So now we have the talk on the radio and what happened to it if you've been to the congress You're already familiar with software defined radio and the great Munich CCC team that organized it. We have sec and Schneider here who are members and also founders of the CCC Munich and Organized on the radio at the camp. Thank you. All right. Hello everyone. Welcome to radio plus plus Radio half a year later The radio in half a year, I mean a lot can happen and will cover stuff so What is the radio? the radio was the electronic name badge of this year's case communication camp and Statistics say that around 50% of the people in this room probably haven't been to the camp and and We wanted to make something special for camp and it's a multi role SDR badge. That means it's a software defined radio, but also a badge We made it compatible to the hacker F which some of you might know It's one a very popular open source SDR platform from Michael Osman We took a lot of their his designs and made it into a badge It's not only an SDR. It's also a development platform. It has a dual core CPU on it Also two USB ports with host support, which I think is quite nice to play with So why did we do that thing? Four years ago. We did the rocket also an electronic name badge for case communication camp 2011 and that thing was a blast. We had a lot of fun doing it was very stressful but also very rewarding lots of people did very nice projects with it and Four years later. It was almost not a question anymore. Do we want to do it? But rather what do we want to do and That gets tricky. I mean you don't want to stand still and Really the goal of the rocket in the beginning was to have something reusable that people use afterwards and also learn something So not just an Arduino, but something where you can actually have fun with discover something new and four years ago That was an arm processor So why an SDR? Well, basically we were into SDRs roughly one year ago and we thought that would be a nice thing to have on a badge it's not like some sensor we put on there and One and a half years later the next Samsung whatever smartphone has that thing already on there but it's something which will be not available to the general public or Cheaply available for quite some time and we wanted to make that stuff available for people to play so SDR Sounds nice Also complicated, but interesting Why would you want to have an SDR because lots of stuff is wireless today and Wireless stuff pops up on your doorstep potentially as a smart meter or something different and There's no way you can have a look at that but if an SDR you can you can probe that stuff you can interact with that stuff you can learn more things and Roughly one and a half years ago. Second me. We started looking at satellites You got into SDR and we lost our fear about SDR basically and That's one of these myths SDR. It's not hard I mean you can make it hard if you want to but you don't have to if you have enough time and motivation You can get it done and you need like three math functions You need sign Cosine and but Pythagoras and then you can figure things out basically You can think of SDR as The signs of a point moving in a plane and figuring out how it moves in that plane that's at least how we in the end understood SDR and That's what we have here. There's a picture There it has lots of points They move in circles and the circle moves in the circle and what it means is that you have some frequency which is Modulating an offset from your center Basically, you follow the point on the plane and apply some math to it We won't go we won't get into SDR too much of this talk because Focusing a little bit on the radio There's a datangarten talk of me in German actually which I held at cccb You can find it on media dot cccde which explains a little bit of stuff and Michael Ossman He has great videos for the hacker F tutorials about SDR check them out. You will not Have a problem afterwards so Where can you get a radio? Well half a year ago. We told you well, maybe we'll build some more but really no one has stepped up No one has the time and it's unlikely that will that that will change But it's an open-source project after all The eagle files on github the original files for the hacker F are in kycat We had to somehow speed things up if you're familiar and eagle so it's eagle files Sorry for that, but nevertheless a free viewer and the Gerber files will be there so one of our prototype manufacturers agreed to step up and Accept orders for the radio ideally In bulk it will have contact details at the end of the talk and some idea about how to manage that Table of contents now Let's get into it We'll cover some bird changes in half a year will cover what happened to the hardware and you wouldn't imagine How much can happen to a hardware in half a year? we'll Look back on the radio challenge at the camp where we had an SDR challenge We'll talk a little bit about the nice art project involving the radio in the lounge and then a little bit of SDR some resources and final words Now sec is our firmware guru He did a lot of stuff a lot of magic to get all of this bootloader stuff and switching between Different parts of the RAM going and he will cover the firmware part Thank you So the firmware was not only my doing and I had lots of help from other people of this is Munich, CCC and We will not be going into all details. We just want to show you what's what's the current state of the firmware So the firm as as at the camp still on github There have been quite a few changes Several people have sent in pull requests and most of them have been merged We might have missed something if we missed something Just maybe contact us again, and we will look at it. It's always right after events You're we are a little bit busy with all the requests in them might drop something on the floor I'm sorry for that But it's still open for everyone And the the current firmware I don't know. I mean half of you were probably not at the camp has Different Concepts there's the the camp firmware the one that shows your nickname and run stuff and this one loads Small modules that are called laudables, which is a self-contained small binary That you can run inside the normal camp application. We've we had quite a list of laudables in the meantime many of them submitted by Different people and we will just do a quick overview of what we've got now to maybe get you in the mood of writing some code for the Radio yourself. It's not that difficult So the first one is called B, which is a Reimplementation of a fairly famous web game I Doesn't look like the best strategy here Well Well, okay, so you can play and of course the display space is limited. So after Like nine it goes to A and B and if you reach B, you're done That's why it has this name. So the next laudable is snake. That's a Reimplementation of the old Nokia snake game. So we need to be compatible to old phones and Because he ran into the wall. There's also snake too Where you can wait for it those suspends Yeah, okay, that might makes it much more difficult to kill yourself as you can see right there Then we have Tetris, which we sped up a little bit because the start of Tetris is quite boring No one of us can play that fast Okay, but that's all all games and the next one is also Also a game. I mean as the simplest thing That's actually a part of the laudable which we also had for the rocket four years ago just with some added colors There was I mean You didn't get the UFO. Okay. The other the next thing is bricks, which is a Submission we got I mean looks also familiar Well Okay might need some improvement then then there is Also nice graphics hacks like the cube which I particularly like just nice to you look at and the Mandelbrot Which is actually also a port of an old laudable for the rocket you can zoom in quite far Then we have the fire laudable And I think the last thing is wobble. Yes, I Didn't think of those names those are submissions, but you can see that the CPU is quite fast to do this stuff Then there's the always the question how much space is on my Radio left We have a 2 megabit megabyte flash Which has 1.5 megabytes for the file system to put all the stuff on it And you can also see a nice graph of how much space is still left Then we have the schedule laudable, which is done by Ray which has a small Schedule of the current 32 C3 You can get it at our wiki or if you stop by our assembly and flash your Radio at the fresh station then you have the schedule and if the servers are down again, then you can just look it up on your radio So the next laudable is no, there's no more little sorry the next day those are actually also laudables I mean the idle animation of your of your radio shows your nickname and maybe some animations They'll just have a special name and display your nickname. This is a Life which has some the Conway game of life in the background going then we also have the matrix laudable animation which shows you the thing and some nice stars in the background and This is also a submission. I Rather like the fact that it's running very smoothly And the last one is using the full color capability of our display Which is the color plasm There's also like the basic ones that just show your nick and do nothing, but those are not as interesting And then this concludes the list of laudables which run inside the camp firmware and Can use all the framework of the camp all the functions that are already implemented You can write a complete application which runs standalone on the radio and has nothing to do To enter the menu for that is if you turn it on you hold the joystick to the left and then you get a list of the applications the most common ones are the camp application which shows your nickname and stuff and hacker F Which is by now replaced by the hacker of app Application which does the hacker of compability. I mean you have it as a SDR which you can use with your computer with new radio and it's Compatible to the hacker F There we have also some other applications like a submitted one that plays mod files there. We have a demo Yes Just a second thank you That was rather nice, I mean you need to plug in a headphone for this But and then we also have the RF app which does some standalone RF things like Waterfall display where you can see you can set the frequency which it shows and then it shows you if there is activity there or not You can also select the speed up to how fast the super you will allow you to go and there's a bandwidth of two megahertz, which is not too bad for for a standalone thing and The RF app also has some additional features like FM receiver transmitter, which we want to demo right now Just a second. Okay, this thing Is a wide band FM receiver and transmitter submitted by Hilsin? So you can select the frequency you want to Send on or receive on it has pushed to talk if you press the button inside this application your badge basically merges Into an FM transmitter and we're