Master Trading Psychology in UNDER 83 Minutes with Rande Howell

What is the number one psychological problem that you've seen with all the traders that you've come into contact with over the decades?

Oh, the number one by any stretch of the imagination is. Randy Howell is a world renowned author and trading psychologist. His Secrets in psychology has helped unprofitable traders become millionaires. The successful trader wins by being an expert at losing. And I believe that trading is the perfect self mastery. If you do not master the self, you are not going to be a successful trader.

There are a lot of traders out there who say trading psychology is bull. What are your thoughts when you hear that?

First thing I ask, are you profitable? There's a wonderful thing about trading is that most of us spend a lifetime avoiding our psychological demons in trading. They're going to stalk you. When you're looking at charts, you're actually looking at emotions. The vast majority are not profitable. The trading gods really don't care. The success rate of a trader to become consistently profitable at 2 to 3% and we're moving that 2 to 3% to 30. We have a brain that is about 6 to 8 million years old. It's all about survival in the moment and we bring that brain to trading. We believe that we can control outcome, we believe that we can make things happen. And then you get into trading and you find out that this is a game of probability, not certainty.

Loads of people in the trading space say that you need to treat trading like a business. Would you say that's the wrong thing to do?

The truth is, is that trading.

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Hey guys, before we get into this episode, I just want to say this is an incredible moment for me directly and for all of you, no doubt as well. Randy Howe is an absolute legend in this space. When I first started trading almost 10 years ago, I used to see his clips and his lectures all over social media and YouTube, generating millions of views and impacting millions of traders across the world. So the fact that I got to sit down with Randy myself to speak to him and to extract so much value of exactly how the trading mind works and how to operate as a trader the right way and to be profitable, it was incredible for me and a huge thank you to Randy. I'm so, so happy to be able to bring to you an episode on Words of Wisdom on how to master your trading psychology with the one and only Randy Howe.

Welcome everyone to the Words of Wisdom podcast. We are back once again. It's still the number one podcast in the trading space and the fastest growing. Thanks to all of you and our incredible guests. I'm on the big US Tour still and we're on our second destination in Carolina and we've come here for one person only, and that is a world famous trading psychology and performance coach. He has authored many books and you've.

Probably seen his face many times that.

I know I did in my journey. Mr. One and only Randy Howe.

I'm embarrassed.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

I really appreciate it. I thank you for sitting down with us because I know we had gone back and forth for a while and I'm sure you get so many requests. No doubt. It was great to speak about some of the trips you've done and the speaking engagements you've done as well.

Well, you were really interesting. You know, it's not about you. Who is this guy? This is interesting. You really got my curiosity. I really appreciate it.

I'm glad we did.

I'm glad we did.

But I wanted to kick things off like in just straight away. In terms of what is the number one psychological problem that you've seen with all the traders that you've come into contact with over the decades?

Oh, the number one, by any stretch of the imagination, is that the brain that they brought into trading is unfit to actually manage the conditions of trading. We have a brain that is about 6 to 8 million years old and it was built for the African savannas. And it's all about survival in the moment. Okay. And it's acting on instinct. And what we do is we take that brain that is still operational, 95%. Our decisions that we make on a daily basis never go through cognition. They are emotionally based from this very old brain. And we bring that brain to trading and we have built a mind. We have in this mind, we believe that we can control outcome. We believe that we can make things happen. And then you get into trading and you find out that this is a game of probability, not certainty. And they come in and they come face to face with it. They get emotionally hijacked because that brain does not understand the difference between risk and threat to life. Caveman had no money to play with. What he had was survival. And he was. He shared the world with saber toothed tigers, same caves. And ultimately, a threat to self is a threat to capital, to the primitive brain. And you get in there and what happens is people want to not lose because to them that not losing is. Guess what? Getting deranged by saber tooth tiger at the Same time, you also want to win and you will get cranked up. Like for instance, if you're. If you and eight guys find a woolly mammoth and you decide to attack it because it's going to feed the. It's going to feed the village forever and all this kind of stuff, you're going to have to get really cranked up. That's a dangerous animal. People died. So in the same way that when you see over trading, it's the same principle going on, it's seeing the reward, big news and it gets cranked up and it blinds itself to the risk that's involved. So out of it is the first order, is that we're bringing a brain that, thank God, evolutionary, it allowed us to survive, but now we're asking it to do something that evolution didn't build. And if you're going to go beyond that and get to where you're actually consistently profitable in your trading, you're going to have to train instinct that has been around for 6 to 8 million years to accept a very different reality with the uncertainty that you deal with in trading all the time. That's where it starts.

I love that. And there's so much to unpack there. And it's so fascinating always to hear how the markets brings that fight or flight response, even though there's no physical action really involved other than the. That's as far as it goes. Yeah.

But no physical action in terms of.

As you say, that. That actual risk of life.

Right.

But there's risk involved and that risk sort of bridges between the two. But have you ever come across when you're working with people, trying to help them sort of navigate and change that mindset and be able to handle that, that risk better, would you say that you've worked with people with it not able to remove themselves from that brain, that evolution?

Yeah, all the time. That's. If you take a look at the success rate in trading, you know, 95 are going to go down and another 2 or 3% are going to be marginal and make some money. But there's only 2 or 3% of people who actually generate wealth out of this. And those are the people who have been able to reorganize their mind for whatever reason, not necessarily with the trader psychologist, but somehow they've been able to remold the mind. And there are other people who are scared. I can't tell you how many times. It's very common for me to have a guy, he's. I'm working with him and he's made some really breakthroughs. He's actually putting really good trading mind together to act not on winning or losing, but on performance. And it starts showing and that he's extracting more capital out of the markets than he's giving back in. He's really happy, elated, and he tells his friends and then he'll say, you got to go. You got to go see this guy. Oh, no, I'm not going to go see any shrink. What happens if you find something wrong with me? And I'm going, of course there's something wrong with you. You're taking a brain incapable of doing what you're asking it to do and you're trying to force it and then it bucks at you and kicks you hard. So, yeah, it happens all the time.

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What would you say those traits? Have you seen any sort of common traits with those people where they struggle to make those changes?

They really believe in winning. They have to win to prove themselves. It's like, particularly like with Alphas, their winning is not just about money. Money is representational of power. Of mattering of status. And that hooks back into our caveman stuff is that if you were an alpha and you went out and took that woolly mammoth town with friends, what happens, You've got tremendous status. You had first dibs to the food. You had, you had leadership qualities and you also had first dibs on the breeding stock. So your genes were going to the future at a higher rate than anything else. That's hardwired. And so people come in wanting to win, wanting to prove themselves. And if they make money, they have power, they have status, they have all this. And they forget that the, the rules of success in trading are enormously different than the rules of success in the world out there. It's kind of like, it's kind of like Newtonian physics, large particle physics and quantum mechanics. They're different rules. And if you try to apply, if you try to force Newtonian physics principles onto microscopic type of particles, it blows up in your face. And the same thing that alphas do, because alphas blow up money, man. They, they really do.

