Mastering the Urgency to GET IT BACK!
A trader who was up 12% in a month blew it all trying to get back losses, driven by family beliefs about what women deserve. The speaker explains revenge trading as a caveman-brain response and offers tools to build emotional discipline instead.
Chapters
Foreign.
You can see that over trading and revenge trading is ugly. You know, you don't want to go there. And yet what happens is one of the most common problems in trading. It keeps happening over and over again, despite all the interventions. Now, the deal for me is when I look at these two phenomenon, revenge trading and overtrading, what I recognize is that they're actually symptoms of something deeper. And often we don't look to the deeper root of the problem. We want to stay up here and attack it behaviorally and make it go away by willpower or by some fancy words we say to ourself or some visualizations that get away from it. But the thing is, the problem is occurring in the emotional brain, that which I call caveman brain. And it just so happens it doesn't think, it emotes, it reacts. It is built.
From, oh, hundreds of millions of years ago. And as humans, 68 million years ago, to be able to sit there and go, you know something, there's a change in status and the environment. We have to change now. Now, back then, 100,000 years ago, 200,000 years ago, 50,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, it's a pretty pricey thing. It was a pretty dangerous world. Not like we don't get attacked by sabertooth tigers walking out of my house, big bears, all that's gone. But that was common. So I want you to see is that when they had a chance of like, you know, taking advantage of something, they had to jump on it right then, or that opportunity to be good gone and gone forever. And also conversely, what happens is that they feel attacked. Like the trade going against you, they viewed that as an attack on their being, their biology, their life. And they weren't fighting for capital restoration. They were fighting for their very lives. They were going to fight into the last breath. Now, we've now gone from just the behavior to an understanding of the evolutionary psychology that lies behind it. Okay, that's what we would call nature. Now let's take it one step further though. Let's take a look at this in a case study that examines this and really looks at it. And the case happens to be a female who is a very good trader. She has a mid six figure account. She has been living a very good life. Thank you. For the last five or six years. She's made that 3%. Okay. And yet in her background, there is still a tendency to over trade and it comes out of the blue. And what happens, obviously, once you over trade and you take a loss, you want to get it back. You want to get it back right now. And suddenly that urgency to get in and take advantage of something, to prove something suddenly turns into a life and death situation of get it back, get it back before the save the toothed tiger eats me. So what happens with this particular woman is she grew up in a very, very affluent home. And it just so happens it was very patriarchal. That means everything was about the men. They didn't view women as being capable of handling real money. They could use spare change, they could do a lot of things. But in terms of real money, that's something that the men in that family, from the grandfather to the father to her brother, okay, didn't believe that females had. They were really supposed to be, you know, oh, they're so quaint. They're supposed to be, they're supposed to be homemakers, they're supposed to be mothers. And the men will take care of them. That whole patriarchal thing. At the same time, this client is born.
To lead. She is born to grow beyond her, her limitations. And what happens is as a child, she would beg, she would do everything she could to her grandfather and then to her father about giving her some money to be able to do things herself, plan adventures, do that. And it was, oh, you're a girl, you can't do that. That's what men do. She grew up there and she began to rebel.
Do you sense the problem going on here and that rebellion? What she really wants though, she wants the respect of her grandfather and her father.
She wants them to know that she can handle real money. But there is a wall there that she's not going to penetrate. So she acts out, she gets into trouble. She does some really crazy things as a teenager and young adult. She gets her act together. She becomes a traitor. And she goes in and has built up what most traders would envy, what she has been able to do. But she's at the moment of living well to producing wealth. That's where her little niche is. Okay? She knows that she's right at the edge and she's a hard worker, she's smart, she has all that stuff. And it just so happens one month she produced a 12% ROI. Now and again that's on a mid figure, six figure account. This is, this is, this is cooking. And what happened, she was very proud. She finally reached this moment and now she was ready to go and celebrate. She, she was quitting. She said, you know something, I'm not going to even. It's Friday afternoon, early Friday afternoon. I'm going to put it aside. And I'm just going to do my paperwork, I'm going to do the, I'm going to do the month end work. And she's doing undo that. And occasionally she'd go over and just check the markets, but nothing was there. No solid setups were forming, nothing. So just pushed it away. And then she finally finished her paperwork and she was beginning to say, well, what am I going to do now?