now tuning to 2.4 gigahertz on on our badges and We'll transmit audio from sex batch to my batch. I'm running the receiver. He's running the transmitter It's basically it's the same software. You just have to make it the transmitter. Let's see if it works No I cannot hold three things at once get away a little bit Just oh, yes. Hello test. Yay Crabby quality, but okay, I guess that was a little bit of overpowering the receiver, but in fact if you tune to a Wideband FM broadcast station has a very good quality. Also, you might need to have an antenna Appropriate for the frequency the built-in antenna is only tuned for 2.2 around 2.4 gigahertz and radio is quite a little bit lower than that and Thanks to at hill's who wrote this application. He really Went into the RF stuff and implemented all the all the necessary functions for that We wouldn't have had the time to do it in as nice fashion as he did Yeah, I told you a little bit before about the hacker f app I mean before at the camp you could start it in hacker f mode and it would work like a hacker f But you would not see anything on a display and would not Get any feedback from from the application what you do and now we have the the full gooey experience Where you can actually see what the what the badge is doing. I mean this is And when when you started it's off and then you can if you receive Something from your computer then the display shows that you are receiving And you can also see the settings if the amplifier is enabled or disabled or the gain settings and Which at which radio is receiving because we found the hacker of tools sometimes confusing to to not I mean if you if you don't set anything it just leaves the last set mode for like the Amplifier and that might be confusing and so you can see at a glance if it's on or not and then if you transmit it shows you that you are transmitting and You get the full feedback. There's nothing to select on the badge, but you at least you get a nice display and Last but not least just a few days ago Again at Hills submitted the RF lip which does Several RF related stuff in a nice library where you have quite easy functions to set the frequency and retrieve Run binary frequency shift keying to transmit data or receive data it even uses some offload some of the processing to the second core on the on the badge so you can run other code on In the meantime while you while you receive stuff on the main CPU That works really great the only caveat is that if you want to send something to the display you need the Special function from the library so the display is set up correctly and does not conflict with the RF code in the meantime But that is really great and has part of the github since Three days ago last-minute edition but it's really great and What we what we still plan to do what we haven't gotten around to is we want to Upstream the changes we made in the radio to the hacker of github So we don't have to maintain them separately and we can also always be up-to-date with any other changes that happen upstream and One project that Schneider still wants to do is to send and receive Stuff directly from the SD card that is not populated by default But you can solder an SD card slot on your on your badge And then from the firmware read and write files and you could in theory. This is what we want to do Just receive something and write it to the SD card and then replay it from the SD card So so you would have a standalone RF Replay device which might be nice if you have like old garage door openers or something like that now we come to the Hardware details and I have to defer that to Schneider because he's the hardware guru All right. Thanks. So What can happen in half a year to hardware you might ask? Well? box You can find a lot of bugs in half a year in something you've cobbled together in two months and we found plenty of them And some of them you can fix in software some of them you can't and we'll go through all of them right now all of those we know about and Tell you if you can do something in software if you can do something yourself or if it's just like that now Okay, so one of the common problems also if the hacker F is that you can get lots of Interferences from the clock lines which are on the PCB itself and they manifest as peaks in the spectrum these Are inherent to the design you can't really get rid of them If you have a clock at 40 megahertz I'm going that device you will have peaks at 80 120 160 megahertz and they won't go away Thankfully if you have for example a clock at 40 megahertz you can see here There's a big peak at 80 megahertz That's the first harmonic there and if you but if you go up in frequency at 120 it's a bit lower 160 even lower 200 gets a little bit lower and at roughly 400 and above you can't see that anymore But it means that's something you have to live with if you see these peaks in the spectrum and they just they're there They don't move whatever you do you attach the antenna you remove the antenna that you have to ignore him And there's only a limited amount of stuff we can do we did a little bit We covered that Had one in talk, but just as a heads up Be aware. All right next one Missing high pass so we announced the radio as being Workable from lower frequencies roughly 10 to 30 megahertz up to four gigahertz But we didn't populate one key part for the four gigahertz Operation that's in high-pass filter. We had to save cost that thing was going to throw us out of budget and we left it out but the Result is that you can't transmit or receive above 2.75 gigahertz We originally thought that we can solve that in software but now realize that's not possible There's only two solutions either you populate the high-pass yourself You can get the part number from the schematic no problem or you just bridge it But be aware if you bridge it and you transmit something you really have to add an external filter to remove Some of the harmonics created by this because there's a reason this thing was on there in the first place You just want to receive above 2.75 gigahertz should be okay to just bridge that thing and we have reports of the backlight staying on and That's caused by a design decision Which we took where we placed the pin which controls the backlight onto a pin which also controls the boot options on the MCU It's high by default and if you turn it off It's floating a little bit and but high and on some badges it turns on the display even went off Tricky to solve the only real Solution to this is to unplug your battery. Otherwise, it will drain your battery and at some point will just be empty Antenna originally the antenna was designed to be at around 2.4 Ish and a little bit up so 2.4 8 2.5 because there's a bit of space where there's no Wi-Fi and It would be nice to have the radio transmit and receive there the best because that gives the best batch-to-batch communication, but turns out that we Mis-tuned a little bit. It's too low. It's at 2.3 5 gigahertz works. Well still at 2.4 2.5 gigahertz, but not the best Sadly nothing we can do about that. I will USB power now and we have two USB ports on there and they're currently limited Also, the first USB port takes precedence So if you plug in the first USB port it will always take as much power as it can from that thing to get powered If you attach the radio to a Raspberry Pi that can be a problem because the thing can't supply enough power anymore You cannot supply it at the same time for the second USB port because that thing doesn't take precedence And it's also limited to half an ampere, which is not enough to supply the radio There's two solutions to that either you Take some why adapter which basically takes power from some other part or a USB hub Which is powered which is basically that or The hacker firmware gets ported to the second USB port and you can power it for the first port and have data coming Off of the second port this hasn't been done yet, but just be aware if you attach this thing to an embedded device Might take too much power Then the clock input We initially thought that around one third of all radios have a working clock input or at least could be made workable But turns out that during a design we hard Wired that clock input to ground. There's no way you can fix this It looks easy on the picture here just remove that That piece of copper which connects the pin to the ground plane, but it's below the chip and you won't reach that So the only way to introduce an external clock into the radio is really to attach it solder it to the pads of the of the crystal and supply it with 27 megahertz no way around that and The ice people floating we missed the pull up We've seen it once Someone soldered something to a connector on the radio didn't boot up anymore. There's a pin on the microcontroller called ISP It's floating and if it goes low the thing doesn't boot So if you have something like that, that's really rare so far. We've seen it once and unique It seems to be no problem as long as you don't solar on any connectors to any Connector which has the ISP pin on check the data sheet and the schematics for that Something similar reset pin. We've seen it's a little bit touchy if you Put anything onto the reset pin make sure that that thing still gets pulled high We've seen radios reset occasionally if something is happening there So Typical problems now we get into stuff we can actually fix broken display Well look for Nokia 6100 displays on eBay They're available Not that Expensive we also have some at the radio assembly right now. I think we have 40 with us if you have a broken display just step by and we can swap that thing out and Because someone told it to us You can't use a rocket display the pin incompatible and if you think you move that on I'm surprised that the thing doesn't go up in smoke So please don't do that Next one no audio input output The headphone connector sometimes isn't sold out properly check that check the pins on the headphone connector solder them again To make sure you have contact and sometimes you also have to rotate the headset a little bit like the actual connector of the headset To make contact we've seen that also Bad power switch It's like the most stressed part of the rocket if it fails remove it put a jumper on there That's fine No data flowing you've seen that You go into a hacker of mode It's detected everything works you can set the settings even the hacker of app which we've rolled show stuff, but there's no data flowing That's potentially because of a bad USB cable too long USB cable not enough power getting in The display flickering please charge your battery. That's the low battery indication. Actually, it's the protection circuit Which is a little bit it's not very steep so it starts to flicker when the voltage goes down Nothing to vary just charge your radio Then if you mount the thing I mean mount internal flash memory onto your PC It takes a very long time to write something to the flash memory. That's normal Please