Is it kind of the. Because of the need to be an Alpha and the traits of that personality aren't suited towards what the market needed.

I've actually had a guy that I worked with a number of years ago, was a very successful serial entrepreneur. When he graduated from college, he sold a bar business for half a million dollars. Now, I don't know about you, but when I got out of college, I didn't have an extra half a million dollars floating around. But then over time, he had always been able to be able to size up companies, understand what was not functioning, and then to build them and to sell them 10, 20 times more than he paid for them. And then he was talking to his brother who was a trader, and he found out that trading was a capital intensive business.

And he said, oh, well. And he had just sold a position for cash, cash that gave him multimillion dollars worth of cash. So he has a, oh, I've got it. I know how to, I know how to build businesses. I can do that easy. And now I've got the capital for a capital intensive thing. So he went out, four years later, he's not making any money.

And then he comes to me and we start working and he became consistently profitable. One day we're talking, he says, randy, I want to thank you. This is the best money I've ever invested in my life. I know that I'm not going to be a traitor. I'm not willing to give up control.

I'm really Good at control. And I've realized that I have to give up control, and I have to accept that my power comes from my ability to perform. I can't do that. And I was like, kind of weirded out because my job at that time, I thought, was to help people organize themselves into a more powerful mind for trading. And I'm talking to a trader, very good trader, and I was telling about this, and he says, you know something, Randy? It's just a crying shame to take a perfect, good entrepreneurial mind and try to force it to become a trading mind. It's just so whacked up. So, yeah, there. There are traits and there are ways that when you look at it, you go something, you know, it's just not really. The amount of effort may not be enough. And the truth is, is it going to fulfill you?

Do you feel like there are people that really aren't capable of change, just as you mentioned there, that those are those alpha? I do. You think because a lot of people when it comes to trading, that one of the big appeals of it is that anyone can do it and from anywhere, and you don't necessarily need a lot of money and so on and so forth. But what's the reality of that look like? Is it a case where there are really are a lot of people out there probably who aren't capable of trading? And even if that means that they do it for a long time, they're just not capable of the change that's needed, as you said, relinquishing that control, the power that trading is necessary for consistent trading.

Well, I'll tell you something. In my individual work, we follow a program where I'm actually teaching a process, okay? From understanding emotion very differently than you probably do now, to learning how to regulate emotion, to being able to produce an observer where you recognize you and your thinking aren't the same, to discovering the destructive part of the human potential and then also building and empowered elements of yourself that have been with us since the beginning. And you learn how to reconstruct the mind you bring, and it's very powerful. And I have about a 30% success rate with my individual clients now. I used to think God, but I don't want to tell anybody that, much less cap this all over the dang universe. And then I realized a guy was talking to me, says, Randy, if a major league baseball player hits 300 for a lifetime, he's going to be in the hall of Fame.

That's great. And I realized that, you know something? The success rate of A trader is to become consistently profitable at 2 to 3% and we're moving that 2 to 3% to 30. And at the same time you're still, you still have groups of people for whatever reason. I have in my file this morning, I looked in there, I said, you know, these, these files have been in here for like a couple years and I've never seen them. I've actually had people pay money up front and never show up for a first meeting.

Really?

What's that all about? Okay, talking about fear of like being exposed and at the same time is there's a lot of people who just are not willing to change. They, they think this is the way it should be and I'm going to be bullheaded about it and I'm going to force my will upon the markets, upon life and stuff like that. And the trading gods just kind of laugh at that stuff about us being able to control the will of the markets. And so there's a lot, there's, there's lots. Most. I wish there were an evaluation tool that would allow traders to really find out before they start sinking a lot of capital, a lot of their, their interest into it, whether or not they actually have what it takes to begin to shape that. I really. That would be an interesting thing.

It definitely would be.

I'm actually talking to a guy who used to be in one of them, used to work with me, is now running a good sized organization where he's saying, randy, I would like you to start teaching in my group. And what I would really like to do is offer this instrument that helps us to decide whether or not we're going to actually work with these people, whether or not they actually, we can at least get in more narrow about whether or not they have a chance of doing this because it's a hard business to. Well, that's just it. It's not really a business. There is a business aspect to it, but it's a mindset problem of where you're actually having to remold a mind.

And get it to do things that it truly was diametrically opposed to by evolution that has been hardwired into an instinct so very, it's very hard in terms of business.

One thing you mentioned there, it's like, it's like a business because I've heard loads of people, especially because there's a couple things we can touch on, but we'll start with the business element, which is loads of people in the trading space say that you need to treat trading like a business. Would you say that's the wrong thing to do?

Good luck.

Obviously, trading is transactional in that you're, you're extracting capital, you're putting back in capital. At the end of the day, you're finding out what your return on investment is. Okay. So. And you're going to have to pay taxes on that. So, yeah, there is an aspect of it being business, but to think that I'm going to take the mind that I use for business winning and not losing, being competitive, and if you think you're going to produce the mind that's going to be able to execute and recognize that you're going to be losing a lot.

Okay. And you're going to have to, you're going to have to become an accomplished loser. Okay. I mean accomplished. In order for you to be able to wait for the moments when things work out well and that guy hits target and then you put a leader on it, it just goes into orbit and you make a lot of money and get it through thrill. The rest of the time what you're doing is you're, you're protecting your nickels and dimes and you're, you're, you're making your losses as small as possible. And that, that's not a business model that very many people know about that. It, you know, it's true.

No, it's true. One thing that we did mention in terms of people not being capable of, of trying to change and they get kind of stuck of like, I don't want, I don't believe that I want to stick it with this way. Do you feel there is an element of. Especially nowadays, but even throughout your career, no doubt there was still mentorships and guidance, but rather than social media and being so readily available. Yeah, it was probably more so in seminars and things like, of this nature. But regardless, do you think a lot of people build a lot of limiting beliefs that they get really stuck to and sort of really put into their foundational beliefs, even so that it becomes so difficult for them to break them because of the, maybe even a pedestal that they've put this particular trader on that they're learning from or someone they look up to or someone they want to mirror and that's the message they're providing them. So then when, let's say someone like yourself is telling them no, you need to think in this way or put these practices in place and they're saying, no, no, no. Well, I've learned from so and so, or this person does it this way. Is that a do you think that's something that definitely happens?

