averages. I could tell you you know how stochastic works, but I couldn't actually give you a step-by-step process to say here's how you're going to find a trade, so it was at that point that I kind of went into what I called the lab hence what was sort of the inspiration for the name-maker on, but I would go into my office and, for eight hours a day, I was just backtesting different strategies, creating what I now teach today, defining things, collecting the data, looking at what was working, expanding on what was profitable, taking out what wasn't, until I actually created a step-by-step system. And the thing is as well, like I'm a very I need a series of steps If I'm going to learn something. I can't just go in with just a bit of vague. I need like do this, do this, do that. So that's why I always aim to create as a trading strategy, because I thought, if I had that, it's a scalable and it's obviously simple. I remember reading in one of my books that said your trading strategy you should be able to literally write on the back of a napkin. It should be that simple. It shouldn't have 100 different criteria and filters for you to justify and enter into the market. And with that in mind, that's how I created the strategy. And I always say to people that I'm speaking to now that trading is a bit like cooking. You could be shit in the kitchen, but if you have a recipe with step by step instructions, if you have the right ingredients, it's quite difficult to not get a pretty good result. You might not have ever cooked this particular dish before, but if you just follow the steps in the right order, you can't really get it wrong. And trading is the exact same. There are no bad traders, there are only bad trading strategies. So if you just follow the steps and these are the exact steps that I lay out in my program in the right order you can't really get it wrong.

Speaker 3: 14:54

So how? What kind of success are your students having? Like are you or do you have? Like one guy that you were just like this is this is going to be like my marketing piece right here. This guy came in, didn't know anything, followed my step, followed my program, step by step, and he's got. He's achieved whatever goals he set out.

Speaker 4: 15:15

Yeah, I mean, when I think of that there's one. Well, there's a couple that particularly come to mind. I mean Josh, who joined our program in January 2022, he had come from very basic understanding of trading. He'd dabbled in a bit of crypto. He'd, you know, not actually ever traded. They had very little knowledge. He comes into the program. He's trading on a demo account for five months, so literally never trading actually real capital. But refining his skill set via a demo account gets an FTMO funded account. So FTMO company that will fund you with live accounts if you can prove your competency. Got a 140 grand account closed out his first month of 10 grand profit. Sorry, 14 grand profit. Wow, jesus. And that was from complete beginner within six months.

Speaker 3: 16:01

And how long. I mean, like, what kind of what did his days look like?

Speaker 4: 16:06

So I can't. Obviously, in the developmental stage, when he's learning the course and he's and he's nailing his skill set, I know he was putting in, you know, good three hours, four hours of solid study every single day. But this was alongside his main business, you know his main gig. But as he, as he's actually had that skill set as a trader, it was no different to, probably very similar, to mine. You know he does a market analysis first thing in the morning, which will be about 45 minutes, and then sporadic market checks that set intervals throughout the day which last about five to 10 minutes. You certainly don't have to be glued to your screen for eight or 10 hours a day. It's just a case of staying on top of recent market movement by having a quick check of the markets you're looking at every two, three hours.

Speaker 3: 16:51

So if there's a trade presence.

Speaker 4: 16:54

Sorry Guy.

Speaker 3: 16:54

No, I was going to say so you're checking, you're doing this every morning and you're checking are there like off days? So you, I know that the British people give much more vacation than we do. I mean, I go to, I go to Florida, and there are guys that are like yeah, I've been here since 1985. I still got three months left of vacation. Geez, you know, that's obviously facetious, but it's like they say, like three months or whatever, you have a year to go wherever you want. Yeah, do you like take days off? Do you hit like is there ever like a fear? Like man, if I don't check this at 12 o'clock, I'm going to lose my ass on this whole I think you close out your trades every night too.

Speaker 2: 17:30

I think you're supposed to not wait. You shouldn't have them like the next day or something like that. Maybe that's options.

