Keeping the Money You Make

As a trader starts gaining a little bit of success, they start having good days, they start winning. And golly, after all that work of all that learning, all that paying it forward and losing, and you finally get to this moment where you start going, oh, wow, the strategy works. I'm working, I'm doing everything together. Wow, this works. And before you know it, all that money that you've earned disappears. So the question really becomes, how do you keep the money that you earn and not have it stripped away from you? Let's talk about that. The very first thing we want to look at is saying, that's an emotional hijacking. And let's take a look at it. Let's give you an example. Let's say you're like this person and we were just talking about a moment for you started winning. It felt good. Right there. Right there. You didn't notice it, did you? It just fluted on past you. You feel good. Well, what's wrong with feeling good?

Everything. In trading, what happens is when you are managing a trade, when you're actually engaged in the trading mind, the only emotional programs that need to be there are discipline, the ability to maintain water under pressure, courage, the ability to face your fears, and one other, patience, calmness, and waiting for the market to give you something. Nowhere in there is feeling good. Feeling good is an emotional program that's deeply linked to the dopamine, which is the reward chemistry that helps build patterns. Well, what happens is you build a pattern of feeling good and then collapsing. Because when you take a snort of that dopamine from winning, what happens is.

You become really just snorting cocaine and all of a sudden you start feeling good and you start having exhilaration, you start having euphoria, and you think, hey, wow, I got it. I've done it. I've done it. I've gotten there.

You have just witnessed an emotional hijacking right there, friends. The moment that you thought you got there, it was going to roll on forever. That's the hijacking. If you'd seen it before, you could have interrupted it. And this is the work of dopamine. Dopamine is a powerful neurotransmitter. It's the one, the reward system. It's the one that, you know, you feel it. You, you get a charge and you feel good. You have energy. I have all that stuff. That's. That's not what you're looking for in trading. Again, you're looking for discipline, patience, and clear thinking. You're not looking for feeling good to Produce that mind of. Of the patience, of the discipline, of the clarity of thought. Your heart rate's going to go back down. It's going to be slow. It's not going to be accelerated. It's not just catching up with something. So what you're doing is you're going, oh, my goodness, by winning and not learning how to regulate that winning. Then I'm already in trouble. Yes, you are. And what we want to do is say, if you want to keep your money, what you're going to have to say is, I'm winning. But what does winning really mean in trading? I propose my sense of winning is landing on the right side of probability. And it has more to do with keeping a mindset that allows you to execute your strategy. That is winning. To me, whether or not you make money or not, that's irrelevant. Your job is to maintain a strategy that you know has the edge to extract more capital out of the markets than you're pulling back in. To do that, that mind has to be riveted on executing strategy, not on feeling good about the wind and making all that money.

Making money is a byproduct of right mind. What we're doing is saying, I want you to notice how this is put together is that one. You're going to have to learn to interrupt that process. That's what I call emotional regulation. And the seeing, the stop sign, flash, flash, flash in your mind, that kind of stuff. But other than that, though, then you need to produce some sort of mindfulness of where you recognize that you and your thoughts are not the same. You are not your thoughts. I doesn't exist. I is just simply your current organization of your potential into a self. Don't confuse that with who you can be. And then you're saying, okay, I have this moment, though. I have this moment right here where I've interrupted this process. I've been feeling good, I've caught it, so they don't get euphoric. But what do I do there? First, understand the damage that dopamine can do to the trading mind. Feeling good. And you're saying, okay, if I have that, I also know living within me is something that I call in my work orphan. That part of you that wants to win the pot of gold, the one that wants to make the money now, and it sees this opportunity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That right there is your long, long ancient brother, your caveman brain. And what you're doing is you're saying, we need to calm it down. We need to calm it down. Because ultimately what you want to do is you want to be able to have a mind that's alert, focused and ready. But you do not want your body activated. You don't want to see it moving up.

That's when you activate the fight flight syndrome. And what we want to do is keep it cognitive. Where you're alert, you're focused, you're ready. You're ready to take advantage of whatever opportunity comes your way, but you're not activated to take action. Okay, so now we've got this thing where we're going, okay, I know that we can interrupt that process. And now what happens is how do I go about, how do I go about taking that orphan nature mind, the one that has that impulse need to feel good or win, and then start saying, okay, what does it really need? It needs some adults around. What it needs is the discipline of a ruler. It needs the courage of a warrior. It needs the calming, the self soothing of a caregiver. These are emotional programs that already live within you. What I'm saying, if you want to produce success in trading, you're going to have to take these emotional programs, which are not the ones that forthcome into your mind when you're trading. You're going to have to train yourself. So these three emotional programs show up in order to be able to calm the orphan nature down, to be able to have it become a student of a greater whole, and to be able to execute your strategy. Friends, that's what it looks like, is that your mind is a community of rival emotional programs.

And when that mind becomes a committee, those programs given voice as thoughts can really play havoc or they can congeal into a powerful mind that can handle uncertainty. Not like the old ancient caveman brain where he either was in fight or flight over like really quick looking dangerous things. No, what you're doing is you're learning to produce a very different mind that engages the uncertainty. One that does not look to feel good and sees feel getting good is dangerous. No, we want you to find that where you can stop it through emotional regulation and mindfulness. You're realizing there are lots of different moving parts in your mind and you're choosing which emotional programs that give rise to the mind that engages that uncertainty. In this case, engages winning. Remember, winning is only landing on the right side of probability. Okay? And we want winning to become. Guess what we want winning to become staying in the mindset you need to execute your strategy. You got it. This is the way it can be done. You keep the money, then you're not letting yourself peel off into this.

Got to have the money. Right now. I'm feeling so good, it's going to go on forever. That's gambling. What I'm asking you to do is work with your mind. Work with what's going on in your mind to be able to produce the mind that can manage uncertainty. And then your strategy.

Is backed up by your psychology. That's when the music really begins. Good luck. And friends, it's been fun.

Sam.