Oh, all the time. And it really, it really boils down to that. All of us are born into a world. And I don't know if you've noticed, but we've been born into an incredibly broken world. Okay. And it just so happens your brain's function is to adapt you to survive in that world whether or not you're a wildebeest or whether or not you're a human being. And unfortunately what happens is it adapts you and your brain. Most other animals bring at birth, they have ancient systems already set up. A giraffe can run in three hours. A chimpanzee can walk and hang out. Human infants, I don't know if you've noticed, but they are born remarkably undeveloped and their brain is developing live wired in the moment to the environment around. And what happens, it's going to pick up the rules, the beliefs in that family system, in that, in that culture, in that community and they're going to become so solidified that you would never see that. You're looking through those beliefs and we all bring those beliefs. And it's not rocket science. That's the whole thing is it's about mattering. If I make a bunch of money, I'm going to matter. If I make money, I'm gonna have prestige. If I make money, I have, I'm gonna have a worth. And a lot of people find out that they have a sense of self worth that deeply limits their ability to make money. They have low, they have a monetary worth that gets just snagged. I had one guy who grew up in a blue collar family in Detroit. His father worked in the automobile factories and he just railed at these executives who had made too much money. Nobody's worth a million dollars. Well, I met this guy, he's working with a high six figure account and every time he goes over into seven figures, a million dollars, he loses back down to the high six hundreds. When I met him, he had been doing that for 10 years. And you're seeing that he didn't know that he had a self limiting belief that had been absorbed at the dinner table of a perfectly fine family. Okay. And the other one is that you have this sense of worth, you have this sense of competency. I'm not good enough. That's, I can't tell you. That happens all the time. I'm not good enough, I'll never make it, blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah. And a sense of belonging and a sense of being lovable. And I Want to really get on. I have a friend, an enormously successful trader. I know for a fact he's made between 2 and $300 million in the last several years. Incredible. He's, yeah, he's, he's, he's of this generation. And he never used traitor psychologists. He never did anything like that. And I said, Mitch, how did you do this? Because when guys do that, I, you know, I want to know how they did. And he says, Randy, I'll tell you exactly what happened. He says, you know, I carelessly blew three quarters of a million dollars in a day back when for me, three quarters of a million dollars was a lot of money and it was rocking financially. What was going to happen in the home? And he hadn't told his wife yet. And he finally came to the moment, he says, I have to do that, I have to tell my wife. And he comes and he tells his wife and he thought for sure that the wife was going to be very angry and leave him and blah. All the catastrophic thinking you would imagine. And what happened when told what she did is she went over, held him and they cried together. They cried for 15, 20 minutes. And what Mitch came out of that, came out of that as is recognizing come win or lose, he still loved. And he said it was there that I no longer, I just thought of this as, you know, I'm taking different sides. I'm doing my best job or performing, but whether or not I win or lose, I'm okay. That is what freed him from being an adequate trader to being this, this, this phenomenon. So yeah, those are the basic self limiting beliefs that if you're human, they're there and they're, they are the beliefs that you're going to have to heal or compassion, not with tough guy, but with compassion. And out of that what happens, you start growing new beliefs about your ability to manage uncertainty. But if you're trying to prove your worth, if you're trying to prove your mattering, trading is a really terrible, terrible place to force your will against something that you can't really comprehend.

Do you feel like when you are working with someone who has limiting beliefs, what's the sort of process you go through? Is one of the first processes making them aware of that limiting belief, helping them to observe it for themselves and accept that limiting belief.

Yeah, but I take it a step further than that. Again, I teach a process and.

People have no idea what an emotion really is. They have no idea, they don't grasp that all thinking is emotional state dependent. It is your emotions Generating your ability to produce explanations about what's going on out here. And so the first thing I'm doing is I'm educating people that you don't have emotions, they have you.

And that until you wise up and put down all the, the barky sounds of being a tough guy, the emotion's still going to overwhelm you. It is more powerful than you ever imagined. Your body is part of, part of that emotion. The way you breathe, the way you hold tension is part of that emotion. It's the arousal element. And once it hits a particular threshold, it's taking out the mind, it's taking out the cognitive mind. So I'm teaching, first of all, I'm getting people to understand that they really need to change their opinion about emotions. It's not like you can do live without emotions. The only time that you don't have emotions is when you're dead. However, you can develop freedom of emotion so that you actually become the spearhead of being able to develop an emotional cocktail that thinking arises out of that allows you to perform really well in trading.

The second part is that you have to regulate the emotion. In the first part of the training with me, you're learning how to breathe diaphragmatically. As you trade, you're also having a mirror or a video camera on you to see all the tenseness and see that you're not breathing, which means you're accelerating the emotions ascent to take over mind, hijack mind. And then I teach, when you do that, I also teach mindfulness of where you recognize that you and your thoughts are not the same. That again, you don't have thoughts, they're having you, they're creating your stuff. And most likely it's history coming right through you and continue its creation. Like for instance, I come from a family that lost generational wealth, the generation before me. And it was always the macmillan's getting the money back from the o' Connors who stole it from them. It was just, oh, it was crazy. And I found myself always trying to get the money back. And even into adulthood I found myself in one business. I would do, something would happen, I would want to get the money back. That's what I knew and understood. If I was going to have power, I was going to have to get the money back. Then it occurred to me that you know something?

Money is actually a transaction. It's really more about it's the grease that makes things happen. It's not a good way to measure your inherent worth as a human being being. And in the time that I finally learned to change that belief to where now capital is really more about an exchange of values, exchange of what people see my worth, my work is worth. And and since that has occurred, it's we have done, we've done really well financially before. I was always trying to get the money back. Completely different mindsets. It's those kind of beliefs that once you begin to develop the empowered elements of your potential that you can actually bring to bear and you can turn toward the self learning belief and you can actually identify it much more easy because now you're realizing, oh my God, I as a human being have been given this gift of being captain of my own destiny. I can build the way the mind engages the challenges of living and the way that I'm currently dealing with it is not working well.

That's why people come and work with me.

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Now let's get back to this episode. What would you say in terms of let's say someone was entering trading, they're a few months in, they've just found their interest as someone to put on their radar, like to help them make that, you know, to help them as much as possible in the beginning of their journey. What would you say to them?

