Episode 1296: The Backpack Trader: Turning Trading Into a Business That Gives You Freedom with Troy Noonan

What if successful trading is less about staring at screens all day and more about building a proven plan that gives you the freedom to walk away? In this episode of Sharkpreneur, Seth Greene interviews Troy Noonan, The Backpack Trader, who shares how an early British pound trade helped launch his lifelong connection between trading and freedom and shaped his philosophy of trading with structure, discipline, controlled risk, and a lifestyle-first mindset. He also explains why traders need more than a strategy, how to build a proven trade plan, and what it means to shift from trying to trade to being the CEO of a trading business. Key Takeaways: → A proven trading plan helps remove emotion from each trade. → Learning a strategy is only one part of achieving success. → Risk management matters more than chasing individual wins. → Losses are part of the random distribution of trading results. → Beginners should test a trading plan before risking real money. Troy Noonan, also known as “The Backpack Trader,” has been helping people trade smarter since 1995. With nearly 30 years of market experience, he has built his career around one core belief: successful trading should create freedom, not require someone to sit in front of a screen all day. Troy is the bestselling author of Day Trading QuickStart Guide and has mentored more than 5,000 students across 100+ countries. Through his proven strategies, automated systems, and global trading community, he teaches traders to approach the markets as a real business rather than a gamble. His mission is to help people become the CEOs of their own trading businesses, trade consistently, and reclaim their time while building a smarter path to financial independence. Connect With Troy: Website: https://www.backpacktrader.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/backpacktrader/ X: https://x.com/TroyNoonan4 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheBackpackTrader/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/netpickstradingcoach/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/BackpackTrader

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Sharkpreneur Podcast with Kevin Harrington and Seth Green. Kevin Harrington is the inventor of the infomercial, one of the original sharks from the hit TV show Shark Tank, and has generated over $5 billion in TV and digital direct response sales. Seth Green is the world's first trusted authority on cutting-edge direct response marketing, a bestselling author, and the only three-time marketer of the year nominee. On the podcast, Kevin and Seth interview sharkpreneurs who share straight talk on what it takes to explode your business.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Forty-nine faces looked to him in triumph. Over the last 12 months, they had each taken turns and promoted his business for a week at a time, driving over $987,342 in revenue. What if you had a network of 50 centers of influence who promoted your business every week for a year? Grab your copy of the number one Amazon bestselling book, The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with a Podcast at 33% off the Amazon price by going to ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Again, that website for 33% off the Amazon price is ultimatenpodcastbook.com. Welcome to the podcast. This is your host Seth Green. Today I've got the good fortune of Troy Noonan, the Backpack Trader, all about the idea

• 1:19Speaker 01

  of trading with structure, discipline, controlled risk, and freedom. Trade less, live better, rather than being glued to your screen. He's also the bestselling author of The Day Trading Quick Start Guide, The Forex Trading Quick Start Guide, and a whole bunch of other amazing resources. Troy, thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Great to be here, Seth. Thank you.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Our pleasure. So, let's go back in time a little bit. How did the Backpack Trader get started?

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Well, there was the inadvertent beginning, which is the beginning of my journey as a trader, started way back in early 1991, when I learned how to trade. I had to subscribe to paper charts, literally. It was before we could access the markets. The internet was still in its infantile beginnings. And I saw a pattern that emerged. It was what's known as a head and shoulders pattern. Called my broker in those days, shorted the British pound. Costs like $50 commission per contract in those days and that was a discount. Now it's like a dollar in, dollar out. Anyway, I inadvertently fell upon the same price action,

• 2:25Speaker 02

  an infamous trade that went down in history, if you will, known as the trade that broke the Bank of England. And little did I know, billionaire trader George Soros was selling the British pound against all the major currencies. Well, I shorted the British pound. I took my several thousand dollars, put my business in the hands of a capable manager and backpacked through Europe for about three and a half months.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  The backpack trader was born at that point, although I didn't realize it. I had this experience, this freedom that I've never experienced before in my life. And at that point in time, I was hooked. I never wanted to give up trading. But what it took me on this amazing journey, see, I played drums, so I picked up bongos along the way. And I started sitting in with street musicians and playing and bars for free beer and went on this big adventure. And I met this Venezuelan musician who I later, after returning home, went on a second trip, visited him in Caracas, Venezuela, and within 24 hours,

