How to stop spinning your wheels and make actual progress

Wow.

Today’s quote hits me like a brick to the chest.

I see a lot of people experiencing life on repeat: each year looks almost exactly the same as the year before. They don’t go deep on things, they just go through the motions.

Like they’re spinning their wheels in the mud when a car ought to be going somewhere.

As a general solution, the only way to stop the spinning is by fixing the immediate problem.

I’m as guilty as anyone else of being overwhelmed by problems and sitting paralyzed. But I do know how to make progress. In fact, sitting down and writing this out now -- while reflecting on the quote above -- I can see how this year I have made progress.

I’m thankful for that.

How do I do it?

The same way I would eat an elephant: one bite at a time.

I know that’s cliched, nevertheless it remains true. All my big projects are finished by sitting down, making a plan, and then getting to work on that plan. Often, the plan morphs as I work on it because what I thought would happen isn’t what actually happens. And that’s okay because I can always just make little adjustments here and there, always moving forward.

In the movie Creed, Rocky Balboa gives some boxing advice to his protege about how to win the fight: “One step at a time. One punch at a time. One round at a time.”

Good advice for all of life, including trading.

The Japan deal has raised hopes of more pacts ahead of Trump's Aug. 1 deadline, with large tariffs looming.

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President Trump is getting trade deals done. Deadlines truly do move things along. I suspected that the August 1st deadline would not be pushed back, and it looks like some countries are agreeing with that. The President said, “I just signed the largest deal in history with Japan,” including over half a trillion dollars of Japan investing in the US.

Because Japan is such an important trade partner on the world stage, I expect this big announcement to pave the way for many other countries -- especially the Asia-Pacific region -- to quickly get deals done. 

Meanwhile, the EU looks like they want to play hardball with Trump. Personally, I don’t think they have the infrastructure in place to negotiate from a place of strength; I think this is just postering. Like a pufferfish, not as big & powerful as it appears.

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I really only put this here so you would be aware that Tesla and Google’s earnings are being announced tonight. I still have an open position in TSLL (a Tesla leveraged ETF, an advanced trade idea I did many months ago) so I will be riding this particular earnings “landmine” and seeing how it shakes out.

Comments: The Indexes continue their bullish creep higher. I was reading some other trading newsletters yesterday and I was seeing some of the same sentiment I have in the markets: long-term bullish but looking for a pullback in August.

Is that confirmation bias or do I have a good pulse on the markets? I don’t know, and only time will tell. I will say -- again -- that this feels like a good time to book profits and patiently wait for a pullback rather than aggressively jumping into new trades. For sure, I don’t want to trade the euphoria of bullish momentum, choosing rather to stick to my tried-and-true setups.

I took today’s trade idea in one of my small accounts, getting a nice 2.2% return on risk for next Friday’s expiration. And it could cover a month of the Premium subscription...