use the safe eject feature of your operating system or type sync into a console on Linux and press enter and wait until it returns That way you make sure that you don't corrupt your data your file system and everything will be on there Just you have to be very patient. You can take a few minutes to transfer large amounts of data to the radio Then RGD LEDs We made a mistake in the layout The transistors which should turn on the power off the power unpopulated correctly and then we had some mishap in the communication with You guys so really it's not necessary to run any wires or anything across the batch just rich to Pads at every transistor and you will be good to go. No special hacks necessary The antenna connector if you solder on a connector to the antenna make sure that you don't bridge the two Pads which are in this circle. They're very close together They're not connected by default and they're easily to bridge and if you bridge them You bridge the power supply to ground the thing won't do anything anymore. We'll just get very hot Sadly It there's no solar mask in there I think and they're very very close together. It looked like huge distance while layouting that thing But really it's very small and really easy to bridge. Make sure you don't bridge these two things also if you're Sold in and bias you you might have an active antenna like GPS antennas or modified GPS antennas For example that we use for iridium and other stuff which have amplifiers in the antenna You can add a small coil in there like 10 microhenries for example for GPS antenna and that will power the antenna also make sure that you Don't bridge the pads there and While the hacker F has this thing as default built in and also a switchable via software We never had the time not a money to implement it But if you want that it's really big pads you can solar in a rather large inductor there Yeah, just let it do get it done by someone with yourself should be fine one very important thing if your antenna has a DC path and that means an Electrical path from the inner conductor of the SMA connector to the outer conductor conductor that film thing might burn out the Inductor for example this lock periodic that we show here that we Used to capture some iridium stuff has at the very end a small connection connecting the two parts of the antenna Make sure you don't do that Okay protection, there are some very tiny parts on the radio and they get off easily We really recommend to you solder on some shields or get some case for the radio Because they break off easily we have a few of them now or at least take a lot of care when transporting the radio Wrap it into something make sure yet. There's nothing scraping on the PCB Then performance improvements we've improved the firmware quite a lot you can see here in the middle There's the signal which way it should be and on the sides. There's huge Mountains of unwanted spurs and Energy which should not be there. We have you did some improvements to the PLL and now looks a little bit different like this really this improves Transmission and reception a lot and I urge you update your firmware if you do anything with the SDR on the radio badge It's a lot better now Same thing for the spurs. We disabled a few clocks, which most likely no one uses at the moment anyways We've removed one clock. We've moved one to another clock so that we don't get additional spurs That's improving the reception a lot again. Please update your firm So radio challenge we had a radio challenge at the camp and second is going to talk a little bit about that So at camp when we gave out all these badges we had the Problem that we wanted to people to play with SDR There's this misconception About SDR and that it is difficult and obscure and people Tend to say oh, yeah, that looks difficult. I don't want to touch it And we wanted to get people to to try out all the SDR features of the badge So we ran a radio challenge where we wanted to have some Invite the people to play with the radio and at the same time. I mean have clear defined Things they could do and they were wanted to have them I mean all at the same time trying stuff. So we implemented the radio challenge We wanted to Ramp up the difficulty start with very easy problems and slowly increase the difficulty. We didn't want to have Really difficult things we wanted to get people to introduce them We were very very short on time because we also had to finish the bad radio before camp and then Give them out to people and give support for problems And so we only managed nine challenges one of them had to be removed because there was some miscommunication and All the possible answers were wrong so actually it were only eight challenges and We got some room from the Munich CDC to have a web interface for solution tracking where you could register and Put your solutions in that made it easy for us to to at the end to check who had the most correct answers Then we have I have a quick overview about the challenges for you I mean the first one was just flesh some code on it This is like a really low barrier of entry So people have to like look at your badge and find out how to start it and run some code on it and maybe If they see that it's not that difficult maybe they even develop some loadables or something later on the second challenge was a waterfall challenge there was Hidden transmitter somewhere which transmitted a signal which was turning on and off at certain intervals And the answer was just how much time passes between two two times When the signal was on So this gets the people to install a simple waterfall tools or just turn it on and play with it the second one was Like only slightly more difficult to find Where in the frequency of a signal is we told them it is somewhere between I think 1 gigahertz and 1.5 gigahertz And then you have to just use gqrx or any waterfall diagram and find it We had the improved the difficulty a little bit for the next one And we had an FM transmitter which was transmitting some self-recorded stuff the RF app at this point did not exist So it was not just starting the RF app But you had to install some str tools and do some FM receive or you can do it with gqrx Which does it build in but still you need to familiarize yourself with the tools Then just because we are at camp and we wanted to get people moving around a bit We hit one transmitter somewhere and people had to locate it The first challenge was somewhere near our village because it is fun to see people running around in your village and searching for something And and then this was concluded the most of the easy challenges And we wanted to have a little bit of difficulty at the end This is the h2 2 2 6 2 is the Remote-controlled power sockets the really cheap ones We had the remote control for one of them at our village and people had to decode the address that it was sending It's not that difficult. We had some introduction in the question And we had an str workshop where we discussed this in case you wanted some help and But that many people managed to do this you can also do it just by looking at a waterfall diagram that is really fast enough to catch the signal If you if you just want the easy way And the last two challenges was The same remote control power circuits, but you had to turn one of the sockets on That might have been too difficult Or we fucked something up because Nearly no one got it correct. I think why we had one contestant who got it correct. So I'm I'm sorry for that We I thought it would be easy enough and the last one was just for fun was again locate a signal source And at this time it it sent something in Morse code and you needed to also decode the Morse code There was a we we hit that at the Some other village and at the end when we wanted to to grab it knew where we hit it, but it wasn't there anymore So the the plus point is when when you give all the people on the camp a radio Everyone has a radio so we just grabbed the next person and asked them to borrow us their laptop and their radio and so we Started to search for it and followed its surprisingly difficult without a directional antenna to actually find this thing The the successful strategy was having several people around Standing in the way and blocking the signal to make a human directional antenna Yeah, at the end we should have just asked they had a lost and found bin at this village and it was in there So we had really fun to make this challenge and The feedback we got was really positive. Unfortunately, not that many people took part So we wanted to revive this challenge for the camp for the Congress We we still haven't set up anything but Stop by our assembly later and we might have put up a few of the challenges again just if you want to play with it and There is one more thing We have some me lights, which are remote controlled light bulbs You have With an RGB LED. They're not that expensive and use either the normal both normal light sockets, I forgot the names of those and If the first standalone radio Application that someone writes to which remote controls one of those the protocol is not that difficult in Google I mean the first one who stops by assembly and chose a standalone application radio gets two of those lamps He doesn't need a remote control So this concludes the part of the radio challenge and now we come to the launch list, okay? So this is an art installation in the lounge unsincrease from the Munich CCC did it It's basically just a radio connected to DMX of the lounge which Transmitted has the light information of all these installations transmitted over radio to the upper batches and they can receive that and switch on their LEDs Like the lounge wants it or the VJ wants it. It's pretty easy There's a There's a small protocol you can set all LEDs you can set them off to the same color to different colors and We have small piece of hardware.  