How I Beat The Mental Game of Trading (After 5 Years of Failure)

For my first 5 years of trading, I completely failed. It's not because I didn't know strategies, but it's because I consistently lost the mental game. I'd panic in my trades. I'd chase after my losses. I'd consistently sabotage myself over and over and over again. But once I learned how to beat the mental side of trading, literally everything changed and I finally became consistent. So in this video, I'm going to break down the 7 most important lessons that I learned that helped me go from 5 years of failure to finally mastering the psychology of trading and generating consistent profits. These 7 principles completely changed my trading forever, so let's get right into it. The first principle is to follow your strategy, not your emotions. It took me 5 years to finally get this ingrained inside of my mind and realize that it was not the strategy's fault, it was all on me. You can have a strategy that's data-backed over the past 1,000 trades to have an 80% win rate for 2:1 risk-to-reward ratio and just the most fire strategy ever that according to the data should be making you an insane amount of money, but when you use it, it just completely does not work and the market's just against you and you never make money. It's not the strategy, it's simply because you're trading off your emotions and you're not trading the strategy. Let me give you an example. I used to be trading this one strategy that I found on YouTube when I first started off trading, and I backtested it And according to this guy's YouTube video, it had a 95% win rate, which at this time I know that's not probably true, probably more like an 80% win rate. But either way, it had a high win rate. And then when I backtested it, it also had a high win rate. But every time I took it to trade live in the markets, I was consistently losing money. I had like a freaking 15% win rate with this strategy. And I realized that it's not the strategy, it's because I wasn't even following the strategy. I was going based off my emotions. 90% of the trades that I was taking using this strategy were not me actually following the checklist. The video had like an 11-step checklist for this strategy where all these 11 things had to hit for me to take the trade. And if 2 of those things did not hit, but I really wanted to take the trade, I would still hop into the trade. And I was consistently wondering why I was always losing and why I wasn't profitable with a so-called profitable strategy. It wasn't the strategy, it's because I was skipping steps. I was going based off my emotions. I was FOMOing into trades because I didn't want to miss it. I was overleveraging, which was causing my account's total risk-to-reward ratio to be off, causing me to never see profits over a long period of time. I was moving my stop loss. I was trying to be greedy and making my take profit longer. I was doing all these things based off my emotions that the strategy did not call for. And a lot of people— trust me, I've been able to help over 10,000 people, tens of thousands of people at this point, be able to start trading. And most people that come to me are in the same exact shoes. They're blaming a strategy, they're switching from strategy to strategy to strategy because they're saying that this strategy is not working. But when you ask them how many of their trades that they're taking that follow every single thing that it's supposed to follow for you to take that trade, they're saying majority of them aren't, but they're hopping in anyways because they just think that'll play out, or they, they hope it plays out. But that's why this first point, as I said, is to follow the strategy Don't follow your emotions. Ignore your emotions when you're trading. Your emotions do not help you when you're trading. They only cause you to deviate from the plan. Follow the system. The next core principle is to detach from money. We all get into trading to obviously make money. What ends up happening is we get too fixated on the money that we can't see anything else. All we see is green. All we see is numbers. All we see is our bank account and that Lamborghini or that Rolex or whatever it is, right? Every single time we're taking a trade or about to take a trade, we're looking in the sense of money. That way we're taking trades based off of, okay, how much will this trade make me? What can I buy with this trade? We're not taking trades based off of risk, which is what you should be doing. You should be taking every single trade based off of the setup itself. You should not be taking it based off of this trade can make me $10,000 or this trade can make me $400. That's what you should not be trading based off of. It's very important that you detach from money. One of the main steps that I've made and the main things that's allowed me to help myself become detached from the money when it comes to trading is when you're trading in any platform— well, majority of platforms— you can actually turn off your profit and loss. A lot of times you'll be floating in profit. I'm sure you guys have done this before if you guys are unprofitable or even in your unprofitable stages. A lot of times you can be floating in profit $200. Now your entire trade that's supposed to take profit it's supposed to make you, let's say, $700, but you see green $133 and you're like, I could kind of buy 10 Subway sandwiches with that. I should close the trade out right now and just take— take— green is green. I should just take the trade, right? I should take my, my profits right now. Now that might sound good for this one time, but you have to realize if you're consistently doing this, if your strategy, let's say, is supposed to be a 2:1, that way you can cover your losses. If you're consistently cutting your trades short because you're so attached to the money and thinking about the money too much, you're going to become unprofitable. Because when you have those losing trades, it's going to take you 10 more of those $133 trades to make your money back, if that makes sense. So it's very important that you detach from