In this monologue, trading coach Randy (referred to as Mr. Owl) explains that while most traders focus on conquering the fear of losing—the first "demon" of trading—there is a second, often overlooked demon: success. After mastering fear, traders experience winning streaks that trigger a dopamine rush, euphoria, and overconfidence. This emotional high can erode discipline, impartiality, and patience, leading to poor decisions and eventual loss. Randy argues that feeling good while actively trading is dangerous; traders should step away to celebrate, then return with a "game face" grounded in three core emotional programs: discipline (maintaining order), impartiality (objective adherence to a plan), and patience (waiting for the market). He emphasizes that trading performance should be viewed probabilistically—wins are landing on the right side of probability, losses on the wrong side—not as reflections of personal worth. By managing emotions, executing a well‑defined edge, and separating performance from identity, traders can turn success into a sustainable advantage rather than a self‑destructive trap.
Chapters
Foreign. We all know how dangerous the fear of losing is. You have that fear, and it just absolutely underwhelms you. Well, you know, it's valid. Most of the people that I work with, when they first come to me, what they're saying to me is, randy, if you can solve this problem I have with fear, the fear of losing, the fear of this fomo, all that, I'll be happy. Everything will be great. I'll be there, okay? And truth is, these are motivated people. They're going to learn how to do that. They're going to find that and learn how to master that fear. And then they start having some really good days. They start really showing. Oh, my God, this is what trading can deliver. And then they blow it up, give it back. And then some. What they've done inadvertently, they've already met the first demon of trading. That's the fear of losing, okay? And they think, if I can just get past that, everything's downhill, everything's roses. But then what they discover is the second demon they meet on the journey, Success. You go, what? What are you talking about? Yeah, winning can be dangerous to your success as a trader. Think about what happens here. We all want to win, and yet we want to win. Yet we don't have control over winning and losing. So we put ourselves in a crazy place. But even more than that, imagine that you've been losing. You finally got it together, you figured out how to deal with that fear. You've got it. You've got the mind, right? You've got it trained, and you start really experiencing success. What do you think happens? You start feeling good. And in feeling good allows you to feel confident, actually maybe overconfident. What you're now experiencing in winning, you're hitting the dopamine drip. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is reward chemistry. It's built to form patterns, to form habits, okay? And it does a very great job of that. But suddenly what happens is that when you hit that dopamine, it's giving you a flush of dopamine, which you might be able to say is very similar to cocaine. You've just sorted some cocaine, you've got that rush, you feel really good. And then what happens? You start feeling, hey, man, the good times are going to roll on forever. I can do this. I know how to conquer this, man. I've got it made. I know how to trade now. And the truth is, you don't. First, you're never in control of winning and losing. But second of all, at least in what I teach. I'm teaching people how to take a brain built for six and a half to eight million years ago and to be able to keep it in the groundedness for an hour, hour and a half at a pop so that all that caveman stuff doesn't come in and take over your trading, but in winning, it sneaks around you, okay? You're sitting there winning. Oh my God, I'm winning. Oh, I just won again. I just won again. I'm consistently profitable. Do you feel the excitement? Do you feel the euphoria? Euphoria is a mood, is an emotion that has you believing that the good times are going to roll on forever, okay? And that you've got it, you can handle it. It's not true at all. Yet it feels true. Takes over the mind, and before you know it, you start trading from overconfidence, euphoria. Making decisions based on a schematic in your head that says, I've got it. I know how to do this. Now do you see the problem? A number of years ago, I'm in China and I'm talking to a very large fund and a large auditorium, and I make the statement as I'm talking to a bunch of active traders and traders. And what I say is this, you're not allowed to feel good when you trade. And there was a hush. And then one guy raises his hand, stands up and he says, but I like feeling good. And I looked at him and said, look, you can feel good. Get up and remove yourself from your desk, get away from your computer, Go someplace, feel good, do the stuff of feeling good, whoop it up, everything. But when you come back, you put your game face back on and you're ready again to go. Because the truth is, feeling good is not allowed in trading. Feeling good produces this euphoria. And he looked at me and said, but I like feeling good. And he packed up his stuff, he walked out of the oratorium and about 20 people followed him. A couple days later, I'm still there training, and he comes up to me and says, Mr. Owl, I now understand why you said it's not. It's not good to feel good when trading. He said, and it just so happens that their stock market went through a 2% correction. And he said, I knew it. I saw the numbers, but. But I refused