The Secret to Becoming a Consistently Profitable Trader

Welcome. You know, when people first start trading, they see the potential and they go, wow, I can see how this thing can get big. And I can do all the wonderful things I want to do with my life that I've wanted to. It's going to be great. Then they start trading, and the money becomes live. Before you know it.

It'S very different. What's the secret? What's the secret about becoming a consistently profitable trader? You know, you see some people do it and they do it big, but most just go in and they fall flat on their heads. And where it starts, friends, is understanding about winning and losing in power. You have a section of your brain, the emotional brain, that I often call the caveman brain, and that is very active part of your brain. It is producing 95% of the decisions you make on a daily basis. The thinking brain doesn't necessarily know about it. I mean, that thinking brain's got language and stuff like that. And the emotional brain does not have language. It has emotions. And it's their emotions that are interacting with the environment, the markets. And the moment there's a change in status out there, there's automatically an emotion that appears, whether or not the thinking brain knows it or not. And here's the confusion is that we come in with an enormous bias to win. I want to win. I want to make things happen. I want to make money. Okay? Everybody does. Yet at the same time, the caveman brain that actually is doing your emotional trading knows nothing about money. Money is just an alien concept. If you gave it a boatload of money, it would look and not even know, have any idea. But caveman is your ancestor, and you carry his brain, the emotional brain, the survival brain, in you. And it has no idea what money is, but it knows what the power to survive is. And that's a lot about this cognition we have. You think, oh, my gosh, I'm going to go in and win. I'm going to make money. I'm going to have power, power, money. And that money becomes a representation of your power to survive, your power to have status, your power to be safe, okay? And all of a sudden, you take a brain that was developed on the African savannas six and a half million years ago. It became thinking probably 50,000 years ago. And you're expecting it.

This is what's so funny. You're expecting it to be able to handle the confusion, to handle the uncertainty of trading. It can't. It views taking a loss as death. Think about it. If you take a loss, oh, it's a monetary loss. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can handle it. I've got this plan that just keep my. Keep my losses small. Well, nobody clued in. The emotional brain, your caveman brain. You know, taking a loss to it was serious business.

It was life and death.

To die. To lose was to be consumed by like a saber toothed tiger for a meal. So, yeah, if you get into a trade and it start turning against you and you're taking a loss, it's going bigger and bigger. It's getting close to your stop. Your caveman is going to be activated immediately. There's a change. There's danger in the environment, friend.

Okay? And what it's going to do is it's going to fight to the very end. It's going to fight to its death. It'll never want to take that loss. That loss is so powerful. So we have a problem. Already we realize that that brain that activates under stressful conditions, uncertainty. Because when it experiences uncertainty, what your brain does, what that caveman brain does, is all of a sudden it feels very vulnerable. It fills confusion. And it's built not to do that. It is built to control the environment, control outcome. It's built to make things happen. It's built not to lose. And here you are.

All of a sudden, it's coming on a loss. Your thinking brain blown out of the water by the urgency of the emotional brain to address this death threat. So that's what you've got, friends. The question is, now that you've got it.

What are you going to do? The evolutionary psychology is there, okay? You do not want to lose. You want to win. Because if you win, you survive the day. Yeah, you survive the day. And you also, because you win, you get prestige, you matter. That's something that all homo sapiens want now. But there's one more. We've got one thing that stands in your way, that's evolutionary psychology. And you're dead against it. And understand it operates in the background. Your thinking brain doesn't even know it's there. It thinks, it's quite the beast is so tame. But when, when the money's real and the loss is really imminent, it's activated and it just overwhelms the thinking brain. You see this problem now? Let's compound it. Let's talk about your brain's mission when you're born, is to build you, to adapt you to survive in the world. That world is your family of origin. It's your extended family. It's your community. It's your culture. And Most of us grow up in a world that's highly competitive. We want to win.

You know, we don't want to lose. And we're taught that from our parents. If you're in a competitive family, it's all about winning. Okay? Then you get in trading and find out something. You have no control over whether or not you win or lose.

In everyday life. You think you do unless a black swan shows up, you can control by will. You can. You can be. You can just tough it up. But in trading, the trading gods just don't care. So now we've gotten this evolutionary psychology, and now we've gotten this basically the adaptation process of your brain building you to survive in a particular world. And it just so happens it wants to win. Yeah. It matters when it wins. You prove yourself when you win and you get status. Okay? And what you don't want to do if you grew up in a competitive family is you don't want to lose. Oh, bummer. I hate losing. I hate losing. How many times have I heard that as a trader? Psychologist. And yet.