First of all, find a good teacher, a good method teacher and learn that method to the point where on paper you can, you can make money. And then what happens is then you're going to need to learn. And it may be that you just go from paper to real cash and everything's hunky dory. I don't deal with people like that. At the point where they start actually risking real capital, they turn on the ancient brain. And that is the time where you need to be learning how to what psychology of trading is and how you go and intervene in emotions and build emotions. So what I basically say is that once you come to the moment where you turn over, get really small, go to micros, do whatever you can so that you're not blowing yourself up and start seeing that the moment you add money to the equation, everything changes. And then that's when traitor psychology becomes really interesting. They will never believe you. If, if you say you're going to need this. Oh no, I'm just going to get this system, man. My teacher knows how we're going to just be minning money, blah blah, blah, blah. No, get there and all of a sudden have feel the potential of loss or the potential of making a bunch of money. And what happens is that the motions just blow you out and you're back in ancient caveman time and your thinking brain has just been relegated to the caboose of a train.

Is there any exercises that you give to traders that they can do on their own to try and identify things?

The simple ones are breathing. What I, in almost all my work, particularly when I'm presenting, do my little presentation, my dog and pony show. What I'm asking people to do is not to believe me, but get a mirror, get a camera, point it at yourself while you're trading and notice how much tension is in your face, in your shoulders, in your fists and notice that you're not breathing.

And once they grasp that those are parts of an emotion and what they've just done is they've just kicked it up to fight flight, you feel all that, that's fight flight ready to act. And at fight flight, thinking is just hijacked. So the first thing I do is I have them do that simple exercise and it begins to wake them up. And I've also, I get A lot of people who will write me. In fact, one Doris read while we were coming over here, where this guy is just taking these really simple exercises that I'm not necessarily intending to help people grow themselves into a better trader. I want them to come through me. And what they're doing is they're finding greater levels of success. That's just from breathing. And the other element is that everybody can start practicing mindfulness and recognizing a great truth. Is that no, just because you hear voices in your head doesn't mean you're crazy, but you are crazy to ignore the voices in your head. There are some. There are some destructive elements in there. There are some highly empowering parts of the cell. But in mindfulness, you begin to be able to start sorting out all this cacophony going on in your mind and actually recognizing that it can be ordered. And what's going to happen, the observer, the CEO of your company needs to wake up from its deep sleep and recognize that the committee of the mind.

Is in a mutiny and that you have to decide that I'm going to learn to put this mind together so that it is empowered. And I'm leading not from my fears, not from my greeds, but I'm leading from discipline. I'm leading from impartiality. I'm leading from patience. And that you can read my book, you can read, you can watch the videos, you can. That stuff's constantly out there. And Dolores and I get through feedback about how people's lives have changed just from that. I love that.

I love that. In terms of the emotions when it comes to greed, is there like somewhere that. That stems from or like why traders seem to be a very common theme when it comes to greed in particular?

Well, first of all, in the background of this, we're labeling greed as bad. Hmm. It's not. If you didn't have greed, you wouldn't find the motivation to go do things and make things happen. The deal is, is that, is that greed, in conjunction with a number of other emotional programs that allow the greed to give you the motivation to seek better. And particularly what you're doing is you're saying there is a. In my work, I actually use a heart rate monitor and an app that aligns the heart rate within. Within certain parameters that are indicative of a good trading mind and a. A deteriorating trading mind and a get the hell out of this trade trading mind. Okay. And you know, ultimately, greed is just something that needs to be managed like any other emotion. You know, it's like you can Be compassionate all you want, but if you just give away everything, you end up poor at the end. So compassion has to be managed. The courage, you know, we want to have courage to act, but we don't want to do really dumb, stupid sophomore stuff. So to me, greed is that, yeah, sure, it gets in the way because we have this idea that if, if we had money, that would solve all the problems in the world. I used to work with really wealthy people when I was a therapist.

And what I found is that the wealth was so great that they could insulate themselves from having to change. They could just send attorneys.

And ultimately. But if you're actually in a honest, God feedback relationship with your environment, you're looking at greed going. It has some really, it has some good qualities to it. The thing is, is we need to start defining how those qualities, qualities are going to activate. Because if you really have a belief of scarcity, you want to make money and you're greedy to get it. And that greed starts dominating the committee of the mind rather than having a balanced part of that mind. And so ultimately it's not, it's not that greed is bad, it's that you don't know how to use emotions, intelligence. So your eq, your emotional intelligence is low. But as you develop that eq, you begin to see that, I mean, even shame, understand, shame has a bad rap. If you want to change, you're going to have to employ shame. Shame is an emotion that says the way you're currently organized is not working for the good of the whole. You need to reorganize yourself. And what it does is it starts the party.

Disorganizes you, and the brain flips out and it wants everything in the world not to feel that again. So it shuts it off. But if you really find the courage.

A number of years ago, my wife, I led my wife into a business debacle that cost me a couple million dollars.

And I felt nothing but shame. At that time. I was this guy who thought, I am, I am so cool, I am so great. And we were living this high life. And then a recession happened. The business started failing and we were financially underwater. And I was deeply ashamed. I was a failure. You know, I wasn't the man that I purported to be. And I said, dolores, you can leave, I know you're going to be leaving. And she has a temper, but boy, she, she really got angry. And what she got angry about was that.

I thought that her love for me had anything to do with the abundant success that I was Claiming and out of that though, in the dissolution of that organization itself what we discovered is that the one thing that I really wanted to be and wanted to do with my life is I wanted to help people grow as I had been able to grow and get out of the confinement of the self limiting beliefs that was born into and had executed. So the greed ended up reorganizing me into much more higher functioning. So if you have, it's just, it's not saying there's something wrong with you. There's. It's saying the way you're currently organized and your competency needs to be looked at and changed to be able to match up with the requirements, requirements of trading. So like even shame, guilt, all that they are, they are, they are there because they were integral parts of our survival as a species.

To even, even fair the same, same element is that there are benefits to it.

Failure.

Failure. Fear.

Oh, I'll tell you failure. You know the brain does not learn from success. Success hits the dopamine button and it, it more hardwires that pattern. Yeah. And it'll get you in a lot of trouble. Failure is forcing the brain. That's the way the brain learns. If you look at failure and all of a sudden you're going okay, it's not about me, it's about my competencies. And you learn to reorganize yourself to do better. Ray Kroc, McDonald's, he was famous for having the words I failed my way to success. Yes. Okay. And it's the same thing is that if you're, if you're afraid of failure, oh my God, don't step out the front door, much less start trading. Because in trading you have this thing of where let's say you take loss.

I teach my folk to do this is one, is this a method mistake? And let's say that no, you executed, your method was fine. All of that, that doesn't need to be looked at. Reformed. Is this a psychological mistake? Let's say that no, you actually performed quite well and you did exactly that. And let's say that no, you executed, your method was fine. All of that, that doesn't need to be looked at. Reformed. Is this a psychological mistake? Let's say that no, you actually perform quite well and you did exactly what your rule said and you still lost. So what happens? You realize that loss is just simply probability.

