What's It Take to Make the Promise of Trading a Reality?

What's it going to take to be able to turn that beautiful vision of trading into the lifestyle that you're actually looking for? You know, the allure of trading is that it can give you financial freedom and it can give you personal freedom. It can cut you away from having to work with a man, to have employees do all sorts of stuff, and you can have a really good life. That's the allure. And the truth is, it's true. All of us know people who have done incredibly well in trading and are living the life. And yet at the same time, for most of us, what happens is what we discover. We think we're going to learn this system and it's going to give us an edge. And we take that edge and all of a sudden the edge isn't there. Because what's in here is stopping us from executing the edge that we have that can produce that lifestyle we want. What's it going to take? Though? A chunk of it is really, truly a misunderstanding. Our notion of success in this modern world is success is equal to hard work plus persistence. Now you apply that to trading and what does it mean? It means you're going to go in there and work hard, you're going to do hard, yet the work you do in trading is about like this. It's a huge difference. Yet we want to work hard for our money to produce the success that gives us a sense of worth. Okay. Yet at the same time, what we discover is that trading really isn't about hard work at all. It's not even really about being smart. It's really about being emotionally disciplined. Without that discipline, you can't pull up the other emotions that give rise to the mind that can trade well. So we've gotten hard work and go, oh my gosh, all that hard work that I've learned all my life and I've applied all along is not going to work in trading. Correct. And yet we want to believe that it's a bias sitting way, way back that says you have to work hard to make your money. You have to work hard to be successful and you have to be persistent. You just have to push through things. Push through things. And at the same time, that doesn't necessarily work in trading at all. Trading is a probability based understanding of working a business. You're not going to work hard and the output is I make money. What happens is you're going to work effectively.

You're going to bring the kind of mind that's necessary to work in probabilities and friends.

That is the biggest problem in trading is that we come from a stock of our ancestor cavemen that were built to survive really harsh, dangerous conditions. The chance of you living past 25 years were practically nil. There was a lot of death. Death was all around. We were good meals for big bears, big cats, all that. And the deal is, is we had to. We really had to come to lie to ourselves about we're going to win against all odds, okay? Our ancestors had to come to believe that or the species would not have been able to make it. Yet at the same time, that was so successful that we're going to win against all odds, we're going to live against all odds that it became a bias. A bias is operating in the background. You don't see the bias. You're going to have to spot the bias in trading, though, because it's there, and it's going to hold you back from what you really seek, that good life, that financial independence, okay? So we bring in a bias that is actually against us, okay? And that bias is that I'm going to work hard and I'm going to win. You know, I'm going to find a way to win. And you work hard, hard, hard, and what happens is the trading gods just don't buy into it. And so the deal is, what is this bias really happening? What's going on? Well, think about success. We want to make things happen. That's the battle cry of any Alpha. You want to go in, you make things happen. So you make the money, you get the prestige. Yet at the same time, in trading, no, you don't. That bias does not work. You do not make things happen to create winning conditions in trading. What happens is you wait. You wait patiently, and then it comes to you. The market's going to do what the market's going to do. The deal is, is can you patiently wait for the markets to throw something off to you that you can take advantage of rather than making something happen? The second thing that we have a bias about is winning. We want to win now, understand, caveman had to win, or he starved or he became somebody else's meal. So again, that bias takes root, becomes genetic, transmits. And we go from our old caveman stuff. We're modern human beings now, yet we have the caveman brain. It's called the emotional brain, mammalian brain, and it operates the same way it did way back then. So now you're going, now I have to win. Oh, my gosh. I have to win in order to prove myself to live at the same Time, what you discover in trading is you're going to lose a lot of okay. And so it's not really about winning. It's really about the mind that you bring into the game. If you have an edge, and if you can produce a psychological edge that allows you to really work that edge and produce it in trading, you will extract more capital out of the markets than you put back in. Notice you're not winning, you're extracting more capital than you're putting back in. There's a, there's an ebb and flow that goes on in here in live, in real trading. So we've gotten that. And, oh, and by the way, hate, hate, hate losing. And yet at the same time, what happens is in trading, you're going to have to become an accomplished loser. You're going to have to be able to keep the losses small because they're going to be a chunk of them. And then you're going to have to expand your winners when they do. So. The thing is, you can already see that these things are mounted against you as bias. You can't control outcome in trading, okay? You can't make things happen. You're not winning, you're landing on the right side of probability. Okay, you're in and losing. This means you landed on the wrong side of probability.

