Sticking to Your Rules When the Trade Goes Against You

There's a magic moment and it is right at orderfill. Interestingly, at orderfill, and believe me, it's one of the biggest problems psychologically that people have in trading. If you're not right at order, fill everything after that in trade, management is just waiting to explode on you. But let's take a look at this first. At order, Phil, you are no longer an offensive coordinator on a on American football team. You're not looking for opportunity anymore. You've done that. But now at order, Phil, oh, you're in the game. The yards count against you. You can take losses now. And what happens is a defensive coordinator thinks differently the way an offensive coordinator thinks. The defensive coordinator wants to limit losses. He knows they're going to be losses, but he wants them small. He doesn't want to give up the big play. So you get it is that you have been sitting there getting ready to exploit opportunity and you finally get in. Order's been orders in, it's filled.

And you didn't check yourself. You didn't think, I need to maintain the mind right now. And then you're going along and all of a sudden, guess what? You know your rules up in this moment, you've got them and clear you, you can just say them in your sleep. You know what you should and shouldn't do. You've practiced them all that stuff. You know it. You have great knowledge of trading and how to trade. Then what happens is that trade suddenly decides not to obey your hypothesis and it starts turning against you and closer and closer and closer to the stop out. And what do you think's happening? The question is this, are you going to be able to maintain your rules or are you going to get emotionally hijacked? The truth is because you weren't prepared at order fill by the time you got there and your hate of losing and all of a sudden you're sitting there and you know you're supposed to be able to take losses, but you're not prepared for it. And all of a sudden, before you know it, boom, they're gone. But the deal is, what we want to look at is how can you lock into your rules so that even when a trade is coming against you, you maintain that lock on those rules. You're sitting there and you can't control the outcome, but what you're doing is you're following your rules, which gives you an edge. Now everybody learns that, oh, I can do that. That's knowledge of trading. And they get great knowledge. But here, right at this moment, that Trade's turning against you. All your rules fly out. Suddenly all that knowledge you have.

It'S out the window. Without the emotional intelligence building those skills to be able to calm emotions down, and not just calm emotions, but to actually sit there and say, what emotions do I need present to produce the kind of thinking that can play this game under these circumstances. That's emotional intelligence, friend. What I'm getting is this, is that you and everybody else that wants to be successful in trading, what they're going to have to do, they're going to have to negotiate a completely different way of understanding the way knowledge and emotional intelligence work together. If you think you're just going to push those emotions out of the way, well, they're going to bite you. If you can ignore them, strong will them. No, they grow to being a 600 pound gorilla. The key is, how do I create the emotional state that allows me to think calmly.

Patiently, in a disciplined manner and use that wisdom that I have, that knowledge I have under these pressure situations, friends, that's the ticket. And where you can really look and find out where you're going wrong and how you need to work is take a look at your trading account. Your trading account is your best friend. And as a best friend, it's going to tell you things that you probably don't want to hear. What it's doing. It's telling you point blank.

Whether or not you are producing a set of thinking from your beliefs about your ability to manage uncertainty that is able to extract more capital out of the markets than you give back in. If those beliefs are not effective, no matter how fervently you believe them, the trading account is going to show you that in no uncertain terms. The deal is we are bred, we are built to not want to hear bad news. We much rather have a soothing lie than an inconvenient truth. We will believe that lie. We will produce denial. We will produce distraction. We will produce aggression in order to escape having to do anything. It's a standard pattern that's already been set up. And what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to learn how do I interrupt that standard pattern that fires immediately? Okay, you're seeing that the knowledge by itself is not enough to cool that emotional pattern down. You've got to have the other knowledge there, but you have to have the emotional intelligence to say, I know that when I start coming in here, suddenly that money is at risk. And that money is not just money. Like legal tender, no to the caveman. Brain that you're built upon, Your new brain's built upon that thinking brain.

Money to it is life and death. When you start seeing that thing going against you, caveman brain inside you is looking at going, oh, my God, I'm being attacked. I'm being threatened. My very existence is being threatened. I need to do something. I need to fight back. I don't want to take that loss because it meant me losing. So all of a sudden, you're going, wow, oh, this is a lot more than just money I'm losing. No, you're triggering ancient, ancient, ancient patterns that are built for your survival. Unless you learn how to work with them, you're going to get stuck here over and over again. Believe me, the trade going against you is one of the big deals that you have to solve, and you're doing okay. What I need is a mind that when I hit that I'm in control of my emotional nature. That's giving rise to the kind of perception, thinking I can do the next piece is you're going to have to rethink winning and losing. The deal is your caveman ancestors had to control outcome. They had to win or they were somebody else's meal.

We no longer have lions, tigers, and bears, but what we have is we still have the caveman brain, and we're having to learn to cool it down. That's the emotional regulation I teach. You're going to have to produce a mindfulness so that you can say, what are the dominant thoughts playing out in my mind right now? Are they the ones that I need? And then you're going to need to learn to pull those up. The dominant emotional programs that lead to effective trading. This is the marriage. And what you discover, it's not really about winning and losing. It's about performing. Caveman believed that he had to win and not lose for his life's sake. As traders, you're having to train the brain something to something very new. Winning really is about performing. Well, if you stick to your plans, if you lock into your plans and follow through, win or lose, from a trading standpoint, you've won.

You are working the one thing that you can control, the mind you bring to performance. Okay, and you're using your edge, your method edge, with that new psychological edge to put yourself in the best favorable position.

To actually make money. But the deal is your focus. Your goal is to maintain performance. Mind the winning and losing will take care of themselves. And you come to a moment where winning is really only landing on the right side of probability relative view. And losing is only landing on the wrong side of probability relative to you. And then your trading account is giving you a world open to you about the beliefs that you're bringing to the arena.

Friends, this is what you can control. You can find the courage within you to turn toward that fear and to bring compassion to it, to help bring the change, to reorganize it into higher functioning that you can learn. Want to know more about how to do this? Come to our website. Watch more of the YouTube videos. Just check it and start going. What would it be like if I were able to control myself, where I stick to my rules when that trade goes against me? It'd be a different world, wouldn't it? Come, friends. Come and learn. Come and learn the skill sets you need to be able to accomplish that trader state of mind. And when you come to that place, that place where the trade's going against you, you still maintain your rules.

You're disciplined, you're courageous, you're calming. And you have clarity of mind. That's the trader's state of mind. Come. Learn how. Thank.

Sam.