to see them. I was feeling so good and I was so confident that I decided I was going to defy it. And I knew I should have been in cash, but I wasn't. And it Blew me out, he said, so I now understand. So what we get, what are the emotions that you need present when you trade? Discipline, for sure. Maintaining order of the self is absolutely required. Nothing happens unless you have the emotional discipline, the ruler. Okay? The second one is impartiality. You have to have impartiality to think through these scenarios and be able to say, this is what my plan is. I'm following this plan. Does this meet my plans? The third one is patience. In trading, you do not make things happen. What you do is you wait patiently for the market to give you something. That's what you take. This particular guy was no longer patiently waiting. He wanted to go make things happen. You know, at that time, that stock market had been on a bull run for about 50 years and it was easy to make money. Suddenly they start seeing the realities of what the rest of the world's been up to. They had to learn to trade again. So now we're looking at it and going, we realize those three emotional programs are the ones that you need to learn how to pull forward as emotional programs. Because out of that, those emotional programs rises the mind that you bring. Okay? So discipline, impartiality and patience. Feeling good doesn't have anything to do with that. And what I'm asking of you is to recognize this. If you're a trader who's just coming to the moment of learning to master fear, understand that's not a card to get home free. That's simply a card to get on another part of the journey of learning to trade and expect it. That there is another demon, there's another force out there, success that you're going to have to learn to deal with. Success. Success is not about you. What you do as a trader is. Your job is to execute your plan. That takes discipline, it takes patience, and it takes impartiality. Those are the emotions you need present. Your job is to make sure that you're performing your edge. That is the new winning. That is the new success in trading. If you truly have an edge and you follow that psychological edge, then the markets are going to give you more money than it takes from you. That's the plan. But as you come into trading and you get that rush of, oh my God, I figured it out. I know how to trade. Wow, I'm going to make this. This is going to be so much fun. And you realize you can't allow that to happen. That's just the inner critic talking in your ear. That's just your orphan nature whooping it up, going look at me. Look at me. And ultimately what you're doing is you're making your performances, winning and losing, about your being, about who you are as a human being. What we teach in my work is that winning and losing has nothing to do with your being. And as long as you're using your performances to judge your being, you're going to have a lot of problems. And truth is, in this particular case, when you meet that second demon, success is what is success really? You know, ultimately it's what two viewed two ways. One is it just so happens that you landed on the right side of probability relative to you. It's not a big deal, okay? It could have landed the other way just as easily. Losing is only landing on the wrong side of probability relative to you. And out of that you get to find out through that failure, that loss you get to learn about either was this a method mistake, was this a psychological mistake, or or is it just probability? It's a learning experience. It's not about you as a human being. Do you see the difference? What I encourage you to do is to dig deeply into my work, do the video work, go to YouTube, watch all the videos, but then start saying, well, how do I go about building this mind? How do I use emotions to be able to build a mind? Because understand this, at the very bottom, all thinking is emotional state dependent. Your job is really a psychological manager, managing the chemistry of emotions that give rise to the mind you trade with. What you want is a cocktail of emotions of discipline, patience and impartiality that gives rise to the mind that can deal in probabilities and not make a judgment about your being from your performances, friends, that's the big thing that would be called really claiming your inherent worth as a human being, recognizing that it just is. It's not about your performances. Your performances are about competencies, competencies you can learn from psychological competencies to trading competencies all, all the way down the line and to distinguish between would I take this trade again? If you say yes, then you did everything right. Okay, you just landed on the wrong side of probability, not about you. So here I want you to get it is that winning can be dangerous to the mind you bring to trading. Okay, it's just winning, friends, it's not about you. You landed on the right side of probability. Did you execute well? And if you do, it feels good. After you finish that trade, go up and celebrate, do whatever what you want, you deserve it. But when you come back and ready to go to the game, you pull back the trader state of mind. It doesn't have overconfidence in it. It's not fear of losing. It's not fear of winning. It is all about maintaining performance. Am I executing my plan that delivers my edge? Friends, that's when you move from trading can be dangerous to your health to trading can open up your life and allow you to grow as a human being beyond your greatest expectations. Come learn more, friends. Come learn more. Take care.