Speaker 4: 17:36

Yeah, I mean, if you're a day trader, you absolutely will be closing off all positions before the night. There's no particular reason why it's essential, though, yeah, the kind of strategy that I teach is very universal and that you can apply it in any way that makes sense. When you approach 10 o'clock UK time in the night, there are the swap hours where spreads can go a little bit crazy and there does carry a little bit more risk when you hold a trade. But providing you've managed your risk correctly, providing that you've got enough room to account for spreads, there's no reason at all why you need to be closing off your trades, certainly in the forex market, because in the stock market that makes more sense, because you're obviously now going to have that period where the market's going to be closed and that can create gaps in the charts and that comes with different implications. But as a forex trader, as I said before, the markets are open 24 hours, so you get that continuous trading throughout the night. So it's not uncommon that you might put a trade on that 6 o'clock that previous evening and then wake up and it's running to your 3% worth of profit, which are obviously always the favourable.

Speaker 2: 18:36

Yeah, Because the market sits 24 hours. It's just like crypto. I mean there's money, Some market is open in the world at some point and they have a currency. So the currency I mean they're working all day, just like crypto. And crypto can freak you out because you could wake up in the morning and next thing you know, it made a wild swing. And that's the scary thing for a lot of people.

Speaker 4: 19:00

Yeah, and that's it. And these fluctuations, certainly in lower liquidity markets I mean I can't even imagine what they could look like on the intraday charts of some of these sort of small alternative coins but that volatility can lead to a lot of profit potential. It can also lead to a lot of potential risks. So once you have a strategy, it is your job to find out what your propensity to risk is, what kind of like preferences are as a trader, and then to trade accordingly to that. Regardless, you're never going to be risking any more than 1% of your account balance in any one trade.

Speaker 2: 19:32

That's just good point, yes, good point. I mean, do you do normally see people that are like, yeah, my risk level is at 10. Fuck it, let her go.

Speaker 3: 19:41

Yeah, let it go, just who cares right, all on red.

Speaker 2: 19:45

I put it all on red Like I've done that with some money. Like they say, you shouldn't put more than like 5% of your portfolio in crypto, right, and you know I was going crazy for a while there People were mortgaging their houses. They were, they were taking out mortgages on their houses to get into Bitcoin and stuff in Ethereum and all that. I was buying Ethereum at 10 bucks. So most of my theorems you know. It's good. But you know a lot of people are just you know they're buying at $1800 and you know selling at $1700, which is what you're not supposed to do and they buy high and they sell low, you know.

Speaker 4: 20:19

The thing is, as a trader, you are going to experience a string of losses. At some point it will happen, you know, like whether it takes six months or it will happen at some point and of course, drawdown becomes exponentially more difficult to recover from. So if you lose 50% of your account balance, you don't need 50% to get back to breakeven. You now need to necessitate a 100% return on the remaining capital to get back to that starting point. Yes, right, so it becomes exponentially more difficult. So that's why ensuring you never get into deep drawdown in the first place is so, so important, and that's why the 1% rule is fundamental. It's just absolutely essential.

Speaker 2: 20:57

You know what I love? I love looking at the inflation of the Argentinian peso. Oh my god, yes, you do, I love it. So what are these days?

Speaker 3: 21:06

I can tell you everything about conversion, whether, whatever it has to do with the Argentinian peso. I can tell you how much a cheeseburger costs in McDonald's and Buenos.

Speaker 4: 21:14

Aires.

Speaker 3: 21:16

I can tell you what we can get a house for in Rosario. Yeah, I've been educated on that.

Speaker 2: 21:21

I've been addicted, like I love watching the. There's the websites out there where the you know people their community generated. So people that are actually living there will tell you how much this costs. But the thing is, here's the cool thing.

Speaker 3: 21:32

This is like sounds like the new Nigerian Prince like send me 10,000 US and I'll make.

Speaker 2: 21:39

No, but there's a blue rate, is what they call it in Argentina. So when you look at these sites it says you know, for example, a dinner for two to a nice restaurant costs, converts to $40 US, right? Well, that's the bank exchange rate. If you send money cash American dollars to Western Union and when you get to Argentina you pick up that money, you get what's close to the street rate. The street rate is almost twice what the bank exchange rate is. So instead of that dinner costing you $40, now cost you $20. Have you seen this, james?

Speaker 4: 22:17

Do you know any, any sort of more exotic currency? I don't track, I only track eight major global currencies and they're, and it's the combination of those currencies, that which are the which form the markets that I trade.

