THE MINDSET THAT YOU SHOULD HAVE AS A TRADER - ICT MOTIVATION

You are a cheetah.

Stalking in the high grass.

And there's a herd out there. They think they're safe because they're close. They're all doing the same thing, eating the grass. They're hanging around. Same people doing the same harmonic retail. Elliott Wave. You're the cheetah. You're sitting out there in the long grass. You're just waiting. You're just waiting and waiting and waiting. And you see that one.

Gazelle just takes a step too far out and puts his stop loss right there. Easy for the taking.

The herd is going to move away. But that one.

Animal that doesn't know what it's doing, it doesn't shift when it should. And now there's a fair value gap.

In 72 miles an hour. In seconds, your ass is there pouncing on it.

That's what I'm envisioning in price. Do I know that person that's losing money? No. Do I know the person that has all their hopes and expectations of making money on that trade? Do I know them? Do I? Am I going to see them? No. Am I worried about them? No. Do I feel bad that they lost money? No.

I have to eat. You have to eat. Everybody signs the same risk disclosures when you come to this market. Everybody understands that you can lose and lose more than you have. I have no qualms about it, period. It's way it is. It's a jungle out here. You either are prey or you're a predator.

I don't walk around or teach my students to be a the lamb. This is the way it is, folks. You have to have teeth and you have to have claws. And you need to know when to use them and how to use them.

You want to come in here and play the nice guy, Roll. And everybody you know is going to love you. And you never say anything wrong or never off color, whatever. Bottom line is, that's not what this is. This is war. We're talking about money. Real money, lots of it. And major entities out there that do not want you to be doing this successfully, they're gonna roll on that. And I'm teaching you how to beat the out of that, okay? Consistently. To be able to just constantly walk in there every. Every single week you go to work, do you have to learn your job? Every. Every new. Every, every new week that you go there, do you have to relearn your job? No. You know what you're doing? You're bored. You can't stand being there. It's the same thing for Trading, you need to get your trading to be just like that.

And for the folks that are struggling, you can see the draw. I'm gonna play devil's advocate for a moment. Let's say for a moment that you can determine the next draw on liquidity. You can do that all by yourself without me. Wonderful. I'm proud of you. That's. That's the number one thing, is if you can do that, you will always find setups.

But if you can do that and you can see how trades form but you can't execute on them, how do you fix that? Well, you don't have a model. You just have a familiarity. Okay, the market should be turning here. Well, what do you do? Well, what is it telling you? Is there an order block? Is there a fair value gap? Is there a breaker? Is it institutional order flow entry drill there? Is it.

Good grief. Is it optimal trade entry? You know, any number of things.

Is it an Artemis pattern?

My nod to my charter members. Oh, here comes a whole new wave of videos by everybody on YouTube. The. The ICT. Artemis Trade. He never loses. That's the guys that are out there saying you never lose. Doing Silver Bullet Trace. You shouldn't do that. That's false advertising. Okay? You're gonna have a losing trade. Don't. I never said you're never gonna have a losing trade.

But you're gonna find consistency using Silver Bullet because it's time based and it's always going to form every single day. It's there. The problem is you want to form on your favorite time frame. You want it to fit your already established expectation or preconceived notions about what price should do. And you're not following the rules. So, yes, you're doing wrong and you're not getting the results. And that's expected, right? If I give you a recipe and say, this is the ingredients, this is the order you do it, and this is what you should expect as a result. And you substitute something, okay? You leave a key ingredient out and replace it with what you think is better suited for that. You're not going to get the same result.

And don't complain that you didn't get the result that was promoted by me that you should be getting. If you're doing something outside the scope of the instructions and parameters I've given. If you come to me as an educator, as a mentor, you're trusting me enough to give me your attention initially. So why don't you. Following the rules that I've placed in front of you, you're Failing. You are failing. Not me, you are. So you have to change that. And it's always going to be you. When I mess up and I fail, nobody's fault but mine.