It goes up onto some antenna in the lounge and you can receive the signal there and There's a small Application it shows you a nickname and when you get near to the lounge It starts to blink the LEDs change the background color of the display and So you can be part of the light show at Lounge this is based on the RF lip from hilsin. Oh, yeah, you should have some LEDs, but we have lots of LEDs at Assembly, so if you need some just Get to us We have a flash station at the assembly you can get the latest firmware there including the lounge app and Otherwise you can get it from github just compile it yourself will have some binary distribution later on today, I think Now SDR. This is going to be very short What can you do with SDR? There's some recent hacks here. I mean, of course what we did the iridium stuff There's also global stuffing so that satellites there was a really nice sickly hack lately Using very weak encryption or known keys of the sickly protocol to open locks and stuff like that Have a look at that play around with that stuff Public transport, maybe you want to receive your local schedule for public transport. You can use the radio for that There's quite a few different hacks Go to hack a day get the SDR Tag on hack a day and you'll find lots of stuff Interesting protocols satellites airplanes the ECT you name it building automation. There's lots of stuff to look at We'll upload the slides later on so you can have a look at all the links also from the previous slide and this stuff Hack on your heart's content. There's a lot of stuff to be discovered and it's not that hard really possible standalone applications now really I Mean this thing it's a multi-role SDR batch, so I mean it has the battery It can run standalone Use that use the processing power you have on there do something which is not running on your laptop use the power and Have something, you know, which you just turn on it just works You don't have to boot anything you have to start up new radio and have stuff like that Which is not working in potentially because some software update was going on and there's a lot of stuff to do Put stuff on the SD card sampling onto the SD card transmitting from the SD card So I've made home automation Maybe you have some power sockets you want to turn on or off you can do that with the radio No problem in the localization also The USB ports no one has done something with the USB parts yet, but I mean they're host They support the host mode so you can take a USB stick plug into one socket with an USB on to go adapter Take the radio plug it into your computer have a look at what's going on over USB Maybe a USB firewall USB sniffer intercepting stuff. You might know the I was called again Teres good speed has a nice one the face dancer, which does that also now you can do it with the radio to for sure Then getting a radio as I said before There's one of our prototype manufacturers, which has agreed to manufacture radios again if you asked them It's deeds electronic manufacturer I Proposed that if you really want to get a radio get together on the mailing list We now have a mailing list will be on the next slide Get some group orders going will provide a data set of complete data set Which you can give to them so they can manufacture the stuff But really you're on your own probably sourcing the parts getting the deal with them going really We're not in the business of selling stuff and That's probably not going to change Then last slide Mailing this there's no mailing this took us half a year to do it, but we finally have it Get on it, especially if you want to get a radio We'll get to we'll we'll also be on there will try to answer any questions you have Support you in any way GitHub of course get the radio get the firmware from there the wiki Hasn't been that active lately, but really if we want to document something go there I think lots of people are still looking on to that thing and the radio batch Twitter account You can get any news from there. We think I think we had some Nice responses just before Congress for the lounge licht and the other actual new apps We have for the radio then at the assembly down at Hall 3. We have the flash station You can get the latest firmware from there. Just plug your radio in have the joystick Moved up at that point and you will get the latest and greatest firmware Take your radio to the lounge. I hope this is already live yesterday wasn't yet But we're working on it hard and I think Chris and aunts will be happy to have you Have you with your radio there? Johnny assembly will be hacking will be hacking on these lights will be hacking on SD cards and stuff like that and Yes, half an hour after this talk. We'll have a little sale of SMA connectors LEDs and a few cases which are left and Super queue from many ways. I think has had this morning eight our F kids left and he's willing to sell them He's at Millie ways get to him if you want to have some of these. Thank you very much Thanks a lot second Schneider So we have ten minutes left for questions if you need to get out already, please be quiet and If you can stay please stay Do we have questions from the internet a? Few all right If you have questions here in the audience, please come to the microphones They are always like in the eight and we take the first question from the internet, please The first question from anon and the tassel broom they were wondering what tools were used to dimension the antenna Okay, yeah pieces of copper The antenna is a reference design from I'm not sure I think ti actually and We had it on the first prototype. It was way off and what we did we took little pieces of copper We soldered them on tried to change the dimensions a little bit to make it to tune it to the right frequency and then we measured these dimensions and put it into the final batch and Well, it's awful bit. That's what we did It was trial and error basically Okay, one question from the microphone three Hello, you mentioned that you found some Bucks in the hardware and you published the plans. Did you adjust them after you found them? That's a good question No, we did not so the thing is I'm working in hard a little bit also Professionally and I tend to don't touch it It's working more or less right now and it's working pretty well given what time we developed that in and the box We found our minor I would say if you want to change these You'll have to follow pull request change them But be aware that if you change anything on hardware and use produce that stuff in mass That's tricky. You need to do prototypes really smallest change you need to do prototype That's my opinion Thanks one question from the internet, please a Question from Hector at which power level does the FM sender work or the sender in general? We can put out the roughly plus 10 dBm so that Was it? Yeah, 10 dBm And but we don't reach that always it's a little bit dependent on the frequency and the FM transmitter Has all the gains available to you so you can tune up the TX gain and activate the external amplifier if you want to Put out a little bit more power Be aware if you put on turn on the external amplifier or not the extra like the extra amplifier And you also turn on up the TX gain a lot you'll get a lot of harmonics That's like it is but yeah, we don't care about that too much Okay, no microphone for please That's no question. Okay, then three please. Hello. So it's more than a feature request. So it's would be cool to have Generator code generator for GNU radio. So you can build a flow chart their flow diagram and produce a Python code and Do the same with Radio project to produce code straight to the CPU for radio With a flow graph It's not on our to-do list. I would say Sounds nice also really hard Honestly, I have no idea how to do that Right now so it's it's not on our plans if you have plans to do it and then submit a pull request we would be happy to merge it but I don't see that happening right now Thanks for providing the pull request So one question from the signal angel Tetzel broom is wondering is there a hardware or a file somewhere? And if not, could you put it there on GitHub? Yes, we've just presented it to you No, seriously, we found out a few of these bugs two days ago while Checking some things again and then making sure of a few assumptions. We always had and at the moment. It's this presentation But it's a good point and we'll put up a wiki page with this. Yes Great, we still have five minutes so we can relay a few more questions from the internet. Thank you Also from tetzel broom Could you give some pointers to what software tools and resources to write the apps and firmware for the radio? I mean I mean the Software tools and software tools is just a compiler and you can you can look at the the github code that is there There's no magic documentation anywhere. I'm sorry. We didn't have the time But I think the code is not too hard to understand if you just look at the code that is already there And that's all you all the help you get at the moment. I'm sorry one more Yes, so Also wondering how important are the metal cans around the sensitive circuits with regard with regard to the RF parts? because Some people didn't get them at the ccc cap I talk to cages How important well, they're quite important for mechanical protection really and And We did measurements with regarding our app performance and it's not that much better with the shields on but we're very happy with people have shields on because that will protect the The things from Mechanical damage, I mean they they give a lot of better a lot better results if you have some strong Transmitter next to your badge and that might be a motor for example Your laptops Wi-Fi Yes, anything which has something which creates a spark or has a powerful transmitter in it That will radiate into the radio and you will get that in your received data But if you don't have that there's not too much Additional benefits from having the shields on Do you have another one? Yes, there was some discussion about the preferred Design tools for hardware and would you recommend a key card or? Basically, yes, what's the preferred design tool for the community? Would you say? kikert for sure If the we did it in I would like to do it in kikert really the problem was that we didn't have time to get some people into kikert at that point that's that's including me and We had to really spit this thing out in a hurry and so it We had to go back to Eagle because everyone in the team was Fine with Eagle and knew how to do that stuff and that's the only way we were able to get this thing done in time the hackerf original files on kikert and I think that's really good and It would have been nice to have the radio in kikert too, but that's sadly not the case Thank you, and microphone 7 please just wanted to ask if you have any information about external amplifiers any information The only information I can give you is there's two things Take a look at the latest video from Michael Ostman He's talking about transmitting and also amplifiers and the second one is put a filter after that thing If you amplify your signal a lot, you will have spurs at places where you don't Expect them especially if you amplify stuff and You have to check with a spectrum analyzer You really should if you put an external amplifier on there and you should put filters on there to limit the amplifier To the region where you want to amplify something Unless your amplifier has some internal filter characteristic already Thanks Okay, and one last from the internet. What is so Robinson wants to know what is the maximum supported sample rate? It's around 20 mega samples per second you can go a little bit higher And I'm talking about the radio in hackerf mode connected to a PC You can get around 20 mega samples per second if you have a fast PC Potentially even one or two more But I think that depends on the USB stack and other factors But really you're limited by the bandwidth that USB can support at that point Okay, thanks a lot for those questions. Maybe somebody also can transcribe them somehow in some FAQ or something that people can read afterwards also Do you have an FAQ already? I think there's an FAQ on the wiki. Yes Okay, so you can extend it and maybe put all the information you got today from the talk Also in some written form so people can access it even easier. Thank you Thanks And yeah, thanks for this great project Somebody of you has a radio at home and doesn't use it Please just donate it to somebody who can put it to better use to your hacker space or to some Up-and-coming hackers or something so the radios are not in the closet somewhere and getting dusty