Speaker 2: 22:30

So, whilst I might know that there's global macroeconomic news events relating to, you know, the Turkish lira, or you know, the Argentinian peso in this case, or that it won't be a market that I'll be willing to trade, yeah, well, also, I think you know that's a good point, because a lot of people say, hey, if you're going to trade crypto, if you're going to trade even stocks, if you're going to trade stocks, just keep an eye on a few of them. That way you get to know them intimately and you kind of get a sense it's almost like a Jedi sense for what it's going to kind of do and it improves your trading. Is that something that you found?

Speaker 4: 23:10

Yeah, absolutely. You know every market has its own personality in that sense and, just like people, you know, markets can be quite volatile and erratic or they can be quite, you know, sort of easy going and quite easy to work with. And it's definitely a good point of as a trader to find the markets that resonate with your particular style and your particular yeah sort of personality and then to trade those markets in alignment with that. I wouldn't say to anyone else to not trade more exotic currencies, but I just have never, in six years of trading, never felt the need to, because there's more than enough profit potential over the markets that I do track.

Speaker 2: 23:46

Yeah, and you're talking about bigger countries with less volatile inflation and things like that. So it's, yeah, I mean the British pound, the US dollar, you know, maybe Japan, I don't know. Sometimes they're.

Speaker 4: 24:00

Canadian dollar, swiss franc, new Zealand dollar. Any combination of those will create a pair that I'm willing to trade.

Speaker 2: 24:07

And that's in your program, right? This is a strategy you have in your program.

Speaker 4: 24:13

Yeah, yeah. So they're the markets that I recommend those 28 pairs. I also will dabble in commodities. I have traded crypto before. Ultimately, the strategy that I teach, so what I have in my training. It works on any market. If you want to apply it to stocks, indices, if you want to trade the spy 500 on it, if you want to trade, you know it works regardless.

Speaker 2: 24:33

And this is technical analysis for the most part, right, yeah, okay, okay, this is always. I've tried to learn technical analysis on my own.

Speaker 3: 24:41

I tried to read a book.

Speaker 2: 24:42

I was like nope, it blows your mind right. There's so many different things you have to look at. I do like stochastic, because the stochastic tells you if something's oversold or overbought based on a number of factors. Whoever designed the stochastic, you know they put a bunch of things in, but that's a really good one that I like to look at Generally. If it's way oversold, I'm like, ah, you know, maybe there's some more downside here, but it's, you know, it's already taken a hit, so let me just toss some money in there. You know, but the crazy thing about 4X versus regular stocks is with regular stocks, some news could always come out about the company or one of the leaders in the company or a product not going through. Or you know things that have happened to Target recently in Bud Light, where they've been, you know, boycotted. So you've got issues like that that you could face if you're a stockholder in a company. Versus 4X, 4X is a different animal. Can you explain that a little bit?

Speaker 4: 25:43

Yeah. So I mean you're absolutely right. Obviously, with individual company shares, you have news reports, you know earnings announcements, all of that sort of stuff which absolutely regardless of the technical information you're seeing in the chart, regardless of what the stochastics or whatever strategy you're using is telling, you can override that in an instant and then obviously just change direction. And that's, of course, again coming back to risk management. With 4X, you still do have news announcements. If you have any particular high impact news announcements relating to either of the currencies in the pair that you're trading, that's almost akin to a company releasing you know information. So I'm talking interest rates decisions, inflationary figures, employment data, all of that sort of stuff. They absolutely do have a bearing, some more so than others. But whilst there are some traders that will try and capitalize on the volatility that those announcements create, I just don't think it's worth it and will create a blanket rule to never trade an hour, sometimes two hours, either side of these news releases, because they can be wild.

Speaker 2: 26:43

Yeah Well, how do you stay up to date on all this stuff Like? What news sources do you look at? Is there anything that you prefer that you put in your course, that you tell your students to take a look at?