• 3:32Speaker 02

  met the woman who I've now been married to for over 30 years. We have our 30th anniversary coming up this summer. Got two kids in their twenties now. And I always say Soros made billions. I made a wife and kids. I'll let you decide who got the best end of that trade. The backpack trader was born, although I didn't realize it. And I always tell that story, not to talk about me, but to express how important it is to get trading right for you, for anyone listening, because of what it can do for your life, how it could change your life in so many amazing ways.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  Well, that is an absolutely incredible story. I know the long version is in the books and in your podcast and a whole lot of other content. You've described backpack trader as a lifestyle of freedom, not just a trading method. So we've heard your story. What does freedom actually look like in practice? What does a day in the life of one of your students look like?

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I mean, freedom is to be able to call your own shots and do whatever you want. But the perfect day trade plan that gives you a lifestyle of freedom, from my point of view, is to be able to log in from anywhere in the world and trade a trade plan that you've been able to prove is going to make you money. So you're not worried about whether the trade wins or loses. You just execute that plan like a business. And we want to get in, get out, get done. We don't want another job. We don't want to be Velcroed to the chair staring at a computer all day. So the best trade plans are going to hit their goals really fast. We call it the power of quitting. It empowers you to quit trading for the day and then go off and live your best life that day.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Over time, you can give yourself a raise by moving your finger from the one to the two or the two to the three. Slowly, compound and increase your position size safely through the formulas and the methods that we teach. But that is the perfect day trade plan for a backpack trader. I just posted a video. Well, I was going to say recently. It's already a couple of years old now, but it was a cafe in Florence, where I literally traded from a cafe in Florence, Italy, and I recorded it. And I hit my goals in two minutes and I was done. So I worked two minutes that day. And to me, that's as close to free as you can get.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Of course, you could take that idea and expand it out in a lot of different ways, but that's the short elevator version.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Well, that's incredible. What, not only did it work for you, but what was the gap you saw in trading education that led you to build Backpack Trader and teach others your methods?