That's accountability. You have to be accountable to yourself. And some people just don't want to be accountable. They want to have the luxury of being able to blame somebody else because they up they didn't do something right. And in this industry, guess what, Jack, you don't get that luxury. It's always you. Because I don't run a signal service. If you make money, congratulations. You did it right. Well done. I am proud of you. If you lose money, eat that because you did it on your own. What do you mean eat that? Learn from it. It's hard medicine. It's a bitter pill. Swallow it. It's going to make you better. It will make you better. It's going to make you the trader you want to be. You think that it's always going to be the sugar highs that make you the best trader that you're ever going to be. Give me the stuff that works. Icc all the. You're going to learn from all the cuts, the abrasions, the bruises, the losses. That's what I learned from.

And you're going to learn from it too. But you have to allow that to happen. You can't tiptoe around thinking I'm going to avoid losing trades. You're not. Because the more you try to do that, it's going to land right in your lap. But every single time I blew out an account, it was on the heels of a good run and I wanted to feel good again because it was wearing off too fast. The same hour, walking around looking like, man, I made more money than I make a whole month, a whole month of work in this job. I made more money than that in this one trade, man. Like if I just did that once a month, I don't need to have a job. Yeah, that's great. It's wearing off. I gotta do it again. And you think that you can just go into the market and find something like that again, forgetting the fact that it just took you two and a half, three weeks for that price run to continue to complete and go to its target. You're. You get tore up by the chemical imbalances in your brain when you win. And you don't even know what that feels like yet because you haven't done it yet, you haven't won, you haven't found consistency. And when that achievement is reached, you have a whole new level of learning to go through. It's something, folks. It's a learning process to grow accustomed to being profitable.

It sounds like it's something. There's no way everybody should have no problem adjusting it. No, it's weird. I don't know how to. I don't know how to articulate it where it would make sense. I've wrestled with this topic for a long time to be able to teach it to students. And that's why I say you'll know when you go through it. You'll know exactly what I mean, because there's no way for me to articulate in words to make you understand that it is extremely stressful making money in the beginning.

When you. When you find consistency and you find profitability, it's stressful because first of all, you want to do more of it when you do it. And you're going to have to wrestle with that. Do I. Am I over trading? Am I. Am I pushing too much? Am I trying to push the edge too far? Am I overstaying my welcome? You're going to have a whole new learning experience that you haven't ever even considered yet because you're not even profitable.

I promise you. If you ask anybody, do it. Ask anybody that's found profitability. If this isn't true, it's a weird. It's a weird state of mind because it's like it's too good to be true. That's what. It's like a dream light state. It's. It's like a. That's really the one of the topics in the title of my. One of my books, the chapter A Dream Like State, where I do my best. And I already know because what I have in outline isn't going to be satisfying, but it's enough to introduce you to the idea, which is what I'm doing here. When you find consistency and profitability, it's going to feel like at any time it's going to stop working. And some of you already have that mindset that come to me all the time. Aren't you afraid that you're teaching this and the market's going to adjust to that? What the you mean it's going to adjust to it? This is the market. This is the market. This is exactly what the market does. So the market's not going to try to do something it doesn't do. This is what it does. I mean, you're. You're who you are.

You're who you are, and that's just the way it is. You can't be a dog. You might try to say you identify as a dog, but you're a human being. You are a person. This is how you are. You can't be something that you aren't. The market isn't going to stop being this way. That's why I tell you all the time, unequivocally, there's no way, there's no way that this is going to ever change. It's never going to change. Never. It's never going to change. You doing it wrong, that's going to happen. You losing money, doing something incorrectly, that's going to happen. But if you know how to trade and you learn how to control yourself, a losing trade or two or three. Okay, stop, recalibrate, let me get my bearings again. And then go back to doing what you're supposed to be doing. But you have to learn how to pause. Pause when you're losing money and pause when you made money. It's not like you want to go out there and get another hit and get high on success. The people that succeed that are long term, consistently profitable, they know when to sit still. And that's a very hard thing to teach. It's, it's hard, it's hard to teach that. So I just come up with general rules that when you have a really good, nice run, stop, be content, live there for a little while, a whole week. But there's so many other trades. Yes, there is. The market's always moving, but you're insisting upon doing something because the availability is there versus building a foundation of mental capital.