I want you to hear that. Then when she said, I'll just look one more time, and she looks one more time and she is grabbed.
And before she knows it, she has an urgency to enter a trade that's not even there. She does not see a valid setup. She jumps in anyway, of course, loses. And then the cycle begins and blows up. That 12% that she had at like 1:01pm on Friday afternoon has now become 3%. She stops, okay? And you know, a 3% return on investment is not a bad deal, okay? And it would, it would produce a professional trader, you know, but the 12 is extraordinary. Okay? She was showing that she had the capacity of making real money. There's the ticket. What she's got is a case of sabotage. She's growing up. She has tremendous respect and love and admiration for particularly her grandfather and father. And what she wants to do is prove to them that she can handle real money. The very thing that they kept telling her that, oh, you can't handle it. You can handle spending money, you can handle little stuff, but no, not the big stuff. And what she had done that month.
She had proved him wrong. She had proved him. She's in the league of really elite traders. And then at the same time when that happened, what triggers is a very Olympic pattern.
That says, how dare you? Who says that you're worth real money? Who says you could work with real money? You're disobeying. And what happened is she's in a fight right now. She's in that rebel that's going to fight back. I can do this. And she's also in this thing of where she's grown up in this system. It's what she sees through. And that fight ends up moving over into over trading and then revenge trading. And what she's done fundamentally based on her family system rules.
She got out of the zone of her acceptance and she blew herself up. And she's left with pity. Then she's left with like, I don't deserve this, I don't deserve this. The truth is.
She was going to buck up against that particular ceiling it's in her nature to want to lead, to want to grow. And at the same time as in breaking through that, she has to deal with the history. She has to deal with that history saying, no, girls don't get a hold of real money. They don't go out and make fortunes. And yet there she was, she was proving that she could do it. And then suddenly she sabotages herself, pulls her back down to where she's just fighting for respect again. That's where she's been for five years, fighting for today. Oh, yeah, she's making money. She lives by herself. She has good income and stuff like that, but she doesn't have wealth.
She was right at it. She literally, in this particular case, she snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory. And what I want you to recognize is it all had to do with triggering an old, old, old belief that she inherited from her family system for generations and generations and generations. It is time now where she's going to have to learn to love herself, to apply that love and say, you know something, I can rebuild this. I can become that and do it from a ground of being that says, yes, I am worthy. I don't have to prove anything to my family system, to the patriarchy. All I really have to do is to show myself that I love myself enough and I have the discipline, I have the courage and I can calm myself so that I don't do stupid stuff, sabotage myself and go back and get sucked back in to the currents of that family system. Doesn't mean you can't love that family system. It just means you have to step beyond it, let them go and realize that you have always been inventing this. Friends, you can do this too. Come and learn. Come and learn about how you can take all that stuff where you've been over trading and revenge, trading and realizing, get down to the bottom of it. If you're a serious trader, you're going to have to do this and then go. You know something? I am ready to find a new ground in my being where I am inherently worthy of building this new wealth.
Okay? It's not about my net worth. It's not about my self worth. It's not about whether I matter. It's about my competency, the emotional intelligence that I bring into this moment. Because the truth is, I am becoming captain of my own destiny. I don't hear the voices of my ancestors calling out my name to tell me where I can go. I'm now at the fork in the road and I choose the one less traveled.
Watch the video.
Come to the webinar, really take a look at the reading that I've provided this time and decide you're at the fork. Do you really want to take that fork? You're going to have to take full responsibility for your results. You're going to have to come to the moment of where, yes, I am responsible for the beliefs that I bring and project onto the markets, and I can face them and I can master them to begin working on a higher level, real money. Be well.
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