Do You Want to be Right or Effective
Kardec Trader argues that traders obsessing over winning actually sabotage their edge. Instead, adopt a probability-based mindset, plan your trades, and retrain your emotional response to uncertainty. Two-thirds of traders think about winning while trading, which undermines discipline.
Chapters
I have a question for you. This is regarding your trading. Do you want to be right or do you want to be effective? I want you to think about that for a moment. Okay? I want you to go, hmm. What does he mean by do I want to be right? Of course I want to be right. Of course I want to win. Of course I want to be able to make prediction. But what if your desire to be right gets in the way of your being effective.
And not being effective? Or what happens is you no longer perform well and you're no longer having the edge that you need psychologically to drive your method edge. What if that's happening? Okay, the truth is.
The vast majority of traders are stuck here. They want to be right, and they're resistant to anything that tells them they may not be right. They want to be a winner. They want to be focused. They want to. They want that. But in doing that, they become insular, and they can't see that it's not about winning and losing that's so important. It's about the effectiveness of performance. Do you want to be right? Do you want to be effective? Ultimately, this is really a game where you have to give up the illusion of control over outcome. It's not there. People who say, you know, I want to be able to win 70, 80% of my trades. What you look, when you look at them, they're not making any money. They're making their brokers wealthy, but not them. The problem is, it's not about winning. It's about performing. It's about knowing how to lose incredibly well and knowing how to stay the course when things are going your way. It's not about, I'm gonna make it. It's not going against me. A trade's not going against me. A trade's just doing what it's doing. The truth is, your job is to perform. Just maintain a mind that allows you to literally plan your trade and then trade your plan. How many people do you know that, yeah, I've got the plan, and, you know, I'm supposed to. I know that I'm supposed to trade my plan, but I get into the trade and I. And just things start happening, and I don't trade my plan. Well, the reason is that you're focused on outcome. You're focused on trying to be right rather than trying to focus on the one thing that you really, truly can control, the mind you bring into the moment of performance. Interestingly, when I do seminars and I ask a simple question, what are you thinking about while you're trading, 66% of the people will say, two thirds, two thirds. Other people will say, I'm thinking about winning.
My view is, why would you be focused in thinking about something you can't control? It's not like there's magic where you're going to think and train your subconscious to will the markets to land your way. No, that's not going to happen, friends. That's new age stuff. What I'm saying is that what you have is you have a methodology. If you've been studying trading for a while, that has an edge in the markets. The problem is the mindset you bring is focused on winning, which is impossible. So you don't have the psychology edge that you need to drive the method edge. That's what we're talking about here. Ultimately, your self preservation gets in the way of your becoming a winning trader. Ultimately, you need to redefine what winning and losing in trading is. You know, winning. As long as you want to control the outcome, predict the outcome, winning is going to be elusive to you. However, if you begin to look at it going, how well did I perform? How well did I maintain emotional sobriety and maintain a trading mind all the way through this process?
What if you actually check says yes, that's winning, okay? It's not whether or not you won, the trade landed on the right side of probability or lost, the trade landed on the wrong side of probability. It was probability in the first place, okay? However, what was not probability was the mind that you brought into trading. Most people bring in a mine that is going to fail them when they're trading because it is focused on winning and losing. If you develop a mind about probability, what you're doing is you're saying, hmm, what I can control is the mind that I bring into the moment of performance.
Friends, that's everything. When you do that, you discover that the psychology lines up because you can control the mind you bring into a moment. You can't control the outcome of a trade. So you begin to say, how do I do that? The first thing is you start recognizing that.
Emotional ignorance just isn't going to work at all. You need to become emotional literate. With emotional intelligence. You need to start recognizing, okay.
I cannot have freedom from emotion. But what I can do if I work with this, I can train my brain and my mind to have freedom of emotion. I can't control the uncertainty that happens in trading. And uncertainty is linked to confusion and then confusion is linked to fight flight. That's where all the problem is. However, that's by genetic predisposition. What you can do, thank God, is that you can retrain the brain so that when it comes engages uncertainty, it no longer triggers to fight flight. It triggers to disciplined impartiality. It takes a lot of work. It takes retraining the way the emotions are organized around uncertainty. You start developing a trading mind as opposed to a winning mind. This can be done, friends. It's about literally recognizing that I have to take responsibility.
Okay, for the mind that I bring into the moment.
Sitting here and trying to avoid having to be responsible for the mind, saying, you know, there's something, I need another toy, I need another tool, I need another skill, another teacher, another this. That's not really what the problem is. The problem is you need to learn how to use emotions to create a mind that can perform in the midst of uncertainty and risk. It can be done, friends. You learn to regulate the emotions. You learn to rebuild the emotions that are associated with uncertainty so that it doesn't trigger to fight flight. That's all that what was I thinking? What was I doing? But rather it triggers to discipline impartiality. You calm fears, you nurture that part of yourself. You soothe yourself rather than beat yourself up. You acknowledge there's a power struggle going on inside your head the moment that you engage uncertainty. But what you decide is instead of ignoring that internal struggle, trying to push it away, trying to silence it, what you decide to do is turn toward it from a much stronger position. Though you choose the emotional programs to engage the struggle that create the mind that engages that struggle of, you know, the thing is all that ambiguity that happens instead of like self doubt, what you're going to have as a consequence is humble confidence, okay, that you can perform in the moment and you let go of winning and losing. If you want to learn more, go to our website, start reading the article that's associated with this, and come to the program. Come to the webinar that's associated with this. Really learn what you're going to need to do if you really want to become a consistently profitable trader. Not one that talks the game, but one who walks the game, man. That's an actual player. The one who has learned how to mold the emotions that responds to uncertainty. Come and learn, friends. Come and learn. It's.
It's not just about trading either. It's what you discover is what you're learning in trading about how to maintain the mind that engages uncertainty. What you discover is that impacts the rest of your life too. Come and learn, friends. Come to the website learn more. Take care and have a great new year.
Sam.