That's the, that's the point. You can have whatever you want to have in your funded accounts or your real accounts, but you really aren't trading with that. You're trading with what you're willing to lose in your head. That's real. That's the, that's the threshold that you don't want to ever cross. What does that mean? Say you have a ten thousand dollar account. You have ten thousand dollars in your trading account. And you know, you think 2, 2%, you can take that. Well, if you're new, 2%'s too high.

Way too high. But let's assume that that's what it is. In reality, you're uncomfortable if it gets to 1%. So you might initially put your stop loss there at what would be considered 2%. As soon as it starts approaching that 1% threshold and drawdown while you're in the trade, that's what causes you to collapse the trade. So what's your mental capital, 1%, that's your real capital.

Have you considered that when you're doing your, your trades, most of you probably haven't. That's a secret that unlocks performance that you've never even dreamed of. Because when you excel in knowing where your threshold is and you say, okay, I'm content with that. That's why I always said be content with enough. What is enough? It's going to be uniquely different for all of you. Fifteen thousand dollar winning trade may not be significant for some of you. For other people, that's a whole year for and I'm done, I gotta do now. So it's a, it's a matter of personal preference and where you are, what your expectations, what your skill set provides for.

But your mental capital, the way you build that up is when you have the victory like this and it's, it's done well. And you may have never taken a trade on this, but remember in your journaling, you're going to be recording it like you saw it coming and you did. You're tricking your brain with pseudo experience. So you're always constantly laying down foundation psychologically because this is where all this battle is won. It's not in the chart, it's in your head. Because you can talk yourself out of a winning trade easily and you can talk yourself out of a short term drawdown that will eventually pay out if you just stuck to the model and what you're trying to trade. But your mental capital needs to be increased. How do you increase your mental capital? Because you can't deposit mental money. It's experience. That experience factor is something that goes largely untouched in terms of teaching. Mark Douglas didn't talk about it enough. He didn't really get to the grasp of. You have to fortify yourself between trades. When you've done something correctly.

Sit still.

Feel what it feels like to be content not needing to go to that next trade. How do you know you're ready to go in and trade with live funds? How do you know when you're ready to do a funded account challenge? When you're not driven by the passion to get into a next new trade? If you're the person or persons that always tweet to me when I'm calling something out and delivers, you're the first person in the line that says what's next? What's going to do next? You're not ready, bro. You are not ready. You're a fiend. You're literally cracked out. You're, you're equipped to have a crack pipe in your mouth and you're literally out of rocks and you want to get the next one you're feeding, you're not ready. You are absolutely not ready. The people that are like, yeah, I'm gonna take this week off, but the market's gonna do this. Yeah, sorry, that's someone that's got the right mindset if they're already consistent in terms of what they can see and forecast and price action, and they can take themselves away from the market even when they know there's something coming. That's maturity. That is a, a skill set that if you can forge that before you press into real money, that factor of.

Well, discipline, it will serve you so well.

But you all think it's just the stuff in the chart, that's what you need, the new ICT gimmick, the new something set up or model, whatever. And it's not. I've given you, I've given you so many things already, but you are the missing final piece of the puzzle. And you don't want to believe me because it's painful. I'm going to constantly remind you, every time I talk in the Twitter space, I'm reminding you. Sometimes gently, but in this one, it probably hurts a little bit. It probably feels off putting. Don't hit the. Don't hate the messenger. Okay, Dr. ICT, okay. I'm telling you, this is the medicine you need. It doesn't taste good, but it helps you. It makes you better. And it's important for you to grow and understand how to do this correctly and not hurt yourself.