And yet.

The successful trader wins by being expert.

At losing. Yeah. Yeah. He doesn't get sucked into hating to lose. No. It's a skill that you develop and you hone under the crucible of the uncertainty and the risk of losing capital. And you learn to be able to guess what, take the loss. When your guess is not right, it's no big deal. You're not wedding to your hypothesis. If you go in and find out it's not right, you get out as soon as you can. With a small loss, you live to trade another day. Okay? But in a competitive family, you don't want to lose. You hate losing. Losing means you don't have status. You're not. You're not. You're not worth anything. You don't matter.

You want to win. You want to make things happen.

Okay? And ultimately, what you discover is a successful trader is not trying to make things happen. He's managing that beast, that caveman brain, so that it's okay to lose. In fact, he trains himself to say, that was a really good loss. I look at my trade and say, was this a method mistake? No, that's pretty much my strategy. Was it a psychological mistake? No. I acted. I had a good, solid mindset. Then what happened is I just experienced probability, uncertainty of trading. That's all that happened. And what you need to do is you need to calm down that ancient part of your brain that I'm calling cave brand. If you don't, you've got a problem. It's not going to go away. You're going to have to develop the skill sets to be able to teach that caveman brain of yours how to be in the world today. How do you do that? Well, we teach a process. Part of that process is one acknowledging that you're an emotional creature. You're not a thinking creature. Thinking is a byproduct of this emotional nature, interacting with your beliefs in the environment. And then what you're going to do is you're going to sit there and go, wow.

Emotion is a biological action potential that interacts with. With the environment for survival. Yeah. Now you're beginning to recognize the kind of thinking that can help you get out of this problem. Then you start going, how do I work with it? And the truth is, you're going to have to come. You're going to have to redo the way you breathe. You breathe in such a way that accelerates fight flight. You're going to have to learn how to breathe diaphragmatically. Intense moments. You're going to have to produce mindfulness that allows you to step back out of fusing and identifying with all these thoughts that run around your mind and all the beliefs you have. There is no you. There's no just me. No, what there is, is there is a brain that has organized the potential that you are into a particular structure called the self that the observer that you are has so frozen to that it now identifies as, that's me. Those are my thoughts. No, they're not. You are not having thoughts. You, you are being created by them. They come from history. They come right through your family of origin and through evolutionary psychology, and they interact with the uncertainty. That's what happens. Friends.

You have within you the capacity of changing the emotions that give rise to the mind that engages uncertainty that you have control over. You don't have control over outcome. But you can redo the beliefs that you learned in your family of origin and that you inherited by traits from your evolutionary psychology to produce a mind that when it is trained to engage uncertainty with the disciplined, impartial mind, it calms itself down. It calms the caveman brain down. It also turns toward what it fears to. To master it. Not to conquer it, but to master it. That, my friends, is why trading.

Amazingly, is the most powerful self development avenue that I've ever met in my life. You have to learn to rebuild the mind in order to engage uncertainty successfully in trading. You can get away with denial forever in this ordinary life. And it catches up with you sometimes. But in trading.

The time compression between cause and effect just slams you. And you cannot lie to yourself. You have to become honest with yourself. And you have to look and say, I am going to rebuild this brain, this mind that I brought from history into this moment of trading, and I'm going to have to retrain it to change the way it is going to reactively react.

To uncertainty instead of fear or anger about taking a loss. What you're going to do is you're going to have a disciplined partiality and recognize that it's only probability. All you really did is land on the wrong side of probability relative to you. Even more than that, when you win, that's all you've done, too. There's no reason to get up and gloat. All you've done is landed on the right side of probability.

Relative to you. That's all, friends. That's what the successful trader knows he's learned to. Just taking a loss is just taking a loss. It's not about me.

Okay? It's about the mind that I bring into that moment. Successful traders learned how to lose really well, and they also learn how to calm the winning stuff down. It's just probability. You're managing probability. That's all you're doing. You don't have control of the future. Friends, this can be learned. Come to my website, take a look. Start. Start reading. Get the free book. Go deeper, read my book. And then start looking at how you can really change.

Come and learn, friends. Come and learn. Thank you.