You're not going to learn from it because it really wasn't a failure. I actually consider that to be success in trading. But if there's a psychological mistake there, it's exposing it so that it can be worked with. If there's a method mistake there, the same thing is it's exposing it so you can decide whether or not that method, that that rule actually is delivering the goods or whether or not you're growing past that methodology, those sets of rules. So no, all the emotions are built for you to be able to survive as a group. And they get kind of, they can get skewed.

But they don't have to be.

What processes would you give to traders as they're actively trading? Is there things that once they've enter the trade or execute on a trade or the trade has given it to the result, as you mentioned, like you've asked, for example, did that fit your plan, etc. But other processes that you're, when you're working with someone that you're tracking, you're keeping on top of, you're asking them to do and getting feedback from them.

It depends on how well trained they are. In my, and again, my process is that first of all they're going to be. I use these forms that basically take all sorts of information about physiologically what's happening to you because I know that the physiological aspect of yourself cannot be separated from your emotions, from your cognition or your spirituality for that matter. And you're looking at this all in place and you're saying, okay, if I'm watching that and I'm, and I'm seeing my breathing and stuff like that, I can regulate that and I can maintain the kind of mind that I need to trade with. I also teach that you should be setting alerts every 10 to 15 minutes so that the alerts just sitting there saying you need to check in to. Is your mind still in the right place? And you should be able, if you're working with me, you should be getting to a point of where you know what, you know what the, the empowered mind looks like, feels like when it's present. Okay. And so you're, you're having, you're setting up an alert. And I also have people take breaks about every hour. And the truth is, is that trading is a massive drain on your cognitive system. The amount of glucose that's the fuel when you're looking, when you're looking at trading, it's like a 1965 muscle car GTO stomping it. And you're sitting there stomping it and you're seeing the gas gauge go. That's pretty much what the high activity, the cognitive activity that you're doing in trading, that's what it's doing. I don't care who you are, is that after about an hour, hour and 15 minutes of that kind of load, you're going to start running out of glucose and all of a sudden your mind's going to get dull, it's not going to be sharp, and you're going to start making mistakes. So there's a. There's a process of taking care of yourself. But when it really comes down to it, what I'm teaching a person do is to find what I call the ruler living within them. And that ruler exemplifies discipline, the ability to maintain order under pressure. And what happens with most people, they discover that their ruler goes awol.

You know, they get all cranked up about the orphan wanting money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or the inner critic saying, you might as well give up. It's never going to work. It's never going to work. And what you're looking at is saying is ruler present. Because, you know, ultimately, if you do not have discipline, everything else.

Is for not. But emotional discipline is a requirement. And if you develop, like, for instance, with me, it is a Roman centurion, and I have a fascination of Roman centurion. Since high school, I took a lot of Latin. And in the second, third year, you retain order under pressure. And what happens with most people, they discover that their ruler goes awol.

You know, they get all cranked up about the orphan wanting texts. And I read a book by Julius Caesar called I Came, I Saw, I Conquered. And what it was was a life, the life of centurions. I fell in love. And that centurion, symbolically just stayed with me for ages, to the point where this almost became a conversation where I finally asked this part of myself, what is it you need from me? And in this hallucination I'm talking about, that centurion looked at me and says, I need the sword back. The one you dropped on the ground and never picked up again. I did that with a stick that I used as a sword to play king. And I threw it down one time because I grew up in a profoundly crazy making home. And I gave up and I threw it down. And I didn't pick it up for about 30 years. And that part of me, as weird as it may sound, that part of me was sitting there waiting for me to get to a moment that he could wake up and come become part of me again. And I claim that all of us have those kind of heroic qualities living within us, and a lot of them get Pushed down for us to learn how to survive in an environment. And if you're going to become a much better achieving human being and a better trader, you're going to have to find those qualities again. They're there, they're part of the genome, they're part of group survival, of our caveman thing. And you're going to have to learn to build that into a very different committee of the mind that can engage life's challenges. Life changes radically when that happens. I went through a heart transplant where I was on death row for a couple years. Well, and I had to maintain this, this empowered part of myself.

Because it was bleak. And yet at the same time, I now look at it. It's probably the best thing that ever happened to me. Really. Oh, it just opened my eyes. And now I'm at a point where I realize I'm 73 and sooner or later, you know, I really should retire, of course, kind of maybe serve. But what I want is, I want a systematic programming that people can see years after I'm gone and work with and learn how to find that power within themselves and to grow it and to take their God given gifts and manifest them.

Is.

Doesn't sound like trading. But nobody can start with trading.

No, definitely no. But I can see where it intertwines though. And in terms of that like making a systematic approach. Is there any element of your work where you're looking at personality traits of individuals?

I tend to look, I don't look at personality traits. I look at. I used Carl Jung's archetypal system where there are 12 different archetypes and they are personality traits like the ruler is discipline, the, the warrior is courage, the caregiver is self soothing self.

I've heard of these. Yes.

So they, they're. And, but the thing is, what I, Carl Jung, when he studied, what he discovered is these traits were in all human beings, no matter what culture you came from. They were common from our, from our, our African experience. And the deal is, is that I'm more interested in naming him from that perspective because I'm looking for their purest form to pull forward.

You know, I don't need a guy who already is having a very big strong problem with his greed manifesting a powerful ruler that becomes a tyrant.

I'm looking for a person to be able to pull a ruler out of themselves that has the highest good that I believe that a human being could strive for. And so, and my favorite saying is by Thomas Jefferson, the guy who envisioned the United States, he said the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. And what I hold is that we can build a mine, but that's not enough. We have to maintain it. To be able to engage the challenges of our life and to do something with them that.

No other animal has ever been able to do, ever. Yeah, we are, this is like we are literally conscious creation. Now by the way, I count creation as the big bang and the organization that came to where life and the way it evolved into where.

One animal ended up starting having consciousness, I consider that to be a miracle that is unexplainable. And if you have an empowered committee that you have developed, it's much easier to actually take responsibility for that kind of mind and to develop it. Are you going to fall off the wagon every once in a while? Oh, yeah, of course. Our job is to strive and to build that. And I believe that trading is the perfect Self mastery.

Is that if you do not master the self, you are not going to be a successful trader.

There's a big line. There's a big line. But it's so true because trading is almost as you do with some of your exercises, it's putting that mirror in front of you. If you want to succeed, you have to be able to look very clearly in detailed manner and almost objectively at that mirror and not be, as you said earlier, like not feel shame, even though shame has its positives. Not feel shame for what you see.

