INTERVIEW WITH TEAM LEADER | James Mason

“ …by taking those smaller position sizes you can focus on your trade especially if it starts going against you.”

James Mason

How does it feel to be an accomplished Team Leader of WSDT?
Does it feel like an important milestone in your mentoring career?

It was a great opportunity to be a part of the World Series of Day Trading and to be able to lead a team of my size as we work together to trade against everyone else in this competition.  And as we all know already we had some outstanding traders, to begin with.

This was definitely a milestone in my trading career. I say more so for the fact that I had the opportunity to bring so many people together in my community to where we worked together and communicated like never before.

How would you describe your overall experience with the
competition? Was it more of a challenge that you took seriously or more of an entertainment event for you and your team?

I had a great experience in this competition. For me, I was much focused on my team and them progressing throughout the ranks as we all work together and watch the market. Everyone was communicating with each other and it was just an amazing experience to witness.

What advice would you give to novice traders who have tested the waters of day trading with you in the competition and are preparing to tackle the challenges of the real world?

My advice I would like to give to my team and anyone else who took part in this trading competition would be to take smaller position sizes. By taking those smaller position sizes you can focus on your trade especially if it starts going against you.

What a lot of people struggle with is they will take a position size that is way beyond their means and when it goes against them, emotions will come into play to where they cannot even analyze the chart correctly and then they will hold on to this losing positions and will take far greater losses than what they should.

Was it hard to coordinate such a great amount of traders? What are the new challenges that you had as a mentor?

Some of the challenges that I faced as a mentor was the communication aspect of getting everybody into one area where we can all focus on the market together and plan something out for the day.

I have one of the largest teams and a lot of people were trying to contact me from multiple platforms and it was such a struggle to get them to migrate to one area and we were just using the score. So that was definitely the greatest challenge that I faced.

Join WSDT – Spring games – 2021

What kind of feedback did you get from your team? Will it affect your approach to leading and mentoring in the future?

With me, I am pretty consistent with my leadership and mentoring style.
My team gave me outstanding feedback for how the WSDT played out and also I was actually working together in this Discord chart. They are actually looking forward to the next one coming up in the near future, so I can’t wait, I know they can’t wait.

What was the overall sentiment within a team? Were they competing with each other, or preferred to help each other out?

Hands down I had some of the best people on my team, everybody was looking out for each other in the market, everybody was calling out tickers that were moving and calling out what they saw.

People were keeping up with the news and it was just such an amazing thing to see naturally come together in this environment that we have created where everybody cared about one another and helping each other out. It was truly a team event.

How was paper trading during the competition different from trading on a real account?

So, anytime with paper trading, there are going to be less emotions involved, but when you put your real money on the line, there are times that if trades go against people they will forget everything they have ever learned.

The whole psychological aspect of real money versus paper money is two different worlds of their own.

This is why it is so important to build that foundation of paper trading, and then slowly transition into real money. And this is where it comes into play with taking small position sizes because you can manage your trade far greater than trying to jump in and dump your account into a trade just like how a lot of people were doing in this paper trading competition

Did you change your trading strategy to adapt to the competition?
Maybe took more risks or played safer than usual?

For me, and I think for many of us we did change our trading style for this competition since it was no risk on our end, to be honest. I know with me I was far more aggressive with my trades than how I would be with my real account. With my real account, I take smaller position sizes and I let those trades work out because it is manageable with the paper trading account I was going heavy a lot of times