Speaker 4: 26:54

Yeah, any sort of simple economic calendar you can find them online on Google. You'll find a dozen instantly will tell you and list all the news announcements relating to the major currency pairs. They'll tell you what the announcement is, the effect it can have on the markets, all of that kind of thing, and then the impact it's likely going to have on that currency pair as well. And they'll normally grade these events from anywhere from like gray, which is quite minimal, to red, which is quite a significant event, and the red events are normally, like I said, interest rate decisions, employment data, that kind of thing, and that will just tell you when not to take a trade effectively. So, if I'm looking at taking a potential trade on dollar, on dollar yen, so the United States dollar against the Japanese yen, but there's NFP coming out in an hour, regardless of how good that trade setup is, I'm staying out of the market.

Speaker 2: 27:44

Interesting Discipline. Yeah, you got to have the discipline. Have you ever started using AI at all with some of that information? Like you know, if somebody puts out a big article, maybe you just copy and paste that into chat, gpt or something and say, hey, summarize this for me and let me know how this would apply to this other thing I'm trying to do. Have you ever used AI in that way, or have you started to investigate AI, using it with your trading at all?

Speaker 4: 28:13

I mean, there's always the possibility of you know bots and AI, you know sort of trading robots. In a sense, the problem is is at this point there's, I think, the statistics that I remember reading is that 99% of automated forex trading bots AI powered bots don't perform over a six month period. Oh, interesting as a trader and it came almost, you know, as, like a poker player as well, you want to put as much probability on your side as possible straight away. So the moment you decide that you're going to go with one of these bots, these automated trading systems, you're immediately putting yourself in the much smaller group of likely going to be successful. If you see what I'm saying, you're immediately putting the odds against you. That's what I'm trying to say. So it's not something that I've looked into too heavily yet, and whilst I do believe that a strategy could be completely automated using, you know, sort of coding, it never, I would think, would be the eye test, like the human element, of actually going into a chart and reading it. In that sense it's like, I suppose, if you imagine, like driving a car, you could absolutely imagine it programming a computer to drive a car based on very set criteria. But when you drive, as any experienced driver will be able to tell you, there are those more qualitative things that go into it. You'll probably know, I mean, if you were ever driving, and there's just something about that car in front of you that you can't even quite pin why, but for some reason you're just going to leave that slightly bigger gap than usual, or there's just something about this area that you're driving in that makes you go that little bit of a gap, and that's something like that. You know, it's like those things you know carry over into trading as well, and sometimes you can't quite pin them, you can't quite face them, and that all comes into your decision making, obviously when you're placing trades. And that's the stuff that obviously computers and AI won't be able to factor in.

Speaker 3: 30:05

Oh, so like if they you see a high license plate in front of you, you know that in the fast lane they're going to go really slow and they're going to not use any signals to let you know whether they're getting over or where they're going. And chances are they're having a hell of a conversation via text on their phone.

Speaker 4: 30:21

Yeah, or if it's a BMW driver. I found as well.

Speaker 2: 30:23

Oh my God, does that happen to you guys too? With the BMW, you guys don't have the full size trucks.

Speaker 3: 30:27

Dude the full the four by four truck guys around here. Holy shit, that's in.

Speaker 2: 30:32

Kentucky, though no, no, no no.

Speaker 3: 30:34

The.

Speaker 2: 30:34

BMW people are the worst. I don't know oh my God.

Speaker 4: 30:38

Yeah, this is like an international thing. I swear. Like you speak to Australians, you speak to Americans, speak. It is BMW drivers I could never have even as much like a lot of other BMW. I'm never going to get one simply for that purpose. The reputation they've got that, and also over here, alby drivers as well, but not as, not as much.

Speaker 2: 30:56

That's true. I don't want to make any BMW owners mad, but you know who you are. You know who you are and why you got that BMW.

Speaker 4: 31:03

Oh yeah, I'd say it must just be something about that. Someone gets behind a BMW will and they just something that happens to their, to their psychology, that that suddenly they forget how to use indicators and speed limits become non-existent, and yeah you have to live on the Autobahn.

Speaker 2: 31:19

really, if you're going to be a BMW driver, just just move to Germany and drive the Autobahn and you'll be happy. That's where you're truly be happy. It should not be on regular streets with regular people, with speed limits.