Yeah, not. Not feel toxic shame.

Toxic shame.

You become a character flaw that nothing can be done about at that moment.

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Now let's get back to the episode. In terms of a trade, like someone you may have worked with in the past, for example, taking a heavy loss, you know, a significant loss, more than the usual sort of loss. And it really is, you know, playing on their mind, maybe even impacting future performance.

Absolutely.

What do you do in those circumstances?

Well, the first thing is that when you take the loss, you're going to have emotional chemistry in the body that you do not want. And the very first thing is you exercise, you want to burn that chemistry. And then, you know, from my standpoint in teaching people what to do, what you're doing is you're going back and reorganizing yourself around something that I call inherent worth.

I believe inherent there is a section of us that is inherently worthy of being loved, of being respected and stuff like that. And for me, we keep pushing that inherent worth away and we keep looking for performances to cover that. Making money. And you know, ultimately this isn't about making money. Look, in two generations, a very wealthy man is going to die and nobody's going to remember him. He may have foundation name, but the thing is, what do you give? Like this guy Mitch, you know, he's building a foundation, for God's sake. He's teaching people and funding them, okay, within his system of trading. And he's not doing anybody. He's taking people who are financially really challenged, which is. I probably wouldn't do that myself. That's a whole nother, you know, working with money conversations that people have about what the meaning of money is. He's doing that.

He's altered the way he perceives money, the way he believes in money, and he wants to help produce a better potential life for others. That's to me.

I'm hoping that that's the way that people, they will not remember be my name, but they remember.

Somehow that they became much more equipped to deal with the challenges of living.

Definitely. How important is that, do you think, the beliefs around money? Because the amount of people. Obviously everyone. I say obviously, but loads of people get into trading more so focused on the money element.

Oh yeah, right.

But unfortunately, a lot of people come to trading with very little money to begin with.

And in my opinion, that's a very bad recipe because a lot of the messaging they're getting is that trading brings easy money.

Yep.

It's easy to get rich from, from, from trading. And therefore they bring this very little money sometimes with no money already and they might be going into debt to try and trade, which is a whole different conversation.

I've actually had that happen where the guy was telling his wife that, yeah, we're, I'm doing great, everybody, everything's fine. And then the first thing she knew, that there was trouble on the horizon when they got the foreclosure messages and yeah, they lost their house. So yeah, it's easy.

How much of that is important to a trader in terms of like those beliefs around money and being able to change those perceptions around money?

Huge is that. Understand if you go back to the notion of cavemen, this is. These are guys living hundred thousand years ago. The concept of money just was irrelevant. If you dumped a truckload of money in front of them, they might use it as tinder to light, but they would have no concept of it. Yet at the same time, the brain is going to produce explanation, it's going to produce symbolic representation. It that's just what brains do. And the connection between money as a source of safety, as a source of power, as a source of status became embedded into.

Your whole sense of power, your whole sense of trading. If I have money, then this. And.

It'S interesting, you go into a trading community and the guy asks you to sit and just watch people talk and stuff like that. And what I know is that only 2 or 3% are profitable. And yet when you listen to this crowd of people talk, you would think every one of them are just turning it. What happens is they, they're in, they're living in self deception. And as long as they're living in self deception about their money beliefs, then they're stuck with the performance level that they're in. Is that.

In trading it's not about winning and losing, it's about performing? Is that your job is to perform and execute your plan every time, regardless of what happens. And if you do that, you extract more capital out of the market than you put in. What happens is so easy though. When you see something in that thing, that thing's coming near your stop and on, suddenly I can just give it some more room, blah, blah, blah, blah. You're gambling at that moment. The moment you decide to give it more room, you're gambling. A friend of mine, David Debay, is enormously successful trader. And when I first met him, he was an intuitive trader. He had been, he was a market maker. He was just all that stuff. And he runs his own, his runs his own group now. And in his group you have to be at an elevated level to take his intuitive training trades because he's not going to let people who are just getting into the business do that. And one day he said this, is this an intuitive trade we're getting in and only a certain group of people could do it. They got in. And what happened is that once David's in, he has certain markers that is going to tell him whether or not he's going to stay in that trade or not. It didn't hit those markers and he got out at small loss.

Next day his buddies come up and say, oh man, did you make all that money too? And it was the biggest thing this month. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they started saying, why didn't you do it? And he said, because it was an intuitive trade. And it didn't, it didn't meet my criterion. Once I got in for him, it was nothing. That's just the way you did. Everybody else though, gets seduced by the idea of money, of power, of the prestige and you know, look at me. So that's, you know, money is all involved in that and everyone is going to have to change those beliefs. And particularly scarcity thinking. You know, scarcity thinking is thinking that what you have will be taken from you.

And it just so happens that if you happen to have a mortgage, you're already primed for it. Yes, okay, very true. So you're looking at it that way and you're realizing that I also have to work through the scarcity, that there's never enough or it will be taken from me. And those beliefs are going to impact your trading phenomenally much less. If I make a bunch of money, people are going to like me and stuff like that. That, that just gets all the other stuff.

What about in terms of striving for perfection? Do you find that a lot of people come into trading and they, they're trying to be perfect? Trying to be. They assume that there is something they may learn or something that they can gather that will allow them to never lose and never really have any significant losses and only really win.

Oh, that's the perfectionist. That's a, that's actually a personality type I talk about. And the perfectionist believes that if you do everything right, you won't be wrong. And if I want my engineer, the civil engineer who built the bridge that I'm driving over, I want him to be a professional perfectionist. Of course I want the accountant I work with to be a perfectionist. I want the airline pilot that's, that's taking me through the sky to be a perfectionist. However, if you take those traits and put them into trading, you're going to lose. And so the thing is, is that perfectionism truly has to die. Perfectionism is really about anxiety that you're going to be wrong and you're trying to make sure that you prove you're right. And the truth is, is that it's not about being right or wrong, it's about whether or not you learn and whether or not you perform your plan. And.

The perfectionist believes if I just do a little more and then they miss the trade because they're just trying to accumulate, accumulate more data to be able to make a better, better read on the market, entry time and stuff like that. So perfectionism, that's, that's just. Sorry about that. That just, that just doesn't work.

Definitely. And you mentioned discipline earlier and obviously the ruler, in terms of discipline. Is there certain things that you advise traders to do in order for them to be more disciplined.

Get rest, not do stupid stuff like drink way too much sugary drinks and don't, don't all that stuff. But ultimately it's really more about training. And I use a technique that is fairly simple.