Trading the markets can be difficult to master and seemingly just out of reach. Professional traders have a secret.  It requires the trade hacker mindset. Welcome back everyone. I am joined by a special guest today by the name of Mr. Rich Friesen. I'll give a little intro of Rich and then I'll let you fill in the gaps and really provide a little bit more detail. Rich is the founder of MindMusclesforTraders.com. He has a book out called A Private Conversation with Money. By the way, full disclosure, I have not read it yet but I did order the book. So I will be catching up on that shortly. Rich has a degree in philosophy, a master's in clinical psychology and a master's certification in neuro-linguistic programming, NLP. So with that Rich, I'll turn it over to you and tell the folks a little bit more about yourself. Well, I started trading almost by accident. One of my best friends in college went to work in Chicago on the floors of the exchanges and soon was building his own trading firm. And so he said, Rich, come on out. And I said, I'm a philosophy major. I don't know about this standing on the floor and yelling and screaming. So I decided to learn a bit and I went to work for Merrill Lynch as a futures broker. And that taught me a lot. And one of the things that taught me is that almost all of my clients lost money over the long term. And as a guy who really likes to add value to the world, it was really a challenge to, you know, it's dialing for dollars. And to pick up that phone and say, hey, you want to get, make a lot of money fast, I couldn't do that. So as a result, I threw in the towel and said, Joe, I'm coming to Chicago. And he put me on in the, I mean, this was no training almost. He put me in the middle of the S&P 500 pit. And this was, you got to understand, this was when there was 500 people now. You know, it's all changed. And what year, what timeframe was this for reference? That would have been 1970, let's see, I was there, that means 74, 1974. Okay. And so philosophy major, therapist Rich Fries was in the floor of the exchange, yelling and screaming. And I was off the mark bidding and selling because they were giving me their hedge orders in the futures. So they took me out of there and they put me in the option pit. The S&P had options on the futures that just opened up.  That's a confidence builder.  You know, it was just, you're terrible. And he was right. I was terrible, but I managed to survive that. And I opened an options desk on the Pacific Exchange for Chicago research and trading. And that started my career and especially given my background as a therapist, I was interested in my own mindset. And I have a story about when that made a big shift but I thought maybe you might have some questions or comments so far. Yeah, no, go ahead and jump into that. Obviously the name of this podcast is the trade hacker mindset all about the mindset around trading.  And so, yeah, please continue and cause that's what this is all about. Well, I so appreciate that that is part of your awareness because in my experience, it amplifies what you just said. So let me give you my story. And that was April of, this is a long time ago, it tells you how old I am. April of 1995, I woke up in the middle of the night and I heard this voice said, Rich, you're only worth 200,000 a year. I mean, that voice was as real as your voice is now. And so I looked around the room, you know, a little panicky. Wife was sleeping beside me. She wasn't disturbed. And I realized it was a voice in my head. It was something from really deep that came up. So I dressed, shower, shower dressed and I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to the San Francisco and went to the options floor which was still locked at the time I got in so early. And while I was waiting for the doors to open, it gave me a lot of thought about what was that voice. And when the doors are open, there was an empty pit, of course, because nobody else was there that early. I stood at the back like I normally do and I'm very careful. I have my option values. I just take a little bite out of this order or bite out of that. And to understand a little background is that first year I went on my own. I made a, yeah, working for this large firm and making hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly. On my own, the first year I made 125,000, the next year 150, 175, and then 200, 200 and 200. And that's when that voice woke me up. And so I stood at the back of the pit and I thought about that voice. And in a moment, I realized I was done with it. And I went and stood in the best spot in the pit. Now, you young people don't know anything about this, but it's a jungle and who owns the best spot is the most aggressive, the most well-capitalized, the person who's the biggest bully, the person who can really set their boundaries and really make everybody fall in line. So I stood in the best spot in the pit and then the market maker started coming in a little bit before 6.30.  And I didn't move. The whole pit just stepped back. We got into a pushing match and the exchange official warned us very quickly that it was a $10,000 fine for both of us if we continued. So I pretended I had concrete boots. I stood my ground and when the bell went off, I just, I would blow everybody's mind. I'll put my microphone away from my mouth. I was buy the hundred, sell your 50, buy 20, sell your 50. And the pit thought Rich Friesen had gone berserk. But what happened was I realized I was done with that voice, that internal limitation.  I was the worst. I wasn't as smart. I wasn't as aggressive. I couldn't remember things as much concepts I could get, but you know, specific values were difficult. So I created a, what the firm, the floor kit people tease me, it was optionalmatic. It was a piece of cardboard sliced just right. So I could determine where my values were at any given point. Well, it turns out after a couple of years, everybody was using it cause it was so convenient. But I was able then to go on to make 650,000 that year and make more every year.  And so Rich, the, going back to that voice and the fact that, you know, you kind of yourself worth was around that $200,000 number was, was in your conscious mind was part of that because you were scared of the risk it would take to get to that next level or was it something, something different? Well, that's a good question and a hard question. Yes. I think there was a risk. I think there was a timidity. I've always been a guy who in conflict I withdrew. That was a training for my parents and I could go into that. A lot of conflict at home, I had a younger brother who conflict, he came out fighting. I went and hid under the bed. So my process was to be safe was to withdraw and to fight on the floor was a very different process. And the risk wasn't that much cause I had a low risk process that was expandable because all I had to do was increase my volume and it worked. I see, I see. And so, so let's take it forward now to the electronic world of trading. So tell the, tell the audience a little bit about what do you, what do you trade now and kind of what's your, a little bit about your methodology and kind of what you're doing today? Well, I don't trade actively today because I have enough money to retire.  I've did that for almost three decades. So what I do now is very different is I look for belief systems. For example, when I watch the news, I don't believe any of the content. And I think anybody that believes what's coming, the content is nuts. But what I look for is, what emotional state does this engage people with? So what I'm really interested is in the emotional state. For example, in March when the pandemic was the worst and the market was collapsing, I called one of the best traders I know and I says, what do you think's going to happen? This was a really dark time. And he says, we're not going to see the market bounce until we have a wave of bankruptcies and a major economic dislocation. So I checked with a bunch of other people. The beliefs were all the same. And I went and started. I was maybe in 30, 40% cash in my retirement account. And I brought up that to about 70% in investment. And boy, that worked out. So what I'm doing now is just looking for those moments. Could I go into the market and tell you where it's going today? No, I have no idea. I have all I could give you some percentage, 60, 40 or something. But there are moments in my career where everything just was crystal clear. And that's because I sense belief systems were about to shift. So this really fits me as a therapist and a study of how the brain works and neuropsychology because now all of a sudden I'm in my wheelhouse. I'm not trying to keep track of a dozen option values on the floor. I see. So in working with traders that you work with, some of the common things that I hear from our community, from people who are either new traders or maybe they've been trading a while but they haven't gotten to that place of consistency with their profits or their P&L curve. Some of the common things are that there's some people trade out of fear and some people trade out of greed or a combination of both. Those are the two major driving emotions that traders have. How can a trader, one of the common things I hear is how can I deal with getting over losing trades mentally? Emotional. Yeah, all the surveys I've done. The top three issues are the reaction to losing trades and then some people get aggressive. They try to make it back. They go into depression or they do some impulse trades or they overtrade and all the reactions to that. So the question then it becomes how do we create a new state of mind that can handle that and handle those losses? So this discussion now could go in a whole bunch of different areas so maybe we can come back to some others. But one of the things I do is I have a product called Mind Metrics. And in Mind Metrics, we start with our awareness, our sensations, emotions, thoughts, and we score them from minus five which would be depression for our emotions and a plus five would be like we're on cocaine or caffeine or just really jittery and excited. With a zero meaning we're just really present. We do that for our physiology. We do that for emotions and the quality of our thoughts. So we have this in the chart and you click button and it turns to each square green, yellow, or red so that we know if red were in the danger zone, for example. Then what we do is we mark the trades by our strategy. In other words, and we call them either lousy or lucrative.  