Speaker 3: 31:33

Absolutely not. Yeah, I think that. I think it's like some sort of like missing the thing, like it's like there is not even an ego thing. It's like this lack of self confidence that they have, so they have to mask it with a $80,000 car. That's just, it's insanity.

Speaker 2: 31:49

That could be freaking nuts. That could be part of it. That could definitely be part of it. So, where do you see all this stuff going? I get people that ask me all the time, just because they know how long I've been in the crypto world Adam, where do you think crypto is going? What do you think is going on with crypto? But for you, I guess the question would be where do you see forex trading? Because I've, ever since crypto was a thing, I feel like everyone that got into crypto then got into forex, or, if they were into forex, they got into crypto, which, when you think about it, it's all just forex Really. I mean, it's currency, yeah, yeah, where? Do you see it going?

Speaker 4: 32:27

I mean, I think there's certainly. Obviously, since the colossal Bitcoin run in 2017, there was a much stronger interest in crypto and then a lot of forex traders that I was seeing at that time were then suddenly not jumping ship as much but then focusing very heavily on the crypto market. It seems to be a bit more balanced now. I know that there are some just crypto guys that, if it's like they will not touch anything but crypto, for me they're all just markets. It doesn't really matter what it is. I can't really have too strong an opinion on it because to me, a chart is a chart. You can give me any chart and if there's a trade that I'm going to take it, I couldn't care what it is. A high-quality opportunity is a high-quality opportunity unless, of course, as I said, it relates to an exotic currency or something like that. Strong cryptocurrency, blue chips, docks, the main forex markets, commodities these are all fair game for me. I don't really have any longer-term predictions as to what we're going to see in the crypto space as such, or if we're going to see a high-transitional forex traders, crypto or anything like that, I guess I suppose I do think we're going to see more people getting into the crypto space, and that being the catalyst for them to get into trading.

Speaker 2: 33:52

That's a good point too. Young people, young people seem to be the ones that are doing that, but Bitcoin's not going to zero in your opinion. No, no, I don't think it's going to. Not financial advice. We have to put that in there. None of this is financial advice, by the way.

Speaker 3: 34:07

people Try to throw a disclaimer at the beginning.

Speaker 2: 34:10

I know we should have put that disclaimer, but you mentioned on your website the people that would be interested in taking your program cryptocurrency folks, digital nomads or people that want to be digital nomads, business students, financial advisors, entrepreneurs, personal development enthusiasts, risk management professionals, investors.

Speaker 3: 34:36

This is actually one that I want to do. Yeah, no, Because I have. Like my work day is kind of like whitewater aftening it's 45 seconds of sheer terror because an issue came up and you have to fix it right away. And then it's three to four hours of boredom. So I could do this on my phone and not get in trouble for using more computers, and I could easily kill three to four hours learning this in the first four months of it.

Speaker 2: 35:01

Yeah, how long does it take to take your course? What kind of a time investment is this?

Speaker 4: 35:07

I mean, the entire course is about 15 hours of content, not including quizzes and homework exercises and that kind of stuff, and then there's also another 15 hours of complimentary market breakdowns as well, where you'll actually see the strategy being applied in real markets by myself. How quick it takes to go through obviously depends on how much study you put in right. Obviously, someone who's putting in three hours a day is going to get through it a lot quicker than someone who puts in an hour a day. So most people, though, are putting in an hour or two, and they're going to get through the course in a week, sometimes too. That, of course, doesn't mean that they're now ready to suddenly start going into the markets with real capital. I would still encourage that person to trade a demo account at least the next two months, get a record of profitability behind them, see if there's any gaps in their knowledge, if there's any technical tweaks they can make to their trading, if there's any clear emotional themes that they need to work on, and then they can start thinking about scaling to trading with real capital or, in some cases, to prop firm money, but I would say the quickest turnaround that we've seen are all within six months.

Speaker 3: 36:09

So I missed that part of it. So you basically and to put this in friendly parlance here you can play a friendly on the market and then, when you're ready, which is a soccer term item for a scrimmage game.

Speaker 2: 36:25

No, it's a football term.

Speaker 3: 36:26

Yeah, yeah, so you could have a football term so that you can like go without your own money to see where you're at and you're not going in and blowing $5,000 within the first couple weeks of trying this out. Okay, I like that makes me even happier.