It's symbolic representation where I'm looking for you to find something in the world that has symbolic representation to you of discipline, of maintaining water under pressure. The Roman centurion. Other people may find Winston Churchill. Other people may find a lion, other people might find an owl. It doesn't really matter. It could be a person or not. But what you're looking at is going, you could even use like Gandhi. He was highly disciplined, you know, he, and he beat, he beat the British, you know. But what you're doing is you're finding the essence of that in something that resonates with you. And out of that you learn to feel that in the body when you, when you move that, when you take that movement from seeing an object as a symbol to where you can activate the emotional program and feel it. That feeling is the emotional chemistry in the body altering the way you perceive reality. And in acting, it's called method acting. Yes, I teach it. I teach it. And that's, that's how initially I start people going, you know, you need to find. And by the way guys, the hardest one they generally have is the caregiver self compassion they want. They believe that beating themselves up is going to help them become a better trader. And I'll ask them, well, when has that worked? And I say never. And at the same time, if you were to like, the easiest one to quickly get to is like Mother Teresa, you know, I understood that she wasn't required. I understand she was pretty mean. But the thing is, at other times, other people will find something that was compassionate toward them. In my own case, it was a dog. The dog that I grew up with is the only thing at that time that really had deep compassion for me and would do anything for me. And I actually look at the dog's name was Bullet. I actually think about, you know, it's really something funny who I am today. The reason there was a space there for healing and growth was because of a dog.

I'm sure it is for a lot of people that, you know, and they just might not realize it. Yeah, but what would you say in terms of, let's say if you were to give an exercise or like, what would be the easiest thing that traders can do who are struggling with their psychology? What would be the easiest thing you could say to them?

It goes to breathing. Breathing in the presence of challenge and diaphragmatic. And what you would do if you really wanted to take another level, have a, have a heart monitor sitting there measuring and find out.

Your heart rate at rest.

And then as you're breathing, as you're trading, you're looking over there and initially when you first start doing this exercise, you're going to see it bouncing around a lot. Mean it'd be cracking 100. It'll be in, you know, just really Crazy, undisciplined, untrained type of stuff. But over time, particularly as you look at that, look at the monitor and watching your heart rate and recognize that that heart rate and your breathing rate approximate one another. And as you come to the diaphragmatic breathing, you will actually see the. The heart rate go down. When I used to, when I was a therapist, it was very typical to work with panic disorder. And there's nothing worse than having a panic disorder when you're on a freeway around Charlotte, North Carolina.

Crunch time. But what happened is we would teach them by breathing and breathing alone, to be able to calm down, to calm down, to get to the side of the road and to recognize that if you do not fight the panic attack, if you breathe with it diaphragmatically, that the panic attack will be gone in 20 minutes. Well, instead of going to the hospital thinking you're having a heart attack. Yeah, okay. Yeah. But that is how powerful that simple skill is. And.

It'S 4,500 years old.

Hindu gurus were teaching it, yogas were teaching it. And probably the next thing is that breath and. And mindfulness have been worked together. That's the Buddha's work.

Would you say mindfulness if you were to break that down? Is it just being more aware of your thoughts, what's triggering them, why they're happening, Sort of taking a step back? Is that what you say, a good.

Way of saying it? It's stepping back out of thought. The way I define mindfulness is noticing what you notice instead of what's very common. When a person starts explaining to me, you know, all their problems, they don't know why in the world happening, it's just happening. They're blown away. They're not noticing what they're noticing. They're noticing in retrospect, but they're not noticing as things build up. And if you can catch it before it builds up physically, you can calm it back down. But mindfulness particularly, there is a exercise I use, and it's. It's called second order metacognition, where you are not just an observer noticing what you notice, but you're an observer observing the observer. And so you're looking at yourself, trading. And what you're saying is what makes this guy tick? And it's nothing personal this time. Nobody's. It's just like I'm observing that I'm observing the fear of losing is gripping, and you're going, why is the fear there? And usually, well, we come preloaded with it from an evolutionary standpoint but we also learn fear in our families and our communities, in our societies. Okay. I mean, where I live, there's a bunch of AK47s going off all the time.

Really?

Yeah. And be honest with you, it puts me on alert. I'm the only one in the, what I call the hood that, that doesn't own a gun. And I'm, you know, if I, if I. You only need the kind of gun that, that you need and I don't need a gun. I, I have, I have faith in the process.

I love that.

I love that. And one thing that is interesting actually that I'd love to get your opinion on is that there are a lot of traders out there who say, and part of my language they say psychology is trading. Psychology is what they mean by that though, when they say that is that, you know, all you need really is a proper edge, you know, trading edge. And once you have that, all those problems that, you know, those problems when it comes to mindset, dissipate. What are your thoughts when you hear that?

The first thing I ask, are you profitable? Yeah, that's a good.

That'S a very good question, Jaz.

And what you. And people who have become profitable, most of them have fought the interior war and they know that, you know, whether or not they do it themselves, whether or not they would work with me or somebody else, that's another issue. But the thing is, is that.

Most.

Of the people saying that they're not profitable, the vast majority are not profitable, but they have an idea of what the tough, tough trader is. And you just, you just out tough it. And the trading gods really don't care in that when you're looking at charts, you're actually looking at emotions. I had a guy that I worked with, he was working on his intuition and he's really great trader, traded with an eight figure account. And he and I are on zoom. We're looking and he pulls up a chart and he says, Randy, what do you think I see right here? And I'm talking to this guy who has been trading for 45, 50 years and all this kind of stuff. And I said, Christopher, I have no idea. You tell me what you see. He says, okay, I'll tell you what I see right here. I see blood. I see a bunch of retail traders hanging around here right at this line and I'm going to give them a little shake and I'm going to scare them to death. They're going to run and I'm going to suck their blood. And he proceeded to do that. And what it really boiled down to.

You can say, well, he had all this big money that he could actually shake a market, blah, blah, blah, blah. No, it was the observer. He was observing the charts, recognizing that there is a lot of scared money. And all he did is see the point that he could trigger that fear. And they, they ran and he, he had a feast.

Would you say that the charts are essentially a representation of.

A good trader will be observing emotion within the charts?

Yeah.

Right. Because before electronic trading I've had the pleasure of interviewing many pit traders.

Yeah. And love the snarly guys. Yeah, definitely.

I bet. Yeah, I bet you do. Because they really emphasized how a lot of the edge, you know, a lot of their performance was really derived off the emotion in the, in the pit. Noticing where people were showing that probably exactly what you've talked about with it, you know, tensed up or the breathing.

They're watching, they're, they're looking at the broker, they're looking at the power players. Yeah. And they're seeing what's going on between them. That's what they're betting on.