That's a lucrative trade. It doesn't matter whether it made money or lost money. So then we measure the lucrative trades versus everything else. And this is after they've closed the trade out or this is when they are entering the trade? Well, there's two ways to do this and one, we measure it afterwards and so the trader will say, was that? No, I was really just hoping or my setup wasn't quite there yet. So that would be a lousy trade. And when we look at the trades divided by lucrative, which means we follow the system, like my most profitable traders, 40% to 50% of their trades are profitable. In fact, 40% tends to, my best traders probably have a 40% win rate. That means they can handle a lot of losses. So if you have, you look at your lucrative trades, let's say 50% profitable, 50% unprofitable and then you look at everything else, the trades that didn't follow the system or you had too much to drink the night before or you weren't in the proper mindset. Most trader, I'd say 90% of them when we do this application realize that if they eliminated or if they just made lucrative trades, they would be profitably, consistently overnight. And for some of them it's like a friggin' brick on the forehead. And to that point, you know, you're grading it after the fact, which I liked as well. But the point I made about, you know, dealing with losing trades, that's one thing. But on the flip side of that, I think a lot of traders, one of their biggest issues is actually staying in the trade, right? Where they're cutting, you know, they, oh my gosh, I got this profit. I better just take it. You know, you hear, I just did a podcast episode on this not too long ago where, you know, you've heard the saying, well, you can't go broke taking a profit, right? People will say that. And it makes my body tense up and cringe because the reality is that some of your biggest gains are the ones that you are able to deal with staying in until you reach that, you know, intended profit target or whatever it is that you manage the trade. Talk a little bit about that as far as the mindset around being able to stay in trades as opposed to taking those profits too early. Right. So what we can do is that would be a lousy trade where you take your profit before your strategy calls for it. So it's lousy. You can even divide it up. Lousy trades that I got in, okay? And I took profits pretty soon. You can just measure it. But a short story. I had a clerk that was really bright and people worked their way up in my firm by first starting to clerk. And then once they got the system and understood it, we did afternoon trainings. Then we'd give them a badge and I would capitalize their trading. And then there was a profit split. So we had a trader that it was just one of those days. I mean, I think about it. It's Sarah's own, you know, talk about a rush. The firms were selling premium and the retail was buying premium and just next, you know, close strikes. So, you know, buying 26 volatility, selling 33 volatility, huge spread, minting money. So about mid-morning when the new trader came to me and he says, I'm up 10 grand. I'm going to take off for the day. I said, I am going to take $10,000 out of your account right now. You're starting at zero. So why did I do that? Because he was cutting off the upside and taking his profits too soon. The market sometimes will just give you money when the emotions are right. But the market is a harsh mistress and there will be days, maybe weeks, and I've experienced months when there just wasn't much opportunity.  And when you're working with clients, I mean, do you have them set up very specific risk versus reward metrics for the trades or is it, I mean, I know everybody's got a different style, different methodology, but how do you think about that? You know, some traders will say, well, I only get in something if I'm going to have a reward versus my risk of three to one or four to one or ten to one or whatever it is. How do you think about that when you're working with traders? Well, I don't determine that at all. What I do is work with a mindset and then have them test. Okay, we have a strategy that is two to one. I've had traders that go one to one. That's a lot of work, by the way. You know, some traders go ten to one and they have a lot more bosses, but boy, when they hit, it's big. So my job's not to determine that. I can help them depending on their personality. For example, if a trader is just actively trading and he needs to be there, then I'll say, what would happen if you weren't trading one to one and trading so actively? Oh, I might miss out on something. And their voice goes up like this and they're anxious. So the real issue is not their trading strategy, but their need for constant feedback from the market and their need to be active, and that is almost a compulsion. So then we work on the compulsion and when they start to become aware of the impact of that compulsion and we look for what is driving it, then they make a shift and their risk-to-reward shifts with it. But I don't start with a symptom. I start with what is driving that. I'm glad you brought that up because that's something that I wholeheartedly believe in is that part of the reason that some traders struggle is they see somebody else having success with a particular strategy that might include a specific risk versus reward. And they try to do the same thing and so you've got two people trading the exact same strategy, one is uber successful and one struggles. And so we talk about finding the type of trading, finding the duration, finding the symbols, finding the markets that fit your personality as opposed to trying to copy somebody else's because that never works in the long run. Well, so I divide it into three different parts. The first part is the market has an overwhelming amount of information. There's an overwhelming number of strategies. The strategies sometimes aren't clear. They require pattern recognition. They require some intuition when to execute them. So the new trader command is overwhelmed. If he says, okay, here's the strategy I'm going to copy, there's some value in that is because it narrows all that information and gets you in a rhythm, especially if it gets you in a rhythm of execution. And I can talk about the rhythm of execution. We can come back to that. But then there's the next stage and the next stage is what you brought up, which is so important is who am I? Is that my guide that likes to stare at the screen? Or do I want to put on an option spread and take a peek at it once a week? Or am I a guy that's looking for more longer term? Who am I? And the third part is then when you develop a confidence in your ability through time that's proven that you can handle whatever the market brings you comes up with that you're not attached to the strategy. In fact, I have a graphic. It's called the circle of confidence. And when we start, we're just naively confident. Oh, I can go in and make money. Then we start to lose. And then we say, and when I have a winning trade, well, look at me, I just made money. And then we have a losing trade. We go back and then we say, well, I need a consistent strategy. We get a consistent strategy. We don't follow it. Then we have a strategy. We follow it. Then we start making money. And then the market mood, what I call the market mood shifts.  If you had a strategy that lasts forever, that was profitable and easy. Everybody would do it.  But then ultimately, we move to confidence in ourselves. We've gone through this cycle. We've seen all the markets and we can say, you know, I can see what type of market it is. I'm flexible. I'm confident in myself. I can step out of the market when I need to. I'm aware of my mindset. And that's the stage that I work with my traders to develop faster than they could on their own. How do you, and I know again, you're not really focused as much on the strategy but more just on the philosophy and the mental side with the folks you work with. But how do you draw the line between changing strategies based on the market environment and falling into following the shiny object syndrome? Yes. Oh, man, that is an excellent question because what happens is the trader will have a strategy and maybe not even execute it well, not keep track of which trades were on the strategy and which weren't. They're just in a bundle and he's not making money. And then he watches a podcast or, you know, a webinar on this wonderful strategy and he pays more money and jumps to it and jumps to that. Well, that means we're skipping that circle of confidence where we're slowly building our intuition and our skills level. We're saying it's the strategy out here that makes the difference. Now, what I have my traders do is look at a strategy that fits the context. Like beginning traders all have them print out if they can. Several months of the market they're trading. And then I'll have them take like five or six different color pens. And let's say we have a very tight low volatility flat market. Okay, circle that and give it a name. You might call it Titan flat, whatever. Then we have the market. It just collapses. You know, one of those days it just or weeks or whatever, depending on your time frame just collapses and we circle that maybe call it waterfall. So by the time they've got six different market conditions then I say if you have a moving average strategy and you circled one of the markets with just moving up, moving up with almost no pullbacks, will that moving average crossover strategy work? And they go, of course it'll work. Yeah, duh. Or if we have a tight market support and resistance well then you know a support resistance strategy will work. So I have them take their strategy and then look at the different market moods where it works well, heaven, I call it heaven, and where it works poorly, I call it strategy hell. And what we're doing now is rather than just saying some of my traders when they come to me they think the market's like an ATM. Well, my goal is to make $1,000 a day. Huh? The market is not there as an ATM. It doesn't deliver the same market, the same ability, the same thing. So once they see the different what I call the market moods, they've named them, then we have them go and say what's the volume like or their gaps, what's the momentum, what other indicators do you have that so that you can start to take measurements on each of these different market moods. Now then you have a strategy. Let's say you have one strategy. You don't apply it everywhere. You apply it to a specific context. Now this is harder than, harder, easier said than done, of course. It's easy in hindsight, right? Exactly. But what it does is it sets your mind to say the market isn't always the same and sometimes it works for me and sometimes it doesn't. The most