the money. And like I said, one of the main things that I personally do is on my trading platform— I personally use Tradovate— there's an option to turn off the P&L from being in dollars and switch that to ticks. That way I'm looking at the tick amount that I'm floating in profit or the tick amount that I'm in drawdown. Because it also goes vice versa. It's also if you're down $300, you'll kind of get scared and maybe close your trade out. But in all reality, you're just in a little bit of drawdown, and that's completely normal when it comes to trading. So it's very important that you detach yourself from money, because when you're not detached from money with your trading, then you're making your trades based off of money. And that goes back to our first point where you're making your trades based off of emotions, and that's not what we want to do. The third principle is that profitable trading is very boring. I've been a profitable trader for a long time now, and I can assure you, when I was unprofitable, trading was a lot more fun. You would be— I would be in and out of trades. I'd be taking freaking 10, 15 trades a day. But me now, as a profitable trader, I have mastered my patience to the point where trading now becomes boring. I'm waiting for everything to align with my strategy. I'm waiting patiently for my entries. I'm waiting patiently for my trades to play out how they're supposed to play out. I'm waiting patiently for everything that I've planned to happen. I'm not being impatient and just randomly hopping into trades. I'm not being impatient and over-leveraging. I'm being extremely patient and waiting for my trades to present themselves and then executing when that trade happens. I saw a YouTube video on this like 3 or 4 years ago where somebody actually compared trading to a surfer. Most of the time that you're spent as a surfer— I've never surfed. Well, I have surfed before. I almost died, but we won't talk about that. I've surfed one time. I'm not a professional surfer, but surfers, majority of their time in the ocean is not spent riding a wave or riding through that, that tunnel thingy that they be going through. It's spent waiting for the wave to come. It's the same thing when it comes to trading. Majority of the time that I am at my desk, at my computer, looking at my charts, I'm not doing anything. I'm sitting on my hands. I'm waiting patiently for an opportunity to present itself. And only when an opportunity presents itself, that's when I hop into action and execute on that trade. So it's important to know, if you are super excited about trading, you're probably unprofitable. Once you get to the point where everything is so systematic and it becomes a waiting game and you're patient enough to allow that waiting game to happen, that's when you'll notice you're very, very bored, yet your bank account continuously goes up. Now, another part of that is realizing that trading has been here since before I've even been alive, and I guarantee you it's going to be here for a lot longer. And the reason I say that is most people think they have to make the money right now. They have to make it today, they have to make it this week, they even think they have to make it this month, when in reality that is not the case. Your job as a trader is to realize that tomorrow there's just as much opportunities as today. So if you can have that mindset and have that patience to know, okay, today might not be my day, today I didn't get a setup, or today I lost a trade, and even though I want to get into another trade to make my money back, it's okay, I don't have to because tomorrow there will be more opportunities. Trading is not going away, it is not a rush. So that being said, you need to become comfortable with being bored while you're trading. Now the fourth principle that I feel like a lot of people overlook and nobody really talks about is that you need to have a structured trading routine. And what that means is you need to show up to the markets the same way every single day. Now, most people get into trading for the freedom and the flexibility that it gives you, because you can work from wherever you want at any time you want, you can make a stupid amount of money, right? But there's a downside to that, because when you have no type of structure in something, it's very hard for you to deviate and not actually take it serious. Trading is a real career. It's a real job. This is not just something random that you do on a Wednesday when you want to print some money out of nowhere. That's not how this works. You need to have a specific routine that forces you to be in the same mindset every day going into the market so that you can be as systematic and make the best decisions possible when you are trading. So to me, a trading routine looks like this: coming to the markets at the same exact time, doing the same exact things when you first hop onto your charts, What I personally like to do is I like to take 5, 10, 15 minutes of backtesting to get my mind ready or kind of warmed up for trading. The next thing I'll do is look at the live markets of what the price has done the day before or during London session the morning before. I'll go and look at that, and then when I see that, that's when I'll start drawing out my key levels. I'll start drawing out my support or resistance zones, my trend lines. I start planning out my trades as far as I want this to happen. If this happens, then I'll make this action. If this happens, then I'll make this action. Am I bullish bias on the day? Am I bearish bias on the day? I start doing all of this because I want to come to the markets with the same mentality so that I can consistently follow the same exact system that's allowed me to be able to generate profits consistently over the past few years. And in order to do that on a consistent basis, I need to show up to markets the same way. And that's why in the beginning of my trading, I was not consistently profitable. I'd have maybe one good day, one good week, maybe if I was lucky a good month, but it wouldn't stick because I was all over the place. I'd come to the