Exactly, exactly. I don't think personally after speaking with them, much has changed other than the environment, obviously being in the pits.

Well, what they say is I dang well know it's behind those screens, but I just can't see it.

That's it. That's right. That's right. And that's what I was getting at. But just going back to that, that, that phrase that people say in terms of trading psychology, is that the reason why I would agree with them and I want you to just bear with me.

Is that, yeah.

Based on this conversation, really is that trading psychology, I think to a lot of people's mind is it's the trading in terms of like trading mindset. Like, oh, you know, this trade maybe didn't work out or I needed more size or all trading related. When really it's psychology. It's the emotions as we're talking about, it's observing those emotions. So is not really to do with trading at all. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Actually I would go one step further is psychology comes out of emotion. And so you're looking at, again at an emotional base. And if you happen to be a human being, is you're primed for being anxious or you're primed for being aggression. Jane Goodall was once asked, what's her favorite animal? And they all assumed chimpanzees because she spent what, 40 years studying them. And she said, well, it's not Chimpanzees, they're way too much like humans. Says my favorite animal is a dog.

But the thing is that when people complain about the psychology, we like to think that thinking is just the last thing that happens. It is in neurobiology it's considered to be a neural behavior and it's electrical behavior at that. And so I can understand how people would complain about that. At the same time is that ultimately at the very bottom of it, we are not psychological creatures, we are emotional creatures who rationalize.

And how that animal that is us rationalizes produces what I would call the emotional intelligence of the psychology. And that's what I'm working with. But I can understand where, I can understand where people would question psychology. And what I do is it's just, it's not worth my breath talking to them.

Of course. No, of course.

I just give them another two or three years, let them, let them come around.

That's right. But I think, I think it's both though, isn't it? I think a lot of people who say that a lot of the time don't have any edge anyway either. So. Really? Because I'm guessing it would probably be hard to work with someone on their psychology when they don't have any trading edge.

You know, it's really interesting, it's very common, is that as a person develops this committee of the mind and really starts learning how to run this plant called the human body is they recognize their methodology is just missing big huge chunks and they have to go back and refine their methodology based on a new psychology arising that is more efficient in trading? Definitely, it's very common.

Is there ever any times when you identify who you're working with that, hey, you know, you're, you seem more suited towards longer term trading, but you keep trying to fight with the markets on scalping and short term trading.

Do you ever find, well, all human beings would be better off if they did swing trading? Yeah, I mean, understand the, in, in swing trading there are only a few moments where the stress levels go up and you really have to work. Whereas day trading, you know, if you're, if you're producing three to four trades a day is the level of inflation intensity and stuff like that that's going on is pretty remarkable. And to keep that mental edge, it's not easy. It's not easy. And I, I see a lot of people who start in day trading, they end up in swing trading and it's because they, they can have three or four days to two weeks worth of time to, to not get cranked up. Understand your. Our ancestors spent 90% of their time in what we call rest, digest. Everybody's just chilled out, everybody's real cool and hanging around the campsite. Only 10% of the time was there stress.

In today's world, where we are now about 90% of the time we're stressed and 10% of the time we rest. And when you're trading, it's exponentially higher.

Yeah.

So if you're going to be a day trader, you're going to have to really take care of yourself. You're going to have to take those hour breaks and take 15, 20 minutes. Just absolutely do anything but think. Walk, dog, go for a walk, do whatever, but don't think, allow the refueling to go through. So there's just.

You know, my bread and butter is day trading. You know, I'm, I'm.

I wouldn't, we wouldn't be here if it weren't for day traders and their needs. And so, you know, what happens is that most of my time is generated about the brain on stressful events. Now it's not the swing traders that come along, they're pretty far and few between. You know, I don't, I don't see them very much and.

And there's not as much intensity. There are certain moments that, you know, certain things are gonna have to be done. You're gonna have to get your psychology together. It's not uncommon. When I'm working with a trader, we will be taking micro moments, a quarter of a second in a trade management situation and we're actually extracting that, elongating it, and we're trying to make changes about beliefs triggering into emotional action.

That occur within a quarter of a second.

In terms of preparation, as you told, is that something you're working on as well? Prep, like the preparation before coming to the markets?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. You're fooled.

In my opinion, you're a fool to walk into the markets without a mind that is ready for the tail task in front of it. And I know that if you're an alpha, that mind is good for about maybe five minutes. And I know that if, if you're more of a typical trader, that mind is good for 15, 20 minutes and you need to be checking into it, you need to be reasserting it because it's going to start drifting off. It's.

That'S, it's just the name of the game. So you have to be very vigilant with the mind you bring to the.

Game in terms of the probability Aspect, how are you having to kind of help people and guide people into thinking in terms of probabilities all the time?

I mean, we have. Our evolution has us believing the deception that we're going to control outcome. And in caveman times, that would be called control environment. And what happens is, it was never true, but caveman had to believe it, or you and I are not sitting here today. And in trading, what happens is that.

Programming still there? It was very successful. It's not going to go away. And you're going to have to be able to get on top of it to be able to produce the mine consistently that can trade. And the one thing I also want to say is probably the biggest. The biggest thing I see is a trader will finally master his fears to a degree that allows him to be profitable. And he thinks, I've got it. Yep. Hey, it's great. And what he doesn't see is the second demon getting onto the road. Success.

Is that when you start winning, you start going, look at me. Yay, dopamine. Cocaine starts pulsing through. And what happens is, I don't know anybody that would take a line of cocaine, snort it, and then trade. That would be crazy because you're. You're in exhilaration, Everything's wonderful, you're euphoric, everything's going good. Everything. Everything's going to turn out fine. And it really screws up a perfectly good trading mind. And, you know, ultimately, that's what happens when you. When you start winning, you get you for it, because you start thinking, I got it. I finally have it. You never have it. What you have is you learn a system that is able to hack the ancient brain that we have from our caveman times and soothe it for periods of an hour or so. And then you need to take care again, because if you've taken losses, you've triggered your emotional brain to either fear getting in or want to get that money back. And you have a lot of observation you have to do. You have a lot of discipline that has to be managed, and you have a lot of soothing that you have to do to be able to keep good thinking. And you have to always be in a position where you're courageous to face your fears. Yeah. Trading.

Trading in a nutshell. And Randy, I could sit here all day, really, I really enjoyed this conversation.

It's been a lot of fun.

It has been really. And everyone at home, you know, drop a comment of your biggest takeaway from this episode. You know, like, subscribe. But more importantly, the links for Randy will be in the description, so make sure you check those out as well. Other episodes are on screen, and until next time, everyone take care.