At the same time, though, if you take a trade, let's say it takes loss, and you look at it and say, you know something? I followed my plan all the way through. And you know what? It wasn't a psychological mistake. I did exactly what I was supposed to do. I produced my edge. And all of a sudden you realize that though it landed on the wrong side of probability, my definition of losing, it's actually a winner from my perspective. Why? Because what you did is you controlled the one thing that you could control. You controlled the mind you brought to performance, and it executed very well. That, my friends, is how you produce the edge that extracts the capital out of the markets and doesn't put so much back in. So we've got that and so now we're going. Well, are you telling me that the brain that I brought to trading is not going to work? Yes, that's what I'm saying. Unless you happen to have won the lottery, okay, and all of a sudden the genetics just come together. The truth is you're going to have to retrain that brain. You're going to have to let go of winning as a measure of self. You're going to have to find inherent worth living within you. That Is independent of your performances. Winning and losing, that's absolutely key. And a friend of mine, he very successful and I asked him, how did you learn this lesson? He says, randy, I remember it exactly. I lost a ton of money and I thought my wife was going to leave me because what I did, what I lost that day, really put us in tough situation. And I told her, I had her sat down and I told her. And she looked at me and I was crying and she came over and she hugged me. We cried together. And what I realized out of that is that I was going to be loved. Whether or not I won or our loss, that took all the pressure off of me. At the core, this man wanted to be loved. He wanted to belong and to belong. He wanted to love and be loved. That's core human need. And what happened is he thought it was all about the money. And what he did is he found out that being loved made him a winner. So all of a sudden, if he followed his plan, if he executed well, you know, win or lose, he still loved. That is what allowed him to elevate his game to another completely different way. So what I'm asking of you is to take a look at. We need to change what success is.

Winning and losing becomes landing on the wrong or right side of probability. And any mistake made, both method and psychological, can be improved. It's about competency, it's not about you. And you're going to notice the problem is right here in the conversations. You beat yourself up, you get all pumped up, you do all that stuff. When in fact, the mind that you bring to that game is rooted in discipline, it's rooted in patience, and it's rooted in partiality. Those are the three emotional states that give rise to the trading mind that can work in probabilities that don't see losses as bad. Just landed on the wrong side of probability. Was there a mistake there? No. I did everything exactly. Well, then it's just probability. Yeah. It's not about you. It's about the probability. You've got the edge. You keep playing the game because you have the edge. You maintain the discipline, the patience and the impartiality. Okay? And out of that, that's the emotional edge that produces the mind edge that you need to be able to extract more capital out of the markets than you put back in friends.

All of us bring that bias of winning and losing to the game. We're going to have to unlearn that and to produce a different learning about probability, about your worth as a human Being not being tied to your performances.

A performance is just a performance. Can it be improved? Maybe you're going to look and you're going to examine at the same time. At the very bottom, you've got to know that you're inherently worthy as a human being. Otherwise you're going to always be playing the game about making money to prove self.

That's not, that's not a really good way to try to enter the game of trading. I encourage you, friends, take a look at the biases, expose them, see them in action and come to the point where you realize they're not working and then start saying, how do I learn to create the mind? And at that particular time, friends, there are different places you can look. I encourage you to go to our website, go to our YouTube channel, and really take a look at what I'm talking about. How do you, how do you produce that trading mind? It happens every day. I see people making that trading mind work. I see people falling, I see people getting up. But the truth is, with the skill sets, you can come to recognize that you are able to produce that emotional cocktail.

Okay, not a winning, winning. Gotta win, win, win. I'm a winner. I'm a winner. No, what happens is you're disciplined. No, what happens is you're patient. No, what happens is that you're impartial. That, friends allows you to extract more capital out of the markets than you put back in. Come see us. Come learn, take care.