Speaker 2: 36:41

Well, kyle, let's put it in perspective. This is taking less time than your law degree took, and it's also taking less hours. You're actually going to see a return.

Speaker 3: 36:50

As long as I don't lose $35,000, I've got a better return than my law degree.

Speaker 2: 36:55

I love it, I love it.

Speaker 4: 36:57

But that is the beauty, because that demo account exists. The point at which you're going to be your worst as a trader is at the start. So why not minimize the risk by trading with no capital on the line and just trade in demo and do that for two, three months and then only then scale to. If you've got 20 grand that you want to start eventually put into a trading account and start with two grand of that trade on that and then build it up to five grand and then, when you really feel confident in what you're doing, that's when you can start to think six figures and beyond and you can start thinking about London. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3: 37:33

I like reasonable expectations. I hate that idea that you're like going to have this house in West Palm Beach and dying at Mar-a-Lago. After five months of trading forex, I went to Puerto Rico for one of the crypto weeks and that's like old San Juan is where a lot of expats here from the U? S went down to because they don't have federal or state income taxes, so they've created like this freaking, weird ass colony down there and it's guys that are pro regulation and guys that are pure crypto and it's like the jets and the sharks down there. They do not like each other, but I've talked to a lot of the guys that are like pro crypto and their idea of what is responsible and possible and all this shit with money is just like so foreign to me. I'm like no, I don't want to put $10,000 on your buddy's new ecosystem token. That's going to take off. It doesn't even have a project yet. You guys got like an awesome white white paper. That's all you have and I like this so much. I like this so much but maybe because I'm old and I got like responsibilities.

Speaker 2: 38:38

When you've been burned before. So you know what it's like and you've heard the stories before and you've seen it. You've been a victim of it sometimes, but you're also not you know. You've seen other people get into trouble playing around too much and you know. You've got experience. Let's be honest you got experience.

Speaker 3: 38:56

That's what they call this gray hair.

Speaker 2: 39:00

Well, I got a little more gray than you, I think, but you know what the interesting thing is? Is you brought up on your website something about the pandemic and the way work has changed. What's going on in the States? I don't know if it's going on across the pond the same way, but now these businesses are getting people to go back to work and I feel like it's a matter of time before everyone's back in the office. Yeah, 95 every day, especially in the United States.

Speaker 3: 39:25

You know they have to be. You can't, you can't have collaborative effort over zoom calls no it's going to only last so long. You got to use all your senses. You got to have the sense of being close to someone. You've got to be able to experience their body language. You've got to. You know you lose all that when you're on a screen.

Speaker 2: 39:41

Right, and my point is is that if you're still working two or three days at home and you have that opportunity, then you need to do this now, like you don't, don't dick around and wait until you're stuck back at the office.

Speaker 3: 39:54

Totally blow your job off wire.

Speaker 2: 39:56

at home, people do it all. Let's be honest Like this is what people are doing, right now, dude, there's people with.

Speaker 3: 40:00

That's why they want you back in the office.

Speaker 2: 40:02

That's exactly it. They've got two or three full time jobs. Some of these people like developers. They're actually doing two or three jobs. There's people here in the States that are making you know, three, 400 grand a year, 100 off of three, 100, something thousand dollar jobs, and they could totally do it because they're work from home. So it's some point and people are catching on to this. So at some point people are going to say, look, you're going to come back to the office full time. Well, here's all this time that you had to learn something like forex trading and you didn't do it. Now you're a wage slave the rest of your life again.

Speaker 4: 40:36

Well, yeah, it's funny to mention that because my brother-in-law, who works for a big pharmaceutical company, he started to learn how to trade a couple of years back, sort of into the pandemic, and he was now working at all from home. So he had all this free time and he was going through my program and he was getting good and then suddenly he had to like scale back and he had to go into the office a couple of days and then suddenly it turned into like five days a week and then the application which he was trading from, which was his broker's platform and trading view, they actually then shut access to those sites. So I don't know if it was because of him or other people had access to it, but they then shut those applications to those sites. So he had zero accessibility to trading from only six months prior and now it's just become a bit of a. It's sort of become on the backbone or a little bit. But yeah, I think you're completely right in that as people do start making that transition to to, you know, working in the company again and not working from home, as much as it is going to obviously create a problem in as much that, as for the people that are trying to obviously build skill sets on the side. It's going to be a lot harder to do that.