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that's a fantastic question because not too many people ask it, and I think it's the most important question there is. I, when I got back from that first trip where I met my wife, that whole experience. I realized there was a lot I didn't know. And I made a lot of money during the dot com boom, but what really taught me hard lessons was the dot com bust that came afterwards. So I started sitting in the webinars. It started happening in those days. That was right during the you got mail days, right? The AOL days and the funny sound that the modem would make when it would log in. And so I started sitting in and I learned something about trading uh that really changed everything for me.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  This idea of structure, trade plan, mechanical rules. And I joined this company. They invited me in as their first trade coach. I tell this story, I'm giving you the short form right now. But within less than 30 days, I found myself calling a live trade room, calling live trades in front of 180 people or something like that. And uh there's nothing scarier than standing on stage and giving a speech or maybe singing a solo in front of your whole uh community or whatever, especially if you're not a good singer like me. Uh but to call a live trade in a trade room with everyone hanging on your every word, that takes that to a whole nother level. And uh anyway, I learned a lot from that experience too.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  I went on to call a trade room for 18 straight years. And one of the things I learned along the way was that it doesn't matter how good your trading strategy is. I have a lot of good strategies that I've developed over the years and they work. They're evergreen. They don't stop working. But it's that's just technique though. So the easy analogy is learning how to paint by numbers does not make you an artist. Right? Learning a trading technique isn't going to make you a successful trader. There's another track of learning and this is what I put most of my time and attention on and what I've spent a lot of years developing. And that's learning how to be successful with the strategy. And no one teaches that, not adequately in my point of view.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  And and so that is what separates us and the learning track that I focus on when someone comes into my program. I'm going to teach them not only how to use the strategy and get really good at the technique of it so they could do it like riding a bike without thinking, but I'm also going to teach them how to apply that skill to a format that they could create a trade plan.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Prove it's gonna make the money before they risk one penny. Practice it until they could do it flawlessly without thinking. And ultimately earn the rights of passage through the step-by-step process. That's designed to transform you from a person trying to trade. Into the CEO of your trading business and that business becomes that proven trade plan. And that's something no one else does. That's what I think sets us apart.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had never heard of the trading like a CEO philosophy before. Can you talk a little bit about more about that mindset shift?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if you're a person trying to trade, that's how we all start out as and there's nothing wrong with that. It's normal. We're people. We want to trade. But what we don't know is that deep down inside, we have this primal need to survive. And that triggers so many things that we do in life, whether it's conscious or subconscious. And when you're in a trade. Let's say you take a trade, like I want to buy XYZ stock or an option or who knows what. You take the trade. It doesn't look like those beautiful. Swings and trades you would have seen on the charts or you can imagine yourself taking them, how rich you would get.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Because now you're trading into the future, something that has never happened yet. We don't know what the future is going to be. It could be anything and there's a random distribution. To wins and losses regardless of any trading strategy. Nothing wins 100% of the time. So, once you, your money's on the line for whatever reason. It represents a threat against your very survival. When you don't have any security over that money that you just put at risk. And it creates all these unpleasant feelings. And so a person trying to trade is going to try to stop that unpleasant feeling and ultimately do everything wrong. Because trading is counterintuitive. They haven't learned how to be a trader yet. They're a person trying to trade. But their more important and deeper need is to survive.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  And so that feeling of insecurity. On a subconscious level, very deep, maybe even deeper than that, on a primal level, it, it causes you this great sense of insecurity, kinda like being in an earthquake, right? Where the ground is shaking under your feet, you have no control, you can fall right through the earth, who knows if you've ever had that feeling, you know what I'm talking about? And, and that fear kicks in because it's, um, that feeling of insecurity gets you one step closer to becoming extinct. And this all happens on a primal level, and then a person trying to trade is gonna do everything to stop that feeling, which unfortunately, uh, tends to lose. I mean, it just makes you, it's self fulfilling.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  So you have to learn how to instead not worry about that and, and focus on the thing that's gonna, um, it's gonna, uh, satisfy your reason for trading in the first place, which is to make money. It's not the trade that makes you money, it's all the trades that make you money. And so you learn how to create a plan that you could prove, execute really well, and then acquire the belief in it. So that when you are taking that trade on the right edge and you don't know what's gonna happen next, you don't worry about it, because you already know, this plan will grow my account and satisfy my reason for trading. All I have to do now is manage my risk properly and execute properly.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  That makes a lot of sense. How do you teach people to accept being wrong without feeling like they failed?

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Well, when you go through the process of creating a trade plan, you're gonna learn how to live with this random distribution of wins and losses, the tools that we provide, I call it learning how to live with the win-loss column. And you're gonna go through great trades that lose, trades that feel awkward that are the big winners, and ultimately you start to live through, and I'll borrow this from Clint Eastwood, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and the great, and the mediocre, over and over and over. And when you've experienced enough ugly, only to see the great come pouring in, and the account equity curve growing, growing, growing, that's a transformative process. And that is where the epiphanies happen. That's when you start to understand, okay, I'm, I'm starting to really get what it takes

• 12:58Speaker 02

  to make money as a trader, and that's also when you start losing sleep at night, because you get really excited, you can't wait for the next day.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  What should a beginner learn before they ever risk real money?

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Well, this process, so there's a step-by-step process. It begins with some self-analysis. Only you can answer certain questions about you. When do you want to trade? When do you not want to trade? What, when, when can you not trade? Because when you want to and when you can or can't are not the same. How much capital do you have? What's your skill level? Everything about you. What time zone are you in? All those things, right? When you answer that, you can use process of elimination to discard everything you shouldn't focus on. There's usually a handful of obvious candidates that you're going to then focus on. The next step would be learning a strategy. So you learn the technique. It's kind of like learning a piano scale before you learn how to play the piano. Right? So you learn some technique.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  The third step is where the real fun work happens. And that's when you start working on trade plan through a very specific process. And that begins the proving stage. And it's the proving stage is where the epiphanies really begin. And from there, it just goes step by step. And you don't want to skip steps. You want to just stay on the step you're on because you need to, what I call, earn the rites of passage to go to the next step. If you go too fast, you're going to end up falling back. The school of hard knocks is out there hiding behind, like the boogeyman behind the bush. He's going to jump out and grab you. And once, once the school of hard knocks sucks you in, you can't escape its grasp until you pay a lot. It's very painful.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  I want to help people avoid that.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  You've helped so many people. What's your biggest challenge now?