money that I've made have been in the transitions from one type of market to another and the most money I've lost in my life is from transition of one market to another. When I can smell it ahead of time, OMG. When I don't, it's like getting hit with a baseball bat. Right, right. I kind of struggle with communicating that to our members because over the years we've built up a library of, we have 16 different full step-by-step strategy courses and sometimes newer traders will come in and A, they'll either be overwhelmed to the point where they'll just do nothing. But we really try to get them on a path to, just learn one strategy and then see if that's a good fit for you and if not, move on. Or after you feel like you've kind of mastered that, then you can kind of start branching out and learning some other things. But like I said, it's kind of a fine line between the shiny object syndrome and having all the arrows in your quiver that equip you to hit the targets in different market environments. So I like the approach that you mentioned as far as getting the mindset, looking at different market cycles, looking at different periods and naming them because I think that's true. I think you're right on with that. I think you're getting them in the mindset of understanding, because a lot of new traders, they think, once I find the right strategy, I'll just do that over and over again. Make it over. Well, what you're bringing up when you're working with your own clients is to give them a strategy or have them pick a strategy and execute it. The power of this is learning to execute. The strategy says that execute, execute. And it almost is immaterial whether you make money or not because what you need to train your brain is to execute. So what I do with my traders and I just had a guy that just went crazy with this and just so wonderful to see him, that he was confused about his risk manager, his researcher, and his executor. And so when he was in the middle of the trade, the risk manager would say, man, you should take profits here, get out before it goes around. Strategy guys say, you got into early, you didn't really follow the strategy, and the execution person would hand on the mouse, the hand off the mouse didn't know what to do. So we have three physical hats. He bought them, different colored hats. And when we're doing the research and strategy development, and you can find this in two hats, then we physically put on the hat, say this is my goal. Then when we're doing our risk manager, we say, okay, what is my size? Because you know risk and size are really important. How much I'm going to risk on every trade? What is my risk to reward ratio? Okay, I'm fully on with that. And then the executor just executes. When I worked for the arbitrage firm, I'll tell you a story. I was fairly new to the floor in San Francisco working for this large arbitrage firm. And there was a stock comm disco. They had accounting problems, maybe fraud, and the stock could drop 30, 40% or something. And the implied volatility, oh, it's so good, your audience is option savvy. The implied volatility was like 75, 80, 85, 90. So I got a call. In context, that's about five, six times the S&P 500. Yes. So I got a call from my manager, Gus, and he said, Rich, we want to sell some premium stock comm disco because that's huge. So I went in and I carefully looked at the charts. I looked at some options, like the puts, we're selling at 95, the amount of money, and some of the at the money is right at 80. So I started, I sold maybe 20 lots. And I went back and I said, Gus, okay, we've sold 20 watts. He went, no, no, no, we want to really sell some. So I went back and looked at the sheets carefully. I decided where the highest premiums were, and I sold about 100. Okay, I sold 100. The phone went quiet. He says, hang on. And in the background, I heard him talk to the founder, Joe, of the firm. And Joe came on the phone and he said, Rich, do you want me to give this order to a broker? Wow. Oh my God. So I went back to the pit, arms out, palms out, sold, sold, sold. I sold several thousand option contracts. I knocked the implied volatility from 85, 90, all the way down to 70, 65. And I went back and said, okay, we've sold. I don't remember the thousand, 2,000 options. And Gus says, oh, I think that's good enough. Three weeks later, there was almost a half a million dollars in the account because of that. Wow. So what I was, the point of this is that when you're trading by yourself, you don't have the risk manager as a separate role. You don't have all the research behind you as a separate role. And as a result, as an executioner, you have all these voices at the same time. Oh my God. No wonder it's hard to follow a strategy. So long story short, or maybe that was long story long, put on different hats, physical hats, know what role you're playing. And then just do that role, step into the next role, know what role you're playing. And then when the strategy says buy, your hand goes to the mouse and you just buy. I love that. I love that. Physically changing your environment, physically putting on a different hat. It's such a funny thing, but it can just change your mind, completely change your mind into doing the right thing. Well, the more I spend time as a therapist, the more I work with physical presence, physiology, physical things. Because our body tells us the truth.  Our emotions lie to us.  What is that twitch saying? And then these voices come and these voices tell the truth. My stomach hurts. Let me talk to your stomach. And I know that for most of the people out there, this is going to sound crazy. Nobody's going to talk as though they're stomach. But I say it in such a way and the invitation is so positive that almost everybody can drop down and give a voice to a part that needs to be told, that needs to be heard. So I work with a physical presence. I do physical things and work with a physical body because I believe that's where the truth is. And I'm so glad you noticed that and pointed it out. Yeah, that's very interesting. You know, I've actually been just kind of diving into that aspect here over the last few months. And it's just amazing. And I've been using some different techniques, which we don't need to get into here, but yeah, it is. It's really amazing how the mind can react to those things when you physically do it as opposed to just thinking about, okay, I've got these different voices. I can sort them out. No, you really can't. You really have to physically step outside yourself or physically change something. And it's crazy how that can have such an effect. So why do most self-help books fail? And in my current way of thinking is that you read them, but you don't make physical changes just like you pointed out. So in my book, we have a series of 10 exercises and a free online course that explains the exercises comes with a book.  So rather than just reading words and saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, and skipping over them, you stop and there's an exercise and you physically do the exercise. For example, one is called the three-chair exercise. And this has been an eye-opener. If you look at the reviews on my book on Amazon, you'll see this popping up over and over again. And in the three-chair exercise, I have them sitting at chairs themselves and we take physical representation of money. Now, I can't do this as much now that we're on Zoom and with the COVID, but some people would put gold, some people would put money, some people would put a brokerage statement, but whatever really represents money.  And we have started with a conversation of you as you are with money and you would be impressed with what comes up. Money, you, for example, you just avoid me. I try to get closer to you. I try to grab you and you just keep moving away.  Or sometimes it's a love fest. Oh, money. God. I just love you so much. I want more of you. And then we have them sit and share with money. How does that feel, money, when he talked to you or she talked to you? Well, I just want to move back. So grabby. I feel like a girl that's being, you know, just grabbed all the time. I just want to move further away. Or, jeez, she's really inviting. And I didn't realize how inviting she was. So we go back and forth in this conversation and we sit in the chair of our highest self, our wisdom, our spiritual self and say, what did you notice about the conversation? And the wisdom comes up with stuff that I don't even think about. You know, I notice his process is every time money gets close to him, he figures out a way to sabotage it and push it away. And I notice that money is getting tired of getting close to him. And I see this dance between them and I can see why he's struggling. So the three-chair exercise is a very physical way of bringing out these voices. And for traders, this is really important because all we deal with is money. And sometimes, and this is another topic, is that it's hard to see the value and meaning we're bringing to the world by trading. And my traders are good people and some of them sabotage themselves because they don't see the value they're bringing to other people and they don't feel they're worthy and they're not contributing. When do you think most individuals, of course this is different for everybody, when do you think the majority of individuals kind of form their relationship with money? You know, I've heard things, I've read things about our subconscious mind is almost fully developed before the age of eight. What do you, in your mind or kind of your philosophy, when do people form that relationship with money that carries them through their lives? Well, needless to say, it's very individual, but we start with a family. Did our parents fight about money? Was money a thing that just slipped through their fingers? Was money something they hoarded and hard to get? Was money the root of all evil? And so we already start forming those impressions when we were very young. Then we, depending on the training, for example, one of the things my wife did, all of our kids repeatedly say how much they appreciated, she started a bank account for them and gave them the incredible interest rate, I forget what it was, like 5% a month or something. So they could see their savings growing. So there was a very young impression starting when they were four or five. So we have the family. Then we have our community groups. If you are part of the progressives, there is this whole negative evaluation around money, wealth, social justice. Now, I'm not knocking some of these good intentions, but they certainly don't bring a clear path to money and meaning. And then if we look at the culture we're living in, so we have our family, we have our peer group, and then we have the culture, which right now is really confused about money and wealth and meaning. So we bring that all in. So starting from a young age, all the way to right now, we have these conflicting feelings and messages