markets at different times, I'd start trading at a different time every day, I'd trade at freaking 8 o'clock at nighttime in the middle of me playing video games or something. I had no structure, and that is a losing trader's attitude. You need to have structure and you need to build a solid trading routine, whatever that is for you. I just walked you through a quick example of mine, But whatever it is for you, whatever fits your trading style, the time that you wake up, when you trade, the pairs that you trade, all those you have to take into account when you are building your trading routine. The only thing that matters is that you actually need to have a trading routine and stick to that trading routine. The fifth principle that I had to learn and really, really, really had to engrave in my mind is that losses are truly part of the game. Losses are inevitable no matter what you do, no matter what strategy you're trading, No matter if everything's aligned, no matter if you have 50 million confluences, you will still lose. Losses are part of the math. It's part of our business expense as traders, so we shouldn't run from losses. The only thing we can do is make sure that those losses don't take us out. We need to live to trade another day. Losses should be looked at as something that is just part of the process. If you have an 80% win rate, you're still going to lose 200 out of 1,000 trades that you take. You don't know when those losses are going to occur. The only thing that you can control as a trader is how much you lose when you do lose those times. So that's why it's important to understand that losses will come and plan for them. I also want you to think about this right now because I feel like a lot of people don't even understand this concept. You can say your strategy has a 50% win rate, but that does not mean if you take trades that you're gonna win 5, you're gonna lose 5. That's not how it works, and I can prove that to you. If you take a quarter right now and you flip it 10 times— a quarter obviously has heads and tails, so you have to put— you have a 50% chance of landing on heads and a 50% chance of landing on tails. If you take that quarter and flip it 10 times right now, I can almost guarantee you that out of those 10 times, you're not gonna get 5 times heads and 5 times tails. It's probably gonna be like 7 times heads, 3 times tails, or 3 times tails and 7 times heads, or 1 time tails, 9 times heads, it's not going to be a direct 50/50 because you have to understand percentages are seen on a wider range. Meaning if you take 10 flips of your coin, it's probably not going to be 50/50 ratio. If you take 100, it's probably gonna be a little closer to 50/50. If you take 1,000, it's probably gonna be right at that 50/50 ratio. So the reason I'm saying that is no matter you have a 50% win rate strategy, you have an 80% win rate strategy. That does not mean in the short term— the in the short term is like 10 trades, 50 trades, even 100 trades— that does not mean in the short term you're going to actually win 80% of the trades that you're taking. That just means over a long period of time, you're going to win 80% of the trades that you have taken. Now, like I told you, we have to get to that high number. We have to survive enough as traders and have capital inside of our account long enough as traders to be able to get to that 80%, to have taken 500 trades so that our 80% win rate is actually realized. So that's why it's important that we understand that losses are part of the game. We have to embrace the losses, but we have to control and plan for those losses. Once you do that, then you'll stop going on tilt every time you have a losing streak, and you'll stop chasing after more trades after you lost one trade because because you're trying to make your money back. You need to be okay with losing. As long as you have controlled how much you've lost, you're doing perfectly fine. Now, the next principle that I truly had to learn— and honestly, I learned this very fast in the beginning of my trading, but I feel like a lot of people struggle with it— the next principle is that backtesting is essential. It is not an option. It is something that you need to do. Now, I give this example to all of my one-on-one students when I go over it with them. Imagine you're a basketball player and the only time you play basketball is when you have a game. You're going to absolutely suck compared to someone who goes and practices playing basketball every single day regardless if they have a game or not. Think of backtesting as practice for us as traders. It's essential that we put in the time to backtest to perfect our strategy, to give us confidence in our trading strategy, to give us confidence as traders overall, because a lot of times especially in the beginning of my trading when I went through like a losing streak or I was really feeling down about my trading or strategy because I maybe lost 3 or 4 trades in a row. I would go and backtest 100 trades and I would see, okay, after 100 trades I'm doing pretty good, and I would regain my confidence back. I tell people this all the time, if you're going through a losing streak right now, we're all going to go through them. I still go through losing streaks right now. No matter what, as traders we're going to go through losing streaks. And anytime you have a losing streak, or when I have a losing streak, I go and backtest, usually like 100 trades, because usually that will give me my confidence back. That'll make me realize, okay, this is just a losing streak. I don't suck at trading. My strategy is still working as long as I follow the exact steps of my strategy. That is not— I'm not talking about if you're just randomly doing stuff and you keep losing, don't go backtest that. Backtest an actual strategy. That will give you confidence in your trading. But backtesting, as I mentioned, is essential.. It is not something that you can become profitable without ever doing. I personally used to backtest a ridiculous amount of time a day because I, I really wanted to become a profitable trader as fast as possible. It was