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Oh gee, my biggest challenge is, well, the business is busy. So I'm a big believer in freedom. And it's almost like joining a band. I was in a band many years ago, lots of bands, actually. And instead of being married to one person, I found myself married to five people, for example. Well, when you have a business, and you know this, Seth, you're married to a lot more than just five people, right? You're just like, it's almost like this whole idea of freedom is counter, you don't have it because you're, you're now kind of in the grips of your company. And the company gives you the freedom, but you still have to give what the company needs. So my biggest challenge is this kind of managing where I'm at in life.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  This time and place, uh, my age, everything I need to do, what I wanna do, you know, like everyone else is finding that balance of, uh, you know, where I'm just at peace all the time. And, you know, sometimes I find it, sometimes I'm not, not there yet, but.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Your, your passion is obvious. What do you like best about what you're doing?

• 15:53Speaker 02

  You know what, um, I've made quite a bit of money in my life, but I realize I can't take it with me. And, uh, what I can though, I don't know if I could take it with me or not, but I like the satisfaction of helping others. I mean, I'm a big believer that we're all, we all have a responsibility to do our part to make the world a better place. And a real simple way to do that is to make yourself a better person. Because you have power over yourself. And by, in a micro way, you've made the world a better place if you've made yourself a better person. Imagine if everyone in the world did that. What an amazing place that would be. Just focus on yourself, make yourself a better person. World would

• 16:33Speaker 02

  be pretty damn good. But you can take it a little further. If you could help someone else improve their situation, now you've kind of, um, maximized your power and you've been able to multiply it by helping others. And then that rubs off like a ripple effect. And so when I can help somebody improve their situation in life, then I feel like I've kinda fulfilled my purpose for being here in the first place.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Absolutely. What's one student success story that captures why you do what you do?

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Oh gosh, there's so many. We have a couple. They're amazing. Um, he joined maybe a year ago or so, him and his wife. He's incarcerated. He made a mistake as a young man. Great guy, but now he's paying the price. His beautiful wife, living outside, free. And together, he learned the strategy. They both did. She learned how to trade. She knew nothing about trading. And so he's a mastermind in the, in his, uh, prison cell, basically. And with his iPhone, he's texting her and telling her what to trade. And they're, You're doing amazing. That's one, one story. There's another one that happened years before I started

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Backpack Trader when I was still with the earlier company that, that I was doing the trade room for. Net picks are called. Anyway, um, I had a guy who asked me so many questions for days and days and days and days, more and more, and I'd spend hours answering, like I'm trying to teach him by email, right? I learned that's probably not a good idea. Later on, I adopted that as a policy. I'm not going to teach people by email. But anyway, he, um, he taught some about my, taught me something about myself because what I realized, as much as I was like annoyed by all these, this bombardment of questions, I realized that's the person I want to work with. Because he ultimately embraced everything, created a trade plan.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  He was in the, uh, south of France, by the way, this guy. And one day I was doing a live training in person in Los Angeles and this gentleman walked up to me. You know how it is when someone doesn't look like you imagine? He didn't look anything like it, but he goes, "Hey Troy, it's Mark." And I go, "Mark? Mark who?" And he basically, he told me who he was. He goes, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, what are you doing here? I thought you lived in the south of France." He goes, "I do, but I wanted to fly out here, meet you personally and shake your hand and thank you." Because I just retired with your trade plan. I hit my critical mass. I sit on the veranda, drink my wine and watch the beautiful people walk by. In the south of France, life's amazing and I just, I had to come out and just tell you that.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Flew all the way across the world just to say that. That was amazing to me. That's when I realized I'm on to something really good.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  That is absolutely incredible. Well, we greatly appreciate your time. We know it's incredibly valuable. For our folks who want to learn more about the Backpack Trader and how they can get that freedom lifestyle, where is the best place for us to send them?

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Well, backpacktrader.com. That's the pretty simplest, the simplest way. You can also email me. I answer my emails, [email protected]. And that's another way to reach out. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  All right. And also everybody, make sure to check out the Backpack Trader podcast hosted by Troy as well. Um, we will put that information in the show notes. Troy, thank you again so much for joining us.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Seth, thank you too. It was fun.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Thank you, everybody for watching or listening. We'll talk to you or see you next time.

• 20:12Speaker 03

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