The Thief in the Night

Season's greetings. I hope you've had a great Christmas. And I'm hoping as you enter this new year, you're ready to go. You have a new set of mind. You've got your ideas down, you've got your trading plan down. And you're going to be. You're going to say, this is the year. This is the time. This is the place.

This month. What I want to do is I want to talk about a really interesting situation. When a person is enormously successful in one career, but then he brings that into trading, and suddenly those skills that acted so powerfully in his advantage suddenly are at his disadvantage. And I call this the Thief in the Night. You've probably experienced it, you've got it together, you're totally under control, and then out of nowhere, wham. Your mind's gone. You don't even notice it. And all of a sudden, you notice that the trade's over. And there it is. You've done exactly what you know better than doing. Okay, this is something what we might call a repetition. And you see the pattern. You see this pattern, repetition. And you go, man, it's happening all the time. Why is it happening? I know better than that. Why does it happen? Why does it show up? I don't see it. And then it whacks me. I don't even know that I've been whacked. I only find out later, after the trade's over. Okay? That's the piece. This guy, he's like many other traders again, he's enormously successful in another career, in another business. He is an alpha. He is a ruler. He is the one who has provided leadership in his community, in his church, in his businesses, everywhere he goes. He's like, undisputed leader. And he's been enormously successful in the businesses. Here's what's interesting. When he was young, he was faced with a very critical, critical moment where literally the family fortune was in play, and it was up to him. He stood his ground and he negotiated a hard deal, even though there was really nothing behind him. And he really extracted every penny out of that deal. And it worked okay. Biologically, what just happened is a little squirt of dopamine squirted in, and he got an enormous reward. And so what the brain says is, wow, this is a great solution. We're going to get every penny, every drop of blood out of this thing, as long as the client will stay in relationship to us. You get it over a number of years, over decades, that really wired in it was successful. So the next time he was in a negotiation, he found himself habitually doing the same thing. Over time, it became pattern. It became what we would know as trait. He didn't even have to think about it. Then he moves into trading. He's a good trader. He's very smart. He's very knowledgeable. He knows the structure, he knows his targets, he knows everything. He gets into trades and all of a sudden he's up and typically 20, 30%. And then he says, I want more. I want more. I can do it, I can make it. I can squeeze it out of it. What he didn't just notice then is the hijacking. Okay? It was so familiar, it was so successful over many, many, many periods of time that he didn't see it happening. He didn't see the thief in the night.

Just cruising through the back door, robbing him blind and then leaving.

He was not willing to leave any money on the table, even the money that he knew that this was a good target. This is something that's reasonable. I should be exiting after this target's met. No, he wants every drop of blood out of it. Understand in his mind the electrical circuitry and understand this. The brain's language is electrical pattern.

The mind's language is thought. The electrical pattern is all organized around adaptive behavior. And for this particular trader, the adaptation was powerful. It had produced success and continued success. And so when he came into trading, why should he trade differently? The same skills that brought him success there should bring him success now. It didn't.

The brain wasn't prepared. Because the truth is, the markets don't care. It's not going to negotiate with you. It doesn't care to dance continually with you. It's just the markets he's trying to squeeze out of something, believing that he's in a mutual relationship. Okay? He's not. It's a different world. Success in trading is so much different. But he gets in, he fires this electrical pattern that creates a perception in the mind that all he has to is take more.

And he blows it up here. Interestingly, in working with this trader, we're not trying to find and make him change. What we're doing is we're saying the leadership style that works so well over here is now no longer working in the domain of trading, no matter how successful it was.

What does leadership look like in trading? Okay, what he discovered is that leadership in trading is different. He had to develop it going, okay, what happens is I have to be able to take the reasonable profits. I can't let my profits run and run dry and go back on me. What happens is I need to be taking profits sensibly. I can't drain it of blood. The markets don't behave. They don't think that way, they aren't that way. And ultimately, he realized that the external leadership that he had acquired over a lifetime of being a successful businessman did not apply to trading. And what he discovered is that internally the leadership model was going to have to change so that the leadership was patient and willing to take what the markets were willing to give him. Do you see the difference here?

He was taking as much as he could as long as he could maintain relationship in his business negotiations. Here there's a shift in leadership, there's a shift in what becomes effective. The truth is, what happens is he has to develop the leadership style, the ruler style that says, what is the market willing to give me? Reasonably in this situation? I can't force it to do anything. I'm the one that has to dance with it. I can't make it happen. That's the whole point. Friends. What this trader learns is that he can no longer control outcome by will, by willpower, or by perfection, by not making mistakes. What he can control is the mind that he's bringing into that moment of trading and recognizing he can control execution, he can't control outcome. And in doing so, he becomes a much more powerful leader to his internal community, to his internal committee of mine. And suddenly what you're looking at is you're no longer trying to take every drop of blood, but you're saying, what is the market willing to give me? That's what I'm willing to take. Friends, this year, what I hope for you is that you begin to really recognize that the thief in the night is the unexamined beliefs that you bring into trading. You're projecting those beliefs onto the markets. Every time you trade, you're getting feedback about their effectiveness from your trading account, whether or not you like it or not. As you listen to your trading account, use that trading account like this trader did to dig deeper, saying, I don't see the thief. Where is he? And suddenly, like this trader, you discover that an electrical pattern that's become an assumption and belief in the mind is running an old show. What you need to do is you need to spot it and then decide.

How do I take my brain and use neuroplasticity and change it so that I perceive and act in a very different way, so that I provide internal leadership in the domain of trading that's where the success is. Friends, I so hope and I wish for a very prosperous new year for you. And.

I guess it's time to start trading and start really engaging our beliefs and to seeing if they're effective or not. And be looking for the thief in the night.

Sa.