unhealthy. I was probably backtesting like 8, 9, 10 hours a day, to the point where every time I closed my eyes, I was seeing candlesticks. If you guys have seen those memes on Instagram where it's like a picture of the, the sky with a lightning strike and people like drawing a trend line on it. That's really how I was seeing the entire world. Like, no joke, I would see hills and I would see higher highs, higher lows. I would see candlesticks just looking like a black wall or something like that. I'd be looking at a blank wall, I'd be seeing candlesticks. That's just how much time I put into backtesting. And obviously it's paid off over the years because now I'm at the point that I'm at. But most people don't actually respect or take the time to backtest, and that's an extreme error, especially as beginner traders are unprofitable traders. It's essential that you backtest. To this day, I'm making six figures consistent with trading, and I still backtest hours a week. If you can put in the time to backtest, you'll see just how drastically your trading will change. So think of trading as the sport, and think of backtesting as the practice for the sport, and lock in. Now, the next principle is that you need to be surrounded by people of like minds. Trading can be very, very lonely. You can't talk to your girlfriend about it, you can't talk to your boyfriend about it, you can't talk to your parents about it, you can't talk to your friends about it because they just don't understand. I make this joke all the time. When I was trading, um, like when I first started dating my, my wife and I was trading, and I would tell her, oh, I'm up like $300 or something, and she'd be like, close the trade, why are you not closing the trade, blah blah blah. She'll just say all this stuff because she doesn't understand that I'm up $300, but when that trade hits TP, I'm planning on that trade hitting or making $2,000. So me closing my trade out at $300, it's completely pointless and it goes against my trading plan. So I can't talk to her about that, and I'm sure you guys have felt that before. So it's very important that you surround yourself with people who are also like-minded, people who understand trading, whether it's a mentor, whether it's a Discord community, whether it's a freaking WhatsApp group chat or something like that. I don't know, even like following other people on Instagram or social media that are also in your same field and building like a group chat and things like that, that can be very, very helpful as traders because you guys can share your data with each other as far as your backtesting of a specific strategy. You guys can share your outlook on the markets day to day. You can share your trading journal to help each other stay accountable and share your trading rules with them to help each other stay accountable with following your trading rules and following your trading plans. It's very, very important that you surround yourself with people who are also in the space because it helps you to continue to keep going. Becoming a profitable trader is not an easy task, especially by yourself. It's very, very lonely. It's you sitting in front of the charts, it's you dwelling on your mistakes, it's you dwelling on your losses, it's you celebrating your wins all by yourself. It can get, it can get very, very lonely. And that's why having a mentor or having a community or having both is very, very beneficial, and it helps the process of becoming a profitable trader be a lot easier, and it actually helps you get there a lot faster. That's why in the beginning of my trading, I, I guarantee right now all the YouTubers you guys see on YouTube right now, all the Instagram trader influencers, I have every single one of those courses. I was in every single one of their, their Discord groups. I was in probably even people you don't even know about. I have bought every single course possible when it comes to day trading and joined every single trading group possible because I truly understood that I needed to get around people who are already succeeding. I needed to learn from people who are already at the place that I wanted to get to, and I also needed to be surrounded by people who were on the same journey as me so I didn't feel crazy when I'm locked in on my screen for 10 hours a day trying to get to this point. I needed to be surrounded by people that would push me, that would help me, that would educate me, and people that would just be able to relate to me. Because as I mentioned, I didn't have anybody in my actual real life that would relate to me. So it was very important, and it's very important that you guys understand that for yourself, to get yourself a mentor or get yourself in a community of traders or both. And once I started doing that, trading became a lot easier. It was a lot more tolerable. I didn't mind spending all those hours in my office by myself at my computer by myself getting good at this skill. And then also I got to skip a lot of mistakes because I got to learn from my mentors. I got to learn from the courses that I was buying. I got to learn from all these other people who have been where I was at and have gotten to the place I was trying to get to. And that helped me accelerate my path to profitability. Now, those are the 7 key principles that helped me to finally beat the mental game of trading after failing for over 5 years. And as I mentioned, the truth about trading isn't being smarter. It's not about having the fanciest strategy. It's all about controlling your emotions trusting the data, and sticking to your process. That's literally what separates the 90% of traders who fail from the few who actually make it in this career and change their lives. Now, if you want to see how I take the same exact mindset shifts that we just went over in this video and apply it with a proven strategy that I use to make over $10,000 per month starting with only $500, click this video right here. This video applied with the video that you just watched will completely change your life. The next step is putting both of these together. I'll see you in there.