Speaker 2: 41:44

Yeah, take advantage of the time while you have it, guys, because it's not going to be like this forever. You're probably able to spend time. We talked about it earlier spend time with your family, spend time with your kids, spend time with your partner. You know what. You're doing that now. But what happens when you go back to the office full time? Well, there, all that goes away. And now here you are putting your resume in at jobs that still allow you know, partial work from home, maybe. And then what happens when they close it down? And now you're stuck in. You're just in this cycle and now you can't find a job where you're working from home all the time, if you're enjoying time with your kids. Now this is the time to take action before everything changes, especially here in the United States, where they work you to death and they don't want you to have any vacation time. And you know what? From a company perspective, this makes sense. You know, from a company perspective, I don't blame them for making people come back into work. I don't blame them for shutting down trading sites and blacklisting sites on their, on their internal Wi-Fi or whatever. You know that's that. It's their business, right? They want people to be productive while they're at work. So that's just going to continue to happen and you're going to have more and more people having to go back to the office. Take advantage of it now, james. Tell people how they can reach out to you, how they can find your site. You know how they can get started with you.

Speaker 4: 42:56

So I would say if you just want some information about myself and the program that I have, the best place would be go would be to go to my website, which is the trading lab dot online. But if you want to reach out to me and speak to me, you know one on one. If you're more than welcome to connect with me on social media, you can add my Facebook just by searching for my name. I'm sure you shouldn't have too much difficulty finding me. Or you can go to my Instagram, which is James Eaton at FX, and you can find me and connect with me on there. That's awesome.

Speaker 2: 43:27

Well, thanks for putting this together. I'm sure, like a lot of our guests, they do courses like this because they were in the same position. A lot of our listeners are in and they wanted to spend more time with their family. They were sick of the nine to five grind. They did something, they discovered something that helped them free themselves from this, this Institute of Bondi, of institutional slavery. In my opinion, I mean, that's what we're dealing with here, right? I mean, you're stuck there working for someone else, making them rich and you're just, you're working for pennies, let's be honest, and a lot of people are sick of it and they want to change. And you found something and you're willing to share that with people and I commend you for that. It's great that you're doing this.

Speaker 4: 44:12

Absolutely, and if people are maybe thinking like it's only a profession reserved for people with a background in economics or in finance or you've got to be a have a math degree or something like that, it really isn't. I mean, a couple of weeks ago I signed up in the same week a junior doctor and a scaffolder in the same week, and I can just say that I couldn't tell you. If you asked me to bet money on who's going to be more successful in two months from now, I wouldn't be able to give you an answer as to who's going to do better, because there's no skill set that someone can have from a previous profession that's transferable to trade in it. It just doesn't happen. It's a completely unique profession in that sense, and if you've got no prior experience, you're probably the best place to start learning, because if you've come from five different platforms or courses before, you're going to be encumbered by beliefs and preexisting notions and ideas about how the market should work. It's going to be quite hard to take on board and learn new knowledge, whereas if you're a beginner you don't have that problem because you don't know anything. You're blank canvas in that sense, and invariably it is the people that come into my program that get the quickest results. The people that are getting there six months turnaround. They start as beginners.

Speaker 2: 45:24

Love it. James, this has been awesome man. I really appreciate you coming on the show, especially you know it's so late where you're at right now and spending some time with us and educating our guests on what's going on here. So, guys, definitely check out James. We're going to put his information in the description of the podcast so you'll have links and everything else in there. And James, thanks a lot for being on the show. You're very welcome. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining us on this week's episode of Side Hustle City. Well, you've heard from our guests. Now let's hear from you. Join our community on Facebook Side Hustle City. It's a group where people share ideas, share their inspirational stories and motivate each other to be successful and turn their side hustle into their main hustle. We'll see you there and we'll see you next week on the show. Thank, you.