and voices in our head. For example, most of the, maybe even all of the clients that come to me have a good heart and that's maybe because I don't attract or screw others or just make money because they know that that's not my intention or that's not where I live and breathe. So they have a good heart, but they're conflicted. So that's why I developed the concept of certificates of appreciation. And certificates of appreciation mean that when you give me money for something I give you, the service or product I give you is worth more than money. And vice versa, when I get a service or product from you, it's worth more than the money that I give you. So what we shift is from making money to delivering value. And that's why I call them certificates of appreciation. Now for traders, this is especially difficult. What value am I bringing to the world? I'm just taking money from somebody else. Some of my really good hearted traders they believe there was a voice that says when you make money somebody more deserving is maybe losing it. So for traders we reframe the problem. I have a three-stage reframe. Would that be of interest for your audience? I believe so, yeah. Okay, so first there is the obvious one. Price, discovery and liquidity. Without market makers, without traders the bid offer spreads would be expanded. There wouldn't be price discovery. And for some people that's enough. Okay, I'm creating value through price discovery and creating liquidity. The next step up is that I am moving the market towards value. So for example if I look at something saying this is price below value I'm going to buy some. Even if it's a small amount I move the market towards its value even a short-term or long-term depending on my time frame. And the market says to me, Rich you moved me towards value. That's a service and I'm going to pay you for it. If on there Rich says, hey this is really overvalued, I'm going to sell it. But value is a lot higher. Mark will say, Rich I'm sorry you gave me and the market some bad information. You tried to move the market away from value. So I'm going to take some money from your account. Sorry buddy. Maybe not even sorry. You deserve to lose money. You gave it bad information. So as market makers or as traders we can start to think that our job is to move the money market towards value and that's what we get paid for. The third and final stage is I got to watch my language here. We're not on the floor, right? Screw all that. The markets have been here for ages. I'm part of what has survived eons and as a result I don't even have to justify it. So you can justify it on the liquidity and that offer spreads and you can price discovery or you can do it on I am a job moving market towards value and I get paid or you can say this is part of the human system that has worked for eons and I am part of it and I don't need to justify a thing. That's really interesting because that self-sabotage thing or self-worth or not deserving it is such a big thing and I found that when I started going down the road of the mental side of my trading why was I doing these things? Why was I self-sabotaging and having these blow ups where I would lose money early in my career and that makes a lot of sense being able to if I can create an awareness or I can create something in my mind that says why I am deserving of it? That's a big deal. I think so and especially for good hearted people I mean there's some people on the floors morality, ethics it's just can I make money but if you're a good hearted person and a trader I think any one of those three stages depending on the one you want to stop at and that works for you are really valuable so that you know you're providing a service and I believe that if we make money or let me rephrase that if we take in money without providing value that that's toxic to our souls Yeah, I can definitely see that I can definitely see that Let's jump over to a little bit of a different topic I want to give our audience some kind of tactical actionable things that they can use to really take their trading to the next level and obviously this is just a conversation so the mindset takes a lot of work it's not something that you can just hear a podcast Can I stop you for a moment? Sure The mindset takes a lot of work so what you're doing is you're setting up a struggle so I would like to rephrase that and invite you to rephrase that and the invitation is as we step into mindsets that work better for us it feels so good so try saying something like this this is what I would do with the client try rephrasing that So I'd like to have our audience get something that's actionable and help our mind grow into something more enjoyable than trading I love it you notice the difference between those two 100% Okay, excellent so that's just a teeny example of how I coach That's interesting, very interesting So you mentioned the I can't remember exactly what you called it you mentioned the metrics Mind the metrics, yeah What other things can you share with the audience that you would tell them how do you mentally prepare for the trading day do you have your clients have kind of a very strict routine some type of way to mentally prepare before that opening bell goes off or whatever they're doing in the market Yes, what you're bringing up is so important that one we have the physiology preparation sleep hydration, food, exercise so that we physically have the stamina and what my traders do is they do the set score sensations, emotions and thoughts and what they do is what is my physical sensations and I'll do that right now my shoulders are tight, I'm leaning forward I'm very eager to please or to answer your questions my throat's a little bit tight right now I'm exaggerating the sensations that I have so what I do is you notice the sensations and you exaggerate them and you say, oh is this what I want hmm, no take a deep breath, lean back okay, my voice is dropping I'm fully present with you so I've made a shift in my physical sensations next is the emotions, what am I feeling I'm feeling really kind of high talking to you this is exciting conversations you're asking hard but excellent questions yeah, I'm feeling really good emotionally right now and the next one is the quality of my thoughts and my thought is I'm fully here with you and no matter what you bring up we're going to find something of value in how we discuss it so I just made a major shift in my own set scores you know after so much talking okay what would I prefer so they take the set scores and the score minus 5 to plus 5 and we have a whole videos and stuff on that how you score it and then depending on your frequency after every trade before you start a trade you do a quick set score so then we have you click on the colored things and they turn different colors and then we actually have an algorithm that turns them into a number and most traders say if my numbers 2 or greater I will not trade so we have a physical physical measurement of how their state was when they were trading and it's not 100% clear like any trading strategy but the overwhelming thing is when there's red set scores when we're not in the right mindset the P and L reflects that to the negative interesting so in addition to the grading your strategy you're grading your emotions real time and what happens with after you get used to this I can do a set score in about one second physical okay where do I want to be okay I'm here so you get used to not only being aware of it and the second part is acceptance in other words you can say oh darn it my stomach is tight again oh I'm having those terrible negative thoughts stop thinking those terrible negative thoughts you idiot I've said that a few times to myself so it's awareness and then it's acceptance okay he was leaning forward his voice was a little tight oh that's fascinating what do I want so then we can make a decision from that and what we get is the word I use is agency we're no longer just our physical reactions our emotional reactions the being slave to negative thoughts with this awareness eventually that awareness can fly above us in our prefrontal cortex and develop agency I notice this physical sensation I notice this emotion I notice this thought well now what do I want to do that is very different than just reacting from those states and so we're not talking about just a routine before you start trading we're talking about an awareness that can just take a matter of seconds all the time yes I mean even not just when you're trading that's stuff that can help you no matter what you're doing right like for example the conversation with my wife she says something to her brows forward and her voice says up a little bit okay typical rich old rich Titan she said that's not true I gotta defend myself oh oh so now it's waiting Marty I know your voice is a little tight and your eyebrows froze is there something I'm missing well I'm today with the grandkids or whatever it was this and that the other thing okay let me listen to you so if I understand correctly this that the other thing yeah and now all of a sudden we're in rapport with each other whereas without taking that those physical sensations those emotions and thoughts I would have just reacted to something that had nothing to do with me does she ever say rich stop using your psychology tricks on me I know what you're doing oh oh goody oh yes I have learned that if I step over the line that that is not very helpful for our relationship oh goody that's excellent well that that's great stuff I want to be very conscious of your time rich we sure we sure liked having you here if if our listeners want to reach out to you and want to learn more about mind muscles for traders what's the best way to get in contact to you or to check out your stuff yeah mind muscles for traders dot com is the trading website my email is rich at mind muscles dot com and the book is a private conversation with money that's available in most book distributors and I'm do wealth workshops where people can join and we do much what we had this conversation today we put people on the hot seat we work with different issues so there's a number of things we can do so if you want to improve your mindset I know that that's one area that you really focus on with your clients and if there's anything I can do to support you or your clients I'm really happy to do that well I sure appreciate that I really enjoyed having you on the show today and I hope we can do it again sometime in the future let's do it I this is really fun and engaging and the questions you asked really stimulated a lot of great thinking so thank you yeah and I think our community our listeners it's just a great community we have hundreds of traders interacting on a daily basis not only about the mindset stuff but sharing trade ideas and just a lot of different stuff around trading so I know that they're going to find value in this so for that absolutely okay you take care and be well thanks rich